Material: Earnestness vs. Irony – Fiction Writers Reading Non-Fiction                                 Brendan Kerr

 

        I rarely enjoy watching dance performances.  Traditional, modern, experimental, it doesn’t matter.  Sitting in a dance audience, I feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, “oogy*.”  Some people have seen this as an indefensible reaction on my part and, because part of me agrees, I have spent a considerable amount of time in unsatisfying attempts to defend it.  Then, while re-reading Jane Jacobs’ great book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I came upon this passage:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city….This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance – not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.  The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

 

        It occurred to me that for a lover of cities the act of staging dance can be viewed as redundant, its purposes nakedly gratuitous.  Any dance, choreographed or improvised, pulled from its natural habitat of the street and given prominence upon a stage, is distorted in a manner inevitably bound to the earnest impulses of a self-conscious performer.  These impulses are varied and often (in the best work) complex – they may be political, sexual or whimsical – but each suffers in comparison to the true, unpredictable “movement and change” continuing outside the walls of the performance house.

        This line of thought led to an obvious and unsettling parallel.  What about fiction writing?  Is the act of writing fiction similarly redundant?  As anyone involved in workshops can attest, self-conscious fiction can certainly make one feel oogy.  The sensation is mitigated by the privacy of the reading experience, but when it occurs it is unmistakable.  For this reader, at least, the disquieting effect is the exception, while for this member of a dance audience, it is the rule.

        Still, the uneasiness persisted.  In those moments when I find myself unable to sit down to the task of writing, when the sword of Damocles hovers above the act, is this the fear that hampers me?  This fear that the process (and product) itself is redundant and unwelcome – is this the substance of the sword?  Could it be that it is not my fault at all, but that the art form itself is flawed, redundant, obsolete? 

        Surely, no.  Surely there are elements of fiction that are today vital and necessary.  In an attempt to identify and define these I turned to the dance of the streets itself.  I opened the door of the “art” house and walked out into a library of non-fiction.

 

        I read a lot of Buzz Bissinger.  Bissinger is famous for his glorious celebration/send-up of Texan high school football, Friday Night Lights.  FNL has, of course, become an empire, but Bissinger is also the author of an even more ambitious and compelling book, A Prayer for the City, in which he details – with unheard-of access – the first term of Ed Rendell’s mayorship of Philadelphia.  Covering the years 1991-1995, Prayer for the City is an exhaustive investigation of not only Philadelphia’s City Hall, but private lives throughout the city and the American city as an idea.  It’s kind of a The Wire of Philadelphia, and every bit as addictive.  Bissinger also wrote a frolicking blood and guts reveal of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa titled Three Nights in August.  Sort of a humanist’s answer to the cold stats of Moneyball, Three Nights in August will not necessarily teach the dedicated baseball fan much about the game he couldn’t already fathom, but it certainly allows that fan to luxuriate in LaRussa’s obsessive baseball mind.

        All three books are accomplished through years of exhaustive reportage, each sentence seemingly the distillation of lengthy conversations.  Bissinger (somewhat helpfully, somewhat gloatingly) minutely details his source material in elaborate post-scripts.  Reading these, it is difficult to deny the thoroughness – near obsessiveness – of his work and difficult not to imagine the shamelessness with which he secured his access.  The books are dense with numbers and statistics.  All of these cold facts earn Bissinger a bit of un-ironic earnestness, usually voiced by his subjects.  All of these hundreds of hard-won facts work like a giant pile of potatoes from which Bissinger distills drops of sweet-spirited vodka

        A political book – even a great one such as Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites – attains to a more sober, if more pie-in-the-sky goal: to educate and potentially to change minds.  In his book Hayes puts together a sophisticated argument as to how and why American meritocracy has failed.  Despite a near-equal density of facts, Hayes embarks on a slippier slope than Bissinger – his earnest passages not someone else’s celebration of a city or a game, but an argument very much his own.  I happen to agree with Hayes’s thesis and I revel in his earnest dissections, but while I admire his compilation of facts in the service of argument, I am quick to recognize that I don’t write fiction in order to argue.  By diving into political books I find I am driving myself further from the question at hand – if the question at hand is an analysis of the worthiness of my own fictional dedication.

        So I bravely gulp and reach for the scariest creature of them all – the potential horrorshow of nonfiction earnestness…the memoir.  The pitfalls here are obvious and everywhere, so much so that an intelligent memoirist, like Harry Crews, turns the pitfalls, rather than himself, into the subject of his memoir.  It can be argued forever whether or not any one life is worthy of a book.  I can see both sides.  Crews avoids the issue.  He begins his sidestep with his title: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.  Though clearly a memoir, Crews immediately complicates the form by insisting that his subject (in this case his childhood self) exists only to observe and reflect the environment in which he is found.  Crews says: “It’s always seemed to me as though I was not so much born into this life as I awakened to it.”  Indeed, his young self subject is immediately cast into something that moves with a great current – a storytelling family and culture in which everything told tends to live for generations regardless of its truth.  He is cast into a current of spirit, not of fact.

