fiction

Well the parties might finally be over. But of course I speak too soon – I’m heading up to Massachusetts tomorrow for another graduation on Sunday. I suspect there may be some celebrating, although it’s not likely that I will have to attend an actual party. That will be more for the graduates. A reception/luncheon after commencement is more the probability for me. Yesterday we had a department luncheon. Indian food, quite nice. Fake roses on the tables, an extended effort to dress each lovely place. The blooms were in their most open phase – just as the rose is about to drop its petals. Artifice constructed to resemble a dying flower. A peculiar choice.

I’ve always said what, in the end, is the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Either way you must tell a good story. If I read non-fiction, I learn something about the world. But my fiction-writing friend was aghast. Memoir is ruining fiction, she stated with great certainty. But I don’t think memoir is the culprit, it is a symptom. What is ruining fiction is cultural insistence that all authority emanates from the individual and that all individuals are equal sources of authority. It is the same insistence on all points of view being equal that I see in my students. It is the unwillingness to accept expertise, to view an expert voice as elitism. Fueled by the Internet, and the vast abundance of easily available opinions, people seem to believe, really believe, that the only experience worth hearing about is the personal one because no one can possibly be any more authoritative than anyone else.

It is yet another paradox – the paradox of access. You can make a system more accessible, more transparent, and everyone will delight in understanding its functioning and content. But at a certain point these qualities begin to drag the system into inefficiency and eventually breakdown. We get things like Wikipedia. A tantelizing reader controlled text that easily has reams of incorrect information. Without gatekeepers information is unreliable. It leads also to a president people would like to have a beer with, rather than a president who is a deep thinker. We get a jovial, albeit sometimes nasty, advisor controlled executive who has easily made hundreds of bad choices because he has replaced thinking with patronage.