The keys to the kingdom of fiction
The Villa Gillet has been asking writers who attend the International Forum on the Novel to select a word which underpins their work. Jonathan Lethem, Adam Thirlwell, Nuruddin Farah and James Meek explain how the words they've chosen are key to their writing
Source: Guardian
Furniture
Jonathan Lethem
However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing positions for the whole duration of the story. For that matter, when night falls, whether it is depicted or occurs between chapters, characters must be permitted to sleep in beds, to rinse their faces in sinks, to glance into mirrors, and so on. (It is widely believed that after Borges mirrors are forbidden as symbols in novels; however, it is cruel to deny the characters in a novel sight of their own faces, hence mirrors must be provided.) These rules attend no matter how tangential the novel's commitment to so-called 'realism', no matter how avant-garde or capricious, no matter how revolutionary or bourgeois. Furniture may be explicit or implicit, visible or invisible, may bear the duty of conveying social and economic detail or be merely cursorily functional, may be stolen or purchased, borrowed, destroyed, replaced, sprinkled with crumbs of food or splashed with drink, may remain immaculate, may be transformed into artworks by aspiring bohemians, may be inherited by characters from uncles who die before the action of the novel begins, may reward careful inspection of the cushions and seams for loose change that has fallen from pockets, may be collapsible, portable, may even be dragged into the house from the beach where it properly belongs, but in any event it must absolutely exist. Anything less is cruelty.
Hedonism
Adam Thirlwell
Whenever I think about novels, I think about pleasure. For me, the novel is the most complicated, and most enjoyable, experiment with pleasure.
The hedonism of the art of the novel takes three forms: a) the hedonism of the novelist, b) the hedonism of the novel-reader, and c) the hedonism of the character.
The novelist's form of hedonism is motivated by fidelity to the spirit of the non-serious. The seductions of the theological, or the political - all the everyday absolutes - are resisted in the name of a more zigzagging dedication to pleasure. Instead of absolute truths, the novelist delights in relativity, in the freedom of absolute accuracy.
As for the novel-reader: the reader's hedonism is an upside-down version of the novelist's. This kind of reading is not intent on information - the everyday certainties. No, the reader as hedonist enjoys a novel's intricate play of form, its thematic inversion of ideas: its infinite horizontal detail.
But then, there are so many obstacles to pleasure! And pleasure, in the end, is the only concern of any novel's characters - so long as one remembers that pleasure is so difficult to
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The keys to the kingdom of fiction
24 Jul 2008, 09:46
