The role of literature--insofar as man is obviously a historical being--is to create a model of a contemporary age which encompasses past and future, a model of the people living in that age as well. (p. 66)
What the Mormon "serious" literateurs never attempted was a model of the people living in our culture in our age. Or, rather, they attempted it, but never from inside: the pose of the implied author (to use Wayne Booth's term) was always skeptical and Outside rather than critical and Inside; it is my belief that no true national literature can ever be written by those whose values derive from outside that national culture.
But I do not write only or even primarily Mormon literature. As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers--also rather an edge culture, though one that transcends national boundaries. I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience, as are we all who ply this trade. There are times when this, too, seems to me to be an edge culture. We with our passionate involvement in bonding together while standing alone, in staving off death while worshiping its irresistible power, in shrugging off interference while meddling in the lives of others, in keeping our secrets while unmasking others', in being the sole unique individual in a world of people who are all alike, we are strange indeed among all the plants and animals, who unlike us know their place, and if they think of God at all do not imagine him to be their kin, or themselves to be his heirs. How dangerous we are, like those kingdoms of the Edge, how likely we are to erupt outward into every unconquered kingdom in the effort to make ourselves the center after all.
What Kenzaburo Oe seeks for Japanese literature, I seek also for American literature, for Mormon literature, for science fiction, for human literature. But it is not always done in the most obvious way. When Shusaku Endo explores the issue of the meaning of life in the face of death, he assembles a cast of characters in contemporary Japan, but the currents of magic, science, and religion are never far from the heart of his story; while I do not pretend to Endo's mastery of storytelling, have I not dealt with the same issues, using the same tools, in this novel? Does Children of the Mind fail as junbungaku solely because of its farfuture setting? Is my novel Lost Boys the only one of my works that can aspire to seriousness, and only to the degree that it is an accurate mirror of life in 1983 in Greensboro, North Carolina?
Dare I amplify the words of a Nobel laureate by suggesting that one can as easily create "a model of a contemporary age which encompasses past and future" through the guise of a novel that thoroughly and faithfully creates a society of another time and place, through whose contrast our contemporary age stands clearly revealed? Or must I declare an anti-junbungaku and attack a statement that I agree with and pretend to diverge from a goal which I am also pursuing? Is Oe's vision of significant literature incomplete? Or am I merely a participant in edge literatures, longing for the center but condemned never to arrive in that peaceful, all-encompassing place?
Perhaps that is why the Stranger and the Other are so important in all my writings (though never at first by plan), even as my stories also affirm the importance of the Member and the Familiar; but is this not, in its own way, a model of our contemporary age, encompassing past and future; am I not, with my own inner contradictions between Inside and Outside, Member and Stranger, a model of the people living in this age? Is there only one setting in which an author can tell true tales?
When I read Shusaku Endo's Deep River, I am an alien in his world. Things that resonate with Japanese readers, who nod and say, "Yes, that's how it was, that's how it is for us," to me are strange, and I say, "Is this how they experienced it? Is this how it feels to them?" Do I not draw as much value from reading a novel that depicts someone else's contemporary age? Do I not learn as much from Austen as from Tyler? From Endo as from Russo? Is the world of the Stranger and Other not as vital to me in understanding what it means to be human as the world I actually live in? Is it not then possible for me to create an invented future milieu that has as much power to speak to contemporary readers as the milieus of those writers whose contemporary
age is of another era or land?
Perhaps all milieus are equally the product of imagination, whether we live in them or make them up. Perhaps to another Japanese, Deep River contains almost as much strangeness as it does to me, because Endo himself is inevitably different from all other Japanese people. Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited; only the trivial details of place names, dates, and famous people distinguish between a madeup universe like the one in Children of the Mind and the "real" universe depicted in Deep River. What Endo achieves and I aspire to are the same: To give the reader an experience of convincing reality, nevertheless piercing the shell of detail and penetrating to the structure of causation and meaning that we always hope for but never actually experience in the real world. Causation and meaning are always imagined, no matter how thoroughly we "create a model of a contemporary age." But if we imagine well, and do not merely "accept" and "discharge" what we are given by the culture around us, do we not create junbungaku?
I do not believe the tools of science fiction are any less suitable to the task of creating junbungaku than the tools of contemporary serious literature, though of course we who wield the tools may fail to use them to best advantage. But in this I may deceive myself; or my own work may be too weak to prove what is possible within our literature. One thing is certain: The community of readers of science fiction includes as many serious thinkers and explorers of reality as any other literary community I have taken part in. If a great literature demands a great audience, the audience is ready and any failure to achieve such a literature must be laid at the writer's door.
So I will continue to attempt to create junbungaku, commenting on contemporary culture in allegorical or symbolic disguise as do all science fiction writers, consciously or not. Whether any of my own works actually achieve the status of true seriousness that Oe points to is for others to decide, for regardless of the quality of the writer, there must also be an audience to receive the work before it has any transformative power; what I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.