How real should fiction be?
The air of reality is not a question of endings.
I spoke to the marvellous Cal Flynn at Five Books about the best intellectual biographies.
One of the criticisms made of Intermezzo was that Rooney doesn’t write about the really hard things in life. Her characters are always accomplished, attractive, and ambitious. She always ends with a neat(ish) comic resolution. It’s time, some reviewers said, for Rooney’s characters to grow up. Let’s see them actually in the middle of a relationship, dealing with real life. Let’s see them with some real problems.
This was unfair on its own terms. Rooney’s characters do have real problems. I wouldn’t switch places with any of them! And we might notice that many of the people making this criticism are approximately the age of Rooney and her characters. She used to be the novelist of their generation; now she’s showing them things they would rather not see.
But it is not unusual for critics to hold it a fault in novelists when their work makes too easy a picture of difficult realities. Genre romance novels are derided by literati, in part, because it is all too straightforward. And then they lived happily ever afterwards isn’t what actually happens. Many superior minds have held that tragedy is serious work and that comedy is crowd-pleasing. One of the dullest debates about literature is whether “happiness writes white”.
The idea that pulls the strings of these critiques is mimesis—art must reflect life. By showing us the happy ending, and no more, Rooney is failing to reflect life properly.
The artist who reflects life is not obliged to reflect all of life. The mimetic theory requires something more subtle.
Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.
This is one of the classic statements of mimesis. Just representations and general manners, as opposed to irregular combinations and fanciful invention. It comes from Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare, hardly an author we can class as showing us only the literally real.
Henry James put it like this: “as the picture is reality, so the novel is history.” What matters in the novel is the true representation of things, which relies on the proper artistry of the novel’s form. Opposed to this, James saw all the people who thought fiction was merely for “instruction and amusement”, who could therefore have their own arbitrary criteria about what made a novel good, such as it having lots of incident, or a happy ending, or virtuous characters—, it is not a question of art for these people, but rather one of preferences. James summed up this attitude thus,
The “ending” of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes.
The Rooney critics might think they are agreeing with James—after all, they are accusing Rooney of serving up too much lovely dessert and not enough reality. But they are the anti-Jamesians. Rooney’s purpose is to write literary romance stories without conventional endings, as was Austen’s purpose. Her works bring about either ambiguous endings (such as polyamory or vaguely-defined, unstable equilibria) or endings in which the characters shed their social problems for conservatively counter-cultural solutions like marriage and religion. Counter-cultural in the sense that the prevailing culture to which they belong is often left-wing, but they end up conforming to something more traditional.
Each of Rooney’s novels has been some sort of experiment in finding new ways to adjust the classic romance structure to the reality of her generation’s social attitudes. What the critics want instead are the desserts and ices of “real life”. The question of artistic intent is side-lined for their preference to read a different sort of novel, in a different sort of genre. The novel’s only obligation, James said, was to be interesting. How it is interesting is the freedom of the novelist.
It is often said of Rooney, in these words and others, that it would have been better if she had written a different sort of novel. But that is not true criticism. Her fiction is perfectly real: it is a true representation of manners, a just picture of general nature.
As James said, “Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms.” Rooney’s work has the “air of reality”. That is all we can ask of her. If we require novels with other plots, other scenarios, other endings, we must look for them elsewhere.
We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple—to let it alone.
I really enjoyed your interview at Five Books. The Eliot biography has caught my interest.