Mattering

There is a rift, in our troubled century, between imaginative writing and the various mainstream U.S. cultures. I get the sense from conversations, articles, and shifts in educational curricula that a growing contingent fears literature (why else would they work to restrict access?) and an even larger group dismisses it as irrelevant. Those reactions are nearly opposite, but together, they have me thinking about how literature matters. Can fiction, poetry, and essays be a meaningful force for truth? And how—considering that word imaginative—do they stand apart from the various modes of distraction and deception?

Fiction contains the wobble of this topic in its name. Conspiracy theories are also “fiction,” and fictional literature is said to be “made up.” The other day at dinner a friend said, “Usually when I finish a novel, I ask myself why I bothered. I want to read about things that really happened.” Being fiction, a novel seems to argue against its own worth.

Poetry’s situation is not so different. Even more than an essay or story, a poem can encompass really anything. The most faithful precision, filtered through the genre’s rich inheritance of indirection—metaphor, allusion, the ventriloquism of tone—fragments like a voice echoing back across a valley. The work of distinguishing irony from forthrightness, gamesmanship from sincerity, is finally the reader’s to do. There’s no assurance—just the lines laid out for us to absorb and inhabit if we choose.

Nonfiction is somewhat different: we read it as factual because the genre asks us to. Yet its more imaginative forms, such as memoir and essay, are arts, and in the service of scene-making, structuring, and compression, here too details are sometimes transformed. The most common example is dialogue set in quotation marks even when the words can’t have been remembered verbatim. That doesn’t implicate all nonfiction—but another, less mechanical element does: “creative nonfiction” is an imaginative form centered on the self as teller. Memoir and the personal essay do not primarily prize getting reality right; they prize getting experience right. They invite us to an intimate thinking-through or remembering, and tell what they choose to tell from a distinct perspective.

This spring, my brother took me ferociously to task, claiming that as someone who values these squishy, age-old genres, I’m partly to blame for our country’s descent into what Stephen Colbert was the first to call “truthiness”: people ignoring facts in favor of whatever they want to claim. Each time that someone takes a novel seriously, my brother said—blowing at me from a familiar cultural headwind—they’re abandoning reality in favor of anything-goes.

The underlying thesis against imaginative writing is hardly new. Throughout the U.S. version of the Industrial Revolution, men were to be productive, pragmatic, and results-oriented, while women were to imagine only on behalf of their children or spouses. Now, as schools at almost every level turn away from offering a broad-based education and instead focus, vaguely but openly, on molding their charges for the workforce, short stories and poems and novels and even memoirs have been expunged from public classrooms nationwide. There’s a worry that children need to be pushed toward factual accounts of things (at least the dominant mytho-factual accounts of things) or they won’t be able to compete. Starving the imagination, though, doesn’t kill it. An impoverished literalism just renders our inner lives taboo, and leaves us lonely and divided.

~

A flood in my father’s basement several years ago left our ancestral family photo albums intact—but the meddling recovery company, smelling dollar bills and age-old mildew, took them away for “treatment.” They pulled every photo out of those books, prints that my paternal grandmother and great-grandmother had spent years organizing and labeling. What came back to us were stacks of pictures in ziplock bags, some torn, all jumbled, with no record of the notes that had been passed down on the black construction paper of the albums.

Finally this spring—realizing that I was fortunate to have anything at all, really—I spent time looking through those boxes. I believed whole generations would no longer be identifiable—the oldest pictures, once a tracing of our ancestry, now reduced to little more than antique-shop curiosities. But a few circumstances mitigated the loss. Someone over the years had written directly on the fronts of the photos—probably because nothing but grease pencil would show up on the black construction paper. And many of the photos had notations on the reverse, inaccessible while they were mounted in the albums. Between my father’s memory, those penned-in notes, and crowdsourced nuggets from a genealogy website, I was able to recover most of the basics.

And that’s all anyone had ever put in those albums, beyond the precious images themselves—a few facts. I’d let a vision build up, somehow believing that a world of intimate knowledge would have been revealed on those lost pages. But no—we’d seen them, and now I was reminded: there were never more than data points—name, relation, year, address, life event, body of water. Once recovered, those coordinates just emphasized the mysteries and revelations lurking in the images.

Unless we’re to remain “paralysed by fact” (Robert Lowell in “Epilogue”), what actually happened has to be assessed in terms of competing implied stories, because so much goes untold and all of it is gone. Even my genealogical hunts, for little more than connect-the-dots entries on death certificates and census spreadsheets, have been exercises in story-building. Further facts won’t reveal themselves, documents resist being found, until I deploy the tools of the imagination. Plausibility, rather than actuality, reigns. There was once “an answer,” yes. Maybe a simple one—factual. But yesterday, much less a bygone generation, is mostly inaccessible now. Imagining is the only way to give it shape again.

