An Endless Game. Passa Porta Lecture 2018

I was asked to consider the question: Should writers think of their readers when they are writing? To me the answer to that question seems obvious. Of course they should. I see the relationship between reader and writer as that of two people playing a sort of game. In writing fiction, the writer is playing a sort of game with the reader. And the game has only one rule: the writer must not bore the reader – the writer must interest the reader, and keep them interested. Of course there are many different ways of being interesting, and what is interesting to one person won’t necessarily be interesting to another. 

In the case of popular fiction the point about interest seems pretty obvious. Nobody, I think, would disagree that popular fiction must stand or fall solely on its ability to hold the reader’s interest. Successful popular fiction is very good at this. A few years ago I stayed up until two o’clock in the morning to finish Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed up until two in the morning to finish a novel by, for example, Christie’s contemporary Virginia Woolf, much as I like her work. She is compelling in a different way, and the fact that we call Murder in Mesopotamia “a novel” and also call To The Lighthouse “a novel” masks the very great difference in the nature of the interest they offer – it also, of course, points to a fundamental similarity.

The interest offered by Murder in Mesopotamia is straightforwardly the interest of “not knowing what’s going to happen”, and to a lesser extent, not knowing how it’s going to happen. What makes Agatha Christie so good is that she sees this so clearly and doesn’t try to do anything else. Her books are short, lean, and do not waste any more time on extraneous elements – setting, character, anything that might be called “texture” – than is absolutely necessary to provide the rudimentary illusion required to support the suspense. I don’t really remember anything about Murder in Mesopotamia except that I couldn’t stop reading it until I found out who had killed… whatever her name was. I wanted to see how the book would answer the questions that it had raised. Now, To The Lighthouse might raise very different sorts of questions but fundamentally the way it operates is actually quite similar. Agatha Christie asks very simple questions, or rather one very simple question – Who did the murder? And she’s very skilful at making the reader want to know the answer to that question. But a novel like To The Lighthouse also is about questions and answers – it also operates by raising questions to which the reader wants to know the answer. The questions are very different – they’re questions about the nature of perception, they’re questions about the nature of character, they’re questions about the nature of time – but they still have to be presented in ways that make the reader want to know the answers to them, and some kind of answer has to be supplied for the experience to be a satisfying one. In both cases the relationship between question and answer sets up certain expectations in the reader, and the writer’s deft management of these expectations is what allows the book to hold our interest over hundreds of pages. Whether it is able to do that or not is the only criterion for judging its success. To The Lighthouse also must stand or fall solely on its ability to hold the reader’s interest.

To dispute that, it seems to me, is to suggest that what we call ‘serious’ literature is allowed to be boring. (In fact just to call it ‘serious’ literature almost amounts to giving it permission to be boring.) The trouble is that the moment something is allowed to be boring – the moment people almost expect it to be boring, at least part of the time – it is dead as a cultural form. It has lost touch with the reason it exists in the first place. It is merely a dutiful ritual, in which a declining number of mostly elderly people take an interest, until it is forgotten entirely. Opera, for instance, is deep into this process of dying. And some people, I know, think that literature is too. I’m more optimistic, so I’m going to say, No, literature is not allowed to be boring. Its first, its only duty is to be interesting. Nothing else matters. Ultimately the reason for this is very simple. In other kinds of writing, in other kinds of discourse, the text is, as it were, a means to an end – a way of communicating specific information. What distinguishes literature is that the text is an end in itself, whose existence can only be justified by its inherent interest.

Does that sound reductive? Writing is often talked about in grander terms. It is regarded as socially or spiritually important. It is thought of as a sort of quasi-scientific or philosophical investigation into the nature of things. These kind of thoughts can all too easily turn into excuses for neglecting the primary task of being interesting – decadence and decline begin there. It’s difficult for any art form to survive too much prestige. Also threatening is the idea that something might be good for you, or the means to some other end, as when writing is viewed as having a kind of therapeutic value for the writer themselves – when it is seen as a matter of personal development, as a form of spiritual quest. ‘Dig deep inside, battle self-doubt, and become the person you know you can be’ was how an article in a newspaper promoting a well-known school of creative writing, recently characterised the writing process. ‘KNOW THYSELF’ was the title of the article. ‘Writing,’ it went on, ‘is about claiming ownership of yourself in order to become the person you know you can be. It’s about acknowledging to yourself that writing is not just a hobby, but a profound force in your life, one that will help you achieve a deep sense of self-expression. A novel is making your mark on the world. It is your cri de coeur.’

