18 July 2024
I’m starting this at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, in my hotel room, at five am, having already been up for over an hour. Apparently, 1) I get jet lag even when I drive, and 2) my two-year-old’s month of nightmares has conditioned me to wake—yet again—at an ungodly hour. (Both of my children started to wake from night terrors at a certain stage of language acquisition.) I’ve already nibbled at my breakfast, drunk my first cup of coffee, written a letter, and now this.
In just about every class I teach, I state early on that reading literature is individual in that it is the only aesthetic experience completely mediated from the senses. Nothing of the experience of, say, Middlemarch or Yoknapatawpha County is from sensory input—it is a construction purely of imagination. (I acknowledge that this requires bracketing off work like illustrated children’s books, graphic novels, and concrete poetry, but this is a delimitation I’m willing to make here.) This essential quality of literature enables the deliciously hermetic experience of reading special to the literary art, and there is a general regard for this solitude. In that decade when I commuted by train, during the age of the iPod, I felt, quite often, that panhandlers were more willing to interrupt those with earbuds stuffed into their ears than me, who had nothing but an open book in my hands. Yesterday I watched a YouTube clip called “2024 NBA season but it gets increasingly more hilarious” (please don’t judge). Apparently, it’s the funniest year in NBA history, by some measure, and four fifths through the clip there’s a moment when the camera catches Robin Lopez reading a book on the sidelines. The commentators clown on him: “He’s not even watching the game . . . he won’t look up.” I regularly tell students reading is the most antisocial act possible, in a way. And I’m speaking only for myself when I say the only time I’ve ever been convinced I have a soul is when I’ve felt something stir inside of me because of reading literature.
All of this heightens—indeed, makes possible—my excitement at a place like Sewanee. Still to this day, I am struck by the strangely intoxicating energy that comes when bookish people congregate as bookish people. It is a heady mixture to have people geek out with each other about the solitary act of reading and writing—whether it’s a writing conference, AWP, a graduate program, a local book club, a reading, or simply a casual hangout. You can have a robust literary life simply through reading, but if you avoid the social aspect, you are missing out on something other. It is a gift to have a career predicated on building literary communities on and off the page.
Yesterday, I was lucky to arrive in time to attend Claire Messud’s thought-provoking craft talk on time in fiction. She started with the famous Augustine quote, one I think about often: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled” (tr. R. S. Pine-Coffin). It’s noteworthy that the lengthy excursus on past, future, and the seeming elasticity of time that follows this quote lands on prosody as undeniable proof that humans necessarily take up the odd task of measuring time, which implies literary craft as the first means by which humans have grappled with the notion of time with a modicum of success.
Messud’s talk gave us many threads to follow. But front of my mind is the part of the talk that was prompted by Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, a formative book that demonstrated how, around the late nineteenth century, technological innovations and the concomitant cultural inventions that wrestled with the former transformed our sense of time and space. She then considered how the ascendance of social media might have impacted some of the strong trends in current fiction. While focusing on the social media feed, she said that there is, and I paraphrase, no logical reason determining the flow of information, making it a place of story, not plot, per E. M. Forster’s famous definition, made by king and queen.
I agree with Messud’s ultimate point, but there is, of course, a logical reason driving the feed, though it is computational, programmatic, proprietary, and, most significantly, guarded from public understanding—there’s a lot of money riding on it. The whole venture relies on the inability of the user to discern a causality for the sequence of images. Of course, we readers of literature dislike it when we can figure out the motivations and causes all too easily. But the salutary experience of reading literature—whether for expert literary critic or lay reader—requires at least the hope of understanding the intricate workings of a poem, story, or essay. Forster says so much with the formulation that is often forgotten when we think of his definitions of story and plot: “Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.” A literary plot promises a shared understanding of causality, albeit one that requires work from all parties involved.
The “mystery” in Forster’s sentence foregrounds an interesting paradox out of our line of thought. The “mystery” here comes from the “secret life” that is the novel’s essential quality and superpower:
The specialty of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. . . . All that matters to the reader is whether the shifting of attitude and the secret life are convincing, whether it is πιθανόν in fact, and with his favourite word ringing in his ears Aristotle may retire.
The derisive tone toward Aristotle is the chapter’s opening note. “The Plot” targets the classical philosopher, particularly as the spokesperson for drama who declared actions more important than character. “There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle,” Forster writes with questionable sincerity. “He was by temperament apathetic to secrecy,” Forster continues, “and indeed regarded the human mind as a sort of tub from which everything can finally be extracted; and when he wrote the words quoted above [about character and action] he had in view the drama, where no doubt they hold true.” Putting aside Aristotle’s argument about drama, the human mind as tub for extraction is precisely how social media views its users, isn’t it? This makes the emotive quality of Forster’s defining element, “grief,” all the more meaningful. So our thought experiment about plot and social media gives us one way to contrast their reading experiences, per our definitions. They combine the social and the secret in opposite ways. With social media, the societal element is, well, robust, but the causality driving the series of images is kept secret from all but the Silicon Valley org, which necessarily is “apathetic to secrecy” as a defining element of the human mind. With fiction, there is a sociable bond between reader(s) and writer through a shared understanding of causality, but that shared understanding is predicated on a “secret life” we readers believe is characteristic of the human mind.
This is not to assert that there is absolutely no place in literary fiction for social media. Locating an obstacle to fiction writing also marks off a task for triumphant literary achievement. Indeed, Allegra Solomon’s story in this issue deftly weaves social media into a story prominently and profoundly about what Forster would certainly designate the protagonist’s “secret life.” You also might visit work in other genres to experience and learn more about this literary connection built on causality and secrecy. Elisa Gabbert’s “The Essay as Realm” talks about causality by way of wrestling with a penchant for the random. And, as one who wrote a dissertation on the writer Thomas De Quincey, I have to suggest reading Kymm Coveney’s lush translation of Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda’s “Delusional Epitaphs,” which is inspired by the English Opium-Eater.
From around the office:
• In August, we bade farewell to associate editors Soham Patel and Maggie Su. For various reasons, Maggie has decided to relocate to her native Midwest, where she will be starting a job at the University of Notre Dame. Be sure to get her debut novel, Blob, when it is released 28 January. Soham has done a remarkable job giving shape to what the poetry and book review sections look like currently in GR. It is an impact that will live far past her departure. We will miss you both but are excited for what’s ahead for each of you.
• And please join us in welcoming interim associate prose editor Amy Bonnaffons. She is the author of the story collection The Wrong Heaven and the novel The Regrets. She is also founding editor of 7×7.la, a literary journal devoted to collaborations between writers and visual artists. Born in New York City, she now lives in Athens, Georgia.
• Please also join me in welcoming Maxime Berclaz and Christina Wood as our new graduate editors.
• Finally, we would like to congratulate Johanna Magin for winning the 2024 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize with “Trace History.” Our prose prize, opening 15 November, will be judged by Allegra Hyde. Please visit our website for full details.
G.M.
