Maybe I’m cheating with that comment, but I think it is true. There are plenty of writers who never in a million years could write some wacky George Saunders story, yet who can easily write quality realist fiction. An vice versa.

Realist fiction is by far the most common fiction amongst “literary” types. Or so I would assume. I don’t really get why realism presents any particular challenge. Indeed, if I really wanted to play devil’s advocate I might say that realist stories are by far the easiest to write because all you have to do is write down some interesting thing that happened to you, change a name or two and call it fiction. This is what tons of authors do.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/03/books/on-being-wrong-convicted-minimalist-spills-beans.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

he starts talking about realism around paragraph 14 and then goes on to realism and representation a couple paragraphs after. here’s one bit, in which he’s sort of discussing his own process of coming to some “new” kind of writing: “What you wanted to do was draw a distinction between realism, standing for a whole system of literary artifice, and representation, standing for only one part of that system. What you figured was you could try some of this representation stuff, and do your dog and cat too, and see what happened.”

but, i mean, i may just have to agree to disagree. i see your points, i just think that some of this stuff doesn’t really fit into realism anymore. i mean, i accept that it’s more realistic, etc, than other stuff, sci-fi or whatever, and looks more like life and has all these understood conventions, but many of the so-called realists are something else to me.

I think that more than one grouping can be valid. And is often necessary, because the books stick around and hopefully have some resonance. Borges, for instance, was a mid-20th century Argentine writer. He was also a postmodernist, because they took him on-board.

As for the slipstream, I read your post, but it’s not a concept I know too much about. I think I first hear about it when FC2 put out that anthology “In the Slipstream” (1999); I’ve associated it with Avant-Pop ever since (another term I’ve never felt I really understood).

Barthelme was a collagist, and he employed multiple genres, and styles both high and low. It’s easy to see why the postmodernists accepted him. But what Daugherty does (or tries to do) is show Barthelme’s most direct influences—and they’re from Paris 1871, and The New Yorker circa 1945. And I find his argument convincing. As to whether that makes Barthelme “not a postmodernist”—well, he is one, historically, and will probably stay one. But Daugherty’s work opens up new territory in reading Barthelme, and I’m glad for that.

Regarding those lines you point out in “Leaving Women,” I don’t know if they fly in the face of what I’d call realist writing. Again, for me, realism is a genre and a style, with a whole set of conventions organizing it (and then people employing those conventions in a wide variety of ways, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes not—and sometimes innovatively).

“Trecie, Dee’s mother, a bright-yellow-nearly-white woman not much taller than the kitchen counter…”.

I see here character description that uses color and a real-world object. She might be short! Or the counter might be high… I think there’s also a little bit of exaggeration in the story for dramatic effect; it seems to have some regional influences (I mean here the regionalist style), which sometimes employs hyperbole. (I’ve always adored the way in which regionalism retains certain late Romantic elements.)

As to whether the text calls attention to itself: I think that all realism (and all genres) call attention to themselves, simply by being genres. As Derrida says, the text deconstructs itself (the critic does not deconstruct it). Anyone who’s consciously aware of the genre and its conventions will see them, as well as which lines better fit the conventions (or worse fit).

Outside of that, there’s a question as to whether the author is consciously employing the convention, or fighting against it, etc. And of course we don’t know what Andria Nacina Cole was thinking when she wrote this (although we could probably go ask her—although she may not consciously know—always a danger when talking with artists!)

“And Dee, with all her flaws and all her youth, was no fool. She could read two, three chapter books in a day, this girl. Was a magician with numbers-they folded in her hands and became soft slits of easy.”

This is more interesting, I think, because “soft slits of easy” does get abstract. I think there’s precedent for this, though, in realist writing. I can’t think of any good examples at the moment, but this doesn’t strike me as non-realist. …Note also the sibilance, the realist writer’s most prized tool. (I feel like an anthropologist.) (Note also the zero-anaphora in the second sentence: “Was a magician with numbers…” A hallmark of contemporary realist writing is a heavy investment in anaphora as a technique.)

Here’s what strikes me more in the above example: “She could read two, three chapter books in a day, this girl.” The text is ambiguous here, although I don’t think deliberately so. Does this mean that Dee reads two or three “chapter books” in a day? (And what is a “chapter book”?) Or does she read two three-chapter books in a day? (That’s how I tend to read it—as a mistake in punctuation. And we all know how punctuation errors (and mistakes in general) often lead to innovation!)

“the words would land like a fist full of stones against Dee’s head.”

To me this is a classically realist bit. It’s cartoonish, but realism often is (although it doesn’t see itself as such). Most similes I encounter in realist writing seem “wrong” to me—as in, “you don’t really mean that!” But simile is a weird device—all metaphor is. Why is it considered so “realist” to compare two different things? Note, however, the traditional (in some circles) anti-realist distrust of similes. What did Borges say? “Don’t say what things are like, say what they are.” (paraphrasing)

“going into an interesting literary cartoon space. something Joy Williams does amazingly.”

I don’t think I’d agree about this story, really, but Joy Williams—for sure! She’s a “realist” who really plays with language. (But I don’t think language play is outside of realism. Look at how invested in rhetorical device the form is! And consider realists like Carver, Cheever—and anyone in the Gish school.) “Taking Care” is one of my favorite stories of all time, and that’s a pretty “realist” work: very lyrical, lots of metaphor. As well as one of my favorite lines (which I’m quoting here from memory): “Jones has a mad desire to tip the orderly.” I love the double reading there—quite brilliant.

Now *that’s* something you don’t always see in realist writing: indeterminacy. (But Williams’s use is is a calculated indeterminacy—and a very skillful one.)

looking forward to the Barthelme post tomorrow, too.

Or perhaps you’re on to something after all, and authors who use genre awareness to play with their prose without totally giving into that play (as would your prototypical post-modernist) represent a new age of literature.

I’d be tempted to say some of what you’re talking about must be this “slipstream” category I posted about a few days ago–writers who use elements of various genres in a literary framework/mentality. But that you haven’t brought this up (slipstream or new wave fabulism) I take to mean you’ve not done so intentionally.

Tomorrow I’m going to post something about Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man (the biography of Donald Barthelme), and part of what I like about that book is how Daugherty considers Barthelme not much of a postmodernist. Which to a lot of people might seem perplexing. I mean, it’s Barth/Barthelme/Coover, right?

But Daugherty points out that the writers that Barthelme was “in conversation with” were not his 1960s New York contemporaries (who seem to have left him more bemused than anything), but rather mid-19th century French artists (Rimbaud, Damier, Courbet) and mid-20th century American satirists (James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, Frank Sullivan).

Which isn’t to say that critics (and other readers) can’t make Barthelme a postmodernist, by focusing on certain elements of his work. I mean, Roussel is an official member of the Oulipo by now, right?