PATHS OF RESISTANCE
Excerpted from Active in Time and History,
(edited by William Zinsser, published by Houghton Mifflin Company)

My poetry appears to me at once more personal and more universal than my fiction. In my poems I speak mostly in my own persona or in a voice that's a public form of it, except for occasional poems in another character. Some poems come out of my own experiences and some issue from the energy of other people's experiences coming through me, but they are fused in the layers of my mind to a speaking voice.

Fiction is as old a habit of our species as poetry. It goes back to telling a tale, the first perceptions of pattern, and fiction is still about pattern in human life. At its core it answers the question What then? And then? And then, and then? I've tried to figure out, coming into postmodern poetry and fiction, exactly why people have carried out these activities, what they were supposed to do, why I engage in them and why others should pay attention to what I produce.

Poetry is an art of time, as music is. Rhythms are measured against time, they are measures of time. A poem goes forward a beat at a time, the way dance does, step by step, phrase by phrase. But fiction is about time. First this, then that. Or this; and before it, that happened. Therefore this. From the perception of the seasons, of winter, spring, summer, fall, of the seasons of our lives, of the things that return and the things that don't return, of the drama of the searching and finding of the fruit, the seed, the root that sustains life; the looking and the hunting and the kill; the arc of the sex act, the climax of giving birth; these are the sources of the fictional intelligence. If you make such a choice - being kind to an old woman you meet on the road, marrying Bluebeard against all advice, apprenticing yourself to a witch - what follows?

Why do ordinary people read fiction? The most primitive answer is the most real; to get to the next page. To find out what happens next, and what happens after that; to find out how it all comes out.

That desire for finding a pattern of events still functions as a major hunger we bring to the novel - for not all happenings will satisfy us, but only the right ending, the proper disaster, or the proper reward, or the proper suspension. We want stories that help us to make sense of our lives. We want to see all this mess mean something, even if what we discover is a shape perhaps beautiful but not necessarily comforting.

As I said, a novel is about time and patterns in time. It's not a simultaneous art, but one of transition and sequence. You can give the effect of simultaneity, but it's only created by illusion. A novel also takes time to read, so it involves much persuasion. You must persuade the reader to start reading - and continue reading. You have to persuade her not to put the book down on page 1 or page 100, or page 200, or page 700 - not to skip. Fiction is an art of constant persuasion. The use of suspense and one of the uses of identification with a protagonist is to make the reader go on reading and turning pages.

My novels feel very different to me, each a small world. A novel is something I inhabit for two or three years, like a marriage or a house. It owns me and I live inside it. When I'm writing a novel it preoccupies me and stains my life with its particular emotional coloration.

I start with a basic them. Then I work on character. This is all preliminary to writing anything whatsoever. At this time I have a very basic, rough sense of plot. I work on character until I've compiled extensive notes and dossiers on the major characters and I'm very clear about their viewpoints - how each of them thinks and feels and senses and speaks and moves.

Then I work on a plot. I figure the general plot line before I start. I know roughly the length of the book at this point, give or take fifty pages. As I write the rough draft, I work out details of the plot and invent the minor characters as I need them. Often some of them will develop into somewhat more important characters in future drafts.

What I know and don't know about the plot could be stated like this: About a third of the way through Gone to Soldiers Jacqueline and her mother have a serious fight, so Jacqueline storms out, not meaning to run away permanently. This keeps her away from home at a critical time: the night of the Grande Rafle, when twenty thousand French Jews (including five thousand children) were picked up by the French police, under instructions from the Gestapo, and taken to a rink used for bicycle races in the winter. There they were held for eight days without food or water. A great number of the children died. This was the first relay on the road to mass death.

Now I have to find a good reason to remove Jacqueline from her mother's flat in Paris because she has to survive. Naturally I would like it to be an absence that isn't accidental or contrived, something like: "Tonight, Maman, I will sleep at my girlfriend's." So I figure, with Jacqueline being nineteen in the hot summer of 1942 and out of college, because she's been forced out for being Jewish, I will give her a boyfriend. She will at this time begin sleeping with him. That fact, discovered by her mother, will get them into a huge argument and Jacqueline can storm out of the house. So Jacqueline has to have a boyfriend who, to keep her out of danger that night, can't be Jewish. Now what sort of man would be indifferent at that time to the laws and pressures forbidding such an association? One of the zazous, the zoot-suiters of Paris, who defied the Nazis by wearing their hair long and greasy, listening to jazz and acting cool. Now we have Jacqueline's boyfriend Henri emerging, and the plot begins to fill in. This is an actual instance of problem solving from the first draft of Gone to Soldiers. That's how it works.

