Naoise blog 5

My last missive! I’ve been doing the usual this week—writing, interviews, admin—so I thought I’d throw some thoughts down on art. (The natural recourse.)

Fiction is vicarious, so it’s a relatively cheap and practical answer to apocalyptic thinking. If the end is nigh then novels offer new actualities, brief and disposable, like a box of free samples. We spread out the diffused essences in books until they fill us. The text needs us to do that, because written sentences can only ever allude to visions and concepts that readers complete imaginatively. Engaging with fiction isn’t living other lives, but riffing on them with our own.

Then people gather to discuss art. Are they multiplying lifetimes in sharing both themselves and the existences they have personally animated from the text? Or is community a contraction, since all those spaces are being packed into one? Maybe the final compression admits that there is no way to have more experiences than someone else who’s lived as long as you. Superficially one life might seem more vibrant than another, but no-one takes everything in at first exposure, so all those quick glimpses add up to the same total sensory input you’d get from knowing a few things very well. Fiction is a judicious edit. The difference between reading a book and staring at a wall isn’t that the book shows you more, it’s that the things the book shows you might be more worth seeing. (Not always. Books vary in quality, as do walls.)

But people value different things, and ‘value’ can here be broadly understood—I often enjoy books that illuminate things I deplore—so anxiety about the state of criticism is existential. There’s the fear of wasted time off someone else’s dreck recommendation, and the rattling awareness—when we disagree—that there is no foundational truth or rubric, perhaps not even within ourselves. We vary, both from person to person and internally. The same text will read differently depending on how we encounter it. Discussion confronts those fluctuations: we seek to shore up our perspective, and sometimes do, but we’re just as likely to compound our uncertainties.

That troubled subjectivity comes through in language. The terms ‘overrated’ and ‘underrated’ are partly about the allocation of resources, but surely they also imply the speaker is intrinsically upset that too many or too few people like something. Would anyone whine about art being ‘overrated’ or ‘underrated’ under socialism? I’m going to say not, if only because it’s an excellent argument for socialism.

These are all things I would have been considering more intensely if my time at Crossing Border had been physical, just from the immersion of it. But participating online has still kept collective readership on my mind, as has doing virtual events throughout this year.

Anyway! To end on a less abstract note, I’m grateful to the festival for having me, to Elinor for co-ordinating this project, and to Madelon for translating me. Congratulations on making it happen in difficult circumstances and the very best of luck for next year!