LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

I/3. THE NATURE OF FICTION IN THE DESPERADO WORK

1. TRUTH OR FICTION?

Henry James used to state that a work of art must approximate truth. Joyce, Woolf and Eliot restricted the area to the truth of the mind. The basic contention would be that nobody can tell for sure what truth is. Actually, our perception of the truth has changed so much that we read Dickens and do not see the life but the old-fashioned convention in him. Which brings one possible answer: in literature, truth is just another convention. The Desperadoes could not have been absent, since they delight in conventions of all kinds, as many as possible, as varied and as different. Consequently, the Desperadoes claim today, All we want to do is give you the truth.

The Desperado imagination adapts to a new nature, a new reality. It always brings about confusion, and the reader stops and wonders: Is this a new experience, or is it just a baffling of my old way of looking at things? Defiance is in the nature of all conventions. The only difference is that for many centuries, since ancient times to the realism of our own century, readers have been fed one pattern, that of chronological causality, of the couple living (un)happily ever after. The couple and the ending are two outmoded, exhausted conventions. For the first time, the Desperadoes defy the very basis of traditional fiction. The defiance is stronger than the stream of consciousness hybridization of literary genres. Joyce, Woolf, Eliot merely played with the existing conventions, and kept them whole, actually. Literature became a game. Desperadoes find this game and all they can think of is to smash it to pieces. They claim they want truth, not just a game, but their truth is desperately confusing. It is very hard to create a new convention when you start by smashing all components that could have been useful. Imagination works hard, and here we are in front of a question which is in fact as old as the hills: Truth or fiction?

It is quite obvious that what the stream of consciousness claimed to do, which was adjusting literature to the truth, making it more capable of rendering life, was just another illusion of truth. Desperadoes no longer claim to mirror life. They are more drastic, and their literature mirrors no truth, it just is life, truth, reality, whatever we experience daily, outside the written page. Desperado literature takes a trip out of itself. The author steps into unfamiliar surroundings and starts building a new house of fiction. No harm done, as long as the reader keeps in mind that this will be a house, too, in the long run, not a forest or a meadow, no wild nature, but an artificial shelter.

The author is very much aware of two things: first, that he wants to be truer than anyone before him; second, that, being a Desperado, he must make his own law as he goes along. The first thing that must be secured is the reader’s emotional involvement. Most Desperadoes confess in interviews that they want to be friends with the reader, they want the reader on their side, and very much pleased by the work. They mean to say that they need this reader to hold their hand, to trust and believe, wile they baffle, even ruin all his expectations. They claim this is the immediacy of life, that they do not offer fiction but nature, and we must bear with the text, because the war with old conventions is long and hard. The Desperado reader, steeped in intertextuality and other such fine tricks, trots along the new book, disabused and snubbed, till suddenly a miracle happens and he changes. Reading is no longer mere involvement. The reader learns defiance from the author, and Desperado reading is essentially incredulous (is the truth in the work?) and dissatisfied.

The critic is more easily silenced. The contention that the work is the truth and not a mere image of it leads to the idea that, since the truth cannot be changed, the work is above argument. Julian Barnes confesses he has ‘quit’ criticism. Other Desperadoes surrender and accept criticism, claiming that anyone can see in the text what they please. If the author does not even fight for copyright of his fiction, it is easy to understand why the critic is so cautious to approach the mine hidden in the Desperado text.

The mechanism of Desperado fiction relies on untruth, in fact, because the definition of a Desperado text is anti. If truth is tradition, untruth is innovation, so it must be explored. This is how the favourite Desperado space is created, that of dystopia. The text outsmarts the familiar, it defamiliarizes, and instead of a place, which is a traditional approximation of nature, it displaces, it shows the way out of nature, the departure from all known space. Untruth does not deny, it exaggerates all realities and feelings, ending up in maximized fears. A text that defamiliarizes, displaces and maximizes fears can only be grim, grudging, oppressive. Its only hope is inventivity, so the only hope of untruth is fiction. No reader would linger in such scary places of the mind unless they knew they were not for real.

Fiction it is, then. Fiction which does not mean to please, not in the way Jane Austen or Galsworthy pleased the reader. Fiction which pushes the reader to the limit, making him a Desperado displaced reader of a dystopia. This Desperado work has two extremes in it: on the one hand, it has peace, since truth is in it; on the other hand, it is haunted by impatience, since what it does with the truth is fiction, and this fiction is the most ambitious so far.


2. DIARY MAYBE?

The shape of Desperado fiction is varied, yet more often than not it has a diary-like quality. It records incidents in the first or third person. The incidents are disparate and the author keeps them short, like daily entries. The Desperado novel rarely has more than one main hero, so the book is easily seen as this one hero’s self-revelation. The order of incidents is apparently dictated by hazard. In fact the hero postpones the embarrassing, hides the key of our disapproval. Dickens, the Brontes, Galsworthy, had positive and negative characters. There is no such thing for a Desperado author. The one hero he offers us is good and bad at once, likable and unlikable, we had better suspend judgment and go along. We shall be surprised yet, when we grow to like the grumpiest, most arrogant beings ever. Desperadoes always court the displeasing.

