The epic implications of being human end in more than this: we start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles. – Anatole Broyard
WHAT FICTION NEEDS: MORE READERS, MORE DOGS
Anatole Broyard was an editor of The New York Times The Book Review.
November 13, 1988
Every reviewer or critic thinks he knows what modern fiction needs, but I really do: it needs dogs. I’ve been reading ”The Dog in Art From Rococo to Post-Modernism” by Robert Rosenblum (Abrams), and I saw at once that the dog could well be the salvation of the short story and the novel. The trouble with contemporary fiction is that the public is tired of human beings – they’re too much with us – which is where dogs come in. Everyone responds or ”relates” to dogs.
And they certainly have character. Nobody makes better eye contact than a dog. While eyes used to figure prominently in fiction, you hardly ever read about them now, because everybody’s looking over everybody else’s shoulder. A dog’s eyes meet yours with the kind of devotion you see only in religious painting. Putting aside the rat, the dog is the only surviving social animal. Cats are notoriously post-modern. As we grow increasingly blind to our environment, we could use the dog as a seeing eye.
While spontaneity is scarce in fiction, dogs bristle with it. In the dog cemetery in Paris I saw an elderly couple putting flowers on their dog’s grave. ”He was,” they told me, ”the only thing of spontaneity in our life.” On another gravestone I saw the line ”You alone consoled me for human ingratitude.” Dogs are so steady – you can build on them. You’d have to go back to George Eliot to find a good, steady character in fiction.
Dogs have what Mr. Rosenblum calls ”an unthreatening naivete.” And nobody is more domestic. With the dog’s help, I can imagine the revival of the domestic novel. Dogs are sprightly. Except in Anne Tyler’s books, it’s hard to find sprightly people in serious fiction now. Most characters are more hangdog than dogs. Also, dogs pay attention, they can follow a plot. One of the main problems of modern fiction arises out of the fact that humans can’t follow a plot.
It makes all the difference in fiction if you like the characters, and everybody likes dogs. According to Mr. Rosenblum, just about every people in history except the ancient Hebrews has responded to dogs. I think the reason they didn’t is because the dog has very little natural irony. Yet I’m sure that dogs can be trained or bred to irony. As Mr. Rosenblum points out, dogs are terrific at anxiety, and irony is the next step in the scale of human perturbation. Like the drug-detecting dogs at airports, they can learn to sniff out ironies we haven’t yet dreamed of. Wordsworth even used his dog as a critic of poetry. When he was composing, he would declaim his lines as he walked in the garden, and if there was a false note or jarring word the dog’s hackles would go up and he’d bark.
While people tend to sentimentalize or oversimplify them, dogs are capable of an immense range of modern emotions. Perhaps the most striking example is Goya’s painting called simply ”A Dog,” which shows the head of a dog sinking into a Beckett landscape under a sky thick with disaster. This dog has a pathos that rivals Anna Karenina. Critics have seen in it everything from nuclear devastation to the soul’s ascension.
In his ”Dawn After the Wreck,” J. M. W. Turner depicts ”a wraith of a dog,” the lone survivor after the shipwreck of the modern. Turner’s dog barks at immensity – but without bombast. In fact, dogs have a surprising talent for philosophy. In ”Dog Before the World,” Franz Marc’s metaphysical canine sits on a kind of natural eminence and gazes pensively into a primordial scene.
Joan Miro’s ”Dog Barking at the Moon” is a premonition of Star Wars. There’s even an existential Parisian dog, sculpted by Alberto Giacometti, a dog, Mr. Rosenblum says, that ”might well have belonged to Jean-Paul Sartre.” In his ”Man With Dog,” the British painter Francis Bacon shows the dark side of the dog, so indispensable for modern situations. Here’s the dog as ”spook,” an ”ectoplasmic” dog. Farther than that, no man or dog can go.
Perhaps Rilke said it best in one of his love letters. ”Can you imagine with me,” he wrote, ”how glorious it is, for example, to see into a dog, in passing – into him . . . to ease oneself into the dog exactly at his center, the place out of which he exists as a dog?’