symploke

1. Fiction’s present is the intersection of everything that fiction has been and everything that it will become. Forms of writing and reading are always already linked to their historical development and traditions, and yet they are being continuously pulled into a future replete with possibilities. We could even say that change and tem-porality are the only constants in fiction’s present, a characterization that leaves us baffled at the word “present” itself. In comparison with fiction’s long past and open future, the present seems relatively brief and unstable, with hardly any durability at all, yet this does not diminish its value. On the contrary, value may well exist nowhere else. That is, if fiction still has significance for us, then it necessarily has it now, in the present, all other significance being latent or potential. In other words, the fleeting, unrealizable present may simply name the condition of fiction’s continued existence, distinguishing it from what-ever, like epic, has only a past or, like justice, only a future. As the elusive space where the past meets our dreams and desires, fiction’s present extends the promise of change to all who would undergo it.

2. The present demands placed upon fiction are unlike any it has experienced previously. Along with its rich history of problems and innovations, fiction at present must confront the suspicion that forms like the novel and story, as well as the framing concepts of literature and art, have exhausted themselves. Many feel that recent military, economic, and environmental threats demand more direct forms of verbal intervention: e.g., essays, polemics, autobiographies, journalistic accounts, critiques, treatises. The war in Iraq, 9/11 attack, rise of globalization, resurgent neo-conservatism, and ubiquitous religious conflicts, all hold the potential to energize or enervate literary practice, transforming fiction’s present from a natural juncture of past and future into a question: to be present what must fiction now do? Should the novel engage the politically and economically pressing issues of the [End Page 7] day, in this way hoping to secure its relevance, or will fiction’s effort to mirror contemporary history absent itself, dispelling what has made fiction distinctive? That is, is the present something fiction needs to achieve, or is it an inescapable fact, a condition that fiction can, in becoming itself, only acknowledge? Just as literary historians have attributed modernism’s early twentieth-century innovations to the horrors of World War I and the scientific advances of relativity theory, the present of fiction may seem in retrospect to have been produced willy nilly by twenty-first century forces and events. But it is also possible that fiction’s difference from other, putatively more direct, forms may persist through these changes. In fact, one can even wonder whether the second thesis really describes a historically unique situation at all, or whether it merely makes explicit what the adjective “present” means. That is, to the extent that the demands on fiction are present, not past, they remain irreducible to what has come before. The thesis still expresses a predicament, but one having less to do with fiction’s contemporary situation than with our difficulty representing it. If presentness is not an object but a limit, then fiction’s problem is presentness itself.

3. Economic pressures seriously complicate the task, both critical and practical, of recognizing fiction’s present. Many publishing houses are going out of business, cutting back extensively on the publication of new fiction, or becoming absorbed into a decreasing number of publishing conglomerates. Within surviving houses, the change is not so much from quality-driven to market-driven decisions, as from a business culture where this distinction made sense to a business culture in which it has become unintelligible. “Economic decision-making” now sounds redundant, and niche marketing, the once-imagined solution to market consolidation, has proven largely ineffective for the marketing category “literary fiction.” Unlike car buyers and clothing shoppers, consumers of aesthetically ambitious novels do not generally presume to know in advance of reading how to identify the commodity they seek, expecting literariness to...