Hypocrite.
It’s one of the ugliest words I know. Its prefix makes me think
of hippopotamus—a rough, fat, ugly beast. The Latin/Greek makes
the word sound medical, like an age-old term for some sexual perversion
that dares not speak its colloquial name. It’s as bad as a curse—if
not worse; I’ll wager most people would prefer being called an asshole
over being called a hypocrite. I know I would, even though I’m about
to argue that my hypocrisy is good for me, if not for all fiction writers
who are (dis)honest with themselves.
In most circles, hypocrisy is a type of interpersonal treason. We don’t
like our doctors prescribing medicines they believe are ineffective, and
they don’t like admitting they are wrong about a diagnosis. Politicians,
like John Kerry during the last presidential election, are so often accused
of being hypocrites that they are seemingly never allowed to change their
minds about anything, since most people can’t tell the difference
between hypocrisy and reconsideration. Oftentimes, stubborn, blind doggedness
seems to be the highest-praised virtue in the public arena, so praised
that the old cliché “you can’t change boats midstream”
is considered a legitimate justification for trudging mindlessly onward
into oblivion. Nobody likes a hypocrite.
Yet, I want to admit that I am one. Not only do I want to admit I’m
a hypocrite, but I also want to assert that hypocrisy is a good, healthy
quality for a fiction writer. Maybe even a saving grace.
I’m always changing my mind. I’m always spouting off some
conviction that I will later renounce. In fact, I’m often most deeply
convinced of a political, moral, or aesthetic position just before I’m
ready to renounce it. I’ve switched political parties, forsaken
my love for rock bands after they became too popular, and made so many
alterations to my writing aesthetic that I can no longer recall what my
original writerly convictions had been way back when I was seven.
I do, however, remember more recent convictions that I’ve abandoned.
When I was a graduate student in creative writing, I worshipped Charles
Dickens and John Irving and their shared notion that good novels have
a definable moral structure, that the job of a fiction writer is to convey
a message, even if that message is only subtly didactic. And of course
many great stories do send a clear message to the reader, none more obvious
than Dickens’ own A Christmas Carol. But these days I’ve renounced
the idea that good fiction must convey a certain moral world view, a message.
I prefer to embrace Nabokov’s belief about his novel Lolita: “There
are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does
not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic
fiction…. For me a work of literature exists only insofar as it
affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” No messages,
no morals—just great writing.
I also used to think that the best kind of writing was purely realistic.
I didn’t go much in for magical realism or outright fantasy—a
guy turning into a bug or an elderly angel crash-landing on a South American
beach. But then I was writing Pyres, a novel in part about a teenage girl
mourning the death of her father, a folklore professor who specialized
in Norse mythology. In the white heat of writing I realized that those
Norse myths had to come to life for this girl, no matter how unrealistic
their appearance might seem. And another conviction was felled by the
swift, sharp axe of inspiration.
Craig, my friend and fellow writer, has been forced to entertain my hypocrisy
for years now. Whenever I get worked up about a fiction writing or storytelling
technique, he’s the one who has to hear me sermonize about it for
hours, knowing—knowing!—that I will inevitably abandon any
and all convictions that I champion. He has listened to me when I was
a populist raging about the obtuseness of arsty-fartsy literary fiction.
He has listened to me when I scoffed at all the clichés of commercial
fiction. For years this went on until he finally nudged me and said, “You
know, you always make these rules for yourself, and then you break them.”
He seemed genuinely sorry to have to tell me, in the nicest way possible,
that I was a hypocrite. Heck, just four months ago I vowed to him that
I would never have a webpage nor do any blogging because I wanted to be
viewed as an Author, not an actual human being who chats and gripes about
stuff in public.
The first time I allowed myself to admit this character flaw was when
Craig and I were walking through downtown Charlotte, NC and I was spouting
off about how I refused to write a fictional detective into Pyres because
there is no longer any way to write a detective uniquely. All at once
I stopped and admitted that the end result of my tirade would inevitably
include my creating a fictional detective for the novel. And sure enough,
a couple weeks later I invented Greta Hurd, a police investigator, and
made her a second major character.
