But what we can learn from reading faction is that imaginative truth of this quality will always be more ‘buttonholing’ than that which is bound by more traditional conceptions of what constitutes history; it’s not just Vidal’s imaginative reconstructions which influence this, but his editorial eye with pre-existing factual detail. He makes his selections with a novelist’s, not a historian’s eye. And this instinct for facts that tell their own stories is what animates the meaning of his books as much as the portentousness of the events which surround them. Yes, he’s dealing with enormous historical themes which can often de-humanize those men and women sucked into them, but Vidal returns their humanity to them - and not just by reminding us that they’re prone to the same venal tendencies and bodily functions as the rest of us. These are rounded, three-dimensional portraits with whom we can identify, despite the chronological, geographical and social removes at which we experience their lives. This is a point graciously conceded by the eminent historian Paul Dukes, writing in ‘History Today’ in 1999; Ultimately, historians may have to recognise our limitations, perhaps to agree with Herbert Butterfield in ‘Man on his Past’ that “In reality, the poet, the prophet, the novelist and the playwright command sublimer realms than those of technical history because they reconstitute life in its wholeness.” In reality, indeed, the historian, technical or not, cannot hope to transcend the confines of time and culture in a manner achieved, at least sometimes, by the artist. And so, while the artist sometimes succeeds, the historian is always condemned to ultimate failure. Does this make us mere craftspeople operating at a lower level than artists? Not quite, for we know all too well that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, and more elusive too. Reality can never be caught in a work of history as it is in a novel, but a novel's reality is not real reality. Despite that final barb (Big Theme #1 Redux, or the Achilles heel of Literature) this is an incredibly gracious - and accurate - assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of both disciplines, both of which have a job to do. Now let’s upend the telescope and turn our gaze from writers who think reality’s not enough, to those who think there’s more than meets the eye. Both groups are bringing their own contributions to the party, but whereas the first group feels the need to augment or edit reality to create literary meaning, the second seeks to create more authentic forms of meaning by offering a deeper and broader appreciation of what’s there already. What they’re impatient with is not so much the prosaic nature of reality, but the inadequacy of art in dealing with its profusion and prodigality - the fault lies not with literature’s conception of what constitutes reality but its flawed perception and representation of reality. The subject matter’s all there - and it’s the writer’s job to do it justice. And this is: g) PRINCIPLE FOUR: Order pretending to be disorder; the triumph of technique and consciousness “Our lives are summed up in sounds and made significant. Victory. Peace. Home. That’s why we must do so much to invent meanings for the sounds, so damned much.” William Faulkner, ‘Mountain Victory ’ “And the head coach/ Wants no cissies/ So he reads to us/ From something called ‘Ulysses.’” Alan Sherman, singer and satirist, ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’ The subtitle of this Principle should be “don’t be scared - things aren’t as complicated as all that”. Because what we’re dealing with here is among the most complex and experimental writing ever conceived. The time has come to pull the nose of “difficult” literature - and see if it fights back. Most (but not all) of this writing falls under the heading of ‘Modernism’, and it’s the difficulties inherent in this body of literature that fuels not only an enormous percentage of lit crit, but much of the dread that puts Recreational Readers off grappling with “literature”. And that’s a shame, because a lot of this stuff repays the effort involved in trying to get at its meaning. I’ve entitled this Principle ‘Order Pretending to be Disorder’ because that’s precisely what it is: a bunch of writers deliberately frustrating our narrative expectations of cause and effect by using disruptive stylistic devices. This usually takes the form of partial or deliberately withheld meaning; so we’re either being told an incomplete version of events, or an unresolved version of events. And whether those versions are ever completed or resolved is almost entirely dependent on the writer’s aesthetic purpose. In a detective novel, for instance, there’s a strong chance they will be resolved by the writer, but (usually) at the last minute. Sometimes the reader is asked to participate in the resolution - and various degrees of collusion are required by different writers in different works. So the writer’s essentially being a tease. And the bigger tease he is, the more difficult the text will be to read, and the more difficult it will be for the reader to either extract or construct meaning from the available material. So why bother doing this if the net result is a bunch of readers scratching their heads wondering what the hell he’s on about? It’s not just the writer being perverse. Honest. Like