A Few Vague Thoughts on Writing and 'Major' World Events

"When one looks back at the Twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English Intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine famine - about ten years."
- Gorge Orwell, Inside the Whale

Scrape away at the surface of any group of people and you'd be hard pushed not to find the wriggling worms of stories waiting to be dug up. The tragic, the heroic, the comic, they're all there jostling for soil.

As I write a man in his sixties appears from a storefront across the road. He is lean and suspicious looking. He waits with his arms folded, surveying the street. He peers anxiously from left to right. Now he greets a stocky bald man and the two shake hands. They seem to whisper to one another before hurrying inside the store. What are they up to? In many ways they are itching to be written about.

What bothers me this morning is this: why dig these stories up? Why write them? Is it enough to write stories for stories sake? Or should one have a point, an argument to bring to light. Should the novel exist and be judged on its own merits? Or should it be weighed against the historical events it has rubbed shoulders with in its creation. Is it acceptable for a writer to write anything that ignores the state of the world he inhabits and if the answer to this is 'no', why then write fiction at all? Why not meet events head on with serious investigative pieces in the vein of George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' Or Joan Didion's 'Salvador'?

How do you write about an event like 9/11? Not in fiction I think. Everything I have read by Auster and Delillo has felt romantic or sentimental. Like D-Day in slow motion somehow. There seems to be a morbid pleasure that comes from describing the horror in detail. But it's too unreal for the reader. To see an image of a man falling from a building and to know he has thrown himself into space pursued by flames is all the information required. There is nothing else that need be described. And if it is, as I say, there is a danger for it to lean towards romance and sentiment.

My only thought is that 'major' events should either be met directly and seriously or should have walk on parts in works of fiction. But then I could be, and often am, wrong.

And as a post script, what of exile? If a writer is to consider seriously the world he live in, what role does exile play? What concerns me is that the 'fiction writer abroad' is in danger of only seeing and writing what he wants to see and not what is really there. For the man without a country the world becomes an 'Epcot Center' and veers dangerously toward the unreal. Or does he become free of the shackles shared with his countrymen and learn to see in his own way? Not Sure.