I truly love the way you write, and think. Every time i finish a new missive of yours it makes me want to be a better person. Not in a sad way, in a happy way! You're an inspiring creator, writer, person. Thanks for being here for us, Celine <3
thank you for reading!! your comment honestly makes me so happy…it’s really special to actually touch someone thru writing, and I’m really happy I’m succeeding 💌
the nicest part of writing online is getting to hear from people—I really appreciate how warm and conversational it feels to write on Substack
thank you for reading and for the recommendation!! putting it on the infinitely expanding list (I genuinely am grateful but wow I will DIE before I read everything I want to…!!)
kind of tempted to have a month where I read this + Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method
I so agree about the newsletter being a form of practice - at least, it is for me! And thinking about the comments on memory, even if the memories have been 'made up', is it not that they are buried deep within the unconscious and surface without being acknowledged as actual memory? I've had a glass of wine at lunchtime and this may also free me to write the above!
To the idea of writing a regular-ish newsletter as practice…I've been obsessed for the past year or so with the idea that musicians play the scales, athletes stretch, dancers have warmup routines…what does the warmup routine of a writer look like?
I love your idea of memories possibly resurfacing—and not acknowledged as memories, precisely, but perhaps showing up as a strangely familiar resonance…
Firstly, I loved this, you have a new subscriber here. I love both Laurent Binet and Roberto Bolano so that hooked me in.
I think one person who also plays with this what is fiction? question is Geoff Dyer, but from the non-fiction angle. A lot of his books are categorised as non-fiction, but he freely admits that some of the stuff in them is just made up. Consequently everything he writes is essentially just labelled "genre-defying".
Thank you for this very kind comment!! And yes—love Binet and Bolaño (and would really like to be a completionist and read all the books by each in my lifetime).
I haven't read any Geoff Dyer yet, but I have read the Irish writer Rob Doyle enthuse on the enormous influence Dyer had on him—it's so nice when a writer I like recommends another writer! I'd really like to read Dyer at some point, he seems like such a fascinating and wide-ranging thinker
Oh same here about being a completionist! I recommend Out of Sheer Rage. It's Geoff Dyer at his most Dyer-esque and I think if you like that you'll like the rest. It's also so funny!
While I'm not finished reading this yet, I just want to thank you for putting so much effort into your essays! It's really comforting to see that there's a place for long-form/ well-researched writing on here.
Thank you Michael! It's genuinely so rewarding to receive comments like this. In general I have felt so inspired and intellectually activated by the many people writing on Substack (and on personal blogs, in earlier eras of the internet) in exceptionally thoughtful and thorough ways.
I wish I could find the link now…but your comment is reminding me that one of the most helpful discussions of class/privilege I've ever read was on a Livejournal post back in the day. This anonymous writer totally changed my worldview and introduced me to so many useful ideas! I think that's what serious, sustained internet writing can do.
I loved this Celine! All 3 of these books have been on my tbr for a while and I loved how you discussed and analysed them together. I ordered ‘Outline’ yesterday as so many people have been recommending it to me, so I’m excited to read it (for many reasons) but perhaps most interestingly to think about the concepts from this piece while I read!
I really wasn’t sure on ‘Tell’ when I first saw it published but this has seriously sold it to me. I have been eager to read ‘Biography of X’ ever since I read ‘Pew’. Lacey did an introduction to a republished classic by Fitzcarraldo that’s coming out next month called ‘The Edge of the Alphabet’ by Janet Frame - I asked to read the ARC of it purely based on Lacey’s endorsement and I really enjoyed it. I think based off this essay, you might like it too! Rtc in my next newsletter but wanted to share the title!
