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Manifesto for a New Fiction
SOL LUCKMAN
The problem with much contemporary American—some would say, world—fiction is twofold. If we understand many commercial novels these days to fall somewhere on the spectrum between literary and visionary, with much in the middle that scarcely deserves mentioning, it’s hard to ignore the fact we’re living a classic Catch-22. Literary novels are just not that visionary, which is another way of saying they’re often boring and unimaginative, slaves to a dogged realism—whereas visionary novels are, typically, none too literary, which is another way of saying often poorly, if not execrably, written, cobbled together with their narrative machinery clanking and clunking.
Historically, the exceptions confirm the rule. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS are indeed consummately both literary and visionary. These classics have also been imitated so many times—unsuccessfully, even laughably—it beggars belief. Here and there a contemporary novel pops up on the radar in this magical Twilight Zone where craft and invention seem indissolubly wedded—Robert Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING comes to mind—but those of us literary-visionary hybrids who scour today’s fictional landscape in search of inspiration usually come up empty.
The fly in the ointment is that old bugger, realism. Nearly two centuries after Stendhal’s novel-as-mirror traveled the tedious highway of fiction, and despite the influences of modernism and postmodernism, the majority of today’s novel readers, like Coca-Cola addicts, still want the Real Thing. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes real it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality. This is a pivotal point—that the real world probably isn’t what you believe it is, or rather, that it’s precisely what you believe it is—which, if you still don’t get it, I can only trust someday you will.
I don’t mean any of this theoretically. Theory does everything in its power to remove the living soul of literature, tear its heart out, make of the study of Art a hard-edged Science. Never mind that Art is as far removed from measurement as Science is from love. As writers confronting theory, it’s incumbent on us not to let our prose dry up in that desert, but to allow it to become a desert rose, our prose, flourishing in the heat and sands of what passes for knowledge.
We must, then, for them to be of any worth whatsoever, live our theories practically. For writers this means, inevitably, doing the deed—not just having the idea but putting it on paper, writing down not just the bones of our dreams but their flesh and blood as well. Literature, at its best, and despite the recent attempts of critics, can never be murdered and dissected, as it’s an immortal yet organic thing, drawing on the richness and complexity of Experience yet somehow managing to transcend its mundane origins like an alchemist transmuting base metals. The current twin foci on theory and realism conspire to dry up the spirit and wither the soul, blind the eye and deafen the ear, broil the brain and microwave the heart—and perhaps most disturbingly for us radical wordsmiths who still haven’t sold out to the Man, brown the nose and pucker the rectum.
If we’re to avoid becoming fiction robots in a corporate world, we must stop adding to our educational excesses, eschew the assembly line of MFAs and bottom-line publishing houses, commit ourselves to a way of writing that engages in a valiant struggle to push the limits of plot and language so as to awaken, not anesthetize, the reader. Anything rather than live in the dead world of those cold people, the Intellectuals. Anything rather than subject ourselves to the fusty chain of academic command, the savage petty politics where the arguments are so heated because the stakes, as someone once astutely quipped, are so small.
We must lay our ears back and push on into the literary fourth dimension, realm of feminine chaos and infinite possibility, forego regionalism and play with farce—and, especially, always appreciate the bizarre. Love for the bizarre is, itself, transformational. When you welcome the bizarre into the fiction of your life, anything and anybody can be transformed from dogsh*t into gold.
Let’s begin a new literary movement. I don’t care what we call it. Let’s start writing novels for people who don't like novels. Because these days who can blame them? You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. So let’s at least please ourselves. Years from now when verisimilitude is finally understood as a terribly limiting proposition, let our daringly experimental books (often self-published, often ignored by the mainstream) be remembered as the Rubicon fiction crossed on its journey into multidimensionality. There can be no turning back, for readers or writers, after our historical strokes of madcap genius. Or so my story goes.
Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.
In so doing, maybe, over time, our inherited and mostly dysfunctional posterity urge based on ego will gradually give way to something more stable, healthier, that might be called simply the urge to be. To have been versus to be. Product versus process. In the face of a literature of monoliths and petroglyphs, we have the choice to opt for incompletion. May our new writing shine with the protean power of now. May imagination become the new faith.
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of comic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
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While titillating in the tradition of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Tom Robbins, Sol Luckman’s critically acclaimed visionary novel BEGINNER’S LUKE equally impresses as a work of literary art. Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent ourselves and our world. Download your FREE copy of BEGINNER'S LUKE at ...http://beginnersluke.com/beginners-luke REVIEWS “BEGINNER’S LUKE is a welcome start to what promises to be a mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast.” —Apex Reviews “A modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND, where anything can come alive when you start with a blank page … [Luckman] shows the reader that as individuals, we, too, have choices and potentials. There are no boundaries or rules to limit us.” —Reader Views “BEGINNER’S LUKE is a truly an experience that cannot adequately be described except to say that it is extraordinary and grabs one from the first word of the first chapter and never lets one go. Definitely a spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” —Niama Williams, Ph.D. “Sol Luckman’s writing makes BEGINNER’S LUKE a rewarding romp from start to finish. This is the sort of book that could easily have self-destructed in a lesser author’s hands, but Luckman makes it sing.” —Burt Kempner, Sarasota, Florida “The self-seeking Adventure of Luke, a man groping his way around the confusingly metaphorical ‘New Age,’ is, in a way, the story of every enlightened soul finding their way around these confounding metaphysical times.” —Yael Lewis, Tel Aviv, Israel “BEGINNER’S LUKE is an inspirational and darkly fun novel that is a ‘cannot put down’ book and definite movie material. I loved every minute of it.” —Robynn Bridgett, Cape Town, South Africa “Luke’s story has a mighty moral: we’re making it all up! Our imagination is both seed and soil, water and sun. It’s how we cultivate our circumstances and fashion our future. Luke takes us on a tour of time and quaintly confuses the quantity and quality of something we’ve all come to take for granted, the timeline that creates cause and effect.” —Roseann Gabrys, Wyandotte, Michigan “Some theories say we only use a small portion of our minds, that we have come as far (or as short) as we have while utilizing a relatively tiny amount of our intellect. If this is true, what could possibly be a catalyst to inspire further use of our untapped potential? One possible avenue for further expansion is the melding of what we perceive to be ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ and what we perceive to be ‘fantasy’ or ‘fallacy.’ BEGINNER’S LUKE weaves these two poles together to help the reader see the cage of conformity that we all, to some degree, dwell in.” —M. E. Bradley, Grand Rapids, Michigan “Provocatively rich with vivid characters and descriptive emotion, BEGINNER’S LUKE is a flavorful page-turner that not only satisfies the hunger for poetic intellectual stimulation, but also introspective humor.” —Michelle Lawrence, Tempe, Arizona
