translate this to persian:
Everywhere Is Just One Place
LET’S SAY YOU’VE HAD your great insight on the human condition. It’s about the desire for peace or
happiness or tomato soup. Something major, anyway. You want to reach the largest possible audience, but
PBS won’t give you a special. So you decide to write a novel to, you know, tell everybody a universal truth.
Stop! Can’t be done. In the world of the novel, the universal doesn’t have a zip code. If you want to write
about everywhere, you’ll have to stick to just one place. There are some medieval plays about the human
condition, with names like Everyman and Mankind. Their heroes, whose names are the titles, are earnest
representatives of us all—bland, generic, indistinguishable, and undistinguished. There’s a reason Stratford,
Ontario, has a summer Shakespeare Festival and not a Medieval Morality Play Festival.
There’s only one novel with any staying power that is overtly about a
generic figure: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). That’s short for
The Pilgrim’s Progress from the World to That Which Is to Come, just so there’s
no mistaking the didactic intent of the work. It details the journey of its hero,
Christian, toward a place called the Celestial City. He’s helped on his way by
characters called Evangelist and, well, Help, and impeded by Mr. Worldly
Wiseman, Obstinate, Pliable, and Hypocrisy, among others. You get the drift.
The problem, from a reader’s perspective, is that it’s an allegory. These aren’t
characters or places but types, and not very interesting types, either. The names
have had more lasting appeal than the things or persons to which they’re
attached: Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond, Doubter’s Castle, Giant Despair.
As allegory, I suppose it does what Bunyan wanted it to do. As a novel, it just
doesn’t get it. The characters lack depth or complexity, so the achievement of the
journey and the places and people encountered are the only points of genuine
interest. If you want tales of individual humans wrestling with their faith and
with issues of right and wrong, you’ll find much more satisfying reading in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) or The Scarlet
Letter (1850). Hawthorne sometimes veers perilously close to allegory, but his
people feel like real humans rather than cardboard cutouts, his ethical dilemmas
genuinely troubling.
And there’s the trouble with allegory: dull, stiff, two-dimensional. The
allegorist means well, and he doesn’t want us to miss the point. The point,
however, is usually all there is. The novel needs to be more dynamic if it wants
to engage our attention and our emotions. It needs to present characters as rich
and complex as those we believe ourselves to be, and they need to struggle with
problems worth their effort—and ours. This richness, complexity, and
individuation is what the novel’s best at. Yet novelists do sometimes want to
write about “the human condition” or “the problem of the past” or any number of
vexatious big themes. So, then, what to do?
First of all, get a handle on the problem. Understand the twin, sometimes
opposing, pulls of the local and the general. Here’s the Law of Universal
Specificity: You can’t write about everywhere or everyone, only about one
person or one place. If you want to write about everybody, start with one person,
in one place, doing one real thing. Bellow’s Augie March, now there’s a guy—
American, hustling, morally suspect, energetic, hopeful, a little out of control at
times. Representative? You bet. But individuated, not quite like anybody else.
You want to show the disillusionment and loss of World War I veterans? Jake
Barnes. You want a place that stands for everyplace? Joyce’s Dublin. Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha. Erdrich’s reservation. Bellow’s Chicago. Melville’s ship. If you
get the local and particular right, the universal will take care of itself.
Partly, this is a no-brainer. You can’t describe everywhere. Where would you
begin? How would it look? How many millions of pages is your novel, anyway?
And what does everyone look like? So obviously the novelist can’t go in that
direction and maintain anything like verisimilitude. Beyond that clear-cut
problem, though, lurks a trickier one: how can you convey universality to your
reader? How can you make sure that your characters stand for something like all
of us?
You can’t. Don’t even try. Don’t even think about it. And yet, it happens.
Vive le paradoxe! And yet, as with most paradoxes, this one can be understood.
I’ll let you think about it for a bit. (Hint: the answer’s not in the book.)
Meanwhile, an example. Let’s say you want to write about a big event. A
really big, earth-changing event. Something like, oh, Indian independence. At
midnight on August 15, 1947, something on the order of half a billion people
achieved their freedom from colonial rule. Now that’s big. Might even be worth
writing about. Here’s the catch, though: how do you write about half a billion
people? You don’t. You can’t. Even just saying the names would take thousands
of pages. But you can write about one person. You can even give that one person
a special trait, maybe connect him (it is a him) to a few others who share that
trait. You could even have him be born on August 15, 1947. At midnight. He
could be telepathically connected to others who share the moment of birth with
him and the newly formed countries of India and Pakistan. That’s the conceit of
Salman Rushdie’s brilliant evocation of the emerging nations in Midnight’s
Children. His novel is a sprawling tragicomedy centered around Saleem Sinai,
whose life and tangled fate parallels that of his country. The strategy proves a
winner. Why? In part, we can follow the ups and downs of Saleem’s fate far
better than those of a whole nation. Partly, too, by using Saleem, Rushdie can
select those aspects of India’s entry into nationhood he wishes to emphasize; an
individual life, however messy, is far tidier than the whole history of a country.
Even if that history is very short. And finally, he tells a great story.
