Reality Hunger (4 page)

In antiquity, the most common Latin term for the essay was
experior
, meaning “to try, test, experience, prove.”

The etymology of
fiction
is from
fingere
(participle
fictum
), meaning “to shape, fashion, form, or mold.” Any verbal account is a fashioning and shaping of events.

Ancient novels were either fantastic—Lucian’s
The Golden Ass
tells of a man who turns into a donkey and back into a man—or implausible romantic adventures, such as Chariton’s
Chaereas and Callirhoe
.

St. Augustine’s
Confessions
, written in the fourth century, tells his life through the prism of his newfound faith, reflecting on his sins, begging forgiveness from God. For centuries, the memoir was, by definition,
apologia pro vita sua:
prayerful entreaty and inventory of sins. (During the Renaissance, a hybrid memoir—with a more nuanced relation to the divine—emerged: Montaigne’s
Essays
. Memoir wasn’t anymore necessarily what one should know but what one could know. Pascal’s
Pensées
. Rousseau’s
Confessions
. With the posthumous publication in 1908 of Nietzsche’s
Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is
, God was gone for good.)

The Tale of Genji:
an eleventh-century Japanese text about court life.

In the thirteenth century, French troubadours wrote prose poems about thwarted love.

In seventeenth-century France, Madeleine de Scudéry (in
Artamène
) and Madame de La Fayette (in
La Princesse de Clèves
) wrote about the romantic intrigues of aristocrats.

Before the Industrial Revolution, culture was mostly local; niches were geographic. The economy was agrarian, which distributed populations as broadly as the land. Distance divided people, giving rise to regional accents, and the lack of rapid transportation limited the mixing of cultures and the propagation of ideas and trends. There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: it had the best distribution network and the most mass-produced item—the Bible.

When they were published, the books that now form the canon of Western literature (the
Iliad
, the Bible) were understood to be true accounts of actual events. In 1572, when Montaigne set himself the task of naming the “new” brand of writing he was doing in his journals—which later became his books—he came upon the Middle French word
essai
, meaning “trial,” “attempt,” “experiment.” (All of life is an experiment. I love fools’ experiments; I’m always making them.) Many of the most important writers in the Renaissance—Montaigne; Francis Bacon, who imported the essay into English; John Donne, whose sermons mattered much more than his poems—were writers of nonfiction. So secure was the preference for truth that Sir Philip Sidney had to fight, in
Defence of Poesie
(published after his death in 1595), for the right to “lie” in literature at all.

In his retirement, walking the streets of Bordeaux, Montaigne wore a pewter medallion inscribed with the words
Que sais-je?
(“What do I know?”)—thereby forming and backforming a tradition: Lucretius to La Rochefoucauld to Cioran.

Once upon a time, history concerned itself only with what it considered important: the contrivers of significant events, on the one hand, and the forces that such happenings enlisted or expressed, on the other. Historians had difficulty deciding whether history was the result of the remarkable actions of remarkable men or the significant consequences of powerful forces, of climate, custom, and economic consequence, or of social structures, diet, geography, but whatever was the boss, the boss was big, massive, all-powerful, and hogged the center of the stage; however, as machines began to replicate objects, little people began to multiply faster than wars or famines could reduce their numbers, democracy arrived to flatter the multitude and tell them they ruled, commerce flourished, sales grew, money became the risen god, numbers replaced significant individuals, the trivial assumed the throne, and history looked about for gossip, not for laws, preferring lies about secret lives to the intentions of fate. As these changes took place, especially in the eighteenth century, the novel arrived to amuse mainly ladies of the middle and upper classes and provide them a sense of importance: their manners, their concerns, their daily rounds, their aspirations, their dreams of romance. The novel feasted on the unimportant, mimicking reality. Moll Flanders and Clarissa Harlowe replaced Medea and Antigone. Instead of actual adventures, made-up ones were fashionable; instead of perilous voyages, Crusoe carried us through his days; instead of biographies of ministers
and lords, we got bundles of fake letters recounting seductions and betrayals: the extraordinary drama of lied-about ordinary life. Historians soon had at hand all the devices of exploitation. Amusing anecdote, salacious gossip would now fill their pages, too. History was human, personal, full of concrete detail, and had all the suspense of a magazine serial. The techniques of fiction infected history; the materials of history were fed the novelist’s greed. Nowhere was this blended better than in autobiography. The novel sprang from the letter, the diary, the report of a journey; it felt itself alive in the form of every record of private life. Subjectivity was soon everybody’s subject.