From “Abstraction and Nonsense,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of The Yale Review. A version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center.
What am I doing when I decide to write a realistic story? What am I setting about to make? I am in fact constructing an artifice that feels real or “lifelike.” Roland Barthes would have us believe that the tricks of fiction are dead. With all due respect, this is not true for a couple of reasons. The first is that readers still invest themselves in stories so deeply that they will feel bad or good, and argue about whether a character has behaved realistically or not. The second reason is that readers are never unaware that they are regarding a construction. Readers come to the work willingly and agree to certain terms. Those terms will vary from work to work, but are established by the work, usually early on. Like any contract, breaking it leads to distrust. This is accepted reality. But I imagine that the broken agreement and all its attendant distrust can be seen as similar to the analogous actual-world act of betrayal, and so can be as real as anything.
To further understand the notion of the real in fiction, consider dialogue. Dialogue is perhaps the clearest example of the constructed “realness” in fiction. My best dialogue, the best dialogue of writers better than me, the best-ever dialogue is not “real” speech. Not by a stretch. The rhythms, the tics, the inflections are simply not the same. Perhaps it is a function of the presence of punctuation. I don’t know.
Were you and your best friend—and I’ll add that you are both fine actors—to memorize some great passage of contemporary dialogue, and get on a local train and act out that dialogue, people would think you odd. At best they might take you for non-native speakers, but, more likely than not, they will think you are crazy. Conversely, if you were to transcribe the best of your favorite conversations with your dearest friend it would read as terrible dialogue. It would sound “unreal.” But your conversation was real, wasn’t it? Of course it was, but it is not the real that will satisfy in fiction.
This is a language that cannot be taught, only learned. It is much like how Louis Armstrong defined jazz: you know it when you hear it. This is sad news for students and teachers alike. No book can tell you how to do it. There are only people in the world who will tell you that it is or isn’t good dialogue. It is confounding and irritating and it leaves us feeling not unlike Alice talking to the Mad Hatter.
Alice, I’m glad you brought her up. My search for the abstract novel has, of course, forced me to consider, appreciate, be seduced by, and employ nonsense. Nonsense is not the same as gibberish. Random pecking at the keys of a typewriter will give you gibberish. Nonsense has a direction, it has a particular kind of beauty. It is more like instrumental music than a song with lyrics, more like thinking than thought.
The very effort to find meaning in nonsense is the root of some meaning. It finds significance by what it makes us do, like search ourselves or perhaps abandon belief in meaning so that we again enjoy the cadence of language. Even after recognition of the work as nonsense, we still, consciously or unconsciously, attempt to make it mean something. Lovers of literature want what all readers want: they want to know. Whether this is voyeuristic, I can’t say, but there is a desire to know something about the world that is being offered. It is that desire that makes the story real, that makes that strange fictive dialogue believable. It is this desire that attracts me, that makes me want to press the limit of the artifice and see where the limit of sense lies.
