I'm so postmodern

I'm currently reading Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex and am having some major breakthroughs with my writing. Not with the actual words on paper business of writing, but of the sitting and thinking hard aspect -- the 'composting' (incidentally, I think that the amount of composting time required to write a novel that is as complex and interwoven as mine was vastly underestimated...).

Oh! Disclaimer! Please don't think I am comparing my writing to that of Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize winner and one of America's greatest writers of contemporary literary fiction... okay, so that is a lie. I am comparing, albeit a little shamefully. Though (she says, stamping her foot), there can be nothing wrong with aiming high and using successful, admirable writing as a model for my own. Now if only he could create a couple of worksheets for me, I'd be set.

Here in Zurich, I am a member of two writing groups, each with three other wonderful writers. One group meets each month religiously, the other meets a little more sporadically, though usually every two or three months. The week before our meets, we email each other our submission, usually of around ten pages, and then we edit, respond, critique and praise each other's work in preparation for our meeting. When we meet, the three readers, often in conflict with each other, discuss problem areas as well as sections that they particularly enjoyed. The writer of the piece isn't 'allowed' to speak (theoretically) until after all feedback is given, removing the opportunity to explain yourself and justify any potential problems.

Every time I submit my writing, I am riddled with nerves. I assume people won't like it, will find inherent problems with any number of things (continuity of tense, embarrassing spelling or grammatical errors, flaws in characterisation, and - the worst - just 'not getting it') and will be secretly scoffing behind my back... how can I possibly think I have the ability to complete this mammoth task? And yet, every time, I am astonished that people seem to genuinely enjoy my writing. Yes, there are problems (such as 'I really sympathised with this character up until now, but what they just said just doesn't fit with my idea of who they are', or 'this sentence starts in past tense, moves into present, then ends back in past again'), but on the whole, I always leave our sessions feeling as though I actually can do this.

Back to Eugenides.

Some feedback that I continually receive is in reference to my use of point-of-view. I have chosen a very complex structure for my novel, and in order to tie all the flailing bits together, I have employed a grumpy old man to tell the story (I hate having to summarise complex areas of my narrative... just know that it is a whole lot more complicated than that). He makes appearances at the beginning and the end, but also continuously pops in throughout in order to provide comment to his own ability to tell the story, in the style of a metanarrative. Now, the critique that I often receive from my fellow writers goes along the lines of 'How would he know that? How could he know that X feels this way, or that Y is hiding there, or that Z wants this more than anything in the world?'. And so, despite my refutations that he is telling a story and therefore needs to invent the emotions and justify the actions of his fellow characters, I often find myself censoring my old man.

Eugenides doesn't. He has his narrator providing us with an intimate portrayal of his grandparents' first sexual encounter, of the complexities of his parents' relationship, of the events that occurred in the house down the street from his Grandmother... and I never found myself wondering 'how would he know this?'.

I have been reading a lot of interviews with Jeffrey Eugenides to try to uncover some of the challenges he found in writing this novel (which took nine years... *sigh*), and I found this segment, taken from www.3ammagazine.com, particularly interesting and relevant:

Eugenides: I've blended postmodern and traditional I think. My narrator in Middlesex is not entirely reliable; he's inventing the past as much as he is telling it. "You can't really know much about what you really know" is the bottom line, which is an old postmodern strategy. There's a lot of self conscious narration in the book, which is an issue in a lot of postmodern literature as well. Along with that, there are very old-fashioned narrative techniques in it, of telling about wars and the burning of Smyrna. But postmodernism is always recuperating old styles of narration. The one thing that I definitely believe is that strict postmodernists don't all believe that I believe in this power of story-telling. I think that people are still interested in this old-fashioned goals or traits of novels. Something that seizes you, that grabs your attention and gives you a ride through a book. So, I don't want to constantly frustrate the reader by taking him down on dead ends, at the dead end of literature or something -- that doesn't interest me. I want, in a way, a Classical shape to my books and a pleasing and elegant form to them, which is old-fashioned. But within that, I still have a lot of postmodern play without the continuing sense of relativism that… I got so tired of.

So that's it -- I've decided that I'm postmodern. And, apparently, a bit of a fan of writing magical realism. And I'm totally cool with that.

From now on, I'm not going to sensor my storyteller. He is going to be as verbose, arrogant and cumbersome as he likes, popping in and out of my story where he decides is right (yes, I know claims such as these, where the character has control and not the writer, are a little wanky... but they are true!), and screwing with everyone's idea of what is the 'correct' way to write a certain point of view. Iida, Stacy, Kristen, Jill, Libby, Daryl - you are all just going to have to deal with it.