For many years, I gave little thought to the choice I had made between creative writing and literary criticism. In 2006, n+1 magazine asked me to write about the state of the American short story, using the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 2004 and 2005 as data. Only then, as I turned the pages in the name of science, did I find myself remembering the emptiness I had felt on that rainy day on Cape Cod.
I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of “craft.” I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: “Show, don’t tell”; “Murder your darlings”; “Omit needless words.” As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.
I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns—like entries in a contest to identify as many concrete entities as possible, in the fewest possible words. The first sentences were crammed with so many specificities, exceptions, subverted expectations, and minor collisions that one half expected to learn they were acrostics, or had been written without using the letter e. They all began in medias res. Often, they answered the “five Ws and one H.”*
The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value—so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan.† Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: on the one hand, John Briggs and John Hillman . . . on the other, Sybil Mildred Clemm Legrand Pascal, who invites the reader to call her Miss Sibby. On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived—unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In “Lady with Lapdog,” Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog. They were too caught up in trying to bootstrap from a proper name to a meaningful individual essence—like the “compassionate” TV doctor who informs her colleagues: “She has a name.”
But names don’t work that way. As Derrida once wrote, the singularity of the proper name is inextricable from its generality: it always has to be possible for one thing to be named after any other named thing, and for different people, like the characters in Anna Karenina, to be called by the same name. The basic tension of the name is that it simultaneously does and does not designate the unique individual. As someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida—that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle—I nonetheless felt that Derrida had been right about names. More important, he had really thought about names, about how special they are, so that, even if Of Grammatology was more painful to read than the Best American Short Stories, still it belonged to a discourse that tried to say something about what things mean.
Moreover, even if the literary criticism discourse is no less susceptible than the creative writing workshop to charges of self-sufficiency and hermeticism, it has one crucial advantage: its fundamentally collaborative premise. Each work of criticism is supposed to build upon the existing body of work, to increase the sum total of human understanding. It’s not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It’s supposed to be cumulative—it believes in progress.
The creative writing workshop, by contrast, seems to have a collaborative premise, and does indeed involve a collaborative process—but the signs of that process are systematically effaced from the finished product. Contemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or hundred years; instead, middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things.
I don’t know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that “theory” had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?
This isn’t to say that graduate school was one long walk in the park, especially not at first. I did have the good fortune to strike an immediate friendship with one of my classmates, Luba, a Russian émigré who had grown up in Tashkent. I feel very lucky to have met such a wonderful person at that delicate point in my career. In between sessions of a seminar on an obscure school of 1920s Russian filmmakers, known for their “eccentric” use of circus paraphernalia and human-size rubber mannequins, we would take long walks around the graduate-student housing complex, invariably getting lost, and once even falling into some kind of a ditch. Like Mann’s hero in his first weeks on the Magic Mountain, I thought: This can’t last much longer.
In fact, between classes, conferences, teaching, and endless lunches, it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to get anything but term papers written at Stanford. At the end of the year, I filed for a leave of absence and moved to San Francisco where, between odd jobs, I wrote a great deal. Nonetheless, the result somehow wasn’t a novel. It didn’t have a beginning or an end. It didn’t seem to be telling any particular story. This was surprising and difficult for me to understand. It had occurred to me to worry in advance about writer’s block, but the production of a huge non-novel just wasn’t a possibility I had anticipated.
I was thinking over the problem on the evening of September 13, 2001, while running to the Golden Gate Bridge, when I tripped over some kind of plastic barrier, erected, I later learned, with the intention of protecting the bridge from terrorists. Some other joggers helped me to my feet. My arm felt very strange. I walked to the nearest hospital and spent some hours in the waiting room, where a ceiling-mounted television showed endless footage of bodies being excavated from the World Trade Center. Eventually I was admitted to the emergency room, where doctors removed the gravel from my knees, x-rayed my arm, informed me that my elbow was broken, and outfitted me with a cast and sling. The bill came to $1,700. This experience caused me to take a cold, hard look at the direction my life was headed. What was I doing, running around this world—a place about which I clearly understood nothing—with no health insurance and no real job, writing an endless novel about God knows what? A week later, the department head called and asked if I wanted to return to Stanford. I said yes.
That’s when I was sucked in, deeper than I ever expected. The title of this book is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in graduate school.
When I reemerged into the real world, I thought differently about lots of things. I no longer believed that novels should or could be inspired only by life, and not by other novels. I knew now that this belief was itself a novelistic device—that it was precisely the European novel tradition, after Don Quixote, that gave rise to the idea of the falseness and sterility of literature, its disconnect with real life and real education.
In fact, this idea wasn’t unambiguously present in Don Quixote. Consider the famous “book inquisition” episode, in which the priest and barber attempt to cure the knight’s madness by purging his library. The received version of this episode is that Quixote’s friends burn most of his books, mirroring the received message of Don Quixote that romances are stupid and dangerous. But if you actually keep count, you see that, of thirty books mentioned during the inquisition, only fourteen are consigned to the flames, while another fourteen are officially pardoned. This equivalence reflects the balance between life and literature in the plot—which, as Foucault observed, consists of “a diligent search over the entire surface of the earth for forms that will prove that what the books say is true.” Quixote’s adventures in the world, his friendship with Sancho Panza, his reconciling of sundered lovers, the entertainment he affords to countless bored Spaniards—all this, no less than the damage he causes, comes from his determination to experience life in terms of his favorite books, to bring books into the field. Don Quixote could only have been written by someone who really loved chivalric romances, really wanted his life to resemble them more closely, and understood just what it would cost.
Thinking about Don Quixote, I began to wonder about other possible methods for bringing one’s life closer to one’s favorite books. From Cervantes onward, the method of the novel has typically been imitation: the characters try to resemble the characters in the books they find meaningful. But what if you tried something different—what if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor? What if, instead of going out into your neighborhood pretending to be the hero of Amadís of Gaul, you instead devoted your life to the mystery of its original author, learned Spanish and Portuguese, tracked down all the scholarly experts, figured out where Gaul is (most scholars think Wales or Brittany)—what if you did it all yourself, instead of inventing a fictional character? What if you wrote a book and it was all true?
What if you read Lost Illusions and, instead of moving to New York, living in a garret, self-publishing your poetry, writing book reviews, and having love affairs—instead of living your own version of Lost Illusions, in order to someday write the same novel for twenty-first-century America—what if instead you went to Balzac’s house and Madame Hanska’s estate, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him—and then started writing?
That is the idea behind this book.