~

In the 1940s Frances Glessner Lee, one of the founders of modern forensics, constructed a series of intricate dolls’ houses that she referred to as “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.” The miniature rooms are staged with details of aftermath: a body damaged just so, a broken ceramic, blood on a tub, splinters at the doorframe, a window shattered but no glass on the floor. Each diorama maps a different crime, or no crime—and to this day they’re still used to train detectives in the art of resisting our urge to connect things one way and too quickly.^#

Poems, stories, and essays are akin to those Nutshells. They don’t prevent us from coming to premature or biased conclusions of course. But they encourage us to hold more than one possibility in mind. If we jump too fast, or settle on a too-reductive reading, they prove us wrong.

The best imaginative writing, rather than giving what we expect, complicates and reorients, line by line and page by page. It never ties things neatly but brings us to an awareness—as my work with the photographs did—of the remaining plausible knottings. It could be this way, yes. Or it could, and might have to be, that way. Poetry is the form that most often takes it farther. The humble line break is a master class in branchings that aren’t always meant to be re-merged.

Readers of this kind of work don’t make it very far on preconceptions. Those who insist on passing through unchanged will turn away in frustration. Reject and inveigh. Maybe even fight to remove such books from libraries and classrooms. Literature is a scary flood for anyone who tries to erect dikes around meaning or fears being out of control. And it’s unsettling, too, for people who are “naturalists” about language, who need to believe that words establish meaning easily and stably and that each utterance means one thing.

In truth, even the clearest statements have subtexts; poets make use of that. Even tonelessness is a tone, bespeaking an attitude; imaginative prose mines the implications of those textures. Nothing written has just one meaning. Literature, rather than being the maddening Tower of Babel, is a guide to that complexity. If AI is in the process of sinking us into an underworld, human-powered writing is the Virgil that can help see us through.

~

In his first issue as editor of this journal, Sven Birkerts wrote: “A magazine is, figuratively speaking, a receiving dock for the products of our collective dream-life.” He goes on, “I am at root, moved and heartened when I find what strike me as the best words in the best order, never mind the ostensible subject. Language used with high artistic consciousness. Words arranged in a way that declares: here is a living mind; here is a spirit.”

That seemingly low bar is a rare thing to clear, “here is a living mind” rare to be able to convey on the page. In fact, conveying it is enough. I could quibble with the value of the “mot juste,” the claim of the “best” words—but my friend and colleague goes on to say, “When I read language that connects me to the world, I react, and my reaction has an outward fling: I want to carry the news to others.”

Yes. It’s that flip—pulling out of the flow to return to the flow; or retreating to the edge in search of the center of our common life and experience—that marks the relevance of literature. Reading almost anything can help us map an inner landscape. Likewise, even potboilers can train the astonishing facility our minds can have for seeing what’s present only in words—an account transferred onto the reel of our waking consciousness. But something more can be found—that new-forged connection to the world, or even to life—and the hunt for it is thrilling.

~

So much of daily life depends on routine. This is why supply-chain disruptions were enough to turn Americans terminally cranky. This is why displacement and war are so debilitating even for those who remain “safe.” Some mornings, I know a sickness must be coming on because instead of moving through all of my repetitions automatically—brushing my teeth and so on—my mind atomizes everything, presenting it to me as an overwhelming sequence. And then I’ll have to crouch down and lace up my shoes. In routine, our relationships threaten to become automatic—no, they don’t threaten: our attraction to habit threatens to automate our relationships. And the daily commute settles us into an unchanging reaction to the news—to war crimes, to fresh Nakbas, to intentionally cruel policy, to “authoritarian creep,” to dictatorship in our own country, to capricious, masked assaults and disappearances, here, in the United States.

At a certain point, we blinder ourselves by default. The truth is hard to face, especially in a country where uncomfortable realities are often faced alone and group “truths” can be celebrated in stadiums. We’re 6 and 1, and up by 14 at the half! Our gift for tamping and regularizing and oversimplifying—for believing the best of a situation when it’s easier, the worst when it soothes—gives exactly the perch evil needs. Habit is our Achilles’ heel. In programming terms, it’s the necessary subroutine, the essential loop of code, that introduces a vulnerability. “Bread and circuses” was Roman poet Juvenal’s phrase for the easy way a populace can be distracted. Many people’s strength, and their sense of self-worth too, relies on keeping others from real seeing.

So we read along. And article after article, escape after escape, rhyme scheme after rhyme scheme reaffirms the habitual ways. A great deal that’s written simply disseminates, and is meant to disseminate, the author’s defaults, their received wisdom, the truisms—and phrases, the ways of expressing—that the writer hasn’t thought to question or deepen.

But as we read the best of imaginative writing, occasionally something slips from the customary gearing. Something slips in, and through. A familiarity is sparked in an unexpected place; or an unfamiliarity dizzies us in a place we thought we knew; or, instantly and deeply, we trust a sound that’s both new to us and somehow recognizable. Our inner eye jolts, habit is sloughed aside, and there we are, truly present again.

