or
E.B White is Turning over in his Grave.
Characters/stories are not real life, but academics act as if they are, which lends an air of importance to "literature" (stories, novels) that it does not (should not?) really have. People create their own stories, not only in their daily fantasies and nightly dreams, but in the fictions they maintain about themselves, their families, their friends, their neighborhoods, their countries, etc. The practice is ubiquitous.
But few people write these fictions out, as if they are something different than what we all do every day. The commonplace becomes literature. But the characters are not real people, whether or not the stories are based upon real people, because they are based not upon reality, but upon figments we create, abstractions of real situations and real people acting in ways that we want to think are real, but are not, because we do not consider the whole person when we (both as writers and as non-writers) "create" these characters, but instead choose specific traits to (probably prejudicially) stereotype them.
Thus, when academics treat story characters as if they are real, they engage in the reverse process, considering superficial caricatures as indicative of real life. You cannot know real life from stories; what you know is that fictive life we all lead and pretend is real. Real life exists beneath the surface and is so complex that it can never be depicted in so small a volume as even a lengthy novel. Writers who create this artform know this, at least intuitively. It's essential for the art that they gloss over the deeper meaning. They are not psychiatrists, but artists. They render surfaces, or at best, they dig down a few millimeters and expose superficial sub-layers.
The writers who attempt to do more, as for example Joyce did in Finnegan's Wake, end up producing obtuse works inaccessible to all but the most studied and willing-to-study-much-further readers. And the characters they create, because they are more real, seem to the average reader to be less so. Art is art, and life is life, and artists' attempts to bridge the gap always end in failure. You can't get here from there.
Therefore, I think that postmodern and/or experimental fictions, the kind that disregard, ignore, or flout conventional storytelling, that create "unreal" characters, plots, and "stories," are more honest forms of "literature." They reveal the process of "storytelling" more accurately by rendering the underlying motives of the "average person" who engages in all kinds of deceptions, subterfuges, incomplete or incoherent plots and fictions, stereotyping (traditional fiction also does this well), poses, stances, and so on. Yet it is all still art, no matter how much more honest it may be. Life goes on, apart from it.
Yet it is a more populous movement (despite the fact that much of it is obtuse) because it renders, or attempts to render, the everyday process of fiction creation, not the literary farce that academics pretend is an accurate depiction of life. There is far more "truth" in a postmod story than in any standard work of literature, Shakespeare and a few other geniuses possibly excepted, because they "get to the heart and soul" of humanity despite the conventions they often get bogged down in.
I realize that this qualification negates my premise by indicating that literature is a matter of degree, more or less approximating "truth" by connotative and intuitive means, even as it uses convention to render its plot/characters/storyline. But this is okay. My point is not so firm re what experimental fiction really is; it's the fact that academics adopt a pomposity re literature when they try to separate its content from the everyday culture. There is more "truth" in an inept personal website than in a mainstream novel.
Yet academics disconsider this other form of art. It's a practice so far beneath the literary achievements of dedicated writers that it fails, in their minds, to do the job of art. But it does the job, quite well, and every bit as effectively as mainstream fiction, even with bad grammar, lack of plot or story, and incomplete characterization. Taking (some) personal websites as the "worst case" (they're really not) examples, all of the postmod and/or experimental stuff that lies between them and "high literature" are less "invalid" forms (in the assumed opinion of the academics). In fact, they are exactly the same thing, all of it, the proposed differences being a matter of arbitrary judgment decided on the basis style and taste.
Art is, after all, a social practice, subject to all of the whims and wiles of human nature. What is "good" is determined by those who have the social power and/or influence, and postmodernism, despite its insinuation into the mainstream culture, is not yet so powerful as to control the style and taste of academics, who wield a big stick (albeit in a softly spoken voice), especially within their own group. That closed group is still the determining factor of what is quality literature. But it itself is being populated by postmodernists. It won't be much longer now. E.B White is starting to roll in his grave, to the sound of rock and pop.
6-18-03