The first draft is always scary to me. I can't risk interrupting it for long or I may lose it. The momentum is important. It's like building the Verrazano Bridge from one side, hoping it won't fall in on the way. You don't know if you're going to make it.

Between the first and second draft I look for structural flaws and work more on character. I do a lot of detailed plotting, and I generally accomplish whatever research wasn't finished before I began chapter one. A lot of research is useless for the first draft anyhow; it doesn't get incorporated even if you have all your facts on hand.

In the second draft I start paying serious attention to language. Some of the concern has solved itself already. Concentrating on theme and character goes a long way toward evolving the correct style for a subject, a story, a set of people.

As a political writer often I have a fair amount of research to do for a novel. For Going Down Fast, my first novel to be published, I had to understand the uses of urban renewal and the conglomeration of real estate and corporate powers that control cities, and I had to understand Chicago's history and politics. For Woman on the Edge of Time I had to research brain functions, psychosurgery, how it feels to be in a mental institution. A lot of studying was preliminary to thinking about a good future society. Gone to Soldiers has seven years of research on World War II behind it.

All my current research I keep in a database system in my computer. Everything - bibliography, notes from reading, interviews - goes into it. I can retrieve whatever I need for a particular section of a novel. Gone to Soldiers would have been impossible to finish in the time I had without computer technology. I would have drowned in notes.

There's a general assumption on the part of American critics and academics that anyone who writes fiction or poetry that is politically conscious must be kind of dense - that by its nature the work is cruder than work that simply embodies currently held notions; that, roughly speaking, leftist or feminist work is by definition more naïve, simpler, less profound than right-wing work. What is considered deep is writing that deals with man's fate (always man's) in psychospiritual terms, with our heart of darkness, somehow always darker when somebody is thinking that maybe things could be changed a little. Deep work deals with angst-filled alienation (again, always man's because Mama has a baby and she hasn't got time for the angst). Literature is perceived, as Hans Haacke said about art, "as a mythical entity above mundane interests and ideological conflict." As Haacke also remarked, "In non-dictatorial societies, the induction into and the maintenance of a particular way of thinking and seeing must be performed with subtlety in order to succeed. Staying within the acceptable range of divergent views must be perceived as the natural thing to do." I might add that going beyond that A-to-B circuit must be perceived as unnatural, therefore discordant, strident - inherently less artistic.

I've never been able to understand the assumption that being ignorant of science is good for poets, or that being ignorant of economics and social organization is good for novelists. I've always imagined that the more curious you are about the world around you, the more you'll have to bring to your characters and to the worlds that you spin around them. I've always imagined, too, that one reason many American novelists haven't developed, but, rather, have atrophied, producing their best work out of the concerns of late adolescence and early adulthood, is that since they do not care to grapple with or even to identify with moving forces in their society they can't understand more than a few stories.

Writing that is politically conscious involves freeing the imagination, which is one reason why magic realism has been so energizing to Latin American fiction. If we view the world as static, if we think ahistorically, we lack perspective on the lives we are creating. The more variables we can link and switch in the mind, the greater or potential control over the basic and sometimes unconscious premises of our fiction and our poetry. We must be able to feel ourselves active in time and history. We choose from the infinitely complex past certain stories, certain epochs, certain struggles and battles, certain heroines and heroes that lead to us. We draw strength from them as we create our genealogy, both literarily and personally. Deciding who we are is intimately associated with who we believe our ancestors, our progenitors, our precursors are.

In the arts, particularly, we need our own sense of lineage and our own tradition to work in or to rebel against. Often we must work in a contrapuntal way to a given genre or tradition, taking it apart, slicing it against the grain, making explicit its assumptions. Think of Margaret Atwood's use of the Gothic novel tradition, or of what Joanna Russ has done to vampire stories.

