My friends know my aversion to twitter all too well. I have taken one of my famous 'principled stances' against the social networking platform; I have said "anything that's worth saying is worth taking more than 140 characters". That quote, by the way is 69 characters. This, of course, is a simplification and some things can be perfectly said in few words. I am fascinated by the six-word memoir project that was turned into a book back in 2008, when twitter was ONLY doing 100 million tweets per quarter. Getting a spirit, idea, feeling across in only a few words is a magical talent.
And to be entirely honest, my biggest problem in the written (and spoken) word is using too many characters to say what I have to say. I am honestly jealous of writers who can pack meaning into few words, who can write concise sentences that cut like a knife, that don't require semi-colons and comma splices to translate thoughts from their psyche onto paper.
Yet the fact remains: almost all of my favorite works of fiction are incredibly long. Infinite Jest, of course, takes the cake but Absalom isn't much thinner, and I'm pretty sure Just Above My Head is the best James Baldwin novel, but it is definitely the longest, as well.
I know that with works of fiction, longer, of course, isn't always better. Works should be perfectly realized, exactly as long as they need to be to inhabit a place, embody human characters. "As I lay dying" doesn't need to be, indeed shouldn't be, longer than it is. "L'amant" is sparse and short and shocking; it screams with its silences. Length isn't, I know, a marker for quality (looking at you, Proust).
But an advantage of a long work of fiction, as a reader, is that you are forced to inhabit other human beings for weeks, months. You sit inside of these other people, and they sit inside of you. You have to work at them, and they work at you. Long pieces of fiction are not generally easy; our attention may wane. But, when they are good, they give us an experience that is nearly impossible to replicate. We wouldn't be willing to watch a movie, on and off, for a month or more. Books sit with us, they chip away at us even when not open and in our laps. The time they we spend with them, the weeks or more, the work required of us to strip off our own identity (if briefly, for moments, if imperfectly, if incompletely) and to sit in some one else's truth or place or being, this is the transformative power of fiction.
It was Zadie Smith (whose novels are not particularly long) who once said in a talk that fiction is the only work of art that convinces us that we are not the only real human being alive, that others think, feel, exist just as deeply. The idea is, of course, not hers, but she expressed it as clearly as anyone I had ever read/heard at the naive age of 22. Fiction, and art, teach empathy; they show us that others are real. For me, being forced to sit with a single work for weeks or longer makes me exist outside of myself in ways that nothing else ever has. It is a profoundly troubling experience, and with Infinite Jest literally made me feel as though I was losing my bearings on my own construction of myself and my world. It is a profoundly important experience, and has done more to change my view of the world, of others, of personhood and place, than nearly anything else.
In Absalom, absalom we hear the same narrative over and over, from different people at different times. These myths are created right before our very eyes, and they change with every telling. Faulkner is often cited as THE american post-modern writer and this novel embodies why. You literally watch narrative being created, and shifting, and the truth becomes subjective. Infinite Jest creates a world, a near future, terrifying and familiar. Characters come and go, are depressed, addicted (to drugs, entertainment, violence), and you are forced to inhabit each of their identities in turn. And many of them fit uncomfortably. Time shifts and turns on itself, the world makes no sense. Just above my head starts with grief that can only be explained by the love of a brother, and best friend. At first the grief is disorienting and makes no sense. But after you live inside the relationship, felt over decades, over relationships made and lost, through shifts in history and geography and politics, the grief becomes real, and personal. None of these transformative experiences, for me as a reader, would have been possible without literally living inside these books for weeks.
There is something to be said for putting in work, for trying to tackle big things, for sticking with something or some one even when things are difficult. It is almost cliche at this point to decry the ways in which our interactions (with each others, with art) have become more superficial thanks to technology. And yet, it feels to me that interactions have become increasingly replaceable, and therefore it is often easier to discard a person, a thing, a relationship, a work or art or fiction, when the going gets tough.
There are certain rewards that can come only from interactions that require you to give your time, your energy, your attention, your love. And not for 140 characters, but for a day, a week, a month, a year. It's not easy. But it is essential. It is art, and fiction, and love. And, in my mind, it is worth the work.
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