For a while after writing my novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell I deluded myself into thinking that I had achieved my artistic goal of making an abstract novel. I have been so tricked several times in my literary career. I believe that I should be able to construct such a thing, an abstract novel. Given that the constituent parts of my art, namely words, are representational, the problem is obvious. Still, I believe that I should be able to make it. The other obstacle is that I have no idea what such a thing might look like. After four of my novels I have briefly believed that I at least had gotten close, only to look more closely and discover that I was not even in the ballpark. Or so I thought. Now I might believe that the problem is not that I can’t make an abstract novel, but that I cannot make one that is not.
The Western Red River, directed by Howard Hawks, was released in 1948. The American Western film is a fascinating cultural form, if for no other reason than because it is regarded and regards itself as a representation of the American character, albeit an America that exists no place but on the page and on celluloid. The America depicted in Westerns is fantasy, often anchored by a nod toward something historical, but in no way true. However vivid our notion of the two gunmen facing each other in the street or in a saloon might be, there are very few showdowns documented. There were plenty of murders and some gunfights, but rarely quick-draw action. The idea of settlers regularly arranging their wagons in a circle to fend off Native attackers seems unlikely, since their wagon trains were often miles long. I mention Red River because of a choice Hawks made in the production. He chose to shoot the film in black and white, claiming that Technicolor offered colors that were garish and what he wanted was realism. Black and white was more realistic to him. I can certainly understand the aesthetic choice of black and white over color; I like the look of it myself. But what is Hawks thinking when he says realistic? Before the mid-nineteenth century very few people had seen a photograph. I believe that’s fair to say. What could have been further from a realistic depiction of the real world than a picture without color? Perhaps it was because of the terrible images photographer Mathew Brady provided to the public of the carnage of the Civil War. The war was real, the images were of real people, and so black and white became the real representation of that war. Newsreels of the world, in black and white, became the world in the mid-twentieth century, and perhaps this influenced Hawks’s notion of real-looking. Or perhaps it was simply that the world of motion pictures had established its reality and that was the look that Hawks could not break away from. I’m guessing, of course, but my issue with Hawks’s decision remains. He was making a film, a fiction, a fiction telling a fabricated story about the mythologized frontier, a construction true to the fantastical west, but, aside from dress and horses, unconnected to the reality of the landscape and history it supposedly portrayed.
About black and white: We have all been seduced by its perceived honesty, to the point that colorized films look off to us, unrealistic, if you will. Even though black and white is anything but realistic. Is it a step away from the artificiality of so-called realism or a step toward the actual event? This sort of conditioning is not only visual. Imagine the sound of movie gunfire. Sadly, we’ve heard it all our lives. Too much of it. We have been conditioned by these years of hearing gunshots on television and in movies to expect certain sounds, up to the point where real gunfire sounds unreal to us. Would that none of us ever hears real gunfire, but how many times have you heard a witness to a terrible event say on the news that the gunfire didn’t sound real? What does that mean? It is real. What it means is, if I might expand the utterance as a philosopher whom I would perhaps not choose to read, “I have expectations about how some things should present in the world, and often the actual events do not conform to those expectations.”
The realism that Hawks was seeking had nothing to do with anything real, but everything to do with his and our expectations. I do not believe that Hawks would agree with me. I have no doubt but that he would insist that he was trying to create a representation of the (or a) so-called real world. It would be unfair to call him delusional, but he is wrong.
as a writer of fiction I am attempting to mine those same expectations. I am not smarter than Howard Hawks, but I am perhaps more cynical, jaded. So much depends on our expectations and the biases and prejudices that accompany them. What am I doing when I decide to write a realistic story? What am I setting about to make? I am in fact constructing an artifice that appears, seems, feels real or “lifelike.” Roland Barthes would have us believe that the tricks of fiction are no longer effective, dead. With all due respect, this is hardly true, and it’s not true for a couple of reasons. The first is that readers still invest themselves in stories so deeply that they will feel bad or good and defend or argue whether a character has behaved realistically or not. The second reason is that the notion of tricks is unintelligible. Readers are never unaware that they are regarding a construction. Fictions are not lies. Readers come to the work willingly and agree to certain terms. Those terms will vary from work to work, but are established by the work, usually early on. Like any contract, breaking it leads to distrust. This is accepted reality. But I imagine that the broken agreement and all its attendant distrust can be seen as similar to the analogous actual-world act of betrayal, and so can be as real as anything.
