“Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy.”
—Robert Scholes
At long last, we have officially begun the NEW FABULISM PROJECT, a new kind of book that hopes to celebrate a long-neglected literary tradition.
What the hell is Fabulism?
“Fabulation” was popularized in the late 60s by Brown University critic, Robert Scholes, to describe literature that vaguely resembled magical realism but was neither magical enough nor realistic enough to fit the bill. He was speaking primarily of Iris Murdoch, John Hawkes and John Barth, but may as well have included Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Robert Coover. These authors wrote in a highly literary fashion, proceeding studiously from various classical traditions only to violate them by tampering with their formal expectations.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, for instance, wrote love stories using his detached narrative voice as sort of movie camera, collapsing all analysis and digression to a single roving voyeuristic gaze. Georges Perec composed long, meandering essays on subjects so elementary they became de facto prose-poems by virtue of their departure from the given. Milorad Pavic drafted assiduously detailed encyclopedias for tribes that may never have existed. Julio Cortazar created highbrow choose-your-own-adventure books. Borges conjured imaginary beings and infinite libraries.
All were essentially foppish bibliophiles, spellbound by the printed word and its capacity to recreate the world through narrative invention. They plumbed through history, excavating secrets and burnishing gifts. They explored exhaustively, fearlessly. What attracted them to lost civilizations and distant lands was not a necrophilliac fetish for the past or a vacationer’s quaint fondness for the exotic but a dream of future possibility. Unlike many of their contemporaries, they identified less with the virtuosic magician on stage than the wide-eyed child in the audience, as Adam Gopnik wrote of Saul Steinberg. The Fabulators were distinguished, above all, by the level of sincerity with which they engaged in play.
Before Scholes’ useful term took hold, though, these earnestly whimsical experiments were swept into the great mudflat of postmodernism, a category so elastic—and so confounding to the outsider—as to include everything from a briefly lived movement in architecture to the entire “culture of late capitalism.” But the tradition of Fabulism has emerged from the fog, emboldened with freshness and vitality. Authors like Joe Meno, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Samantha Hunt, Paul Fattaruso, Ben Greenman, Helen Phillips, J. Erin Sweeney and others have produced ingeniously inventive works of fiction concerned with transcending, appropriating, merging, or otherwise promiscuously vacillating between various styles and traditions. To them, it’s as if the past forty years had never happened, and anything is possible.
The New Fabulism Project represents an effort to identify this small yet powerful literary tradition by creating a unique venue for its idiosyncratic voices. The book will first appear as a stunning, limited-run letterpress edition and subsequently as a trade paperback. Stay tuned!