Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Mathews

Mathews is picking a fight with the default worship of “plot” and “character” as the holy trinity of serious fiction. By privileging “situations,” he’s arguing that what matters isn’t the tidy arc of events or the psychological dossier of a protagonist, but the charged arrangement of constraints: who’s stuck where, under what rules, with what pressures closing in. A situation is a machine. Put people in it and watch what the machine does.

That preference makes sense in the context Mathews comes from: the Oulipo-adjacent world where form isn’t decoration but an engine for meaning. Situations are where constraint becomes legible. They also let a writer dodge the sentimental prestige of “deep character,” the idea that interiority is automatically truth. Mathews’ fiction often treats identity as something produced by circumstance and language, not excavated like buried treasure. The subtext is mildly heretical: character is less a stable essence than a set of behaviors squeezed out by conditions.

There’s also a cultural critique tucked in. Plot can be a coercive promise - keep reading, everything will add up. Character can be a brand - a consistent self the market can recognize. “Situation” resists both. It leans into contingency, awkwardness, the social and material facts that don’t resolve into catharsis. In Mathews’ hands, that’s not an anti-narrative pose; it’s a demand for a different kind of attention: stop asking what the story is “about” and start noticing the pressure systems that make people speak, lie, improvise, or collapse.