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Monday, February 4, 2008

My Religion

posted by on February 4 at 13:24 PM

In this week’s books section, Christopher Frizzelle makes the leap of faith and determines, with the help of Jonathan Franzen and Moby Dick, that fiction is his “higher power.” It is the fate of a writer to eventually reach this conclusion. If he/she does not, he/she is free to think of their situation in life as anything else but that of a writer. All writers must believe in fiction. An example: Watch this BBC video of J.G. Ballard, Crash!, to the end. That is proof enough.

Fiction is not only a religion but all of reality. There is nothing but fiction between us. What links the social is the imagination, ideology, cognitive mapping, narration. Also, there is no division between fiction and nature. Fiction, which is produced by systems of human communication, is ultimately a natural substance. It is to us what a thread is to the spider or honey to the bee. Fictions are made from the stuff we weave and excrete: words and thoughts.

For me, the acceptance of this final picture of things—the all is fiction—began not with Moby Dick but through a marvelous passage in Moncrieff’s translation of Remembrance of Things Past:


Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress. At a certain moment,—when I was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind, in the preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was to furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale square of the window, over a small black wood I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the wing which has grown to wear it, or the sketch upon which the artist’s fancy has washed it. But I felt that, unlike them, this colour was due neither to inertia nor to caprice but to necessity and life.

dusk-mountain-road.jpg

After reading this passage (the rest of which is below), I converted to fiction. Here was meaning in its entirety. In these words I saw something close to what Borges’s character, Borges, sees in “The Aleph.” At this point, time opened up, the stars became brighter, and there was the infinite, the all of it.

Presently there gathered behind it reserves of light. It brightened; the sky turned to a crimson which I strove, gluing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent nacre of night, beneath a firmament still powdered with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it afresh, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect oh a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of it and a continuous picture.

The scenery became broken, abrupt, the train stopped at a little station between two mountains. Far down the gorge, on the edge of a hurrying Stream, one could see only a solitary watch-house, deep-planted in the water which ran past on a level with its windows. If a person can be the product of a soil the peculiar charm of which one distinguishes in that person, more even than the peasant girl whom I had so desperately longed to see appear when I wandered by myself along the Méséglise way, in the woods of Roussainville, such a person must be the big girl whom I now saw emerge from the house and, climbing a path lighted by the first slanting rays of the sun, come towards the station carrying a jar of milk. In her valley from which its congregated summits hid the rest of the world, she could never see anyone save in these trains which stopped for a moment only. She passed down the line of windows, offering coffee and milk to a few awakened passengers. Purpled with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt in her presence that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, substituting for them in our mind a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean amongst the different faces that have taken our fancy, the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and dull because they are lacking in precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, that element which is proper to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be fair, for we believed that we were taking into account when we formed it happiness and beauty, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either. So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when anyone speaks to him of a new ‘good book,’ because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read and knows already, whereas a good book is something special, something incalculable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man, till then apathetic, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it depicts. So, alien to the models of beauty which my fancy was wont to sketch when I was by myself, this strapping girl gave me at once the sensation of a certain happiness (the sole form, always different, in which we may learn the sensation of happiness), of a happiness that would be realised by my staying and living there by her side. But in this again the temporary cessation of Habit played a great part. I was giving the milk-girl the benefit of what was really my own entire being, ready to taste the keenest joys, which now confronted her. As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live, most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the change of place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, played me false, and all my faculties came hurrying to take their place, vying with one another in their zeal, rising, each of them, like waves in a storm, to the same unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath, appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination. I cannot say whether, so as to make me believe that this girl was unlike the rest of women, the rugged charm of these barren tracts had been added to her own, but if so she gave it back to them. Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts. She would have initiated me into the delights of country life and of the first hours of the day. I signalled to her to give me some of her coffee. I felt that I must be noticed by her. She did not see me; I called to her. Above her body, which was of massive build, the complexion of her face was so burnished and so ruddy that she appeared almost as though I were looking at her through a lighted window. She had turned and was coming towards me; I could not take my eyes from her face which grew larger as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to arrest in its course and draw towards one, letting itself be seen at close quarters, blinding the eyes with its blaze of red and gold. She fastened on me her penetrating stare, but while the porters ran along the platform shutting doors the train had begun to move. I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn. Whether my exaltation had been produced by this girl or had on the other hand been responsible for most of the pleasure that I had found in the sight of her, in the sense of her presence, in either event she was so closely associated with it that my desire to see her again was really not so much a physical as a mental desire, not to allow this state of enthusiasm to perish utterly, not to be separated for ever from the person who, although quite unconsciously, had participated in it. It was not only because this state was a pleasant one. It was principally because (just as increased tension upon a cord or accelerated vibration of a nerve produces a different sound or colour) it gave another tonality to all that I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe; that handsome girl whom I still could see, while the train gathered speed, was like part of a life other than the life that I knew, separated from it by a clear boundary, in which the sensations that things produced in me were no longer the same, from which to return now to my old life would be almost suicide. To procure myself the pleasure of feeling that I had at least an attachment to this new life, it would suffice that I should live near enough to the little station to be able to come to it every morning for a cup of coffee from the girl. But alas, she must be for ever absent from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing swiftness, a life to the prospect of which I resigned myself only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the same station, a project which would have the further advantage of providing with subject matter the selfish, active, practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human mind; for our mind turns readily aside from the effort which is required if it is to analyse in itself, in a general and disinterested manner, a pleasant impression which we have received. And as, on the other hand, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers to imagine it in the future tense, which while it gives us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of recreating it in our own consciousness and allows us to hope that we may receive it afresh from without.

