True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  The trouble with this vision (and the others like it) is that it’s incompatible with the recipe by which our plenty came. We don’t know how many recipes for a cornucopia there are; we only know which have worked and which have failed among those that we have tried. Our local one is made harder to state because of some people’s insistence that markets are its only ingredient, when laws and institutions are just as important. But at the heart of it is a decision to produce what people will pay for, and only what people will pay for, without enquiring further into why. Our cornucopia deliberately makes no distinction between things we want and things we need: it can’t, without beginning to ration the tumbling flow of goods and to make unplentiful decisions about our best interests. Where need becomes want is left to our private judgement, at least in theory. All we can consult is the blurred continuum in our heads with soup at one end and the diamond-studded Rolex at the other. But the other peculiarity of our plenty is that, driven by desire without distinction, it doesn’t include a way of stably stopping when an elegant sufficiency has been achieved for everyone. It’s an economy of insatiability. It has to grow to function. It cannot aim at any particular level of prosperity. It can only achieve any particular tideline of plenty by overshooting it, and keeping on going. And if we all did decide, one at a time or all together, on some mark that represented adequate plenty, and stopped buying at it, our plenty wouldn’t glide calmly to a halt. It would collapse, because the system depends on competition, and whatever ceases to compete in our system doesn’t just stop rising, it immediately and inexorably sinks.

  That’s why in our age of plenty everyone who can is still working frantically hard. That’s why our age of plenty does not resemble the age of leisure that was being predicted just as plenty’s threshold was being crossed, back in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s comical now to remember the promise that people in ‘the year 2000’ would only work two or three hours a day, and would need to fill the remaining hours with a glorious efflorescence of golf-playing, symphony-composing, helicopter-piloting and basket-weaving. It isn’t that the wealthy future turned out less wealthy than the futurologists of 1960 imagined. On the contrary, a range of self-indulgences now exists that they never even dreamed of. Parascending, anyone? Karaoke? Broadband online wargaming? It’s that the structure of our wealth forbids us to run any slower. And, to keep us consuming at the rate we need to in order to expand our plenty (which is to say, to maintain it) the persuaders labour night and day to keep us dissatisfied. We are more advertised at than anyone in history, because it is so vital that we shouldn’t fall into happy, non-buying repletion. ‘Maslow’s hierarchy’ is cited a lot as the basis for our continuing hunger. It says that, in order, we satisfy the needs for food, for shelter and for clothing, and then move on to our need for esteem, as manifested in a handily large number of ways, such as the need for a rewritable DVD player, the need for a sports car, or the need for an aroma­therapy massage at an exclusive spa resort. But Maslow’s hierarchy is a codification of what the economy of plenty needs to be true. The classical economists, the dismal scientists who said that scarcity would last forever, believed in ‘diminishing marginal utility’, the traditional view that as your appetite for something is satisfied, you want each extra helping of it a bit less. A hungry person really, really wants a slice of toast. The second slice is nice but not quite so nice; they can take or leave the third slice, and they probably do leave the fourth one. This, our age of plenty has supplemented. Okay, we say reluctantly. You’ve probably had enough toast for now – enough multigrain granary toast with unsalted organic Normandy farmhouse butter – but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing else you want, does it? Just alternate your hungers, and you can keep craving all the time. Go on, turn away from toast for now, turn with undiminished urgency to that wish for polka-dotted silk handkerchiefs, for tango lessons, for Art Deco ornaments. You know you want to.

  Of course, the problems of having too much are far better than the problems of having too little, but no wonder we feel bilious. No wonder we feel confused. No wonder that some of us balloon into obesity on the cornucopian diet, and some of us starve ourselves, and some find artificial ways of bringing scarcity back. The little roasted pigs rush by, squeaking ‘Eat me!’ I’m sorry, we say: maybe later. I feel a bit . . . full. I feel a bit . . . sick.

  (2005)

  RESPONSIBLE FICTION, IRRESPONSIBLE FACT

  I can tell two completely different stories about how I got to the peculiar blend of the fictional and the documentary in my book Red Plenty, and both of them are true.