his compadres in Principle 2, the writer of Principle 4 acknowledges that a) the texture of reality’s growing more complicated, and b) that trying to translate even the most mundane act of perception into language sells it short. Moreover, these propositions are closely related. It almost goes without saying that if reality is getting more complex, you’re going to have to devise new ways of looking at it, and then incorporate these innovations into your writing. Or literary meaning will no longer engage either with social reality, or the perceptual reality going on in most people’s heads. But the writer of Principle 4 refuses to be daunted by these challenges. Instead, he; a) embraces this complexity, and even revels in it. Rather than fighting the forces of chaos, randomness and imprecision head-on, he acknowledges them and even reflects them in the ways he reproduces reality in his writing. What he’s essentially doing is trying to create meaning whose authenticity is not primarily rooted in stability or authority but richness and depth. b) he tries to make the act of writing more closely mirror the act of perception, no matter how fragmented or incomplete it may be. In short, he won’t, as his predecessors had done, parcel up reality and our perception of it into neat little pre-ordered bundles. He’ll write it as he finds and sees it. And that can be messy. But however problematic this writing may look on a brief inspection, we must never forget that most of these works weren’t conceived in pure chaos. They couldn’t have been, or the writer could never give them any kind of form or expression. So if you stare long enough at most Modernist writing, you’ll sense, however dimly, the writer’s desire to communicate with you, that vanity we noted earlier that compels him to inflict his perspective of the world on other people. He’s not making it easy, but beneath the surface, there’s usually reference points for meaning somewhere. Or what he’s writing would be unadulterated jibberish (which we’re dealing with in Principle 5). So, we’ve established that our writer’s happy to embrace some new tricks. Let’s look in some more detail at his reasons for doing so. If the Imagists were trying to make their created meaning as unambiguous as possible, other ‘-ists’ and ‘-isms’ were pulling in the opposite direction for three main reasons; Þ Looking at things from a single perspective is dull (which, let’s face it, is true, unless you’re of an incredibly conservative - with a small ‘c’ - disposition) Þ The world is therefore multi-dimensional, not uni-dimensional Þ It is the artist’s duty to reflect the richness and possibility inherent in this multi-dimensional world, not limit it to single perspectives So we’re moving from the centre towards the right of our meaning line now, with the writer still an interpreter of reality rather than its ruler, but one who, on the whole, is happy to relax his grip on meaning somewhat. Returning to Joan Didion’s bevatron - the bevatron is significant, but she doesn’t feel sufficiently confident to say outright what it means. And by doing that, she’s letting the bevatron be more ‘itself’, to entertain the possibility it may be something other than she perceives it. It’s slightly mysterious - there’s more to it than meets her eye. And she wants to somehow embrace that ambiguity in her writing. And so does David Malouf, who on this occasion demonstrates an artistic vision less obsessed with control than when we last met him; When I’m creating something, often it is a sharp re-experience of some moment ‘back there’ that opens up that whole bit of the past as something you can step back into. It never seems to me to have a quality that I might call nostalgic because it is never comfortable going back there; in fact it is uncomfortable...What provokes you into attempting to write a poem, or a story or a novel, is something you see back there which is engaging, but in a puzzling way. You want to know what is to be made of it [itals mine] - not just to understand, and discover what it was all about, but to finally give it shape. You may go back there and the thing that engages ou may not be what you thought it was at all. It may lead you to a quite different question. It is finding out where that leads, to which questions and how they can then be given some kind of form, how they can be allowed to find their form [itals mine]. I don’t think you can predict any of that. There is conscious control at the level of the actual writing, because every sentence is controlled and made. But there is also a way of working so that you let the unconscious, if that is what it is, keep putting things up to you to be considered . . The writer may be in ultimate charge of what goes down on paper (as he stated in the earlier Malouf example I quoted), but sometimes the world outside throws you a curve ball and you can’t honestly accommodate what you’re looking at. You don’t have complete control over it. It’s unfamiliar, “puzzling” - it won’t fully yield up its meaning to you. It won’t fit in. So what do you do then? Are you going to let it go on having this ‘independent’ meaning, or are you going to escort it at gunpoint beneath your overarching vision? Can you admit ‘otherness’ into your created world? Malouf believes - on this showing - not only that you can, but should allow meaning to find its own form.