Fiction’s job

Earlier in the month, Mark Athitakis speculated that fiction’s job is to be good fiction. He worried that the proposition is tautological, but it isn’t. If he had said that fiction’s job is simply to be fiction, he would have edged closer to tautology.

The insertion of the epithet gives the proposition its content. Athitakis is saying something that I too have said, again and again, although I broadened the category to haul in some examples of nonfiction too: “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.”

The real question is what such a proposition denies and rejects. Daniel Green blasted it as “reductive” and “dismissive.” For Green, of course, fiction’s job is “to be taken as literature”—a proposition that really is tautological.

Hoping to expand his proposition, Athitakis quotes the novelist Walter Kirn. I can’t follow very much of what Kirn is saying, although his main point seems to be that the fiction writer’s “only job” is to express “our remarkable situation.” In short, the fiction writer must be socially relevant, somehow. His subject must be “in the world,” and his treatment of it must “speak of” the predicament in which men find themselves now.

Athitakis’s original proposition, flat and unadorned, was closer to the truth, and more interesting. The fiction writer has no other job than to write well. That, as I’ve yelled before, is his moral obligation.

Nabokov said something similar, writing that Sebastian Knight “wasn’t concerned with ordinary morals; what annoyed him invariably was the second rate, not the third or N-th rate, because here, at the readable stage, the shamming began, and this was, in an artistic sense, immoral.” The only thing that matters in fiction is whether the writer is seeking with all of the powers and resources at his disposal to write as well as he can—settling for no machine-made gods, appealing to no thematic fashions, buckling to no social demands.

But one thing more. In his book on Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton defines the “ethics of elfland,” the code that regulates fantastical other worlds where fairies glide and monsters prowl. Physical law and even moral law may not operate there, but such lands are not lawless. A different law is in force there; a higher law, even:[A]ccording to elfin ethics all virtue is in an “if.” The note of the fairy utterance always is, “You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word ‘cow’ ”; or “You may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show here an onion.” The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden.Where Chesterton talks of fairy tales, though, I hear him talking of fiction. All fiction is conditional. If a man is transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect then consequences will follow by force of logic—but they will follow if and only if the writer cleaves to his first intent, his entire scheme of implications. The moment that a writer violates the conditions of his own fictional world, the world falls to ashes.

Fiction’s job is generally to be good fiction, but inter alia that entails keeping faith with the particular conditions of a particular fiction.