Preface

Burning Down the House addresses a set of subjects of urgent concern to me, issues that in the broadest sense have to do with the imagination’s grip on daily life and how one lives in the pressure of that grip. The essays return to the scene of writing as a location where some of these matters can be addressed, and where the pressure is greatest. Most of the essays do their best to visit the interesting wayward locales where our public lives and our private imaginings intersect: funeral homes, sites of chemical spills, summer backyard parties, press conferences. Looking them over, I find that the essays have a slightly comic desperation, as if the house of the imagination had to be burned down in order for its contents to be revealed and its foundations made visible. Of course the house, as a product of the imagination, continues to stand.

We often pretend, these days, that public lying by politicians has no effect on the stories we tell each other, but it does; or that our obsession with data processing has no relevance to violence in movies, but it might. In almost every essay in this book I have tried to set forth a widespread belief or practice—the belief in Hell, for example, or the recent, mania for happy endings and insight—as a precondition to the way in which storytellers (and that means almost all of us) come up with narratives and then tell them. Most of the topics arose from questions that seemed to me both social and literary, both obvious and in some sense unanswerable: Why have we come to think that most of our important memories must be traumatic? What has happened, in this century, to the way in which we think about inanimate objects?

I had hoped that by taking on some of these huge subjects, these contemporary patterns of thought, I could say something about what might be called the storytelling of everyday life. The habit of narrative is unceasing. We understand our lives, or try to, by the stories we tell.
These essays, as a result, are hybrid or perhaps mongrel literary productions. They are not academic essays, nor are they how-to guides; they are not even appreciations or readings of texts. Each one of them was originally written as a lecture for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College—most of them have been substantially rewritten—but my intention was never to give any kind of direct advice. I hoped the talks would stimulate the listener to think about a social and literary matter in a way that would be naggingly helpful. I hoped, as I think most critics hope, to stimulate the audience—to provide, as Donald Barthelme once called it, “unhealthy mental excitement.”

The reader may notice that one of the means I employed to create such excitement was the wild claim. There are a number of wild claims here, an occasional manic swing toward the large statement. Most of them are meant to be playful rather than ponderous, but they were intended to set fire to the house. Gertrude Stein talks about “the excitement of unsubstantiated generalities.” Yes, exactly. She herself was a great creator of such generalities: There is always something strange about the children of French notaries… Americans are more interested in you than in the work you have done but they would not be interested in you at all if you had not done the work you have done. Etc.

The topics for these excursions arose from questions or discussions that my students and friends have shared with me. Sometimes they simply arose from the headlines. The counterpointed characterization essay began with a question that my friend Miles Harvey asked me during a class break. The question was, “Whatever happened to the antagonist? There are no antagonists in the stories we write.” The stillness essay grew out of my fascination with the data-nausea, and it was inspired by a single phrase from James Agee that had stuck in my head for years: “expressive air-pockets of dead silence.” The melodrama essay developed from my puzzled interest in the revival, if you could call it that, of Satan and of Hell.

The incendiary and cataclysmic titles for these essays arrived on the mental scene, as such things sometimes do, while I was driving and listening to the radio. In the midst of a thirty-minute set of songs, Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” came on. The car’s right front speaker wasn’t working, so that David Byrne’s vehemently blank singing was virtually unaccompanied, except by an audio-fuzz background.

Something about the song—its title, its flashes of hot-and-cold abstractedness, its ability to sound like an anthem and like nonsense at the same time—keeps in close to the surfaces of memory. In the words of the novelist and critic Fred Pfeil, the pleasures announced by “Burning Down the House” will be “the bliss of escaping from codification and definition altogether, by dispersing and scattering oneself through the codes….”

In these essays I wanted to escape from the definitions without necessarily creating new ones. Setting fire to something can sometimes be a wonderfully creative act, provided that the fire continues to burn.

From Burning Down the House, Expanded Edition by Charles Baxter, © 2008. All rights reserved.