It’s a tautly intimate unfamiliarity that grips me most: The textures and ways of another mind. The richness of our many, many Englishes. Words pulled from a specific place and way of being. The alternate logics of a language not my own; we think differently in different tongues, and those shapes can be conveyed and preserved. And then everywhere, constellations of reference—whether by generation, tribe, or subculture—verbal art formed from the writer’s own manifold territories, not least the ones that are hardest, riskiest, and rarest to step forward and occupy.

The things that we humans lose touch with fastest, it seems, are the things that matter most. Each of us with our decaying, capable body in a loving, genocidal world on a troubled Goldilocks planet in a sparsely lit void. Suddenly, in the best writing, we feel the shape of an urgency, and again know our own.

~

Joe Friday’s line on Dragnet so many decades ago, “Just the facts, ma’am”: maybe it convinced too many people that facts are the exclusive ambit of the truth. Literary editing, for me, is the art of attending to something like the reverse. Facts orbit the truth, the latter being the larger and more capacious thing, though no less precise.

Our team here—we call it “the masthead” after the list at the front of each issue—listens at first in order to receive, then listens again to give suggestions. The entire mandate centers on truthfulness, and if we didn’t listen for places where the truth hides away momentarily or the path gets lost, didn’t gradually develop an ear for unwitting intrusions of the automatic or received, there’s no way the writers we work with could trust the process.

After twenty-one years at AGNI, I’ve been given the honor of leading the team now, which to me means listening to my colleagues’ listening, hearing their ways of hearing and testing my own in relation. And I venture to say that none of us would support publishing a piece that any of the rest considered false or untrue. That would be the quickest dealbreaker—it gives us each something like a veto. We can all step forward with our reasons for championing, or reasons for lacking full enthusiasm about something we might otherwise have been drawn to. But what we most rely on—or, I’ll speak personally: what my trust leans on with its full weight—is my fellow editors’ differently tuned bullshit meters or spidey-sense. Who cares if something is “based on a true story”—that’s the worst canard in narrative. But every poem, every story, every reminiscence or think-piece needs to be true. We have to feel—unalloyed—the honesty of the attempt.

Our work at AGNI, once we commit to a piece of writing and start our collaborative exchange with the writer, is to listen for places where the structure or syntax or word choice hints that something may be missing or glossed over. Something has not been fully encountered by the writer yet, maybe; the piece’s broader truth not yet whole by the standard that the writing itself has established. Maybe secondarily, or maybe not, our work is also to help ensure (though we can get it wrong, like anyone) that the most predictable elements, and the least predictable—those outlying jags—are each the way they are to a purpose. That they function, with their own kind of soul and precision, in service of the piece’s larger immediacy—the artistic need, the sense of a presence, that first enlivened us.

~

The very best imaginative work, in every generation, everywhere, gathers into a subtle and essential record of human reaction and encounter. Without having to try, it exposes us. Exposes the times we’re living in. The ways we’re like one another. And where our cultures and bodies and circumstances have made us very different. It shows up cravenness and illusion. It insists on surfacing the hidden. And all of this it does with an utter reliance on truth—though, to some people’s chagrin and confusion, often no attachment to the facts of a particular instance.

Facts are precious for sure. America’s account of its own history has consistently distorted them, eliding and foreshortening whatever doesn’t agree with a core of originally white and Christian mythologies. In an era of wafered “superintelligence,” accurate accounts may be even harder to make ascendant. The profit and power incentives converge in systems that give more weight to attachment and addiction.

But out beyond our databases, reliance on fact alone is simply not available as a crutch. Nearly everything that happens is unverifiable. And we need far fuller accounts than data alone will ever reveal.

~

How would we not be anxious right now about story—about the ways we understand ourselves, and write and talk about those understandings?

On the one side, truths that had finally begun to surface in daily discourse in the United States are being targeted directly and attacked as illegitimate. These include even straightforward accounts of some people’s lives and histories—starting with Indigenous, Black, and queer Americans’, and extending to Palestinians’ and undocumented people’s also.

On the other side, we have machinery, abruptly, that’s capable of scrambling expressions of human experience into “new” but empty plausibilities at electron speed. Large language models recombine phonemes in exactly the way habit does; they give us the most likely, the most seen, the most already-available, with nothing of one-off particularity.

Keeping attuned to the truth is easier than some claim. But it means finding a space beyond the noise, and engaging elements of ourselves that can be unfashionable to admit to: subtlety, slowness, intuition—our in-born curiosity about others. The forest of humanity spreads far beyond the few trees that get scanned and sent viral. Such sublime wholes aren’t visible to the eye all at once; they’re seen through acts of synthetic imagination. They’re delivered, mosaic-style, through art.

—W. P.