I’m not ashamed—at least not much. Tomorrow I will be ashamed,
but today I believe that if hypocrisy is a horrible quality for most professions,
it’s a great one for a writer and other artists. Writers and artists
thrive off of inconsistency—new ideas, new approaches, new perspectives.
Writers and artists who approach their work the same way every time are
likely to stagnate. I’d go so far as to say that readers expect
us to be hypocrites because they want us to surprise them each time we
release a new work. Convictions come from the rational mind, while the
heart and the imagination are often capricious. If we writers stick to
our rational guns, militantly following a plot plan or a character arc
we’ve begun, aren’t we ignoring the very impulse that makes
us artists—that flightily, contradictory, lying muse we call imagination
or inspiration? The musicians I love the most, like Radiohead, are the
ones who keep me on my toes with every new album release. Each time, they
are certain to dismantle, intentionally, all that they have built before.
Maybe their next album will be utterly conventional, thus reversing their
propensity toward reinvention.
But then I wonder if maybe I’m wrong about all this. Maybe most
normal people like consistency in their entertainment just as they like
consistency in their politicians and doctors. Radiohead lost their popular
following because they got weird, and they’ve never been as popular
as Jessica Simpson, whose songs I could probably not tell apart. Danielle
Steele will always remain more popular than writers who constantly reinvent
themselves because, as with McDonald’s, people like to know what
they’re going to get.
Certainly readers like the characters in the book to remain consistent,
just as they like the established rules of a fictional world to remain
consistent. John Gardner wrote in The Art of Fiction that readers are
capable of sympathizing with any kind of protagonist—even if he’s
a drunk, a womanizer, a murderer, or a coward—if the writer does
a good job of evoking such sympathy. But Gardner warns that the one quality
readers will never accept in their protagonists is hypocrisy. I want to
argue against that rule, citing for instance Iago from Shakespeare’s
Othello as one of the great hypocritical antiheros of literature, but
then I remember that no matter how much hypocrisy Iago displays to his
fellow characters, he is always honest about his devilry with the audience.
So I can see it both ways. Despite my duplicity, I will vehemently preach
to my creative writing students about the virtue of being noncommittal.
I tell them that in order to be sympathetic writers able to inhabit the
hearts and minds of a wide variety of characters, they must abandon all
their convictions for political parties, philosophical ideas, cultural
comforts, culinary tastes, and especially aesthetic certainties. They
must observe the world, but never make decisions about it. In the moment
of creative bliss, I tell them, you must allow yourself every possible
option so that the right one will be free to announce itself. If a salad
fork at a posh dinner party wants to begin talking to the duchess while
it’s in her mouth, then I say let it!
But I don’t really believe this, nor do I practice it. Being noncommittal
isn’t the same thing as being a hypocrite because a lack of commitment
simply exhibits a sense of wishy-washiness. No: I really think it’s
essential to have grand convictions about everything so that the cacophony
of their inevitable destruction can reverberate like the cheer of a victorious
army. One can have no fun assassinating certainties if one never bothers
to march those certainties in front of the firing squad. People are atheists
and vegetarians and punks in part because of the secret thrill they feel
when they spit upon the cultural idols that have been raised before them.
Being a hypocrite is rather like being a rebel—and everybody likes
a rebel.
The only difference is that hypocrites break their own rules rather than
someone else’s. See, the problem with fiction writing is that one
is bound to almost no rules; we don’t have to follow the guidelines
of the bar association or the Hippocratic Oath or the Constitution of
the United States of America. It is this boundless freedom that suffocates
us, so we are forced to write our own rules to break. We have to betray
ourselves, just to have something to betray.
Even now, I fear that my own self-discoveries will hurt me. After all,
once I’ve realized I’m a hypocrite, how can I ever trick myself
into believing my own convictions again? But, no. As I brood over my second
novel and the rules I’m establishing for myself, I am again forced
to believe that we novelists, we “professional liars,” ought
to be good enough at our game to fool even ourselves, at least until it’s
time again to smash down the icons.
|