

N otes on C onceptual F iction



by Ted Gioia













1.



Is it possible that the idea of "realism" as a guiding principle for

fiction is itself unrealistic? After all, there are no Newtonian laws

in stories—an apple can just as easily fly upward from a tree as

drop to the ground. Characters can ride a magic carpet as easily

as walk. Any restrictions are imposed by the author, not by any

external "reality," however defined.



The first storytellers understood this intuitively. That is why

myths, legends, folk tales and other traditional stories recognize

no Newtonian (or other) limitations on their narrative accounts.

These were the first examples of what I call "conceptual fiction"—

in other words stories that delight in the freedom from "reality"

that storytelling allows. Conceptual fiction plays with our

conception of reality, rather than defers to it.



In the past, conceptual fiction existed at the center of our literary

(and even pre-literary) culture. Nowadays it is dismissed by

critics and typically shuffled off into "genre" categories such as

science fiction and fantasy. Realism gained preeminence as a

supposedly rock hard foundation for fiction. From that moment

on, Newton's laws (and a million other laws) gave orders to the

imagination, with the stamp of approval of the literary

establishment.



But here is the more interesting question. Is it possible that this

trend is reversing, and that conceptual fiction is now moving back

from the periphery into the center of our literary culture?





2.



How important is realism in storytelling today? If one judges by

the comments (and, even more importantly, the unstated

assumptions) of critics as diverse as James Wood and Michiko

Kakutani, then realism is the foundation of our literary culture,

and storytellers ignore it at their own peril.



But take a look at the most formative and influential stories of our

age, namely the best-known motion pictures. (We will return to

the novel in a second.) Of the 50 top grossing films of all time,

only 7 reveal even the slightest tendency toward realism. (And I

need to categorize Forrest Gump , The Titanic , Raider of the Lost

Ark , and Jaws as realistic to even get to seven.) You can

denounce Hollywood as much as you like, and ridicule the

uneducated tastes of moviegoers. Yet we see what they think of

realism every time we go the local multiplex.



But I can sense your scorn of Hollywood even from where I am

sitting across the great world wide web. And I am confident that

you have never debased yourself to the point of seeing and

enjoying any of these megahits. So let's turn to the novel. Is it

possible that even the novel—the serious novel--is now falling out

of the gravitational pull of realism? (Ah, I love that adjective:

whenever I hear "serious" used by a literary critic, I am

reminded of John McEnroe taunting the umpire at Wimbledon in

his whiny voice: "You can NOT be SERIOUS. ")



Let's look more deeply into this matter.





3.



During the middle decades of the 20th century, literary works

that experimented with language were seen as harbingers of the

future. These Joycean and Poundian and Faulknerian creations

were singled out for praise and held as models for emulation.

These works won awards, were taught in universities, and gained

acceptance (at least in highbrow circles) as contemporary classics.



During these same years, another group of writers, universally

scorned by academics and critics, were working on different ways

of conceptualizing reality. Unlike the highbrow writers, they did

not experiment with sentences, but rather with the possible

worlds that these sentences described. These authors often

worked in so-called “genre styles” of fiction (science fiction,

fantasy), publishing in pulp fiction periodicals and cheap

paperbacks. Despite the futuristic tenor of their writing, these

authors were not seen as portents of the future. And though

these books sold in huge quantities and developed a zealous

following among readers, these signs of commercial success only

served to increase the suspicion and scorn with which these books

were dealt with in highbrow circles.





4.



In a strange quirk of history, literature in the late 20th and early

21st century failed to follow in the footsteps of Joyce and Pound.

Instead, conceptual fiction came to the fore, and a wide range of

writers—highbrow and lowbrow—focused on literary

metaphysics, a scenario in which sentences stayed the same as

they always were, but the “reality” they described was subject to

modification, distortion and enhancement.



