Authenticity in Realms
of the Absurd

33}PLANTING ABSURD SEEDS
IN REALISTIC SOIL

Readers of fiction don’t want cartoons—and for sure they don’t want to have to work for them.

That’s why, when writing about absurd or incredible situations, those situations must be grounded in a world that makes them credible, so readers will be willing to invest in them.

Imagine a novel about a group of ten-year-olds hijacking an airliner. Neat idea, huh? So are Wile E. Coyote’s ideas, and they never come off. Sociologically, legally, psychologically, physically, the novel’s premise is absurd.

Remember the scene in Catch-22 where Milo Minderbinder— mess officer, genius entrepreneur, and President and CEO of M & M Enterprises—contracts with the Germans to bomb his own air squadron for them, at cost plus 6 percent? The absurd premise works because it grows organically out of the absurd environment of Heller’s novel as a whole. Yes, Heller is writing about World War II, but it’s not the World War II that we read about in history books. It’s an analogous World War II taking place on a fictional island in a parallel universe, one in which such things are not only possible but happen all the time. Within Catch-22’s first pages this parallel universe is firmly established, and the rules of Heller’s sly game are spelled out. The author has contracted to deliver us absurdity, and absurdity is what we get.

Other works that embrace the absurd, like Lewis’s Narnia books and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter books, are works of pure fantasy set in an alternate (as opposed to parallel) universe, or in a mythical past. Emotionally, the worlds of such novels may relate to our world; physically, they have little in common. In the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling succeeds admirably in conflating her imagined world of magic and spells with the prosaic world we all know, defying its limitations to the delight of hundreds of millions of fans.

Other books stay within the real world while bordering on the absurd. In John Irving’s The World According to Garp, the title character’s mother—a hospital nurse in want of a child— impregnates herself through intercourse with a perpetually priapic but vegetative ex-ball-turret gunner. Jenny Fields later becomes a feminist author and icon and is eventually murdered at a political rally. Her son Garp dresses as a woman so he can attend her funeral, since no men are allowed. Throughout his novel, Irving brushes up against, but never quite crosses, the line into absurdity.

Inexperienced authors plant absurd seeds in their realistic soil without ever acknowledging or exploiting the discrepancy. What emerges is neither credible nor convincing. There may well be a parallel universe in which ten-year-olds hijack airliners, but as it stands, that story crosses the line into ludicrousness, and beyond.

34}THREE PREGNANT BANK ROBBERS:
MOTIVATING ABSURDITY

Imagine the story of three pregnant women robbing a bank.

Hard to believe?

That, no doubt, is why the author chose to write it. Her intent was to shock readers with the originality of her premise, her sensational raw material. But here again the question needs to be asked: Under what circumstances, in this or an alternative world, would three pregnant women contemplate robbing a bank, let alone actually rob one?

Unlike Heller, who gives us a world where officers bomb their own squadrons, or Kafka, who gives us one where men turn into giant beetles, or H.G. Wells, who gives us one where a man travels backward and forward through time, or Shirley Jackson, who gives us one where the “decent” folk of a community take part in an annual stoning ritual in which one of their number are killed, this writer merely plops her three pregnant heroines into our world, the same one you and I live in, and expects us to believe it when they do something which, by our world’s standards, isn’t believable.

For such a story to work in our world, the author would have to establish motives for such incredible behavior. She would have to put her three heroines in a position where they have no choice but to rob a bank. Abandoned by the fathers of their children, perhaps they have been bosom buddies since childhood; perhaps one of them was a bank teller whose supervisor knocked her up and then fired her. Perhaps all three women worked at the same bank and were impregnated by the same lothario. Now at least there is opportunity and motivation.

It’s still a stretch to believe that, by endangering their own lives as well as the lives curled up in their wombs, these women hope to gain anything. However, if as readers we are presented with such compelling circumstances in the story’s first paragraphs or pages, we might just buy the story that follows.

Actions, however far-fetched, can be rendered authentic provided that they are sufficiently motivated.

35}AUTHENTICITY VS. REALISM:
DREAMING ON PAPER

When I insist on authenticity, plausibility, credibility, am I advocating “realism”?

No. In fact, I don’t believe that what we experience as everyday life can or should be put on paper. Fiction isn’t “real”—any more than life is made of written words. Fiction is a trick, an illusion, closer to dreams and to magic than to “reality”— one person’s reality being another’s definition of madness. And in any work of art, the “reality” is in any case artificial, as Lionel Trilling tells us:

“When we speak of literal reality, we are aware that there is really no such thing—that everything that is perceived is in some sense conceived, or created. … Nevertheless, bound as we are by society and convention, as well as by certain necessities of the mind, there still is a thing that we persist in calling ‘literary reality,’ and we recognize in works of art a greater or less approximation of it.”

