The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (7 page)

But what gives a work of fiction aesthetic interest? For the moment let us ignore fiction’s flashy young cousin metafiction, since much of what we say here we must take back when we turn to metafiction.

Nothing in the world is inherently interesting—that is, immediately interesting, and interesting in the same degree, to all human beings. And nothing can be made to be of interest to the reader that was not first of vital concern to the writer. Each writer’s prejudices, tastes, background, and experience tend to limit the kinds of characters, actions, and settings he can honestly care about, since by the nature of our mortality we care about what we know and might possibly lose (or have already lost), dislike that which threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has no visible bearing on our safety or the safety of the people and things we love. Thus no two writers get aesthetic interest from exactly the same materials. Mark Twain, saddled with a cast of characters selected by Henry James, would be quick to maneuver them all into wells. Yet all writers, given adequate technique—technique that communicates—can stir our interest in their special subject matter, since at heart all fiction treats, directly or indirectly, the same thing: our love for people and the world, our aspirations
and fears. The particular characters, actions, and settings are merely instances, variations on the universal theme.

If this is so—it may be useful to notice in passing—then the writer who denies that human beings have free will (the writer who really denies it, not jokingly or ironically pretends to deny it) is one who can write nothing of interest. Aside from a grotesquery that must soon grow repetitious, he cannot endow characters, places, and events with real interest because he can find no real interest in them in the first place. Stripped of free will—robbed of all capacity to fight for those things they aspire to and avoid those things they fear—human beings cease to be of anything more than scientific and sentimental interest. For the writer who views his characters as helpless biological organisms, mere units in a mindless social structure, or cogs in a mechanistic universe, whatever values those characters may hold must necessarily be illusions, since none of the characters can do anything about them, and the usual interplay of value against value that makes for an interesting exploration of theme must here be a cynical and academic exercise.

If it is true that no two writers get aesthetic interest from exactly the same materials, yet true that all writers, given adequate technique, can stir our interest in their special subject matter—since all human beings have the same root experience (we’re born, we suffer, we die, to put it grimly), so that all we need for our sympathy to be roused is that the writer communicate with power and conviction the similarities in his characters’ experience and our own—then it must follow that the first business of the writer must be to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel. However odd, however wildly unfamiliar the fictional world—odd as hog-farming to a fourth-generation Parisian designer, or Wall Street to an unemployed tuba player—we must be drawn into the characters’ world as if we were born to it.

To say this is to take, admittedly, an extreme position. There are limits to the extent to which people of one culture can imaginatively
embrace the experience of people from another, and a more cautious statement of the argument I’m offering would be that the writer should make his characters’ world sensually available to a wide range of readers, knowing in advance that for many readers (Tibetans, perhaps), his characters’ experience will be beyond comprehension. Some writers offer a still narrower view, that it’s sufficient to make one’s characters’ experience vivid for only that small group of readers whose background is similar to that of the characters. Only a writer from some great cultural center like Paris or New York can afford such a position. The man from Wyoming, if he cannot communicate his experience to New York, is unlikely to get published. So the writer who limits his audience so narrowly is likely to seem parochial, if not arrogant, to those readers not born in his city or desperate to improve their status by seeming to have lived there. But every writer must make his own choice.

The basic principle stands in any case, at least so long as fiction contains characters at all: The writer must enable us to see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel; that is, enable us to experience as directly and intensely as possible, though vicariously, what his characters experience. How can the writer best do this?

Some of the answer should by now be obvious. The writer must of necessity write in a style that falls somewhere on the continuum running from objective to subjective; in other words, from the discursive, essayist’s style, in which everything is spelled out as scientifically as possible, to the poetic style, in which nothing (or practically nothing) is explained, everything is evoked, or, to use Henry James’ term, “rendered.” The essayist’s style is by nature slow-moving and laborious, more wide than deep. It tends toward abstraction and precision without much power, as we see instantly when we compare any two descriptions, one discursive, one poetic. In the essayist’s style we might write, for instance, “The man in the doorway was large and apparently ill at ease—so large that he had to stoop a little
and draw in his elbows.” The poetic style can run harder at its effects: “He filled the doorway, awkward as a horse.” Both styles, needless to say, can be of use. One builds its world up slowly and completely, as Tolstoy does in
Anna Karenina
, where very few metaphors or similes appear; the other lights up its imaginary world by lightning flashes. In contemporary fiction the essayist’s style is to some extent out of fashion at the moment, or, rather, is used almost exclusively for purposes of irony and humor, since its labored pace can easily be made to reflect pompousness or ennui. But literary fashion never need be taken very seriously. Styles are born in human attitudes, and since Homer’s time the total range of possible human attitudes has probably not changed much.

Wherever the writer’s style falls on the continuum running from objective to subjective, what counts in conventional fiction must be the vividness and continuity of the fictional dream the words set off in the reader’s mind. The writer’s characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the character’s action is, as sometimes happens, something that came as a surprise to the writer himself. We must understand, and the writer before us must understand, more than we
know
about the character; otherwise neither the writer nor the reader after him could feel confident of the character’s behavior when the character acts freely. So it is that Trollope discovers to his astonishment, or so he tells us, that Mrs. Eustace stole her own diamonds. Though her action was not in his original plan, his deep, intuitive knowledge of the character, developed over time, tells him instantly, the moment he gets his first clue, that the act is indeed one that would flow inevitably and surely out of her being. How is this possible? How can a writer—and after him the reader—have this sure knowledge of some personality that literally does not exist?