  The first is pragmatic. My familiar tools stopped working on me. I had been a practitioner of a kind of non-fiction that used the language of experience to warm history, to make it intimate, to make it humanly satisfying in the way that biography and fiction are satisfying. My motto, if I had had such a thing, would have been Viktor Shklovsky’s famous claim (in his 1917 essay ‘Art as Technique’) that ‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.’ This seemed to me to be as applicable to ambitious non-fiction as to fiction. Writing should vivify knowledge, I thought, until it wasn’t knowledge any more but sensation. And I knew how to bring exposition to life, in this sense, starting with a process of interview, and building back towards narrative. That’s what I’d done in Backroom Boys, a book about engineering as an imaginative, almost narrative act. I and my dictaphone – this is before smartphones swallowed the function of voice recording – went to see a series of British rocket engineers, radio engineers, software engineers, genome decoders and video game designers, and they talked. They were happy to talk; in many cases I was the first person outside the profession who’d shown an interest in their technical achievements. So, when I was commissioned to write what was then a reasonably conventional piece of non-fiction about mathematical economics in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, I set off to apply my practised method. I emailed surviving mathematical economists, of whom there were still a reasonable number, this being 2004–5. A surprising number didn’t reply, but some did; I didn’t speak Russian, but I was confident that with the help of an interpreter I could get round the language issue; I booked a trip. And found that while people were willing to be very hospitable, and to feed me pickled mushrooms and homemade jam, and to get me agreeably drunk, they had no desire at all to spill their guts to a stranger with a tape machine. They had all grown up in the Soviet Union, after all, and Soviet experience, as I really should have realised earlier, had provided them with powerful incentives not to confide their private judgements of anything, least of all erstwhile policy initiatives that tangled ideology, science and the Soviet economic record together – not to strangers; not to anyone who had not demonstrated trustworthiness over years, rather than over the minutes of an interview. What they were signalling, with the copious vodka and plates of little gherkins, was that, if I cared to spend say half a decade proving myself, they might then be willing to creep up allusively, indirectly, to the subject in which I was interested. But I didn’t have the time or the budget. My method worked for the history of the British twentieth century; it absolutely did not for the Russian twentieth century. Flying home from St Petersburg with my plans in disarray, I thought to myself, I wish I could just make it up! And then, Could I make it up? Or at least find out how much of the job of exposition could be handled in fiction? That’s the pragmatic story.

  But I have a literary one too. Arriving at (a strange sort of) fiction was also a matter of following out a logic within my existing model of writing. I was already dissatisfied, and therefore ready for the change.

  It’s not that I was disenchanted with non-fiction as such. I was, and am, a firm advocate of non-fiction’s dignity, and its flexibility. I believed and still believe that, when written well, it has the scope to offer as rich and subtle an encounter with the world as fiction does. In part, because of its vast choice of techniques, its extraordinary array of different ways o
f knowing, which could be combined even more variedly, in firework displays of ad hoc consilience. Biographical knowing, biological knowing, mathematical knowing, art-historical knowing, psychological knowing, statistical knowing, poetic knowing: all of them available, all of them seeming to me to be divided by much more porous disciplinary walls than people imagine; all of them therefore open to combination and synthesis. Hybrids, built on the interesting boundary zones where things could mix, were what I was most drawn to. My first book, I May Be Some Time, was a combination cultural history and travel book; my second, The Child that Books Built, was a memoir mixed up with literary criticism and child psychology; Backroom Boys, as well as being about the minds of engineers, and therefore a piece of science writing, was also a stealth industrial history of Britain since 1945.

  My motive in all of these was always to explain. But to explain by showing, by isolating a process or pattern, and giving it a visible body of narrative. You could say that my interest in anything was structured by the story I found to tell about it. I was especially attracted to cases where that was challengingly difficult to do, because the process was very abstract (or very dull), or because the story-like sense I could detect was distributed across much mat­­erial, and only lightly or faintly present in each bit of it. But to bring out a story in those circumstances required a correspondingly intense commitment to selecting relevant detail, and then to separating it out from its background. Even if I aimed at the greatest possible documentary fidelity – and I did, because the point of the exercise was always to unfold something that was really there, to know more of the world as it actually is – I was still, I came to see, engaged in a kind of exaggeration. I was exaggerating things into visibility. I was altering the proportions of historical scenes to allow my chosen story to dominate their foreground; at least, the foreground of those scenes as they existed in my narrative. And narrative isn’t experience. It’s made out of experience, but of course it isn’t the thing itself, and certainly it isn’t the flowing, multitudinous, incommensurable sum of human experiences that constitutes the real past. Narrative, as well as ordering the real, imposes its own demands for the qualities that harmonise narrative. Narrative, to resolve, requires a shape that experience may not obligingly provide. Narrative, to be unified, requires an intelligible development of mood. It is a structure of feeling, unfolding in time. And therefore I was selecting for feeling.

  As I did so, what I wrote worked less and less clearly as argument. This became particularly apparent when I came to revise my work. You can swap out the parts of an argument, but the pieces of a structure of a feeling aren’t straightforwardly replaceable. Take one out, and you don’t have a different contention; you have the same contention, sagging. Put in a piece of a different mood, and you don’t (necessarily) have a differently mixed mosaic of data, pointing to a different conclusion; you may well have an aesthetic kludge, a mood-gridlock, a blend of colours summing to a murky brown.

  Also, and pressingly, an issue was arising to do with the ownership of all this feeling. Back to Viktor Shklovsky. ‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.’ Fine: but, I was coming to think, irresponsible looked at one way, when it came to my kind of non-fiction. Because, perceived by whom, exactly? Known by whom? Experienced by whom? Serious history, history as an academic discipline, knows who is doing its knowing. It comes with its own epistemology built in. Ever since the nineteenth-century intellectual revolution that created it, it has proceeded by attribution, by labelling the source of every known item, and then adding it to the mass, to the general picture, of what history knows; what some ideal collective knower understands of the past. It can be continued through 10,000 or 100,000 separate efforts, and still be one enterprise. Fashion, new interpretations, new ideas change the picture and keep changing it, but every time the interpretations themselves are labelled, and can be weighed and disagreed with and if necessary discounted; and the aim remains, through all the never-ending evolutionary tussling, to have one picture, which is what history knows.

