On Purpose or At Random: The Engineering of Fiction in Tim Parks's "Goodness"

Independent Life
Technologies

In Tim Parks's novel Goodness, the narrator, George, designs an electronic game for his severely handicapped daughter Hilary, with pedals for her feet to press that turn on music and colored lights. Though she does activate the pedals and apparently enjoy the lights, he cannot tell if she is doing it "on purpose or at random." When given such a toy (nowadays commercially available, but not in the 1980s, when the novel takes place), children without developmental difficulties may begin with random button pushing, but they will quickly figure out which buttons produce which effects. It is not clear to George and his wife Shirley whether Hilary is engaging in this kind of trial and error, so purposefulness and randomness remain indistinguishable.

When George decides to try to burn down his house in such a way that Hilary cannot be rescued and will thus die in the fire without his being blamed for her death, he learns something about arson: "The most elementary secret to a successfully designed arson is that the fire must have only one focal point." The arsonist's goal is not to make intention and accident indistinguishable. He wants to disguise intention so that it looks like accident. Something done "on purpose" should look like it happened "at random." This is surely not the case with the serial arsonist who sets fires because he is mentally ill; usually, such an arsonist wants his intentions to be clear. But the one-time arsonist like George does not want to have his creation recognized as something created; it should look like it just happened.

Later, when George has set the fire after long and careful preparation, he finds himself upstairs in his burning house, where he contemplates the position he has put himself in: "This is the moment of truth I have so expensively engineered." The moment is "expensive" not because he has spent money on the act of arson but because of his "sacrifice" of his expensive house to his desire for a life without his handicapped child.

The "engineering" of a "moment of truth" is an excellent description of the writing of fiction. And the novelist's goal is the same as that of the arsonist who does not want to get caught: the "engineering" of that "moment of truth" in the story that leads up to it should not be detectable. For a work of fiction to be credible, it should look not purposeful but random, or its "moment of truth" will not be worth the "expensive engineering" of the writing process.

This is the implicit poetics of Goodness: fiction as an elaborate construction that tries to conceal its own constructedness. There are other types of novels, of course: the long-standing tradition of novels like Tristram Shandy that revel in their fictionality. But they share something with novels like Goodness: they, too, involve the elaborate engineering of "moments of truth," such as the epiphanies in James Joyce's novels. In fiction, a game that we play in order to have intense experiences, the writer may conceal it or flaunt it, or do a little bit of both, but no matter what, the fix is always on.

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My previous post on Goodness is "Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality." Anyone interested in even more posts about Goodness (and soon other novels by Parks) should check out the blog for my current seminar on Parks's novels, which I am giving at the University of Basel English Department this term.

Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality

The following is the first paragraph of the chapter "The Good Samaritan" in Tim Parks's novel Goodness. It appears about two-thirds of the way through the novel. George (the narrator) and his wife Shirley have a seriously handicapped daughter, Hilary, who cannot speak and has hardly developed beyond infancy:

January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: 'We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.' I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can't.

Like many a novel's narrator, George does not always have a very accurate vision of himself, but here he is right on target: he does swing between a "ruthless realism" that asserts his clear understanding of the world's difficulties and a "cloying sentimentality" that would conceal those difficulties in favor of an easier perspective.

The "change" he would like to "get out of" Hilary refers to childhood development: a puppy would develop faster than Hilary would. Since George had not wanted to have children, the reference to a puppy also recalls couples who stereotypically get a dog when they are "not ready for children." But what he and Shirley actually have to "get out of her" is her constipated shit, and it is in terms of shit that the contrast between realism and sentimentality is most fully realized here.

In a sense, "realism" appears here in the very fact that shit is mentioned at all, and it becomes "ruthless" in the explicitness with which George describes the "levering out" of the "turds." In contrast, George's "sentimentality" is somewhat concealed, only becoming clear in the final contrast between Shirley and himself: it is not both of them ("we") who do the dirty work but just Shirley. George wants to be a "ruthless realist," but when it comes to shit, he "simply can't" handle it.

The "realist," then, is beaten by the sentimentality his demonstrative "ruthlessness" is meant to combat. In his memoir Youth, J. M. Coetzee writes that "ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn." (See also this post.) Here, in Parks's novel, "ruthless realism" also ends up looking like a trick, and a relatively easy one at that: if you make a nasty joke and talk about your handicapped daughter's shit, then you are being "ruthless," even if it is your wife who actually cleans up the mess.

The "realistic" and the "sentimental" are also literary categories. Chronologically, the "sentimental" novel came first, in the eighteenth century, while literary "realism" emerged in the nineteenth century. In a simplified version of literary history, "realism" trumped the "sentimental" precisely by being "ruthless" rather than "cloying," and that is precisely the tendency of the "trick" of "ruthless honesty": it aims to produce a "realism" that trumps feelings.

But the slippery nature of this "hard trick" is clear in this passage. George plays tough, but is not really tough enough to face up to the challenge posed by his handicapped daughter. From the perspective of Parks's novel, the history of the genre is not the replacement of the sentimental by the realistic; rather, fiction "alternates" between the realistic and the sentimental. "Realism" would like to be "ruthless" enough to defeat "sentimentalism," but its tricks are never-ending attempts to conceal its own sentimental side. Let's talk tough about shit, but someone else has to actually dispose of it -- and the people who have to do so are those otherwise dismissed as "sentimental."