Gay begins by saying that her thoughts are not a "condemnation of experimentation," and I don't take them as such—but her second paragraph—
My favorite story (though I enjoy all kinds of writing) is told simply and without artifice, one where I turn the page and can’t wait to see what happens next, where the characters are interesting and well-developed and where I am invested emotionally. I love reading something so great that I want to find everything that person has ever written immediately
—makes me wonder exactly what sort of story she believes is told "without artifice." The meaning of that term has, of course, evolved from its initial sense of a thing made by a human being rather than a thing occurring in nature, and certainly carries pejorative connotations concerning sleight-of-hand, ingenuity, and deception. Still, to pretend that "simplicity" (or other here-undefined, relative terms such as "interesting," "well-developed," and "invested emotionally") is not simply another sort of artifice strikes me, particularly in our ongoing political moment, as either a conservative stance or a naïve one, and, in either case, as a dangerous one. In 2010, no one should confuse realism with the real; nor should anyone who doesn't get the news from Fox claim that an aw-shucks "good story, plainly told[,] [w]ith nothing else in the way" and "completely stripped of any bullshit" is possible. That Hemingway and Carver (or choose whomever you prefer) are as mannered and full of artifice as Woolf or Joyce is a commonplace. Language is neither plain nor transparent; it is always in its own way.
The present vogue in fiction for what Gay terms "anti-narratives and intensely language-y work" is, I agree, exhausting, though no more so than the everpresent vogue for narratives and intensely character-y work. Gay's veneration of the Little House on the Prairie books is interesting in that it locates her nostalgia for the "simple story":
I remember how Pa would take Laura and her sisters outside to pour maple syrup into the snow for a winter treat and how Almanzo Wilder picked Laura up from the rural school where she taught every single weekend to bring her home to see her family because she was so lonely and miserable sleeping on a narrow cot in the back room of the district superintendent’s house. I remember how Laura and Almanzo planted a grove of trees when they got their own homestead and how Laura would set out a blanket for herself and their baby Rose to watch “Manny” work and how when the Ingalls family lived in town, they kept themselves warm around the wood stove in the kitchen. I remember these details vividly, without having picked the books up in recent memory.
What Gay overlooks here is that her memories of these things were formed by black marks on a white page, and that it was Ingalls Wilder's artifice that kept the young Gay reading, and—apparently through what the fiction workshop would term well-observed concrete details, themselves an artificial rendering of the real—the older Gay remembering. "Storytelling is an art," Gay continues. "To tell a good story, you have to understand pace; you have to know when to tell your audience what and you have to find a way to keep your audience interested and wanting to know more." Not only would this advice fit, say, in E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927: "The element of surprise or mystery...is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence") or in John Gardner's The Art of Fiction (1983: "Suspenseful delay is enjoyable, but...[i]f the reader is not to waken from the fictional dream, it can be useful to anticipate the reader's feeling and channel it back into the story") or in any other fiction handbook that posits "story" (especially "good story") and "audience" as generally stable categories that the reader of said advice would understand tacitly, it describes a technique—building suspense through delay, withholding, and revelation—that is, of course, pure narrative artifice. And yet elsewhere in her post Gay writes that "any writing that willfully (to my mind) obscures meaning does, on some level, have a beef with readers. If writing makes me think, 'What the fuck is going on here,' in a this is nonsense on the page way, I feel like the writer hates me" (italics in the original). The writer's creation of suspense involves a willful obfuscation of meaning—consider one entire genre of literature, the detective story—and also involves artifice in its most "deceptive" connotation; the writer of any (and I intend the word in its broadest sense) mystery is guilty of messing with her writers, if only to keep them reading.
A nostalgia for an apparently simple narrative in which "characters" "seem" "real" (sorry, but you know what I mean; as William Gass has written, also some time ago, "theories of character are not absurd in the way representational theories are; they are absurd in a grander way, for the belief in Hamlet (which audiences often seem to have) is like the belief in God—incomprehensible to reason") is both forgivable and understandable; everyone knows the pleasure of such stories. What I find less so is the idea that there is a pure, naturally occuring form of narrative and, opposed to it in some way, an artificial one, given the competing, overlapping, multiplying narratives to which we are continually subjected in our everyday lives. (Indeed, I'm sure that more people currently understand and/or use the word "narrative" as synonymous with political or marketing discourse—as "spin"—than as an obviously fictional story about fictional characters.) The narrative that masquerades as guileless, as plain and simple and direct, is all too often artifice in the service of some other insidious cultural nostalgia. How many political speeches or corporate press releases willfully obscure meaning, or express/imply hostility to their audiences? What narrative act isn't in some way hostile, an attempt to control and shape events or facts to suit the author's desire?