  I wasn’t doing that. I was creating, as it were, synthetic subjects to do my knowing. I was knitting together structures of feeling the reader could see, and share, which would not have been visible or palpable, quite, to any of the participants at the time. I was constructing stories that only made sense by angling the historical scenery to face outward along exactly the right sight-lines, whether or not, in the actual past, there had happened to be anyone placed at the focal point where the lines crossed, to see my artful effect. In the chapter about the beginnings of mobile phones in the UK in Backroom Boys, for example, and the engineers of the infant Vodafone radio-planning the urban and rural landscapes of Thatcher’s Britain, I had coaxed and tweaked the technical explanations of how radio planning worked to summon the vision of a wave-swept invisible ocean overhead with the familiar A-roads and Little Chefs as its sea floor; this in turn letting me bring in the magic island of The Tempest, and to support the mood when I introduced Caliban’s line ‘The isle is full of noises’ as an enchanted image for mobile chatter; this in turn putting the mobile-phone chapter of the book into unifying conversation with the opening chapter, about British rocket engineers of the 1960s launching satellites called Ariel and Prospero. Technology was deliberately blurred into magic, Shakespeare deployed as connective emotional tissue for British technology, even though the radio planners, so far as I knew, never thought in Shakespearean terms at all. (The rocket engineers did. They called the extra-fat version of one of their missiles ‘Falstaff’.)

  I was still proud of how these effects worked as art, but increasingly discontented with how they worked as history.

  And I began to see advantages in going from an implicitly fictive process to an explicit one. It struck me, suddenly, that the way a novel attributes knowledge is actually an analogy for the way that scholarly history does it. Unless the viewpoint is omniscient, which is rare, all knowledge in a novel is owned knowledge. It is explicitly someone’s. A novel deals, as E.M. Forster put it, in ‘intermittent knowledge’; it sums knowledge by creating an interference pattern in which different, limited points of view overlap, contrast, and in an aesthetic sense complete each other. In other words, there is still a means to create an emergent effect, a synthesis not limited to the perceptions of any individual actor – but all the perceptions belong to individual actors. True, I thought, the actors would be imaginary, but the trade-off seemed fair. What I lost in direct non-fictional purchase on the world I would gain in a more responsible, therefore truthful, epistemology, and in a more unblurred line between real and not-real.

  So the form of Red Plenty was two things simultaneously, for me. It was a pragmatic solution to a research problem; and at the same time it was a move towards the honesty of making characters, explicitly, the knowers in my work. Writing it the way I did enabled me to do far more justice to what I wanted to be my theme, which was always ideas in lives, muddy, murky, ambiguous, this-worldly, anti-abstract. I could deal with mathematical economics, again, as it was perceived, but now with the perceptions, the emotions, grounded; given time and place and setting, and filtered through Soviet souls one by one.

  (2011)

  IDOLS OF THE MARKETPLACE

  When Francis Bacon was sketching out the foundations for experimental science 400 years ago, he drew up a list of the kinds of mistakes and confusions that were going to get in the way. ‘Idols’, he called them, after the statues and images of strange gods that the Bible tells you you must not worship, because he thought that, like a golden effigy in a heathen temple, these were ideas that misled people about how the world worked, that encouraged people to see qualities in things that weren’t really there. Probably, at the back of his mind, he had the famous denunciation of idols in the Book of Psalms. Psalm 115: ‘Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not.’ In other words, they may loo
k impressive, they may look as if they have power, but everything they have we actually gave them ourselves. The mouths and eyes are only dents in the metal, made by our own hands. This seemed to Bacon to capture something important about the perennial human tendency to mix up our own characteristics and the world’s. His list of modern idols (modern for 1600) included the Idols of the Tribe – things we believe because the whole human species is set up that way; the Idols of the Den – things we believe because our individual temperament leads us to; and the Idols of the Theatre, which are the things we believe because they’re the flimflam that happens to be live on stage in our culture just now. But, he said, ‘the Idols of the Marketplace are the most troublesome of all, namely those which have entwined themselves round our understanding from the association of words and names’. It was language that was the very biggest problem, with its seductive network of connections between things, and echoes, and metaphors, and even rhymes, all linking the world up obtrusively as you tried to see what was really there; all telling you loud stories about the world while you tried to listen to the quiet facts about objects as they were in themselves. There you were, trying to do some botany, trying to have a careful look at a sample of Rosa damascena, wondering how the ingenious Turks and Syrians extracted attar of roses from its petals – and suddenly, give or take a century or two, in came Mr Burns, pointing out that his love was like a red, red rose, and then Mr Blake, claiming that an invisible worm, that flies in the night, in the howling storm, had found out its bed of crimson joy. Sex, death, corruption, the texture of silk sheets: before you knew it, you were completely entwined with stuff that had nothing to do with the flower in front of you. Stuff that made thinking clearly about it difficult, since the words seemed to have a logic of their own, running at cross-purposes to real observation and deduction.