thank you Martha!!! tbh this post felt so unwieldy to write, BUT I do think these 3 novels have particular tendencies that are so satisfying and interesting to me
Rachel Cusk's Outline and Jonathan Buckley's Tell have certain similarities—a somewhat self-effacing narrator that is still obviously present and shepherding you through other people's lives (though Cusk's narrator disappears more, and Buckley's has an incredibly distinctive voice)
The Edge of the Alphabet sounds fascinating—very happy to hear you liked it, and hopefully I'll be able to read it soon! looking forward to your longer thoughts on it
This was a delight to read. I'm reminded of Peli Grietzer's work on ambient meaning (~vibe~) in works of art. Keying off of the way that art is compressive of the real world, he makes a wonderful analogy to a type of generative ML model called an autoencoder, which is trained to compress and then reconstruct its real-world data inputs. Because of the compression, the outputs of the autoencoder are not exact replicas of the real-world inputs (e.g. an autoencoder trained on images of Classical Greek pottery will create images of Classical Greek pottery that don't actually exist...are in some sense fictional). But, he shows that the facsimiles the model generates can actually be more informative about the structure of its real-world data than one of the real world training samples! More real than real life
This is so fascinating—thank you! Peli Grietzer's writing seems potentially relevant to a project I'm working on right now (thinking about 20th c. conceptual artists and current multimodal generative AI tech) so I will look him up…if you have any other references that seem possibly relevant, please let me know!!
The Greek pottery example is so enticing—I think there is something interesting about how computational models refract the world into forms that remove some pieces of information and simultaneously emphasize others, making it a bit easier to see something structurally, quantitatively, etc. There might also be something interesting here about how our experience of encountering models helps us reframe and reinterpret reality in a different light (this can obviously be both positive and negative; see Kranzberg, "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral")
Loved biography of x, tho I felt it dragged a little in the middle. I will have to put tell and the savage detectives on my list, they both sound fascinating.
thank you for reading! I'm looking forward to seeing how I feel about Biography of X overall when I finish—and if you do read Tell and The Savage Detectives, I hope you find them interesting!
Loved this analysis so much!! There's a certain point in reading a novel, that I find myself inside the world in three dimension and get a sense, that feels like intuition, of who the characters are. If it's a good novel, it kind of tears this barrier that we come in with, knowing that the story is 'not real,' and makes us feel as if they were. And specifically for this nonfiction-like-fiction genre, it makes you forget that you're in fiction and start to believe the events took place. I haven't read many works like these, but found-footage films, movies that claim 'based on a true story' (which I didn't know you could just lie about haha) get me all the time. I'm really excited to check out the books you mentioned!
you described it so well—and yes, I similarly can't believe people just get to LIE and say "this is based on a true story"…but I kind of love that form of artificiality, and the uncertainty that comes from feeling like it COULD be real, it COULD be about the strangest and most dazzling parts of the world I live in
It seems odd to say that a character in a novel is captured or articulated by just one story in virtue of existing in the novel, both because characters in novels tend to be the subjects of multiples stories (in the sense intended by the speaker of *Tell*) and because the intended sense of "captur[ing] their whole character" means that there's *more* beyond the story which the story lets you see *in nuce*. But there isn't more to the character in a novel (as you say)—the novel doesn't capture them, it *is* them. Our knowledge of them is perfectly complete; nothing is missing at all. This isn't to say, of course, that there's no place for inference, speculation, figuring things out, or the like. But one of the ways characters in a fiction, even when they "are" real-life figures making guest appearances, differ from real people is that there always *is* more to know about real people. But everything about the character is on the page. Only on the fanfiction metphysics (which is basically "characters are real people whom the author happens to know much better than I do, about whom the author isn't telling everything") is the non-depiction of something a sign of incompleteness really, there just isn't more to know about a character, and the fact that some things just aren't said is no more a sign of incompleteness than the absence of internal organs is in a doll. It's just not that kind of entity. For the same reason I'm not sure that there's really any overcoming of epistemological limitations in accessing a character's interiority (even phrasing it that way is really begging the question). Why can the narrator* depict someone's interior? Because the author made it all up: narrator, character, depiction and all. If anything's "interior" it's because the author put it inside—no wonder they can take it out again! Gallagher is more careful: we *seem* to know an "other mind" in fiction in the way we don't in real life. But we don't. Someone like George Eliot or Henry James is able to produce a narrative of such psychological acuity that we grasp both the character's self-understanding (so to speak) and the more accurate understanding the narrator has of the character, to the point that plenty of people (prominently Martha Nussbaum) have thought that we can become psychologically acute ourselves just by reading their books—and in Eliot's case this is done even with direct address from the narrator to the reader, something that you might think would break the feel of realism but doesn't, any more than the stunning recall for speech and incident in epistolary or diaristic novels tends to. Anyway I'm not sure I see the connection between the pitfalls of trying to create the feeling of psychological depth, which if done poorly feels unrealistic, and the framing devices mentioned. If the gardener knows curiously much about Curtis, even things she wasn't present for, that's a problem *created* by the framing device (a third-person omniscient narrator would just know it all unproblematically), and seemingly one that doesn't relate to psychological depth?
