Disappearing Stars & Fake Realism

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As a child I used to spend hours gazing up at the night sky playing a game I called Disappearing Stars. Lying out in the backyard, I’d keep my gaze “soft” and unfocused, taking in the gestalt of the night sky. A furze of stars bloomed across my vision. But the minute I singled out a sequin and focused my vision, the star would magically disappear. If I let my gaze drift to the side, instead focusing on the darkness beside the missing star, the star would wink shyly back into being as if embarrassed by being directly engaged. It reminded me of trying to pick up one of the many cats that held court in my family home. You couldn’t approach them directly or they would sense your desire and scamper out of reach. You had to pretend disinterest and walk behind them, pointedly looking in the other direction, finally stooping to pick them up while still refusing to look at them. You must approach cats from behind, stars from the side. Children’s logic. But perhaps some of the most enduring and extrapolatable knowledges I’ve acquired in my life.

In adulthood, I learned that the Disappearing Stars phenomenon is due to the presence of two different cells in the retina of our eyes: cones and rods. Cones see color and they see best with full light. Rods perceive no color but work best in dim settings. Cones are daylight vision, centered in the middle of our eyes. While rods live in our peripheral vision and are most useful in dark settings, picking up very little light. Your rods, skilled at night vision, pick up the star in your peripheral vision, but your central vision cones don’t function as well in darkness. When you focus your direct vision on a star, your cones fail.

This past December having handed in the final draft of my memoir on disability and ecology to my publisher, I found myself super-saturated with non-fiction. For years I had devoured scientific papers, ecological theory, dry historical tomes, philosophy, and feminist memoir as I researched and wrote my own non-fiction. But as the winter solstice stole the light, my cones began to fail, and I couldn’t see much anymore. I found myself re-reading the same paragraph in a popular science book again and again, unable to absorb in the basic information. I knew it was time to change direction and remind myself of why I write. I write because I love to read. I needed to read those stories and books that had initially seeded that love. After a long break, I needed to return to fiction.

Like many young people who attend liberal arts colleges, I went through the literary brainwashing that often happens in the pursuit of a literature degree. I read many fantastic books and poem. My professors exposed me to art that radically altered my creative makeup. But I was also was inculcated with the belief that popular fiction, fantasy, and romance are lowbrow and of a diminished nutritional content. The assumption was that the more immediately popular and accessible your work, the more likely it was not of literary value. Those books weren’t “real”. They were junk food escapism.

It was only as I faced my own mortality and psychological anguish in the months leading up to my graduation, that I began the necessary deprogramming that led me to finally ask the question, “What books actually keep me alive though? What stories keep other people alive?”

They were rarely if ever the anorexic novellas written in self-consciously experimental prose. They were mostly the overblown fantasy epics. The soaring love stories. The space operas populated with flawed heroes and nonhuman intelligences. Were those stories – the fantasy and sci-fi stories – really less true, less nutritious than the dry and ironical realism of the literary elite?

This winter as I decided to read for pleasure again –forbidding the use of my usual annotation pen and notebook that accompany research and non-fiction reads – I bought stacks and stacks of books.

I started with the literary fiction. The bright-neon colored millennial literary fiction books that every magazine and literary establishment has given the golden kiss. The books you want to take a picture of sitting on your coffee table next to your homemade cappuccino. The books that are a kind of social media badge of class and education. I read four. Then five. Then ten. I read them often in less than a day. The authors were MFA crowned. Often friends with each other. From the same NYC clique. The protagonists were disaffected millennials living out low-stakes lives. Three or four characters had affairs, resented each other, and performed “realness” by virtue of their despicability, their porn addictions, their mediocrity. There are never any plants or trees or animals in these slender volumes. Nature – or to be more honest the entire world – hardly features in these books except as the decoration of mostly urban and self-consciously ironic drudgery. The sentence structure is all the same. The weird and selfish female protagonist is supposed to be a revolutionary because she is UNLIKABLE. The stories are real because they don’t go anywhere. The endings are usually smugly abrupt.

I was going through a book a day and I was starving. Was this really the “nourishing” real literature? I felt more and more emotionally and psychologically malnourished as I read these popular and acclaimed literary books. Although to call them books felt more and more inaccurate. They were never more than 200 pages double-spaced. Often much, much shorter. They were overblown New Yorker shorter stories given a hard-cover and a six-figure book deal. Were people really spending five years worrying over every sentence in one of these books that didn’t contain a single tree or animal or piece of durable wisdom? As someone faced with mortality and deeply aware of our current climatological peril, I wanted to shout at these authors “We don’t have enough time for this! Write faster and bigger. Write me something that keeps me alive!”

Thankfully, I quickly transitioned back to more nourishing fare. Fantasy and science fiction and romance. I went to a local Barnes & Noble, initially embarrassed, wearing a baseball cap disguise, buying a bag full of Booktok sensations and bestsellers and “smut”.

Yes, there were some bad books. And I learned quite a bit from them. They were books that meant something to a lot of people. I couldn’t be smug. I had to ask why they worked for other people? And then there were amazing books. Books that were full meals that left me feeling stronger and more able to continue through what has been a very personally trying time.

These books were not set in New York City with a cast of “relatable” disenchanted millennials. They were not “real”. Most often they were set on Mars or in what Ursula K. Le Guin calls the generalized otherworld of fantasy: “Elfland”. They were set in other worlds and yet they struck me as being infinitely MORE real than most of what was passing as realist fiction.

It was in those books that I started to recognize myself. These were people and worlds that took stories and feelings and pain seriously again. That didn’t make me feel like a hollow shell. There were protagonists who were really grappling with morality, with illness, with violence, with disempowerment. They grappled with embodiment and desire. It was in romantasy that I finally remembered how revolutionary female desire can be when it is articulated without the anorexic strictures of “good literature”.

Give me smut. Give me life force. Not the same “angry, disaffected anti-hero female protagonist” of an MFA novella. Give me complex, thousand-page ecologies not anemic houseplant novellas.  

I thought again of the Disappearing Stars. What if when we look “directly” at our lives, our lives disappear.

Fantasy and Sci-Fi approach from the rods, from the periphery. And I think because they take this oblique approach, they often get much closer to The Real than our cone-centered realism gets.

What is more real? A novel with no plants, no ecological texture or consideration, and three depressed imaginary twenty-somethings having bad sex? Or an epic story of heroism and animism set in a world with talking trees and many different diverse characters? Rods or cones? Star or no stars?

Ursula K. Le Guin calls this issue one of Fake Realism. In her famous essay “Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” she writes, “That all these genres are sterile, hopelessly sterile, is a reassurance to them…If they were genuinely realistic which is to say genuinely imagined and imaginative, he would be afraid of them. Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market.” Later in her acceptance of National Book Award, she added, “I think that perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the realities of our existence.”

We live in a moment when stories about good and evil and dragons and space travel may be a better way of “seeing” the stars than trying to stare directly at them.

How do we write about “hyper-objects” like climate change and fascism and extinction and capitalism? We must use our rods – our imaginative peripheral vision.

The issues we face exceed our sensory apparatus. They are too big for our direct vision. We must instead approach them like cats – like stars – from the side and from behind.

We must approach them with fantastical worlds wild and nourishing enough to possible gestate a future where the world is still habitable, still home to cats and human eyes that can see stars.

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It has been such a hard time. I don’t feel up to sharing the specifics yet…mainly because I don’t have a lot of answers. But this community on Substack is very practically keeping me alive. You are my life raft. My soil. My sunlight. You are helping me pay for the expensive medicine and doctors that my insurance does not cover. And your support and love keep me going more than anything.

I love you all so so much.