These heroes have a haunting need to confess, yet confession is forbidden as such. The only thing they can do is remember in a certain order, which order suggests to us what they feel, what they most want to hide. They keep recreating past presents. The feeling of a permanent present invades memory, the past. These characters are finally forbidden to hide anything: the text becomes a forceful revelation. They have the inner strength to reveal the embarrassing at last, and this strength is rooted in the author’s hatred for romance: the Desperado will go to any lengths in order to erase soap opera expectations, he will offer several simultaneous endings, no ending, blank pages, a mere ‘GOODBYE’. He will discredit the future to the best of his abilities.

Desperado fiction always takes author, hero and reader by surprise, which explains why Desperadoes make such an exacerbated use of suspense. The book is not a carefree diary, with a reliable past to remember, present to describe and future to hope for. The book is a maybe diary, helpless to imagine tomorrow, but highly skilful in playing with the past. Some authors write as if they were keeping a diary, and they are the introverts (Orwell, Burgess, Lessing, Gray, Ackroyd, Swift, Ishiguro). Others talk, jump, attempt a traditional plot which looks insufficient to a lover of tradition, and those are the histrionic Desperadoes (Fowles, Bradbury, Lodge, Barnes, Amis). With some, lyricism softens the narrative rage. There are all kinds of Desperadoes: bitter, mocking, compassionate. What keeps them together is the addiction to incident and the diary technique, which places the plot in the indeterminacy of memory.

Since the fiction resulted is a diary, a day to day progress, the novel is inconclusive, commanding all those who enter here to abandon all hope for happy endings. If the diary ever stops, it is only because the author needs a breath of life to continue. We have here the first real open work (opera aperta) in the history of the novel, which covers more than a millennium.


3. GAME MORE THAN DIARY

There is an obvious symmetry in the Desperado work, a symmetry that reminds of a game which ranges black and white pawns: themes always have or turn themselves into anti-themes, the plot becomes an anti-plot (a diary), the heroes turn out to be non-heroes (‘You! hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!’), expectations are replaced by decisions that blur any future, and finally, truth and fiction fight for supremacy. The game, more than the mere diary, involves a certain degree of artificiality: the author plays with bits of reality, fitting them in a puzzle of the whole being. What he demands from his readers is a total reading, the committed reading. If the work is a game, the reader has to be in dead earnest, to compensate for the author’s recklessness. Unless reading takes the novel seriously, the Desperado work dies.

The Desperado author treats both writing and reading as a game. He flirts with his heroes’ and his readers’ reason, understanding, memory, even with the air of apparent simplicity. The Desperado work may look a piece of cake, but it is in fact far from being simple. It is the serious game of a very resourceful writer, and cannot survive in the absence of a suspicious reader. A novel like The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) toys with the idea of Englishness, which turns out to be an international air of everyone, everywhere, at most times. The writer is so resourceful that we hardly realize what his real aim is. Which brings us to our own fault, that of not being suspicious enough when we first read the novel, because we are in the habit of looking for what previous traditions had to offer. We must expect what is the unexpected for us. We must surprise ourselves with our expectations. If anyone stands to gain from this image of the work as a game, it is the reader by all means. He is educated to thrive on complication. The strategy of the writer postpones understanding: the author teases the reader’s relaxed frame of mind when faced with verbal clarity, and underground he builds a prolonged sense of suspense. In Ishiguro’s novels, we do not know exactly what we are waiting for, yet the waiting goes on desperately, beyond the last page. The Desperado work is a game which plays with the reading-after-reading.

The reader of Desperado fiction reads as if he were speaking a foreign language with each new book. You master a foreign language, but is it ever familiar? Don’t we all slip back into our mother tongue when we think to ourselves? Meaning, don’t we go back to traditional conventions, expectations, plots, chronology, heroes, fiction on the whole? The Desperado idea is to keep readers alert, breed in them a distaste for orderly, reasonable narratives, for fulfilled expectations. Desperado fiction, game or diary or whatever we may call it, leaves us breathless. If with the fiction of the stream of consciousness the reader focussed on decoding, the Desperado reader gasps for breath while adapting to every new book, while learning to expect dissimilarity within similarity, to discover nature within fiction.


4. BACK TO SQUARE ONE

Every new book, whether called Desperado or any other name, hopes to come closer to what we feel, to reality, to the truth, to us. Yet every new convention – and this Desperado age abounds in imagination for new conventions – is a more sophisticated degree of abstractization. With writers like Burgess, Lessing, Fowles, Brownjohn, Bradbury, Gray, Lodge, Barnes, Ackroyd, Amis, Swift, Ishiguro, life is the pretext, fiction is the game.

The roots of Desperado fiction go through the stream of consciousness, and catch at every device ever used. There is no literary movement so far more technical than the Desperado movement. An author is no longer satisfied if he differs from another age, he wants to be different from: 1. other authors, and 2. his own previous books.

The result is neither truth/ ‘us’ nor pure fiction. The result is a chain of conventions which rush for a breath of life every second page or so. We are, then, with this playful demonstration of the nature of Desperado fiction, back to square one. The Desperado author has an obvious ( general) precept: be fictional unto your truth. His birthmark is that he is in two minds about this truth and, if asked, he would certainly advise: GIVE YOUR READER THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT FICTION.