THE GUY WITH a silver beard at the party leaned on the stove, elbow at the burner’s edge. This was a party for writers. There was the requisite vinegar-like white wine in ratty plastic cups. There was the plastic tray with midget carrots, soaking wet, which no one eats. The bearded guy was talking about novels and narrative in his jeans jacket, and he said that stories are part of us, we human beings, and that “stories–beginnings, middles, and ends–are in our bones.”
I think this made me retch, and when I looked up again he was still leaning over the stove, as if with the weight of this conviction. Of course he meant that from ancient times onward, we humans, somehow part of one great unified tribe, eventually grew ourselves a gene for telling stories (as he went on to say), and of course he was wrong. For one thing–and this isn’t even the main point–the word “gene” is generally flung around (by the media especially) ridiculously. There is no real entity called a gene, and it’s bad science to say there is. “Gene” is the scientific word for a big array of microcellular processes and interchanges, so the word isn’t really even a noun; it’s more like a verb. There’s no gene proper for intelligence, like Time magazine tells you, or, as this guy stated, for storytelling.
And for God’s sake, the conventions of fiction writing aren’t in our bones. Someone who was a Kathy Acker fan began softly arguing the guy’s point about beginning, middle, and end; by then the bearded person was talking about the best novels being those that are “grounded” in everyday life by mentions of artifacts like brand name products, references to timely, worldly events, et cetera, and then I really had to go, but didn’t until after a group of women sat down together to discuss non-oil eye moisturizers or something. That’s how English department parties go.
What the bearded guy was really talking about was his search for an end to anxiety. I guess that beginning, middle, and end are, culturally, about anxiety and the fact that it’s more secure not to be far afield without ballast to support you. He was talking about the myth of closure and he was talking about reading in fiction about products and markers of our times as a means of relieving anxiety about impermanence. If using beginning, middle, and endings relieves anxiety, it also enables writers to get nods from a publishing industry too conservative and dollar-conscious to take aesthetic risks.
I don’t understand why writers aren’t more self-conscious about making the choice for hanging a novel around a beginning, middle, and big-ass, ride-’em-home ending. Compare it to being 35 years old and still having a big frosted cake at your birthday party, along with a magic show and a sleazy clown blowing up balloons. The novel is supposed to be that category baggy enough to include everything–a different kind of a party, if you will–so choosing a stupendously conspicuous, already-traveled, less imaginative form seems ridiculous. As William Gass wrote, “The dominant form of the 20th Century novel has been the 19th Century novel.” Of course, lots of exciting fiction doesn’t lean on such structure, like John McManus’ Stop Breakin’ Down, or Ben Marcus’ Age of Wire and String, or Lance Olsen’s Sewing Shut My Eyes, or, of course, classic works from Stein, Marguerite Young, or Kafka.
I’m not saying the conventions of fiction writing should never be used. Sometimes they should. Lots of times the conventions form the best vehicle for carrying out a complex idea or set of themes, or even a stunning characterization, as in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley or Strangers on a Train. Sometimes writers just feel like telling a story the old-fashioned way. But conventions are overused in the trenches of literature, and are the product of a worried gamut of folk–anxious publishers afraid of losing their big salaries, anxious writers who write in imitation of the writers they’ve been exposed to, and readers whose tastes are influenced by publishers and writers.
Even writers who define themselves in opposition to convention carry a lot of anxiety: the anxiety of being different–for in being different, you’re still just as controlled by, under the sway of, the dominant forms. “Freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out,” a famous novelist wrote, and perhaps this applies to all would-be writers of literature. Probably this longing is similar to the wish of the bearded guy, who (let me just say in closing) was only seeking relief.