This was seen in the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

and Salman Rushdie; the alternative histories of Michael Chabon

and Philip Roth; the modernist allegories of José Saramago ; the

political dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro; the

quasi-sci-fi scenarios of Jonathan Lethem and David Foster

Wallace ; the reality-stretching narratives of David Mitchell and

Audrey Niffenegger ; the urban mysticism of Haruki Murakami

and Mark Z. Danielewski ; the meta-reality musings of Paul

Auster and Italo Calvino; the edgy futurism of J.G. Ballard and

Iain Banks ; and the works of hosts of other writers.





5.



Of course, very few critics or academics linked these works to

their pulp fiction predecessors. Cormac McCarthy might win a

Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road , a book whose apocalyptic

theme was straight out of the science fiction playbook. But no

bookstore would dare to put this novel in the sci-fi section. No

respectable critic would dare compare it to, say, I Am Legend (a

novel very similar to McCarthy’s in many respects). Arbitrary

divisions between “serious fiction” and “genre fiction” were

enforced, even when no legitimate dividing line existed.



Only commercial considerations dictated the separation. Literary

critics, who should have been the first to sniff out the phoniness of

this state of affairs, seemed blissfully ignorant that anything was

amiss.



José Saramago’s Blindness might have a plot that follows in the

footsteps of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain or Greg

Bear’s Blood Music , but no academic would ever mention these

books in the same breath. Toni Morrison’s Beloved might have

as its title character a ghost and build its action around a

haunting, but no one would dare compare it to a horror novel—

even though it has all of the key ingredients.



It almost seemed as if the book industry (and critics and

academics) had reached a tacit agreement. “If you don’t tell

people that these works follow in the footsteps of genre fiction

books, we won’t either." Yet this was merely a commercial

decision. After all, what serious reader would buy these books if

they had the taint of sci-fi or fantasy? When would any Pulitzer

or Nobel panel give an award to a book that was explicitly linked

to genre fiction? They wouldn't. So a charade needed to be

played, in which some works of conceptual fiction were allowed to

sit on the same shelf as the serious books (ah, that McEnroe voice

again), while others were ghetto-ized in a different location,

whether it be in a library or a bookstore or something more

intangible like your mind.





6.



This state of affairs pointed to the fundamental flaw in viewing

works of science fiction and fantasy as similar to other genre

books.



Other genre categories—mysteries, romances, etc.—have very

strict limitations on their plots, characters, narrative structures,

etc. A mystery book must have a crime and a solution to the

crime. A romance book must have a love story that proceeds

along more or less familiar lines. These formulas must be

followed at all costs.



But the science fiction and fantasy categories were far more

freeform. Almost anything could happen in these books, provided

they played some game with our concept of reality. The only

promises these works made were to astound and delight us. This

was not a formula—indeed it was the exact opposite of a formula.



Just look at the names of the early sci-fi magazines: they were

called Amazing or Astounding or Fantastic or tagged with some

equally ambitious title. . . (my favorite: Weird Tales ). Ah, what

could be grander than magazines that forged such extravagant

covenants with their readers? Not even The New Yorker

promises that every issue will be astounding.



In essence, sci-fi and fantasy never fit nicely into the genre

pigeonhole. And given their focus on surprising and delighting

readers—rather than following strict formulas of plot

development and resolution—it was inevitable that “serious

writers” would begin borrowing from these scorned writers who

existed at the fringes of the literary world.





7.



Critics and academics and even readers have largely missed the

implications of this. They prefer to live in denial. A critic as

astute as James Wood—who ranks, for better or worse, among

the most influential writers on literature of our time—can

continue to pretend that the “realist” tradition in fiction somehow

reigns supreme. Yet any perspicacious reader should be able to

see that tinkering with reality is the real driving force in

contemporary fiction, and has been for a long time.





8.



Anthropologist Clifford Geertz differentiated between “thin” and

“thick” ways of describing cultures—labels that have since been

borrowed by other disciplines. The “thin” approach focuses on a

specific aspect of a social situation, whereas the “thick”

perspective also tries to capture the context as well.