* The quotation from Gallagher is odd in that there are plenty of things that are obviously fictions that do not feature a narrator depicting the consciousness or subjectivity of a character. Novels entirely in dialogue by Henry Green or William Gaddis, novels that are just first-person narration in which the narrator doesn't depict the subjectivity of another, either at all, or in a privileged way (and such a narrator doesn't *depict* their own subjectivity), fictions that just aren't interested in subjectivity in the first place. There's all sorts of oddball formal experiments (Michael Martone's Blue Guide to Indiana, say).
To me the transcending-of-epistemic-limitations part comes out not in terms of how we can know the characters—who are contained within the page—but rather the feeling that, if the characters are well-written enough to feel like people, that we know SO much more about them than we can know about people in our actual lives. That's what feels exciting about fiction, to me—I get incredibly, incredibly close to someone's psychological landscape and interiority, in a way that I can hardly ever access in the real world (even with my closest friends), and I can satisfy my immense curiosity about other minds.
And re: framing devices, for me the framing devices work beautifully to suspend reality in the moment of reading—I believe fully that the gardener has access to all these details of Curtis's life because the style of her narration is so believable, and I'm so easily swept up in the vivid quality of the stories, totally immersed in them, that there isn't a part of me standing back and wondering: Wait, how do I know this exactly?? How did the gardener manage to relate so much detail about this moment?? That awareness came later, when I was actually writing the review, and had to work my way out of the immersive-delighted-reader mindset and into the more distant-curious-critic mindset. It's in that mindset that I notice how deliberately constructed the writing has to be—down to very intentional transition sentences—in order to suspend my belief about how memory and knowledge actually work.
Gallagher's argument is not purely, imo, that fiction requires depiction of consciousness/subjectivity. But she points out that there are very specific things that fiction does when depicting characters (there's a long discussion of how characters are named, and the shifting historical understanding of whether a character represented a specific person in the world vs a "type of guy", so to speak)…and one of the MOST compelling things (to readers) that fiction does is those depictions of consciousness/subjectivity. As a modernism fangirl and someone who's rarely drawn to third-person narration, I enjoyed that aspect of Gallagher's argument the most—because I think she describes so effectively what I love about my favorite novels.
Really enjoyed this. Loved Autobiography of X (and liked HHhH) so I think I have to read these other 2 now! And not to be the person who reads Sontag and then starts quoting Sontag, but I literally just re-read On Style today and underlined this, which seems serendipitous, re: art being more real than real life!
“When they grieve and rejoice at human destinies in a play or film or novel, it is not really different from grieving and rejoicing over such events in real life—except that the experience of human destinies in art contains less ambivalence, it is relatively disinterested, and is free from painful consequences. The experience is also, in a certain measure, more intense; for when suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be avid.”
This is an amazing Sontag quote and so relevant—thank you!! The last line ("when suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be avid") is also key to Gallagher's argument—fictionality doesn't make us LESS invested, but MORE (because it's a safe environment to feel complex, intense emotions). I need to read more Sontag! I will occasionally pick through her diaries and just be amazed by how intense she was about her intellectual cultivation…deeply inspiring. And I love the whole cottage industry of people writing about Sontag, very movingly—e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/08/magazine/susan-sontag.html (which I return to often, because the opening paragraph is so brilliant), and Sigrid Nunez's memoir Sempre Susan, which I read very recently
I found The Savage Detectives hard to get through at times but deeply rewarding. The 2nd section is fascinating—you hear from over 40 characters connected, in various ways, to the people you met in part 1, and you get bits of gossip and events and history about the visceral realists. Would love your thoughts if you do read!
