Читать книгу Mantrapped - Fay Weldon - Страница 9

Novels alone are not enough. Self-revelation is required. Readers these days demand to know the credentials of their writers, and so they should. Too often readers cry out for bread and are given stones: writers fail them, fob them off with thrillers, good guys on the political left, the bad guys on the right, or chick lit, first-person tales in the present tense leavened by wisecracks, feeble emotions if nifty enough plots. Writers have to get published somehow: living in garrets is out of fashion. Who would take them seriously if they did? Once writers alone in all the world had privileged information: they could read the human mind and pass the knowledge on. But these days their USP, their Unique Selling Proposition, is wearing thin. Such knowledge is no longer arcane: everyone knows everything. Freud and Jung and a host of psychotherapists have laid out the road map of the mind for all to see: the mechanics of intellectual and emotional reaction have been made clear. From Meet Yourself as You Really Are; I’m Okay, You’re Okay; Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus; The Cinderella Complex and their like, to Help Yourself to Contentment programmes on TV, everyone is now their own expert. Since Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in public, what is there left to be disclosed? It is not better and it is not worse: it is just different.

We are not short of stories, not at all. We wallow in beginnings, middles and ends: if we grow blas´ we are shocked into response. Once a severed finger was alarming, now volleys of decapitated heads fly about our screens and no one flinches. Our whole existence is threaded through with cheapo TV fiction: it is script editors, trained in counselling techniques, not writers, who dictate the lines the actors say, the tears they weep, the homosexual kisses they exchange. Our children grow up as heroes of their own lives, believing there will always be a happy ending. Even those wear thin. We would rather have reality TV.

Fiction drifts backwards into once upon a time: it is an industry, its raw material dug up where the market dictates, hammered into shape by editorial teams and committee, and each writer these days is perforce his own committee—what will the publisher think, what will my friends think, what do I dare say? The computer sniffs at swear words and underlines them with red. Thus the Stalinist Within triumphs, the free expression of thought is stifled. The Committee Without is there to pick off stragglers: can this be safely published? Will this make a profit? (The Satanic Verses would not stand a snowflake’s chance in hell today.) Since the touchstone is what has done well in the past nothing new can happen, or only by accident. But prudence does not pay off. The readers begin to yawn and close their books.

Best put your faith then in the new reality novel. Reality TV is real life lived out in a fictional context (the House): the reality novel threads the life through the fiction. Have my fiction, have me.

That off my chest, on with the story of my own life. Trisha’s is going to have to wait a bit. As she wept, pained and humiliated, so did her writer.