I wrote, a few entries ago, that this lack of regionalism is true of “most of the fiction I have written,” but I was thinking mainly of my third book, The Three Sunrises, and of its middle section, a novella called The Book of Numbers, which is, I think, about as far from an example of ‘regionalism’ as one might get, and more a work of symbolism (if I had to describe it as a work of something), though what exactly it would symbolize I’d find difficult to say.
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Though it is true, of course, that even a ‘regionless’ region (to the extent that one can exist as I have described it), cannot help but have an influence on a story that finds its setting there; for all events that can be conceived of, whether they involve an intelligence or not, are but reactions of one organism or circumstance to another. So that if an audience is to follow a protagonist or ‘hero’ or what have you, through any imagined landscape, that audience will be witness to actions that, when measured against the character’s mood, or interior weather, will not only reveal the judgments of that character, as they relate to his or her setting, but will also invite the audience to make judgments about the same.
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So that where these authors have a richness of regionalism, I have a dearth, or an absence. Which isn’t intended as a criticism against myself, but only as an observation. For what a fictional reality becomes, if it has no regional complexion, or if its region has no obvious significance to the plot that is transpiring within it, is not a realm where a story can never take place, but only a kind of desert of value, where characters must find purpose without the (often beneficial) friction or pressure of circumstance, and where the materiality of creation insists itself on the senses without the clarifying effects of its history.
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To put it another way, where their characters speak with a distinctiveness that belongs to, and reveals, such things as region and race and cultural heritage, mine speak as if they were interlopers in the human comedy, here by a sort of accident in the fabric of space-time, bearing little trace of those categories by which our backgrounds can be known.
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The characters in most of the fiction I have written, for example, inhabit settings that are opposite in the polarity of their ‘thereness’ to those which are found in, say, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Flannery O’Connor’s Taulkinham or Toni Morrison’s Ohio, or James Joyce’s Dublin or Virginia Woolf’s London. Which isn’t to say that the dialects and manners of my characters are merely different than theirs (for theirs, too, are different from each other’s), but that, to the extent that it is possible, mine have no dialects or mannerisms to speak of.
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The consequence for my fiction, anyway, has been, I think, an inclination to depict realities where the characters seem to have no connection to the settings in which they persist. Which isn’t to say that these characters arrive in the landscape of their stories from some other locale, as if they were strangers to it, for more often than not that isn’t the case, but that they seem so baffled by the fact of their existence — that they are alive and are equipped with a consciousness — that nothing of the relevance that might ordinarily be imparted to a narrative by the familiarity of a character’s surroundings, to that character, can be brought to bear on their situation.
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Though it’s possible, as well, that some trait in my personality that exists independent of my geographic history, and that asserts itself regardless, making negligible the influence of any factors that originate outside my person, is what explains my tendency to feel no more of a kinship with one particular region, and its inhabitants, than with another.
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Something that occurs to me, when I think of how my upbringing relates to my writing, is that the regionalism that is so strong in the work of many of the authors I admire, and that originates, I think, in the fact that the entirety of their lives, or at least of their youth, was shaped by a particular area in a particular part of the globe, is lacking in mine precisely because my childhood was marked by a sufficient number of moves, from one country to another (and then, within a country, from one state to the next), that the aspect of my identity that ordinarily would’ve attached itself to the manners and personality of a place, informing my sense of self until a conception of ‘home’ was instilled in it, and a camaraderie for those I would finally come to live among began to dwell in it, never stabilized in me.
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For a contented sort of love, as far as that could pertain to the artist-muse relationship, would not be so different than sleep or than death, inasmuch as those conditions resemble stasis and inaction.
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So that an artist must feel either hounded by some presence, or forever in pursuit of the same.
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Perhaps either case can occur, though I do not think both can occur at once. For there must always be an inequality, or a kind of unrequitedness, in the love that exists between the artist and the muse. And the reason for this is that the energy required to produce art depends on a situation of needfulness or longing or turmoil, as opposed to one of contentment and placidity.
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Though whether the muse falls in love with the would-be artist, thus forging that person as an artist, or whether the person falls in love with the muse, thus confirming themself in the calling of art, I think is unclear.
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I am speaking again of the muses, I suppose, or of some notion associated with them.
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Though instead of saying that every artist “selects” one of these melodies, perhaps it is better to say that every artist is configured, by way of their talent, to be able to give expression to one. For each true artist is made aware, I think, through the doing of their work, of something like an unwittingness in their soul, and an inevitability in that which they produce, as if it was not they alone in whom these things find the language of their embodiment, but them together with some separate person or idea that, by way of a kind of spiritual union (evidence for which exists only in the artist’s feelings), merged with the artist during the time when their personality and aesthetic sense were forming.
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It’s as if somewhere there exists a ghostly choir of voices, forever by their singing giving utterance to the infinite melodies or anthems by which the beauty of reality might be known, and from whose number every artist, through the talent that is individual to them, and that could not belong to anyone else, selects one to disclose, and to bring into sensibility for the rest of us.
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One way to think of this is to recognize that your work is not entirely your own (or, anyway, not yours alone) but is, instead, part of a truth that exists independent of you, remote and ineffable, but somehow eternal, until you bring to its province the talent and perseverance that function like a channel by which that truth finds its articulation as phenomena for the senses.
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In short, an artist must learn how to get out of her own way, so that her work might come forth from her unimpeded.
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And the best way to do this is through a coldness of technique, which really means, for the writer, not being carried away by, or swept up in, the drama of their own feelings, as the writer finds those feelings manifesting in the fiction for which they are responsible, but maintaining a loyalty of attention to the ordering and selection of each word and pause and mark of punctuation that, arriving out of the void of the empty page, would seem almost to present itself to the writer, or assert itself on its own (as if conscious of its necessity), if only the writer would give it the opportunity to do so.
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For what Chekhov understood is that language, like any medium that an artist might make use of, is indifferent to what we, as humans, might refer to as our plight, or our fate, but that, from the perspective of nature and the cosmos, is merely a sequence of events that occur at the level of biology and physics. So that if we are to harness it artistically, which is to say to move an audience by way of manipulating it according to our imaginative fancy, we must free it from the forms of usage or expression that it has fallen into, as a result of cultural habit, or fashion, and invest it with, not necessarily its original meaning (for I’m not certain there is such a thing), but the meaning that is most suited to it in the fictive context into which we would plunge it.
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It isn’t for no reason that we tend to describe the personal as ‘warm’ and the impersonal as ‘cold.’ And yet it is this coldness that is so valuable to an artist, from the standpoint of technique. “When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder,” Chekhov once advised a fellow writer. “It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief.” This from a writer who would never seem to a reader, I don’t think, as lacking in the warmth of human understanding.