I should also say that Jonathan Buckley's Tell is relatively short—so a really good summer read imo! Intense and brief and deeply satisfying
Such a great piece, thank you! The section about Akseli Lehtinen, etc., reminds me of when I read Memoirs of a Geisha, utterly convinced that it was an biography. When I realised it was fictional I somehow felt let down and never read it again. I think playing with readers' expectations is part of writing - but it can end up souring the rest of the work. What did you feel when you realised you hadn't discovered a new literary movement/architect? I think, even now, at 35, I'd still be disappointed 😅
I just felt so disappointed…not in the novel (I was impressed that I’d been taken in) but because I was hoping to see more photos of exceptional contemporary architecture 🥲
thank you for sharing your story about Memoirs of a Geisha! I’m so curious when you read it…like if it had something to do with youthful naïveté and a sense of betrayal?? and if it would have felt different if you KNEW upfront that it wasn’t real
I was 18 or 19 I think. And definitely! I only read novels/YA fiction back then - I was used to stories being made up, but not used to books surprising me in that way 😅 And two years later, I was studying 20th century Modernism!
it’s so good!! I just started it this week and haven’t finished—but it is so engrossing and so beautifully done
I love the framing device, the intriguing alternate-historical details, the characters…I already feel very deeply for the widow, C.M. Lucca, and the disorientation and grief she feels as she learns more about X
Celine I liked this piece. I like all your stuff actually. Re the association of fiction with capitalism, having been an investment guy and now a new novelist, I can attest to both practices having an imaginary epicenter. In investing you imagine a future created by crowds. In fiction you imagine what goes on in the heads of individuals. Both imaginings are equally difficult, lonely, and hard to communicate except in their manifestations. I'm glad I'm not alone thinking about this
I truly love the way you write, and think. Every time i finish a new missive of yours it makes me want to be a better person. Not in a sad way, in a happy way! You're an inspiring creator, writer, person. Thanks for being here for us, Celine <3
thank you for reading!! your comment honestly makes me so happy…it’s really special to actually touch someone thru writing, and I’m really happy I’m succeeding 💌
the nicest part of writing online is getting to hear from people—I really appreciate how warm and conversational it feels to write on Substack
Great post!
On the de-colonization front, I'd strongly recommend 'Kill Everything That Moves' by Nick Turse. Really upends a lot of Vietnamese war narratives.
thank you for reading and for the recommendation!! putting it on the infinitely expanding list (I genuinely am grateful but wow I will DIE before I read everything I want to…!!)
kind of tempted to have a month where I read this + Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method
I so agree about the newsletter being a form of practice - at least, it is for me! And thinking about the comments on memory, even if the memories have been 'made up', is it not that they are buried deep within the unconscious and surface without being acknowledged as actual memory? I've had a glass of wine at lunchtime and this may also free me to write the above!
To the idea of writing a regular-ish newsletter as practice…I've been obsessed for the past year or so with the idea that musicians play the scales, athletes stretch, dancers have warmup routines…what does the warmup routine of a writer look like?
I love your idea of memories possibly resurfacing—and not acknowledged as memories, precisely, but perhaps showing up as a strangely familiar resonance…
Firstly, I loved this, you have a new subscriber here. I love both Laurent Binet and Roberto Bolano so that hooked me in.
I think one person who also plays with this what is fiction? question is Geoff Dyer, but from the non-fiction angle. A lot of his books are categorised as non-fiction, but he freely admits that some of the stuff in them is just made up. Consequently everything he writes is essentially just labelled "genre-defying".
Thank you for this very kind comment!! And yes—love Binet and Bolaño (and would really like to be a completionist and read all the books by each in my lifetime).
I haven't read any Geoff Dyer yet, but I have read the Irish writer Rob Doyle enthuse on the enormous influence Dyer had on him—it's so nice when a writer I like recommends another writer! I'd really like to read Dyer at some point, he seems like such a fascinating and wide-ranging thinker
Oh same here about being a completionist! I recommend Out of Sheer Rage. It's Geoff Dyer at his most Dyer-esque and I think if you like that you'll like the rest. It's also so funny!
While I'm not finished reading this yet, I just want to thank you for putting so much effort into your essays! It's really comforting to see that there's a place for long-form/ well-researched writing on here.
