"Imaginative Qualities is a comic novel. In many places it may be “gallows humor” but it’s basically a comic novel. I know that I laughed often when I was writing it. I laughed at the situations I put my characters in, I laughed at the comments my narrator made about the characters, I laughed at the various zany lists I made up in order to exemplify aspects of their personalities."
So relates Gilbert Sorrentino, American literary author par excellence, in a discussion of his work with Dalkey Archive Press editor John O'Brien. Mr. Sorrentino goes on to outline what's involved in creating first-rate fiction. Here are two key points:
Fiction Is Its Own Reality - Fiction should not be seen as taking the place of reality. "The idea of the mirror being held up to life is a very remote one as far as my fictional thinking goes." In other words, fiction is not to be confused with a mirror image of our everyday, practical, day-to-day existence. For me, as a reader new to Gilbert Sorrentino, I take the author's words here as a signal to read Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things as a world unto itself, far removed from an exercise in sociology or culture studies.
Fiction Requires Exactitude and Expertise - For Gilbert Sorrentino, writing fiction demands an expert's skill: "The point of art is literally the making of something that is beautiful, the making of something that works, if you will forgive me, in a “machinelike” way." Here I think of the precision of Donald Judd's sculptures or the clean lines in architecture created by Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Kahn.
"But the best writers excise sentimentality from their work because sentimentality is death to fiction. You can be a weeper in your life, you can cry in the movies as it were, but you can’t cry in your work because none of that is anything but destructive to fiction, which has got to be extremely cold. Let the reader cry if he wants." Tell it like it is, Gilbert! The takeaway message: a fiction writer must maintain a certain cool, craft-like mindset to ensure his or her words and images are the right ones for the story being told.
Recognizing Gilbert Sorrentino's rigorous approach to writing, we can better appreciate his statement: "The idea that writing comes hot off the griddle seems to me to be a tyro’s idea of writing. Writing is very hard work, often absolute drudgery."
Turning to the novel under review, one fact should be made abundantly clear: although the author shares a number of views with the story's narrator, most notably a hatred for superficial lifestyles and mediocre writing and art, Gilbert Sorrentino is NOT the tale's narrator.
To allay any possible confusion on this point, Gilbert Sorrentino posits, "voice is not in any sense the projection of the writer’s voice into the writing. One of the great problems with learning how to write is to discover that in terms of fiction all voices are invented voices." And applied specifically to the narrator of Imaginative Qualities, the author responds to the accusation that his narrator is a wiseguy: "I defend myself against that description because I think of my narrator not as a wiseguy but as a guy wearing a succession of masks and no one ever finds out who he really is."
I highlight the distinction between author and narrator for a definite reason: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is, above all else, a scathing, scalding, savage attack of the New York art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, most directly focusing on eight artists and writers. But how removed is the narrator from also sharing much of the superficiality? What type of narrator would compose lists of what people like and don't like, what people would be better off being? What's the depth of character when a narrator admits "what a pleasure to make him up (a character), so that I can put him down"?
The eight art scene hipsters are, in fact, superficial, admitting they write mediocre poetry or paint mediocre paintings but say they are living the life of a hip artist as part of the vital art scene; all the while admitting, in turn, their life is a shambles and their relationships a mess but, hey, I'm a published poet, etc. etc.. In effect, circular reasoning as a colossal excuse for creating crap art and living a crap life.
But, damn, is the narrator any better? What an arrogant, condescending priss! Forever attempting to shift the spotlight from himself by an assortment of tricks - footnotes to his ongoing commentary, quoting others' bad poetry, cataloging his characters' perverse sexual activity. Of course, he does periodically remind us this is a fiction, he is the author . . . but still.
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is the type of multilayered work that will appeal to scholars (indeed there is a Casebook Study in The Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to the novel) as well as those readers taken by finely constructed, demanding texts such as JR by William Gaddis, On Being Blue by William Gass and Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau (Gilbert Sorrentino himself wrote glowing reviews of each). Up for the challenge? If so, go for it - pick up this book.
A big thanks to Goodreads friend MJ Nicholls for putting me on to Gilbert Sorrentino.
American author Gilbert Sorrentino, 1929-2006
"Hemingway, at any event, was responsible for wrecking Guy's gifts - such as they were- for the writing of prose." -- Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
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