RSS icon Comments

1

Oh my gawd, the Sushi Master told me the EXACT SAME THING!

Posted by Mr. Poe | February 4, 2008 1:43 PM
2

The Great Seattle Novel;

Chapter I

I got my gun.

Chapter II
I shot Charles.

Chapter III
The shiny steel clouds bent to show the mustard underglow. A narrow band of blue showed white shoulders far to the South.

James and Alice were stuck beyond the misnomered pass, beyond hope, beyond memory.

A crocodile died, and no one cared.
But Harps now plays in the emerald heavens.

Chapter IV
I put the gun away.

There was death in the afternoon, yes; but no bull.

Posted by unPC | February 4, 2008 1:43 PM
3

What's quite funny is that this post combines both his great (and almost creepy) fascination with women and his love of dense and practically meaningless logorrhea to an almost absurd degree.

Posted by bma | February 4, 2008 1:51 PM
4

Another take on the old "why don't they make good movies anymore/God is dead" thingy that has padded college essays for the last 25 years.

Posted by Dougsf | February 4, 2008 2:00 PM
5

@3

The saddest type of woman obsessor is the type who can never get them, ala Charles.

Posted by Non | February 4, 2008 2:01 PM
6

I've always been fascinated by the idea that we are characters in a novel. The author is "God", who is not immortal or omnipotent but just an ordinary author, fat, bad teeth, drinks too much, irritable. Definitely irritable.

Posted by Fnarf | February 4, 2008 2:01 PM
7

How Olympian.

Posted by unPC | February 4, 2008 2:11 PM
8

have you read The Life of Pi?

Posted by Marko Constans | February 4, 2008 8:32 PM
9

Hmmm, who's picture is that? You take that one Charles?

Posted by Shawn | February 4, 2008 8:37 PM
10

"Also, there is no division between fiction and nature."

There's a hole in the ozone layer, not in the text, Charles. This kind of anthropocentric literary criticism (nature-as-text) isn't just solipsistic, it's passe and irresponsible.

Posted by bored lit major | February 4, 2008 9:17 PM
11

Reading comments on a post that's beautiful and inspiring to me makes me sick.

Hell is other people on the internet.

Posted by Kiru Banzai | February 5, 2008 7:25 AM

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