Reality Hunger Read Online Free Page A

and memories of wars and plagues and depressions. Once the earth was flat, but now we say it’s round. Once we thought we could sail west to the Indies; now we know that a New World is there. Once we were the center of a vast but known universe; now we’re just a speck in a vast and chaotic jumble.

    Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground. The sound of voice alone grew less compelling; the longing for narration rose up again, asserting the oldest claim on the reading heart: the tale. What could be more literal than The Story of My Life now being told by Everywoman and Everyman?

    Suddenly everyone’s tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing, even if not everyone’s story turns out to be fascinating or well told.

    Plot is a way to stage and dramatize reality, but when the presentation is too obviously formulaic, as it so often is, the reality is perceived as false. Skeptical of the desperation of the modernist embrace of art as the only solution, and hyperaware of all artifices of genre and form, we nevertheless seek new means of creating the real.

    Barbara Kruger was a painter, but her day job was photo editor at
Glamour
. One day she could no longer tolerate the divide between the two activities, and her artwork became the captioning of photos.

    Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were.

    In 1963, Marguerite Yourcenar said, “In our time, the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as a medium of expression.” No more. Increasingly, the novel goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching writers’ sensations and thoughts get set into the concrete of fiction that perhaps it’s best to avoid the form as a medium of expression.

    My medium is prose, not the novel.

    Just as
Stop-Time
obliges us ultimately to distinguish between Conroy the author and Frank the character, so
A Fan’s Notes
requires that a similar distinction be drawn between Exley the author and Frederick the character, a distinction that much more difficult to draw because Frederick seems, throughout the course of the narrative, to be writing—or at least trying to write—the very book we’re reading. Which accounts for the greater technical and structural complexity of
A Fan’s Notes
and also explains why a book so carefully created and meticulously ironized was so often criticized for being autobiographically self-indulgent. It’s in this very struggle between literary form and lived life that these two books find the structural tension which transforms Conroy’s “autobiographical narrative” and Exley’s “fictional memoir” into fully accomplished works of art. There are two unmistakable and distinctly positive effects of novels-as-autobiography like Frank Conroy’s
Stop-Time
and Frederick Exley’s
A Fan’s Notes:
first, they deliberately undermine the traditional and largely spurious authority of the novelist by depriving him of his privileged position aboveand beyond the world; and second, they narrow the gap that exists between fiction and autobiography, a gap that is artificial to begin with.

    The first essay in Bernard Cooper’s
Maps to Anywhere
was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1988, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first work of fiction of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters “neither fictions nor essays, neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions.” The narrator—Howard calls him “the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)”—is simultaneously “the author” and a fictional creation. From mini-section to mini-section and chapter to chapter, Bernard’s self-conscious and seriocomic