Einstein: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

Substitute “principles of writing” for “laws of mathematics.”

Great fiction creates its own worlds, and in so doing it changes the way we look at the so-called “real” world. Massive bureaucracies today are said to be “Kafkaesque”; authoritarian institutions or states are described as “Orwellian”; scenes of debauchery (as well as gross humor) are classified “Rabelaisian.” When he wrote The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald had no idea that he’d written a love letter to the “The Jazz Age.”

What we are pleased to call “reality” is actually a jumble of handed-down impressions inherited from those who lived before us, artists who preserved their impressions, dreams, and visions vividly in images and words.

Writing fiction is dreaming on paper—not passive dreaming, but active, lucid dreaming, with the author at the controls.

There’s logic in fiction, too. But it’s the logic of dreams.

36}DREAM LOGIC:
SWIMMING IN THE DESERT

This is why I’m always insisting that the word “reality” be bracketed by quotation marks: It’s such a relative term—relative, that is, to the set of perceptions perceiving it.

In one person’s “reality,” it’s entirely possible, in the middle of a desert, to have a swim team.

Miranda July demonstrates this in her story “The Swim Team,” about a woman who captains a swim team in a landlocked, dry-as-dust part of the United States. The narrator explains how she gives swimming lessons without a pool, pond, lake, or stream:

We met twice a week in my apartment. When they arrived, I had three bowls of warm tap water lined up on the floor, and then a fourth bowl in front of those, the coach’s bowl. I added salt to the water because it’s supposed to be healthy to snort warm salt water, and I figured they would be snorting accidentally. I showed them how to put their noses and mouths in the water and how to take a breath to the side. Then we added the legs, and then the arms. I admitted these were not perfect conditions for learning to swim, but, I pointed out, this was how Olympic swimmers trained when there wasn’t a pool nearby.

Do we really believe that any Olympic swimmers train this way, in “real” life? Ms. July sells us not only on that small departure from factual truth, but on her conceit as a whole. How does she do it? By laying firm claim to her own fictional world, one in which people learn to swim in bowls of water on apartment floors.

How does she create that world? When does she create it?

On the first page, in the first paragraph:

This is the story I wouldn’t tell you when I was your girlfriend. You kept asking and asking, and your guesses were so lurid and specific. Was I a kept woman? Was Belvedere like Nevada, where prostitution is legal? Was I naked for the entire year? The reality began to seem barren. And in time I realized that if the truth felt empty, then I probably would not be your girlfriend much longer.

With that first sentence already we’re disarmed. A story the author wouldn’t tell us if she was our girlfriend? The mix of negations, conditionals, and hypothesis is designed to make the reader dizzy, and—like a good battering with a pillow—it simultaneously softens us up for just about anything. We’re told that this battered, disoriented “you” has guessed that the story is “lurid” and “specific”: and so it will prove to be. Was the teller a “kept” woman? Who knows? Who cares? Just please tell us the story, Miranda, any story: At this point, we’ll take whatever we get.

The comparison of Belvedere to Nevada suggests, slyly, that “Belvedere” is likewise one of the United States—one we’ve never seen or heard of, just as we’ve never seen or heard of people learning to swim in however many bowls of salt water. See how the author takes us from our world and slips us into her fictional one? “The reality began to seem barren.” As will the reader’s own reality, once he surrenders to that of the author—as he will any minute now. And in time I realized that if the truth felt empty, then I probably would not be your girlfriend much longer: i.e., if he doesn’t accept what’s coming, the reader can kiss his hypothetical girlfriend goodbye.

From then on it’s the author’s way, or the highway. Readers can either bail or surrender.

That’s how fictional worlds get built.

37}FROM IMPOSSIBLE TO INEVITABLE:
THE CONTINUUM OF CREDIBILITY

Ideally a story’s “world” should be established within the first few sentences. Otherwise, readers can’t be blamed for trying to graft the elements of the story onto their own world, and finding that the graft won’t take.

We can think of credibility as a gradual continuum, with impossible at one end and inevitable at the other. Between these two extremes lie possible and probable.

The level to aim for in fiction is inevitable.

When you can make the actions of your characters seem to be the only possible actions, you have achieved the quality of inevitability. You may even have yourself a masterpiece.

Short of that, the goal to aim for is probability: not only that something could possibly happen, but that it very well might. Mere possibility does not justify fictional events or provide a satisfying reading experience.

And—unless you’re dealing with fantasy, surrealism, magic realism, or downright absurdity—impossibility disqualifies itself.