I write fiction, because what interests me is other people, and it’s the only thing we’ve got to disassemble and measure what that means. Why has science failed to deliver a technical elaboration of experience? Because what’s tricky about other people isn’t a measurement problem. It’s topological: all my experience of experience is my experience of it, and all yours is yours, and though these things appear to belong to the same space, from the perspective of each they are the space itself. I can’t substitute a part of my phenomenology with yours—I can’t touch a stone and feel the way you touch it; even if they could wire up our brains to somehow copy your nervous impulses to my own system, it would still be my system, still my impulses; we might as well have saved time (and our craniums) if you just touched the rock and told me how it felt.
Hence, fiction.
Fiction, or more precisely the novel form, was what the Early Modern Era invented to tackle this last intractable black box problem. It was a rational innovation: wealth accumulation meant that there were more children growing up educated and idle, but economies were still primitive and the majority were dirt poor. The middle class was really in the middle: it had the time, and the voice, to remark on the great upheavals it was watching, but little power to affect anything with its observations. The best it could do is talk to itself about what it saw. Hence—
Modern fiction does not play this role anymore. That’s because the middle class has changed, because how it saw itself changed: quite literally, because it started only paying attention to itself. In its modern American embodiment (and by extension all Western or Westernized cultures, now just American synecdoches), the attitude of the middle class is: They’re not me, so who cares? Personhood is, like everything now, a market: we’re all competing with each other for the right to be. Fiction simply evolved to meet this need. The Catch-22 is of course that if everyone’s writing about themselves, no one’s paying attention. And the less attention paid, the less pressure for fiction to resume the analytical mode; people interested in people drift away, substituting inferior media like film and television, or just end up reading old books. Ipso facto, today.
I have an old-fashioned view of fiction because of my parents, though not because they taught me so. They didn’t teach me much at all. Their excuse was that they weren’t good at anything worth passing on. In reality, they had too much ego and a hoarder’s mentality. They couldn’t give even a bit of themselves away. The irony was that their obsessive self-attention kept them from what they were so desperate to see: because sight is stereographic, mapping all points to one bounded solid—except the point of projection. In other words: your eyes can’t see themselves. My parents suffered greatly because they misunderstood this simple optical law, and they made other people suffer too.
My parents were like the old middle class, but in this case what segregated them was psychology more than vocation (and certainly not accumulated wealth). Imprisoned by their egos, they watched everyone walking free from between the bars; this made them keen but not very kind observers, but even keener talkers. They needed to talk, to tug, turn over, worry everything in their manic way. Because what else was there to do when you’re doing life without parole? And it was me who had the luck, whichever one, to be their cellmate.
My parents talked to me like a guy in a bar, because they’d come to New York in the ‘70s when talking to guys in bars was what you did. Sometimes they actually did it in bars, but mostly it was at the kitchen table, which was just as good for smoking and drinking, and a lot less dear, especially when everyone they knew started dying or disappearing in one way or another.
The downtown that I was born in was at the height of its powers and so already on the way out; money was back, and money meant to have it all. If you’d only paid attention to the junkies and the krust punks and the project girls, just babies themselves, punching their newborns in the stroller when they wouldn’t stop crying, you’d never have known. But that was just scene dressing; because there was something lurking over the river, coming for us all: the new middle class, germinated in damp, dark suburban living rooms, hothousing ‘til the wee hours in a mulch of album covers, primetime, and cultural studies primers under a cathode gro-light glow.
It didn’t matter how fucked up a place was. It didn’t matter the city’d busted up a squat here and found a kid on the missing list melted into a mattress, needle still in what was presumed his arm used to be. These things didn’t matter. That kid was dressing. Once you scraped him up and threw bleach on the ground, the tragic act was over. A marketing manager or a postdoc with family money or a woman bravely trying to break into nonprofit fundraising with nothing but a master’s from Columbia would move in, and the redemption arc could begin.
Fiction was existential for me. It was how I kept my head above water with waves of indifference crashing down on me. Instead of going mad, I wanted to understand: what is it that these people don’t, and why don’t they need, to see?
So I write about them. That’s what you’ll find here, little stages on which to play with blindness and sight. But beauty, eye, beholder; so feel free to ignore all that and just read.
