If Cows Could Talk
In 2005, I sat for a creative writing workshop in Madrid. During one round table , I was told not to have a talking cow appear as a character in a novel. Even as I offered that Mikhail Bulgakov does just that with Behemoth the black cat in Master and Margarita, my colleagues said first you must write a book that doesn’t have a talking cow, and then you may create a world where talking cows are permissible.
In other words, before Picasso could divide the face he had to be a master of portraying the whole. I accepted the critique. So I went ahead and wrote a 160,000 word historical novel that could be taken at face value, in other words, inscribed in our reality.What I believe my colleagues were saying was that if you–the author–doubt for even one moment that a talking cow cannot exist in a work of literature, it cannot exist. To create such a world takes exceptional moral authority, and moral authority can only be derived from experience.
After all, it’s the reader, not the author, who defines the terms of reality within a text. If a reader is unconvinced that a cow can talk, it will not talk. Günter Grass argued that an absolute interpretation of a book doesn’t exist, not even for the author.
To illustrate my point, I refer to a critique by Linda Hutcheon, a Canadian academic and professor of literary theory. Hutcheon coined the term historiographic meta-fiction, which is a tough choice for a name, as not only does it conflate fiction and history, which should be dealt with separately, but it refers itself to itself to derive its definition (as in meta-fiction). I would call the literary genre regurgitation fiction. These are novels that recycle sources, both historical and contemporary, profound and trivial, real and imagined, and may reference works that are themselves references to other works.
Two of the popular novels Hutcheon cites stand out: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. In both of these, authority and inspiration are derived from the real and imagined. Past and present are conflated. Authority is cited often to be undermined. Why? Perhaps to seek perspectives that are marginal, unseen, chaotic or ephemeral. For what purpose? To usurp the conventions of narrative–such as the modernist’s claim that we can even know history at all.
I would like my fiction to go a step beyond, that is to say, to begin with the post-modernist’s core assumption–that nothing can be trusted–and build upon that fractured pillar a story that is itself trustworthy. In my second novel, CLOVERLEAF (unpublished MS), I use a grief-struck, starving, immature and rash narrator, but in contrast to the post-modern novel that functions as an open system on an open continuum, I create a closed narrative that is fully-contained, existing by and for itself, with no need for any “extra-terrestrial” explanation. Outside of the text, nothing exists; the story is the thing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez did this beautifully in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In his novel, Marquez defined the terms of reality, for instance the limits and permissibility of magic. He defined the extent and boundary of the world itself. Outside Macondo the rules do not apply; Macondo is the beginning and end. The magical (as we might call it because it doesn’t exist in our reality) is status quo in Marquez’s world. The difficulty is in deriving authority for this imposition upon the reader.
In contrast to film, where an imagined world is easily taken at face value, a novel must earn the trust of the reader before its basic physical laws can be circumscribed in the reader’s internal apparatus. I would argue that Marquez derives his authority from the novel’s style/voice.
At one time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude looking for a sentence that struck me as “false” or not in keeping with this over-arching voice, and thereby undermining the terms of the novel’s reality, and it wasn’t until page 400 or so that I found one. Even at that, it could just as well have been a miss in translation.
A novelist could derive this kind of authority from a narrator, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Billy Pilgrim is to believed because he tells us he’s to be believed. You can walk away from the book at the preface if you won’t accept a world operating according to Billy’s rules.
Ever since that workshop in Madrid, I’ve wanted to create a world in which a talking cow can serve coffee and no one will question it otherwise. To me, the summon bonum of literature is to create new worlds. If not, then why write at all?
