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INTRODUCTION BY BEN FOUNTAIN
INTRODUCTION
Ben Fountain
Here’s a proposition: It all depends on language. Society, civilization, progress, whatever you want to call it: the entire project depends on the quality of our thought and expression, our ability to put words to the reality of a thing. This is a rare and even radical act in an age where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell something—a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda, an alleged means to a more beautiful version of ourselves. Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb out and dumb down. To call it by another name: the language of advertising.
But what’s wrong with being, as the Pink Floyd song says, “comfortably numb”? Nothing, maybe, until life hits us with something real, and maybe it’s in the existential moments of our lives that we most fully realize how false most of modern discourse is, when we’re faced with the kinds of crises that lead us to ask, Why?, and that have no clear answer. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” These lines are from a poem
by William Carlos Williams, who, in addition to being one of the finest poets this country has produced, was a family doctor who delivered thousands of babies, dealt with death in a hundred forms. Williams had a close working relationship with the most basic realities of human life, and here he is staking a claim to poetry’s fundamental usefulness. What an outrageous proposition for this day and age, that poems are useful, even necessary—that they might actually save lives. But maybe not so outrageous when you consider that it’s the job of writers to see things as they truly are; to find the language that describes human experience fully, without sentimentality, or a political agenda, or a wish to please the reader. Keeping the language accurate, vital, true to all the mystery and challenge of reality, that’s the job of writers, and short of the immediate saving of lives—Dr. Williams’s other job—I can think of no work that’s more important. Congratulations to the Whiting Award winners of 2016. Keep writing as though the fate of the world depends on you. Because it does.
BEN FOUNTAIN has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, an O. Henry Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes, among other honors and awards. He is the author of the collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award. He and his family live in Dallas, Texas. He won a Whiting Award for fiction in 2007.
