The Theatre as Fiction

Abstract

Book publishing over the last ten years has been dominated by non-fiction
"authors" - Alvin Toffler, Marshall McLuhan, Germaine Greer, R.D. Lairig, Woodstein, Timothy Leary and the unspeakable Susan Brownmiller ("before a rape situation develops there is a pre-rape situation"). This has two main consequences for the fiction writer. Firstly, the quality of language has declined because people who can't write are being promoted as writers. Consider the following passage from the appalling Timothy Leary:

The emotional human being is an evolutionary drug addict
continuously and recklessly shooting himself up with
adrenalin and other dark ferments. The way to turn off the
emotions is to turn off the senses, turn on to your body,
turn on to your cellular reincarnation circus, turn on to the
electric glow within and engage only in turn-on ego games.

Quite apart from the unbridled pseudery of Leary's conceptions, the way
language is twisted to follow his conceits results in gibberish. The vulgarity
which can create "cellular reincarnation circus" should be reserved for private conversation among initiates.

If language loses its potency through debasement by these exponents, who will understand or appreciate what a real writer is doing? Yet newspaper hacks who can barely spell "Gilbey's" are falling in judgement on the work of fiction writers - "Needs more depth in the relationships", "an affirmation of life", "genuinely witty and erotic", "funny and touching", "superficial analysis" are the creations of third rate minds. Not one of these shapeless banalities can be applied to a work of fiction. What does "an affirmation of life" mean? How can life be affirmed? It can be lived or terminated but to 'affirm' life is a monstrous absurdity. Do we take it, then, that the Maker has done a good job? Or merely that the author has pinched himself and is not dreaming?