I am a re-drafter. Here is what I do on a writing day: I
sit and I get myself in a mess about sentences. I rock backwards and forwards,
I consult my thesaurus, I pace in circles tugging at my moulting hair. On more
than one occasion, my girlfriend has come home to find me weeping over the
correct placing of a comma, as if it were a tormenting pea hidden under my
mattress. And, when I reach the requisite number of pages, I print the whole
thing out and I start again. (It’s worth remembering that I’m not writing
Madame Bovary here. My novel features pornography-addicted cats, chiliastic
cults and a Men’s Rights activist called Furious Patrick. I am quite possibly putting
myself through hell for no good reason).
Still, Flaubert, I tell myself, would be on my side. Perfectionism
is time-warranted, proven to work even at the cost of sanity and good health.
Then the other day Sheila Heti, talking at the LRB shop, sweetly announced that
“oh, no one drafts anymore”. She was, she said, no longer interested in style. There was something vaguely illicit
about this, something naughty. My
girlfriend nudged me with an air of triumph -see? Not everyone does this crazy shit- as the author began to read an
excerpt from her autobiographical work. Hackles on alert, I waited for
sloppiness, for errors. And, obviously, there were a few if you were looking.
The odd word I might have removed, the odd phrase I would have struck a line
through. But the main thing was; it worked. It was direct, it felt true,
whatever true is, it was funny and naïve and open and fresh. A naivety that could
only be the result, I hoped, of deliberate agonised craft. Couldn’t it?
As she read on, I felt, with my rewrites, my struggled-over plots and my prematurely creased forehead, like Rick Wakeman, interrupted
in creating a triple gatefold, flugelhorn-heavy concept album by the sound of
Pretty Vacant crunching from the speakers. Instantly obsolete, a brontosaurus
lumbering through my paragraphs while sprightlier beasts leap on ahead. Now, if
I have a belief system it lies in a) making stuff up and b) rewriting it an
awful lot. And these beliefs are beginning to seem, well, a little bit old-hat.
Not quite pre-Copernican but getting there.
A few words of caution. Ms Heti has told me via Twitter that she does redraft, just not in the laborious, faintly mad physical sense I described. Two,
even if she doesn’t, she speaks in naturally beautiful finished sentences. Not
everyone could dash out an autobiographical piece and make it read like hers (and her new book did take six years- she's not doing some Jack Kerouac spontaneous prose thing).
Three, she said later on that she has, in fact, rediscovered fiction and can’t
be placed naturally in any anti-making-things-up camp.
Still, it’s fair to say that in recent years the literary
world (or the very narrow part of it known to English speakers) has experienced
a loss of faith, both in literary stylishness and in the novel itself. A lot of
writers find they no longer can sign up to the making-things-up and
then-making-them-read-well project. Off the top of my head (in the new spirit
of instantaneity) there’s David Shields calling for us to make it essayistic,
make it a memoir, make it true. There’s Zadie Smith worrying if Tom McCarthy’s
Spartan modernism is actually where it’s at. There’s Ian McEwan falling out of
love with the novel, Will Self’s anxiety about the fictive conventions he’s
used in most of his work, Karl Knausgard setting out to write his whole life. There’s been the critical backlash against the
confident excesses of the 80s Granta generation, with their wars against
clichés and their unfashionable belief in the value of stories. Clearly I’m
conflating different arguments and examples here (you can be pro or anti
literariness without being pro or anti fiction and many or most of those I mention would see themselves as revitalising not getting rid of novels), but you sense the general
trend. If these discussions end in unconvincing affirmations of the need for
fresh fictions, these tend to have an arriere garde feel to them. Resolute defenders of stylish
novels can have a Fustian, High Anglican, quality, as though holding out
against the barbarians, half-revelling in the dying of a form.
I can think of a few reasons why the novel looks in
trouble although obviously I’d be grateful for more. The Granta novel of the
turn of the decade, with its ever-expanding cast-lists and forced desert-suited
cosmopolitanism had become a silly
thing, well worthy of a backlash. Critical theory has now reached the point
that even novelists read it, with the sometimes paralysing results you might
expect. TV shows have annexed a great deal of what used to be the turf of the
novel (how many fat sagas has The Wire rendered instantly unnecessary?) When
the book itself is under threat, then the future of the novel is hardly to be
taken for granted. Technology has made patient Flaubertian redrafting seem
oddly affected, like baking your own bread. Davids Foster-Wallace and Eggers
have led to a new cult of sincerity. “Literariness” may even be subliminally
associated with male power, with patriarch connoisseurs like Amis and Bloom. Time
is short and if you have something to say, there’s the temptation to get on and
say it with the minimum of artifice. Jot it down, upload it, make it sincere.
Make it true.
It’s also quite possible that the novel has had a good
run and is going the way of verse drama and music hall to be replaced by quick-scribbled
autobiographies, instantly available online. Intriguing as many of the attempts
to forge new forms are (I definitely look forward to reading Heti’s book), I
find myself hoping otherwise; that in the end they end up lending fresh
strength to, rather than replacing, the novel itself. If the novel has survived
so long, it is surely because of the sponginess of the form, its ability to
borrow from its rivals. Although this may just be my own feeble affirmation of
faith. Certainly if the novel is to survive it will need serious thinking about
what it can do. It will need hard work. It may even need a lot of re-drafting.