Thank you Michael! It's genuinely so rewarding to receive comments like this. In general I have felt so inspired and intellectually activated by the many people writing on Substack (and on personal blogs, in earlier eras of the internet) in exceptionally thoughtful and thorough ways.
I wish I could find the link now…but your comment is reminding me that one of the most helpful discussions of class/privilege I've ever read was on a Livejournal post back in the day. This anonymous writer totally changed my worldview and introduced me to so many useful ideas! I think that's what serious, sustained internet writing can do.
i absolutely love that, if you find the link please send it along!!
I loved this Celine! All 3 of these books have been on my tbr for a while and I loved how you discussed and analysed them together. I ordered ‘Outline’ yesterday as so many people have been recommending it to me, so I’m excited to read it (for many reasons) but perhaps most interestingly to think about the concepts from this piece while I read!
I really wasn’t sure on ‘Tell’ when I first saw it published but this has seriously sold it to me. I have been eager to read ‘Biography of X’ ever since I read ‘Pew’. Lacey did an introduction to a republished classic by Fitzcarraldo that’s coming out next month called ‘The Edge of the Alphabet’ by Janet Frame - I asked to read the ARC of it purely based on Lacey’s endorsement and I really enjoyed it. I think based off this essay, you might like it too! Rtc in my next newsletter but wanted to share the title!
thank you Martha!!! tbh this post felt so unwieldy to write, BUT I do think these 3 novels have particular tendencies that are so satisfying and interesting to me
Rachel Cusk's Outline and Jonathan Buckley's Tell have certain similarities—a somewhat self-effacing narrator that is still obviously present and shepherding you through other people's lives (though Cusk's narrator disappears more, and Buckley's has an incredibly distinctive voice)
The Edge of the Alphabet sounds fascinating—very happy to hear you liked it, and hopefully I'll be able to read it soon! looking forward to your longer thoughts on it
This was a delight to read. I'm reminded of Peli Grietzer's work on ambient meaning (~vibe~) in works of art. Keying off of the way that art is compressive of the real world, he makes a wonderful analogy to a type of generative ML model called an autoencoder, which is trained to compress and then reconstruct its real-world data inputs. Because of the compression, the outputs of the autoencoder are not exact replicas of the real-world inputs (e.g. an autoencoder trained on images of Classical Greek pottery will create images of Classical Greek pottery that don't actually exist...are in some sense fictional). But, he shows that the facsimiles the model generates can actually be more informative about the structure of its real-world data than one of the real world training samples! More real than real life
This is so fascinating—thank you! Peli Grietzer's writing seems potentially relevant to a project I'm working on right now (thinking about 20th c. conceptual artists and current multimodal generative AI tech) so I will look him up…if you have any other references that seem possibly relevant, please let me know!!
The Greek pottery example is so enticing—I think there is something interesting about how computational models refract the world into forms that remove some pieces of information and simultaneously emphasize others, making it a bit easier to see something structurally, quantitatively, etc. There might also be something interesting here about how our experience of encountering models helps us reframe and reinterpret reality in a different light (this can obviously be both positive and negative; see Kranzberg, "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral")
20th c. conceptual art X genAI sounds like a super interesting topic! Eager to see what comes of it.
This essay is a good place to start for understanding the philosophical stakes of Grietzer's work:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-poetry-is-a-variety-of-mathematical-experience
And I cribbed the greek pottery example from his dissertation:
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/39988028/GRIETZER-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y
after you commented, I actually downloaded both to Zotero 🙈 but haven’t properly dug into his diss yet!
Loved biography of x, tho I felt it dragged a little in the middle. I will have to put tell and the savage detectives on my list, they both sound fascinating.
thank you for reading! I'm looking forward to seeing how I feel about Biography of X overall when I finish—and if you do read Tell and The Savage Detectives, I hope you find them interesting!