The novel, because of its magical realist elements, is often compared to the
work of Gabriel García Márquez. The greatest similarity between the two,
however, is this localizing strategy, which also places them close to William
Faulkner. Faulkner spoke repeatedly of his “little postage-stamp of ground,”
Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Like Rushdie, like García Márquez,
Faulkner grappled with history, in his case one even more gnarled and thorny
than theirs, entwined as it was with guilt, failure, pride, sin, and the inheritance
of slavery. But he was too savvy to attempt to write about the entire South, or
even the entire state. Rather, he whittled his concerns down to a single county,
based on Lafayette County, where he lived in Oxford, the county seat and home
of the University of Mississippi. Here, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), he
created the Compsons, an aristocratic family on a downward spiral from the
social prominence of the plantation and General Compson to grandsons Quentin,
who commits suicide while a freshman at Harvard, and Benjy, the thirty-threeyear-old with the mind of a small child. In Go Down, Moses (1942), he tells the
story of the McCaslins, descendants of a slaveholding family, and their longunacknowledged black cousins, the Beauchamps. In his Snopes trilogy, The
Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), he creates a far-flung
family of ne’er-do-wells who actually do pretty well, winding up, sometimes in
spite of themselves, owning pretty much the whole town. They seem to support a
Faulknerian beatitude that the rascals shall inherit the earth. In novel after novel,
he explores various aspects of Southern inheritance, always focusing on this one
small parcel of land.
García Márquez does much the same thing in One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967), using the fictional coastal town of Macondo as a microcosm of
postcolonial South America. Many events of the novel—civil war, the
prevalence of the military, corrupt leadership, assassinations and massacres, the
dominance of foreign companies (in this case, a multinational banana company)
—resonate as elements of the history of many Latin American countries, yet it is
the spectacular and singular nature of the town and its main family, the
Buendías, that make the novel a permanent feature of readers’ memories.
Everything about them is prodigious, from the tremendous age of the matriarch,
Ursula, to Colonel Aureliano’s miraculous ability to escape death at the hands of
others and even himself, to his brother José Arcadio’s male member, remarkable
for its size and the fabulous tattoos with which it is adorned. Even the gypsy,
Melquíades, who sets the family on the path to greatness and dissolution, is a
figure of outsized accomplishments, claiming to have come back to life because
death bored him. You’ve got to love a family like this one. Except that there is
no family like this one. Part of García Márquez’s program is to create a family
like no other.
So how do we get from there to a pattern of experience that can stand for the
whole of postcolonial Latin America? Ah, our para dox again. The solution, dear
Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves. The business of universality can’t
be found in the text. If the writer tries to place it there, the work will almost
automatically sound contrived. The writer’s job is to provide a story that
engages, fascinates, provokes, and above all registers as unique. Robert McLiam
Wilson subtitles his novel Eureka Street “A Novel of Ireland Like No Other.”
That’s what every novel aspires to be, a work of fiction about x like no other.
The novelist gets to create his story and to make it specific, particular, singular.
Then he’s done. We readers get to decide on significance. We may decide that
it’s genuinely universal in its depictions or themes, or that it’s not, or that it’s so
poorly done that we don’t care one way or the other, or any of a hundred other
determinations on many topics.
To come back to Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai has to be, above all else,
himself. Rushdie can supply hints or suggestions of a broader set of connections,
as he does starting with the coincidence of Saleem’s birth. What he can’t do is
make readers take those connections seriously. We decide that for ourselves.
Does he represent some aspects of modern India? Which ones? In what ways?
Do all novels aspire to universal themes?
I don’t think so. There may be representative elements in character or
situation, but a lot of novels are happy merely to tell their story. In fact, every
novel needs first of all to be happy telling its story. If it doesn’t do that well,
there’s not much chance it can speak to broader themes. But many novels do not
seek to go beyond their story. The obvious but by no means only works here
would be category or genre fiction, as if “literary” fiction didn’t belong to
categories or genres. What these terms apply to are those novels that fall into one
or another of the popular culture genres: mystery, thriller, horror, western,
romance, science fiction, fantasy. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, for instance, can’t be said to stand for anyone
beyond themselves or a sort of wish fulfillment of sure justice. The novels they
occupy suggest certain aspects of the world: the prevalence of evil, the murky
ethical realm where good guys and bad guys meet, or the improbable ratio of
darkness to light even in sunny Los Angeles. Similarly, with horror novels, say,
it’s tough to generalize from a demented car/canine/caretaker, nor is that really
the point. The business of entertainments, after all, is to entertain.
Even so, we can and do learn things from them. Not direct moral lessons, but
more general implications about human behavior, the desire for justice, the need
to be loved, or right conduct. We can’t help it; we are an inference-drawing
species. Give us a particular and we’ll generalize from it. So almost any novel
can teach us, and the novel has one big lesson that lies at its very root: we matter.
A human life has value not because it belongs to an owner, a ruler, a collective,
or a political party, but because it exists as itself. How is this in the novel form
itself? It lies in the subject matter, which has to do with the little guy. Oh, you
may find one or two novels that feature kings or princes or dauphins (real ones,
not Twain’s), but nearly every novel that has ever been written is about an
ordinary life, be it middle-class, working-class, or down and out. The people of
the novel would have been very minor figures, had they appeared at all, in
Homer or Shakespeare—a name to be killed off, a messenger racing to his
master, a bit of comic stage business, no one to be taken seriously. And all those
novels expect us to take an interest in the lives they present, to hang around till
the end just to see what becomes of their chosen person. What’s more, we do. Do
care, do follow with interest, do hang around to see the finish, big or small.
Because they matter, we do. And that’s pretty universal.