Epilogue: Exploring the Ignored Outskirts of the Art of Telling

Abstract

As Steve Katz suggests in Moving Parts, the difficult but perhaps not unattainable task of fiction is to articulate an inclusive experiential truth. The speech acts of any particular narrative are “reductive, narrow versions of the possible; only the total fiction that results from the juxtaposition of these independent articulations can suggest an adequate means of knowing the boundaries of identity” (J. Kerry Grant, “Fiction and the Facts of Life” 212). “Truth” in fiction is a matter of resonance among diverse acts of narrative and cultural articulation. Recent innovative fiction (Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice and Johns Wife, Pynchon’s Vineland and Mason & Dixon, Federman’s To Whom It May Concern, Sukenick’s Mosaic Man, Morrison’s Jazz and Paradise, and so on) seems more concerned with “a line of reason, or morality” (Katz, Moving Parts 73), more committed to a strong cultural focus. But this renewed emphasis on narrative and cultural articulation is accompanied by an awareness of the acts of exclusion and “darkening” that all narration entails. What it may have lost in experimental versatility, recent innovative fiction compensates for in critical breadth, exploring the ignored outskirts of the art of storytelling.

Fiction is the art of telling. A conviction is possible, commitment to a line of reason, or morality, but the stronger that gets, the more contingencies are eliminated that are also true. As you intensify your focus on “objective truth,” events on the outskirts get dimmer, events that also bear on the whole picture, and when you try to annex those suburbs the focus downtown gets dull. […] You’ve got to move in the dark. Truth is everything included. […][I]t’s not constructed in language, but generated as resonances by the art of telling.

—Steve Katz, Moving Parts (73–74)