I don’t think that.

I think writing a novel is playing a game with the reader.

Writing is rhetoric, not religion. And all writers are readers before they are writers. This is where the idea of the game begins – in childhood. That is where the rules of the game are learnt. That is when the pleasure principle is established. The reading child feels like a co-conspirator in the creation of an imaginative experience, and is deliciously aware of the fact that he is being manipulated, of the fact that he is playing a game. For me those feelings are still the deepest pleasure that reading can afford, and therefore the greatest source of pleasure that writing offers too, since reading and writing are not separate but entirely conjoined activities. Things like self-expression don’t really come into the picture at that point.

And yet later in life we can’t easily shake the feeling that self-expression is somehow important. This has to do, I think, with the idea of truth. We equate self-expression with truth, and truth is what we want. Truth is what interests us.

How many of us, I wonder, have illicitly read the private diary of someone we know? The experience can certainly be compelling – we might stumble on the thing by accident, and be unable to resist taking what we promise ourselves will be just a quick peek, and then find that, half an hour later, we have read dozens of pages and are almost unable to stop. There is a kind of thrill in having that sort of access to someone’s unmediated thoughts. The indiscretions we find make us feel giddy. We feel that we are somehow getting at the essence of the person whose diary we are reading. We feel that we are getting closer to the truth of them. And isn’t this what we feel fiction should be trying to do? To reach some sense of human truth which makes flippant talk of playing games seem silly?

It undoubtedly is one of the fascinations of reading fiction – more or less any fiction – that we are given that sort of access to the private thoughts of other people, even if they are fictional characters. We are permitted to look behind the normally impenetrable surface that other people present to the world and see what they are “really” thinking and feeling. We are permitted, in other words, to experience them as they experience themselves and in doing so we hope to find some sort of truth – the sort of truth to be found, we would like to think, in the minute examination of human character. That has come to be seen as the primary mission of what we think of as serious fiction. So it’s not surprising that one of the main aims of most fiction writers is to make the characters in their book seem as plausible, as persuasive as possible. To make them seem as much as possible like real people. Because only by seeming like real people can they offer the possibility of yielding some sort of truth. From the eighteenth century down to today, successive techniques have been used for creating characters who seem real – presenting them through their letters, for example, or their ‘stream of consciousness’. When new and unfamiliar to the reader, these techniques can be strikingly successful. The characters surge into life with the force and pungency of lived reality. In time, however, the techniques become familiar and predictable – like stratagems in a game – so that the characters start to seem not quite like real people any more, and merely like characters in a novel, the products of an illusion. And of course, no matter how real the characters seem, it always is an illusion.

That this knowledge should bother us in some way – that the fact of its being an illusion should seem problematic to us – is an indicator of our difficulty with seeing literature as simply rhetoric and not as religion. We want to feel that we have grasped some actual truth. One way of dealing with this problem is to write books that appear to say, ‘Actually this isn’t an illusion. This is true. The characters and events in this book are real.’ In other words, to blur the line between fiction and reality to the point where the reader simply has no idea what is real and what isn’t. Using the names of real people, especially the author, is one obvious way to do this – a technique employed from the teasingly titled The Sexual Life of Catherine M by Catherine Millet, to The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis. Another part of this approach is to mimic the linguistic texture of something like a personal diary – and for this the key thing is to create the impression that the writer was specifically not thinking of the reader when they were putting the words down on paper or typing them into a laptop. The lack of finish, of polish, is supposed to convey the actual reality of what is being said, and often of course it does indeed achieve that. It gives us the feeling that we are reading something unmediated – and who knows, perhaps we are reading something unmediated? Our inability to be sure is precisely what achieves the desired end of making what we are reading seem real. Seem real. That’s the important thing, because to label a piece of writing ‘fiction’, to describe it as a ‘novel’, is to assert one thing and one thing only: that the crucial thing is not that what is described is true, but that it seems true. And so by a process that is almost paradoxical, the writer who seeks to persuade the reader that he is not thinking of them at all, that he is entirely indifferent to them, that he is actually unaware of their presence, in fact has the reader in front on his eyes the entire time, because it is precisely for that reader that he is striving to create the sense of reality, and therefore the interest, that his apparent indifference so successfully fosters. His indifference is itself a kind of illusion, a novel move in an endless game.

© David Szalay and Passa Porta, 2018