Accordingly, the value of any given attempt at fashioning a new narrative mode isn’t exclusively determined by its popularity or staying power. That the citadel of realism has withstood innumerable full-on assaults suggests that the greats who first codified the rules of story writing-the Homers, the Shakespeares, the Austens, the Flauberts, the pre- Ulysses Joyces-weren’t merely making them up whole-cloth and hoping they would catch on, but rather discovering them as entry points to universal facets of the human imagination. The authors of experimental works pointedly eschew misdirection and instead go out of their way to call attention to the inner workings of narrative, making for some painfully, purposefully bad stories which may nonetheless garner a modicum of popularity because each nudge and wink to the reader serves as a sort of secret hipster handshake. In the same way we momentarily marvel, not at a magician’s skillfulness at legerdemain, but at the real magic we’ve just borne witness to, the feat of story magic is accomplished by misdirecting attention away from the mechanics of narrative toward the more compelling verisimilitude of the characters and the concrete immediacy of the their dilemmas. If telling stories can be thought of as akin to performing magic, with the chief sleight-of-hand being to make the audience forget for a moment that what they’re witnessing is, after all, just a story, then the meager success of experimental fiction over the past few decades can be ascribed to the way it panders to a subset of readers who like to think of themselves as too cool to believe in magic. Wallace and Don DeLillo (and even post- Portrait Joyce) only succeeded by appealing to readers’ desire to fit in with the reigning cohort of sophisticates.
To be sure, a few writers have won over relatively small and likely ephemeral audiences with their scofflaw writerly antics.
But it’s remarkable how for all the experimentations over the past couple of centuries most of the basic elements of storytelling have yet to be supplanted. Every novelist wants to be the one who rewrites the rules of fiction.