A sense of false belonging destroys our ability to think and to feel. A seamless identification with a culture that excludes us as fully human or that impoverishes our options makes us limit our seeing as well as our saying. This is especially true in America, where official history is Disney World. Most of us are the grandchildren of immigrants, with parents who refused to speak whatever language was theirs as a birthright and who considered all the received history and wisdom and stories of their families as so much peasant trash to be dumped and forgotten. Often we have lost not only the names of the villages where our ancestors lived but any knowledge of what they did for a living, what they believed, why they left and came here. We have lost the history of labor and religious struggles they may have bled for. This ignorance makes us shallower than we may want to be.

Reviewers don't perceive books as having a political dimension when the ideas expressed in the novels - who's good and who's bad, who deserves to win and what it is that's worth winning, what's considered masculine and feminine, what's normal - are congruent with the reviewers' own attitudes or with those they're used to hearing discussed over supper or at parties. When reviewers read novels whose attitudes offend them or clash with their own ideas, they perceive those novels as political and polemical, and they attack them.

Naturally I object to this system of screening books, since my novels always have something to offend everybody, but especially tend to offend the critics on the powerful periodicals. Reviewers tend to want commercial work to excite their fantasies and for literary work to conform to the standards they were taught in college, based on the work of males dead for years, whose childhoods were passed in the nineteenth century.

How we understand our lives, the kind of choices we conceive of as possible, shapes the decisions we end up making. We all operate by myths, in part. Fiction gives us patterns by which we judge our choices, our character, our prospects. Sometimes it helps us to understand ourselves and our friends and acquaintances, as well as those whose choices are inflicted on us - people such as bosses, teachers, administrators, generals, experts and landlords. It helps us to empathize with those whom our choices and our decisions affect. We may learn that parts of ourselves that we've been taught to repress or deny are worthy of coming into daylight. We may decide that what we are ashamed of experiencing is not shameful or singular. We may see through the eyes of our parents, our children, our lovers, our supposed or real enemies, our ancestors, our descendants. We may realize what we want to happen - what kind of relationships, what kind of society we want to work toward, or work to prevent.

In a stratified society all literature is engaged politically and morally, whether it's so perceived by the author or not. It will be so perceived by the readers it validates and by the readers it affronts. This doesn't mean that I think a novel or a poem can be judged by some utilitarian criterion. Art is only partly rational. It acts on all the levels of our brain and influences us through sounds and silences, through identification and imagery, through rhythms and chemistry.

But as writers and readers, the literature we read makes us more or less sensitive to each other. Poems and novels tell us how we may expect to experience love and hatred, violence and peace, birth and death. They deeply influence what we expect to find as our love object, and what we expect to enjoy on the job or in bed, and what we think is okay for others to enjoy. They help us decide what war is like - a boring hell or a necessary masculine maturation experience in a jolly peer group - and therefore whether we are willing to be drafted to fight one. They cause us to expect that rape is a shattering experience of violence, like being struck by a hit-and-run truck, or a titillating escapade that all women secretly desire. They influence our daydreams and our fantasies and therefore what we believe other people offer s or are withholding from us.

I think it's healthy for us to remember where the impulses to say poems and to tell stories come from. Our work should touch those centers of the psyche from which the urge to make and receive it come. Art doesn't progress the way physics progresses. In art we don't build better bombs. We don't know more about poetry than Sappho did, or tell a better story than Homer did. It's new. It's new always. It's made again. Like love. Like anger.

For me, writing fiction issues from the impulse to tell the story of people who deserve to have their lives examined and their stories told to people who deserve to read good stories. I'm responsible to many people with buried lives: people who have bee rendered as invisible in history as they are powerless in the society their work creates, populates, cleans, repairs and defends. For me the impulse to write poems comes from the desire to give permanent voice to something in the experience of a life. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses. We can hear what we hope for, and what we most fear, in the small release of cadenced utterances. We have few rituals that function as well for us in the ordinary chaos of our lives as art can. The pattern, imposed perhaps but nonetheless satisfying, emerges from the utterance, from the story. It's made new again if we're clear-hearted and work hard, and that's enough miracle for me.

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