        Such non-fiction is boldly oppositional to the hard, cold reportage of Bissinger.  It is less earnest; Crews allows himself a generous helping of retrospective irony.  This is easily accomplished because of the established sketchiness of “facts” and moreover because the place he writes of, this storytelling south, by his own admission no longer exists and therefore cannot defend itself against his slander.  But that’s the point: even if it could speak for itself what could it honestly say?

        So, after all of this good nonfiction reading, I find myself again facing the question.  Is fiction merely redundant?  Is it still necessary?  The unspoken (and the only earnest) notion at the heart of Crews’s  book argues yes – stories are necessary because they are humanizing – in all the weakness and messiness that the word human implies.  The earnest argument of Hayes’s book leaves little room for such trivialities.  Bissinger loves the sweet indulgence of earnest storytelling, but will only allow himself the taste after grueling work.  Indeed, each sentence of fiction involves a decision between the busy, exhaustively all-consuming observation of a writer such as Franzen and the sparse poetics of a writer such as, say, Larry Brown. Framed as such, it begins to seem that the question at the center of the dilemma is that of earnestness and irony.

 

 

My earlier example of Jane Jacobs was not pulled at random.  To conjure Bissinger, let’s separate this investigation from art, fiction, and non-fiction.  We can employ a useful parallel and take this argument to the realm of American cities and suburbs.  Pretend that this investigation is by and for city dwellers and city lovers.  Those who have been chased to the safety of the suburbs by fear, or lured there by a near-century of racist and classist tax laws and planning programs – you may feel free to continue to comfort yourselves with pandering approximations of the dance theater and bestseller.  These things serve their purpose (they assuage the guilt and ensure the vote of enough of those who fear true engagement and complexity and they keep our democracy sporadically pointed toward progress (in case you were wondering about their purpose)), provide you with vicarious thrills and help maintain America’s entertainment economy.  For these reasons, until things improve, I (a city-lover) will suck it up and endure your repetitive use of “different” and “urban” as pejoratives.

For the sake of argument, let us over-simplify and hypothesize: earnestness is approximation (oh you well-intentioned stage-dancers); art is irony.  Earnestness has an intended purpose; art is purposeless – or, its only purpose is to wring the wet rag of reality and make it, itself, once again useful.

The true gift of the great fictional biographers of the suburbs (Yates, Roth, Franzen) is Irony.  It is impossible to mistake their indictments as comforting approximations, nor are they earnest and selective redundancies as may be witnessed on the political dance stage.  The vocabularies of these writers do not allow for such earnestness; indeed, their stubbornly idealistic characters, while often what suburban parents may call “creative” people, usually do not survive their own narratives.  Survival in their fictional landscape – indeed the survival of fiction itself – hinges not on the creative impulse, not on talent, but on the critical impulse, on irony.

The American identity has always strived for open land, be it a pioneer ranch or a suburban half-acre.  The American psyche as depicted in literature going back to the nation’s birth views cities as dirty, frightful, European, immoral.  The goal has always been privacy, self-determination, “freedom” from moral temptations and complications.  This ideal persists today in tax codes, highway and retail development and in the push against urban manufacturing.  Similarly, our popular moral and aesthetic tastes, once dictated by the earnest works of Emerson, Jefferson, Thoreau and Melville (in which you are hard-pressed to find a positive image of the city), persist today.  The secluded, sober Heart is celebrated, the vivacious, ironic Mind distrusted.  It is still commonly believed that in private homes the Heart is nurtured with earnest beliefs and moralities, while in bustling neighborhoods the incisive Mind is snide and conniving.  But even in the early days of the Union, sharp, vibrant urban wordsmiths provided a complex, city-loving alternative.  For Whitman, notably, the city and his biological body were one teeming, un-simplifiable organism. 

Today, even more importantly, there is no true art without irony.  The earnestly produced work is a product to be used.  True art eludes usefulness.  It cannot be put to common purposes.  For dance lovers I will concede that perhaps there is a vocabulary of movement and change that I have not considered, one that does not manipulate the language of the streets to meet political ends, but until it is found I will continue to turn to fiction for the vital language of incisiveness and change…and to my neighborhood streets for my dance.

 

 

Brendan Kerr lives and writes in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*oogy – adj.  the feeling associated with imagining one’s parents or siblings having sex.