January 20, 2018


January 20, 2018: The Fiction of Our  Non-Fiction



If we do want to write fiction set in the world in which we live, it is useful to study the works of authors who do have an ear for dialogue, for the locutions people use, for the accidental poetry with which humans express and conceal  their thoughts and feelings.

Francine Prose,  Reading Like A Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books And For Those Who Want To Write Them (2006)

                For people who have the need and/or the desire to find respite, however brief, from the disasters, death-oriented plots, and various terrors  of living, the study of accidental poetry has purpose. Prose has a point.   That quite "literary" point  is nicely complemented by Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel ( 2nd ed., 2012), a "cultural" study based on some findings of cognitive psychology. Prose and Zunshine would probably agree that  we can learn to craft languages,  to lose cares in bright moments. The human condition, the nature of existence, and the limits of psychology ensure that the moments of pleasure  have a short life. The way of the world demands that we give more sustained attention to the grim fiction of our non-fiction.  It is suicidal to live in dreams, either in the myth of the American Dream or its confirmation in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."   Our survival depends, in part, on our dispassionate analysis of how thoroughly fictional non-fictions can be.

                Moreover, not everyone  is predisposed to seek  respite.  Indeed, a few people seek out agony. They batten on it, and try to persuade themselves and others that surviving it is some kind of wonderful.  Ideologues, politicians, journalists and television commentators devote considerable energy to the neo-conservative/neo-liberal games of deception that mark commerce with the fiction of non-fiction.  The world in which we live is saturated with deliberate poetry.  Agony begets agony because it loves company the way some American citizens love books.  It is o.k. to like books and to use them as the tools they are.  Loving books may suggest that we lack stable genius.

                If one wants to be intelligently  radical in the Age of Trump, one joins Tina Turner in singing "What's Love Got to Do with It?" rather than allowing oneself to be narcotized or driven stone blind by  Louis Armstrong's excellent rendition of "It's a Wonderful World."   January 20, 2018 will help us to take account of all -----I do mean ALL ----that has transpired in this world since January 20, 2017. And as we prepare to listen to a State of the Union address on January 30, 2018 (anticipate very great fire and fury and imaginative dissembling) , the fiction we should  explore for its sobering incorporation of both accidental and deliberate poetry is not American.  It comes to us from antiquity by way of superb satire attributed to one Petronius Arbiter ----the Satyricon.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 13, 2018

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