Loved this analysis so much!! There's a certain point in reading a novel, that I find myself inside the world in three dimension and get a sense, that feels like intuition, of who the characters are. If it's a good novel, it kind of tears this barrier that we come in with, knowing that the story is 'not real,' and makes us feel as if they were. And specifically for this nonfiction-like-fiction genre, it makes you forget that you're in fiction and start to believe the events took place. I haven't read many works like these, but found-footage films, movies that claim 'based on a true story' (which I didn't know you could just lie about haha) get me all the time. I'm really excited to check out the books you mentioned!
you described it so well—and yes, I similarly can't believe people just get to LIE and say "this is based on a true story"…but I kind of love that form of artificiality, and the uncertainty that comes from feeling like it COULD be real, it COULD be about the strangest and most dazzling parts of the world I live in
good for you Ms Nguyen!
I really really loved this essay, it touched and inspired me. You are a great writer and thinker!
thank you for your kind words, Margje! really appreciate you reading and commenting 💌
It seems odd to say that a character in a novel is captured or articulated by just one story in virtue of existing in the novel, both because characters in novels tend to be the subjects of multiples stories (in the sense intended by the speaker of *Tell*) and because the intended sense of "captur[ing] their whole character" means that there's *more* beyond the story which the story lets you see *in nuce*. But there isn't more to the character in a novel (as you say)—the novel doesn't capture them, it *is* them. Our knowledge of them is perfectly complete; nothing is missing at all. This isn't to say, of course, that there's no place for inference, speculation, figuring things out, or the like. But one of the ways characters in a fiction, even when they "are" real-life figures making guest appearances, differ from real people is that there always *is* more to know about real people. But everything about the character is on the page. Only on the fanfiction metphysics (which is basically "characters are real people whom the author happens to know much better than I do, about whom the author isn't telling everything") is the non-depiction of something a sign of incompleteness really, there just isn't more to know about a character, and the fact that some things just aren't said is no more a sign of incompleteness than the absence of internal organs is in a doll. It's just not that kind of entity. For the same reason I'm not sure that there's really any overcoming of epistemological limitations in accessing a character's interiority (even phrasing it that way is really begging the question). Why can the narrator* depict someone's interior? Because the author made it all up: narrator, character, depiction and all. If anything's "interior" it's because the author put it inside—no wonder they can take it out again! Gallagher is more careful: we *seem* to know an "other mind" in fiction in the way we don't in real life. But we don't. Someone like George Eliot or Henry James is able to produce a narrative of such psychological acuity that we grasp both the character's self-understanding (so to speak) and the more accurate understanding the narrator has of the character, to the point that plenty of people (prominently Martha Nussbaum) have thought that we can become psychologically acute ourselves just by reading their books—and in Eliot's case this is done even with direct address from the narrator to the reader, something that you might think would break the feel of realism but doesn't, any more than the stunning recall for speech and incident in epistolary or diaristic novels tends to. Anyway I'm not sure I see the connection between the pitfalls of trying to create the feeling of psychological depth, which if done poorly feels unrealistic, and the framing devices mentioned. If the gardener knows curiously much about Curtis, even things she wasn't present for, that's a problem *created* by the framing device (a third-person omniscient narrator would just know it all unproblematically), and seemingly one that doesn't relate to psychological depth?
* The quotation from Gallagher is odd in that there are plenty of things that are obviously fictions that do not feature a narrator depicting the consciousness or subjectivity of a character. Novels entirely in dialogue by Henry Green or William Gaddis, novels that are just first-person narration in which the narrator doesn't depict the subjectivity of another, either at all, or in a privileged way (and such a narrator doesn't *depict* their own subjectivity), fictions that just aren't interested in subjectivity in the first place. There's all sorts of oddball formal experiments (Michael Martone's Blue Guide to Indiana, say).
To me the transcending-of-epistemic-limitations part comes out not in terms of how we can know the characters—who are contained within the page—but rather the feeling that, if the characters are well-written enough to feel like people, that we know SO much more about them than we can know about people in our actual lives. That's what feels exciting about fiction, to me—I get incredibly, incredibly close to someone's psychological landscape and interiority, in a way that I can hardly ever access in the real world (even with my closest friends), and I can satisfy my immense curiosity about other minds.
