How should a novel deal with the reality of telephones and of other, newer modes of telecommunication? To ignore or avoid reference to this reality is obviously one option; but this can inevitably come to look like disavowal or dishonesty. The future of literature is inextricably linked up with these forms of teletechnology, in the most ‘wireless’ ways conceivable. The novel has to work at new velocities, with new rhythms. It has to break up, interrupt, slow down and reroute unexpectedly. There is little point in supposing that new forms of telecommunication are going to be novel-friendly, or vice versa. The novel has to resist and twist, accommodate and diverge. After all, nothing in a work of fiction dates more quickly than the latest gizmo. A novel wants to be a joy forever, or, let’s say, a joy-fever, a fever that resists treatment, that stays with you awhile and can come back, at once chronic and fitful.
You recall the beginning: ‘In the middle of the night the phone rings, over and over, but I don’t hear it.’ The reader hears about what the narrator doesn’t hear. It is the novel calling. The novel is a kind of weird telephone exchange. Reality literature would be writing that acknowledges this weirdness and goes somewhere that was not foreseeable, either for the author or for the reader. And at the same time it makes the word ‘weird’ vibrate with all the resonances of prophecy, fate and clairvoyance we meet with in Macbeth’s witches, the never-faraway weird sisters. Telephones exist in novels long before Alexander Graham Bell and others came along. Wherever you have a narrative or narrator telling you what a character is thinking or feeling, wherever you have someone reportedly thinking to themselves (like Alice in Lewis Carroll), wherever you have a narrator who is not the same as the author, wherever you have a story in which you hear about things which haven’t happened yet or which are happening to someone else without their knowledge, you can pick up a sense of the strange telephone network.
When do you get the call?
These things happen from time to time.
You might suppose that reality literature is the first literary genre to be explicitly derived from TV. The phrase ‘reality TV’ dates back, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to an article published in Newsweek in March 1978. Reality TV is of course a fiction. Like everything else on TV that appears to reach us in a natural or unmediated form, whether it is a ‘wildlife documentary’ or the ‘world news’, it is constructed, programmed and ethnocentric. Reality literature invites us, on the contrary, to be wary of such constructions and narrow-mindedness. It seeks to question and complicate, to dislocate and interfere. Is it a literary reality or a literature of reality? ‘Reality literature’ lives on this duplicity. It is not a genre but something more ghostly and fleeting. Its vivacity is spectraclass="underline" it knows that the dead speak and that without the completely unexpected openings generated out of mourning there would be no future. It is something that happens, perhaps, when the novel is operating at top speed, gone before you can say.
You might suppose that reality literature entails a new attention to realism, even a new kind of realism. Again, you would be right. Yet the force and focus here is not only realism, but what makes it possible. It is the wayward telephone network. There is a literary telephony or, better perhaps, a literary telepathy, that has to do with the singular nature of magical thinking in literature. To read a novel is to enter a world of magical thinking. (This doesn’t mean you’re mad or ‘believe in superstition’ or have to surrender your reason at the door: like love itself, the doorway is magical.) Realism, in this respect, is not so much about credible characters, places, experiences and events, about furniture and food, sadness and street-corners, and so many other narrative details, all or some of which are taken to be suggestive of what is called ‘the real world’ or ‘real life’. Rather, realism is, first of all, what is secured through telepathy and clairvoyance. Reading the thoughts of others, receiving fateful intimations or weird knowledge of the future, hearing what others are feeling: that is what you find yourself doing when you read a novel.
(In a final parenthetical pouch, let me just add: what is at issue here is something ultimately foreign to religion, animism or superstition. The novel would be a space of quilted thinking. Quilt’s a queer word, to be sure. It is perhaps the true afterword here, the title-term that came some time after the writing was done, seeming to raise itself up out of the text. It is a matter of reckoning with all its meanings, associations and sounds (quilt, quill, will, kill, ill, kilt, wilt, quit, it), with all it covers and uncovers, as well as its distance from a world of simple surfaces and depths, concealment or revelation. What may seem so ordinary quickly becomes odd. You might think of something that you get under, something soft and comfortable, but dictionaries start off curiously abstract. Thus the primary definition in Chambers, for example, proceeds: ‘quilt [kwilt] noun: a bedcover consisting of padding between two outer layers of cloth stitched through all three layers into compartments or channels; any material or piece of material so treated…’ Another way of talking about novels is perhaps evoked: instead of ‘narrative perspective’, ‘first person narration’, ‘indirect discourse’, ‘point of view’, ‘focalisation’ and so on, there would be layers and pockets of voices, feelings, thoughts. ‘Quilt’ is also a verb, of course, meaning: to swallow. The principal sense here, however, is as another name — apparently dating from the eighteenth century — for a manta ray.)
Let us turn and begin again, this time without stopping:
In the middle of the night the phone rings, over and over…