Fiction can also adopt “thick” or “thin” perspectives. And it

should come as little surprise that many of the most notable

examples of “thick” storytelling reside in the world of conceptual

fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Frank Herbert’s Dune , C.S.

Lewis’s Narnia, J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts , Gabriel Garcia

Marquez's magical-realist landscapes . . . these all stand out as

marvelously thick, ethnographies of the imagination. And why

the connection between thick descriptions and fantasy / magical /

sci-fi stories? Because these genres cannot take context for

granted, as do so many so-called “serious” novels. The

meticulous creation of a vivid and inspired context is usually

essential to the overall effect in any extended work of conceptual

fiction.



In contrast, when a literary writer attempts a thick description in

the context of a traditional narrative—for example, in writing a

novel set during the time of the French Revolution or the Civil

War—the many telling details that establish the context are

typically drawn from research rather than from the grand leaps

of the imagination that created Middle-earth or Rowling’s

magically-charged variant on contemporary Britain. And when a

literary novel is set in the current day, the approach taken by the

writer is, more often than not, a thin one, since the context is

largely familiar to all readers. The writer working in conceptual

fiction genres has no such support. One might even decide to

rename conceptual fiction as “contextual fiction,” since so much of

the power of these works depend on the author’s ability to create

a powerful context within which the story is situated.



We should not make light of the difficulty—or, indeed, the

artistry—involved in creating a successful work of “thick” fiction

out of pure imagination. Yet how many literary critics will deign

even to notice a book such as Frank Herbert’s Dune , let alone

praise it? The invisibility of this “thick account” masterpiece in

literary discussions is hardly a sign of any failing on the part of

Herbert. Rather it reveals that the literary world, for all its

espousal of open-minded, egalitarian attitudes, has its own

unexamined areas of snobbery and intolerance.



Of course, readers pay little attention to these things. The “thick”

works of conceptual fiction mentioned above by Tolkien, Lewis,

Rowling and Herbert are among the most widely read books of

the last century. According to many in the literary

establishment, this must simply be a sign of the stupidity of the

masses. And they must be especially stupid to read thousands of

pages (since these are usually long books or parts of series) of

such poorly written books.



Then again, this glib dismissal from highbrow critics might itself

be suspect and worthy of scrutiny.





9.



The term "science fiction" as it is applied to many of these works

is especially unfortunate, since the inclusion of science is not the

decisive factor in setting these books apart. Otherwise a book

such as Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations —which

rhapsodizes about science on almost every page—would be a

work of conceptual fiction. It is not. At no point is the reader's

sense of reality challenged by the straightforward narrative style

of Powers' novel, which is a fine book indeed, but with little in

common with the stories discussed here.



By the same token, it is easy to see how mistaken those fans are

who proclaim the superiority of so-called "hard" science fiction—

in other words stories with a large dose of "real" science in them.

Even a quick survey of science fiction books shows that the

science is almost always bogus, and simply serves as a gateway

for bringing imaginative elements into the narrative. The

greatness of these books does not derive from their chemistry or

physics or genetic engineering (which almost always prove to

laughably wrong-headed a few years after the book is published,

if not sooner), but in the writer's visionary reconfiguration of our

conceptions of the real.





10.



Given this situation, we need to return to the many masterworks

of conceptual fiction from earlier decades, and reassess their

importance. Authors such as Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein,

Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Arthur C.

Clarke, Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Robert

Silverberg, Alfred Bester, Stanislaw Lem, and many others

deserve a new reading and a sensitive re-evaluation of their role

in the evolution of modern fiction.



It will not be possible in every instance to “rehabilitate” these

authors. The pulp fiction environment in which they worked

encouraged sloppy writing and perhaps made it difficult for these

writers to develop to their full potential. Yet there is more

substance to this body of work than is usually acknowledged, and

a sensitive study of the history of conceptual fiction (which, in any

account of the history of the novel, would link back to Don

Quixote , Gulliver's Travels and Tristram Shandy, among other

classic works) is an undertaking both fruitful and necessary if we

hope to understand our current literary environment.





Published on April 4, 2009

