Steven Millhauser and Reality
16 Dec
Hello, dear readers! Thanks to the kindness of the good people at American Short Fiction, I will be guest-blogging here for the next three days. I love good quotes about writing, and so my idea is to post a daily quote, briefly say why it has stayed with me, and then—this is where you come in!—hear your take on said quote, your own favorite quotes on writing, or whatever else else suits you.
So, without further ado, quote # 1 from Steven Millhauser, from an interview in Failbetter:
Q: What continues to attract you to messing with reality?
A: I mess with reality in the name of reality. Another way of putting it is that I don’t mess with reality. I mess with the assumption that reality is perfectly captured by middle-of-the-road realist fiction. I’d argue that the conventions of the realist story don’t begin to do justice to the blazing thing that deserves the name of reality.
I love Steven Millhauser and I use this quote a lot when teaching. In workshops, I’ve often felt like the distinction between realist and “nonrealist” writing can be overly simplistic. This could be because I don’t really understand the word “realism” in a lot of ways, perhaps because it seems to imply that reality is a singular thing, a quantifiable thing, whereas I see the whole notion of reality as being much more like the great “blazing thing” Millhauser references. Labels are valuable in that they give us a language to talk about the different kinds of writing out there, but couldn’t one argue that one person’s fabulism is another person’s realism and vice versa? I’m not sure if that’s what Millhauser means in this excerpt from an excellent interview in the excellent Failbetter, but each time I return to these words, Millhauser succeeds in making me think more deeply about my own assumptions about the nature of “reality” in fiction.
Thoughts? Arguments? Laments?
I just read the Failbetter interview, which I agree is terrific. I have a memory of reading about Katherine Mansfield making fun of “middle-of-the-road” realist writers, who seem to think that a story can be pure reportage about someone’s day, a meeting with friends, a conversation over tea. To me it seems that good stories can’t be “realist” in that way, because art demands a certain amount of contrivance, of arranging events, symbols, characters, ideas, etc. in a certain way. I think that writers contrive certain realities by the very act of writing, which Millhauser gets at towards the end of the interview, when he says that ‘the idea of letting a story “lead me where it will” strikes me as ludicrous. It implies a naïve conception of the artist as a wide-eyed child skipping in a field, uninhibited by any constraints.’
This is a lovely post, highlighting a fantastic quote. I am a huge fan of Millhauser and tend also toward other fiction that might be labeled magical realism or which often has some sort of twist on what would be considered “normal” reality: Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Louis de Bernières, JSF, etc. I have friends who can’t stand this type of fiction. It might point toward our different conceptions of reality or, rather, what is “real” to us. I spend a lot of time painting and drawing–creating fictions that are real to me. Thank you for this!
Reality. What a concept! I think Steve means that many fiction writers lose what Robert Olen Butler calls “the dream focus” when they write. They use their memories instead of the reality of the dream story and the characters therein. Only in fiction do things make sense. In “reality,” there are so many different realities going on at the same time that we need higher physics just to get a handle on the possibilities. Dream focus is what we creative writers really do.
I think this is a great quote. I often say, “The job is to make something as strange as life. And life is pretty strange.”
Thanks for the great comments, everyone!
Jim, I especially like the phrase “dream focus.”
Great post and a quote I’ll steal. What I love about Millhauser is that he uses the tricks of form, for example, essayistic, to appear “real” and yet the content of his stories is fabulist.
i agree with you, Laura, when you say that distinctions between realism and nonrealism are often overly-simplified. i’d add that, especially in the online community, realism is sort of frowned upon. but what is interesting to me here is that Milhauser leaves something open by writing “middle-of-the-road.” middle-of-the-road realism is clearly not very good. so, there’s some other better type of realism out there. but still, i was talking about this with some folks on Big Other the other day, and i just don’t think realism is a very good term to use anymore when describing certain types of fiction that look sorta realistic. i think many ‘experimental’ writers would say the same thing about calling their writing experimental. for me though, a lot of writers that typically get called realist, don’t seem to be realists at all. carver, for instance. no talks in real life like how people talk in a carver story. or how spare his descriptions can be. this is why we call it minimalism, because it’s not realism. and Joy Williams, who i love and you give that great quote from the Tao Lin interview, she’s anything but a realist to me. while on the surface, writers like Carver and Williams can be called realists because it’s easy to do or because, you know, they’re not writing about people walking on moonbeams, i think there’s a deeper, more complexly representational aspect to such work, that is just as imaginative, just as playful, and just as wonderful and genre-bending as something more pointedly nonrealist.