Matt Bell
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading and why. One Note 009: Matt Bell, William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Matt Bell.
Over the past six months or so, I’ve been spending time with William Gass’s book of essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life. I’ve been reading it just a little bit at a time, a few pages, even as little as a couple paragraphs per sitting, rarely allowing myself to take in a whole essay in a single go. As challenging as the book is, the main reason for my pacing is how good it is: Gass says, “[The artist] must show or exhibit his world, and to this he must actually make something, not merely describe something that might be made. This takes tremendous technical skill, and except in rare and highly favored persons, great labor.” He says this, and then he shows us how such an artist might think and feel, might write in order to create. The title essay may be the best explanation of what is powerful about metaphor I’ve ever seen, and elsewhere his “The Concept of Character in Fiction” runs counter to much of what’s prized in experimental or progressive literature to argue for character as the defining characteristic of the greatest works of literature. He tackles Borges, Stein, Updike, then switches to “The Stylization of Desire,” “The Artist and Society,” exploring not just the way our art works, but also the way it works in the world. At the end of the book, he lists (in paragraph form) six virtues which the true artist must possess, must make “lifted out of prose and paint and plaster into life”: Honesty, Presence, Unity, Awareness, Sensuality, and Totality. It’s a good list, better when fleshed out with Gass’s fine explanations and examples, and a better mirror to hold up to ourselves, when engaged in the making of our own art: Are these virtues—or others of their kind—the ones we prize highest when at the keys, typing our fictions? I think perhaps they should be, but I think perhaps this is also all too easy to forget. In that case, we’re all the luckier to have essays like these, uncorrupted in their ideals, waiting patiently to guide us back.
Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, a collection of fiction published by Keyhole Press in 2010. He can be found online at www.mdbell.com.
