Fiction As Itself

I don’t remember how we came to run this piece in Context, although this was an issue (the 11th), for which I was an associate editor, and the lead article is “Reading William Carlos Williams” by Linda Wagner-Martin, which I remember getting and nervously working on.1 I suspect this originated with Curtis White, Context’s editor from the jump, and this has all the markings of a Curtis-heavy issue with “Commentaries” by Reg Gibbons, Mary E. Papke, Thomas Frank, and Lindsay Waters.

That said, I was reading a lot of authors at the time that Giles Gordon was connected to, especially B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and, the subject of our next Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast, Brigid Brophy.2 Gordon, an innovative novelist in his own right, also ran the Scottish branch of the Curtis Brown Agency, and represented a number of the members of this branch of boundary-pushing British writers from the latter half of the twentieth century.3 And since this was around the time that we were doing Quin and Brophy, Gordon’s presence—as an agent and a writer—was in the air.

The piece below is, for a lot of Dalkey aficionados, pretty basic, yet a nice starting point to discuss ways to approach and converse about literature, and what sets certain books apart. This is a thread that runs throughout the “Commentaries” in Context, so expect more of them in the coming months. For now, enjoy!

“Fiction As Itself” by Giles Gordon

The difficulty with writing, as with reading, is words. Only the painter uses paint—not the spectator, not even the art critic; he uses words. Only the composer uses notes—not the listener, nor the music critic; he too uses words. The writer uses words, but so does everybody else. Therefore everyone believes he or she is a potential writer.

Most people, in daily currency, use words in what they think of as a fairly literal way. Consequently they are made uneasy if a writer does not use them similarly. They expect a novelist to know more words than they do, and to employ them with greater expertise than they can. Basically though, they expect a “story” to begin at the beginning (wherever that may be). If the first four words aren’t literally “Once upon a time,” the reader should be able to assume they’re taken for granted. The story should continue ...