Reality Hunger (7 page)

I listened to a tour guide at the National Gallery ask his group what made Rothko great. Someone said, “The colors are beautiful.” Someone else mentioned how many books and articles had been written about him. A third person pointed out how much people had paid for his paintings. The tour guide said, “Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.” This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I’ve ever encountered.

In 1987, Cynthia Ozick said, “I recently did a review of William Gaddis and talked about his ambition—his coming
on the scene when it was already too late to be ambitious in that huge way with a vast modernist novel.” She reviewed
Carpenter’s Gothic
. The “vast modernist novel” to which she was referring was
The Recognitions
. It’s difficult to overemphasize how misguided her heroic (antiheroic) way of thinking is.

The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe. The present period is one of administrative numbers.

The life span of a fact is shrinking. I don’t think there’s time to save it. It used to be that a fact would last as long as its people, as long as kingdoms stood or legacies lived or myths endured their skeptics. But now facts have begun to dwindle to the length of a generation, to the life spans and memories of wars and plagues and depressions. Once the earth was flat, but now we say it’s round. Once we thought we could sail west to the Indies; now we know that a New World is there. Once we were the center of a vast but known universe; now we’re just a speck in a vast and chaotic jumble.

Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground. The sound of voice alone grew less compelling; the longing for narration rose up again, asserting the oldest claim on the reading heart: the tale. What could be more literal than The Story of My Life now being told by Everywoman and Everyman?

Suddenly everyone’s tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing, even if not everyone’s story turns out to be fascinating or well told.

Plot is a way to stage and dramatize reality, but when the presentation is too obviously formulaic, as it so often is, the reality is perceived as false. Skeptical of the desperation of the modernist embrace of art as the only solution, and hyperaware of all artifices of genre and form, we nevertheless seek new means of creating the real.

Barbara Kruger was a painter, but her day job was photo editor at
Glamour
. One day she could no longer tolerate the divide between the two activities, and her artwork became the captioning of photos.

Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were.

In 1963, Marguerite Yourcenar said, “In our time, the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as a medium of expression.” No more. Increasingly, the novel goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching writers’ sensations and thoughts get set into the concrete of fiction that perhaps it’s best to avoid the form as a medium of expression.