And re: framing devices, for me the framing devices work beautifully to suspend reality in the moment of reading—I believe fully that the gardener has access to all these details of Curtis's life because the style of her narration is so believable, and I'm so easily swept up in the vivid quality of the stories, totally immersed in them, that there isn't a part of me standing back and wondering: Wait, how do I know this exactly?? How did the gardener manage to relate so much detail about this moment?? That awareness came later, when I was actually writing the review, and had to work my way out of the immersive-delighted-reader mindset and into the more distant-curious-critic mindset. It's in that mindset that I notice how deliberately constructed the writing has to be—down to very intentional transition sentences—in order to suspend my belief about how memory and knowledge actually work.
Gallagher's argument is not purely, imo, that fiction requires depiction of consciousness/subjectivity. But she points out that there are very specific things that fiction does when depicting characters (there's a long discussion of how characters are named, and the shifting historical understanding of whether a character represented a specific person in the world vs a "type of guy", so to speak)…and one of the MOST compelling things (to readers) that fiction does is those depictions of consciousness/subjectivity. As a modernism fangirl and someone who's rarely drawn to third-person narration, I enjoyed that aspect of Gallagher's argument the most—because I think she describes so effectively what I love about my favorite novels.
Really enjoyed this. Loved Autobiography of X (and liked HHhH) so I think I have to read these other 2 now! And not to be the person who reads Sontag and then starts quoting Sontag, but I literally just re-read On Style today and underlined this, which seems serendipitous, re: art being more real than real life!
“When they grieve and rejoice at human destinies in a play or film or novel, it is not really different from grieving and rejoicing over such events in real life—except that the experience of human destinies in art contains less ambivalence, it is relatively disinterested, and is free from painful consequences. The experience is also, in a certain measure, more intense; for when suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be avid.”
This is an amazing Sontag quote and so relevant—thank you!! The last line ("when suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be avid") is also key to Gallagher's argument—fictionality doesn't make us LESS invested, but MORE (because it's a safe environment to feel complex, intense emotions). I need to read more Sontag! I will occasionally pick through her diaries and just be amazed by how intense she was about her intellectual cultivation…deeply inspiring. And I love the whole cottage industry of people writing about Sontag, very movingly—e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/08/magazine/susan-sontag.html (which I return to often, because the opening paragraph is so brilliant), and Sigrid Nunez's memoir Sempre Susan, which I read very recently
I found The Savage Detectives hard to get through at times but deeply rewarding. The 2nd section is fascinating—you hear from over 40 characters connected, in various ways, to the people you met in part 1, and you get bits of gossip and events and history about the visceral realists. Would love your thoughts if you do read!
I should also say that Jonathan Buckley's Tell is relatively short—so a really good summer read imo! Intense and brief and deeply satisfying
Now I have to add Sempre Susan to my tbr too!
Such a great piece, thank you! The section about Akseli Lehtinen, etc., reminds me of when I read Memoirs of a Geisha, utterly convinced that it was an biography. When I realised it was fictional I somehow felt let down and never read it again. I think playing with readers' expectations is part of writing - but it can end up souring the rest of the work. What did you feel when you realised you hadn't discovered a new literary movement/architect? I think, even now, at 35, I'd still be disappointed 😅
I just felt so disappointed…not in the novel (I was impressed that I’d been taken in) but because I was hoping to see more photos of exceptional contemporary architecture 🥲
thank you for sharing your story about Memoirs of a Geisha! I’m so curious when you read it…like if it had something to do with youthful naïveté and a sense of betrayal?? and if it would have felt different if you KNEW upfront that it wasn’t real
I was 18 or 19 I think. And definitely! I only read novels/YA fiction back then - I was used to stories being made up, but not used to books surprising me in that way 😅 And two years later, I was studying 20th century Modernism!
biography of X sounds really intriguing! definitely one i'll be adding to my list :))
it’s so good!! I just started it this week and haven’t finished—but it is so engrossing and so beautifully done
I love the framing device, the intriguing alternate-historical details, the characters…I already feel very deeply for the widow, C.M. Lucca, and the disorientation and grief she feels as she learns more about X
Celine I liked this piece. I like all your stuff actually. Re the association of fiction with capitalism, having been an investment guy and now a new novelist, I can attest to both practices having an imaginary epicenter. In investing you imagine a future created by crowds. In fiction you imagine what goes on in the heads of individuals. Both imaginings are equally difficult, lonely, and hard to communicate except in their manifestations. I'm glad I'm not alone thinking about this