Begin with the crucial observation here that, except as creatures of the imagination, characters in fiction do not exist. It is
true that Mrs. Eustace may be based on, say, Trollope’s Aunt Maude. But except in the writing of a biography (and, strictly speaking, not even there), a writer cannot take a character from life. Every slightest change the writer makes in the character’s background and experience must have subtle repercussions. I am not the same person I would have been if my father had been rich, or had owned elephants. Trollope’s Aunt Maude can no longer remain perfectly herself once she’s married to Mr. Eustace. Subtle details change characters’ lives in ways too complex for the conscious mind to grasp, though we nevertheless grasp them. Thus plot not only changes but creates character: By our actions we discover what we really believe and, simultaneously, reveal ourselves to others. And setting influences both character and plot: One cannot do in a thunderstorm what one does on a hot day in Jordan. (One’s camel slips, or, from homesickness, refuses to budge; so the assassin goes uncaught, the President is shot, the world is again plunged into war.) As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so in fiction every element has effect on every other, so that to change a character’s name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder under her feet.

Thus it appears that to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel—to draw us into the characters’ world as if we were born to it—the writer must do more than simply make up characters and then somehow explain and authenticate them (giving them the right kinds of motorcycles and beards, exactly the right memories and jargon). He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot; or, as Coleridge puts it, he must copy, with his finite mind, the process of the infinite “I AM.”

We are now in a position to look at the problem of aesthetic
interest in a new light. First, and least important, we’re in a position to give tentative answers to those “innovative fictionists,” as they call themselves, who feel impatient with traditional expectations of character and plot. Character, these writers sometimes claim, is a part of the traditional novel’s unnecessary baggage and ought to be discarded. The novel, they argue—and they would say the same of shorter kinds of fiction—once served purposes we can now perceive to be nonessential to its nature. For instance, in an age when travel was travail, when photographs and movies were not yet invented, and sociological studies were unheard of, it was the novelist who told us what life was like in Venice or New Orleans. He described the architecture, climate, and vegetation, told us of the history and sociology of the place; in short, made us feel as if we’d been there. Now we can go there, or get specialized books and picture postcards. Similarly the novelist told us about character, relating people’s attitudes and actions to the customs and climate from which they spring, or delving into the mysteries now demystified by psychology and neurology. By the old, now outmoded theory, they explain, fiction was a means of discovering or revealing how things happen in the world. We read of a woman in Chicago who threw her father out the window of her sixth-floor apartment. “How in the world could such a terrible thing have come about?” we exclaim, and the novelist’s business is to show us, step by step, what happened. That theory of fiction was exploded the day Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story that has an end but no beginning or middle; hence its success is a flat refutation of Aristotle’s theory that what is central to fiction is
energeia
; that is, “the actualization of the potential which exists in character and situation.” Poe frees Kafka to write: “One day Gregor Samsa awoke to discover that he had been changed into a large cockroach.” Who knows how or why? Who cares? By the selection and arrangement of the materials of his fiction, the writer gives us not the truth about the world and how things come about but an image of himself, “a portrait
of the artist”—or perhaps nothing more than an interesting construction, an object for our study and amusement.

This view, now common, has important virtues. It encourages the writer to think in new ways, broadening the fictional experience. If Lois Lane and Superman were to wander into a scene by Henry James, what would they think of it and how would they affect it? The answer does not matter—it cannot properly be called correct or incorrect—it is merely interesting. If the state of California were to sink into the sea, how would daily life be changed in Brooklyn? Again, if plot is no longer important (since its justification and central interest is its revelation of the potential in character and situation), why should fiction have profluence—our sense, as we read, that we’re “getting somewhere”? If the portrait of the artist is all that really counts, why not an artist who simply chats with us, plays with us, perhaps even insults us, creating not an action we can follow to its end but a small, highly flavored imitation of Eternity? The longer we think along these lines, the more interesting the aesthetic possibilities become. If the artist’s revelation of himself is his style—not just his style in choosing words and phrases, sentence rhythms and ways of building paragraphs (or destroying the whole idea of the phrase, the sentence, the paragraph), but also his style in choosing details from reality or dream; elements, that is, of character and setting—what happens, in terms of aesthetic interest, if the writer offers not his own materials but someone else’s? Thus Borges gives us the image of a brilliant modern writer whose great opus is, word for word, Cervantes’
Don Quixote
, and Donald Barthelme, in his short story “Paraguay,” borrows (and footnotes) a landscape description that in fact has to do not with Paraguay but with Tibet.

These are of course the arguments raised against conventional fiction by people more interested in metafiction. None of the arguments against conventional fiction will hold, and looking closely at conventional fiction’s defense will help us see clearly what the interest and “truth” in conventional fiction are.
Once we have fiction’s nature clear, we can better appreciate the special interest of metafiction, a subject to which we will turn in the next chapter.

The traditionalist answer to the “innovative fictionist’s” general line of argument might go like this: Innovative fictions of the kind just discussed are not inherently wrong-headed, merely unserious. Whatever interest or value they have they derive from their contrast with “traditional”—that is, “conventional” or “normal”—fiction. So long as conventional fiction remains adequate and worthwhile, innovative fictions are literary stunts. They have a kind of interest, as intellectual toys, but they engage us only for the moment. Though traditional serious fiction may also be play, since it deeply involves us with the troubles of characters who do not in fact exist, the play in serious traditional fiction bears on life, not just art. As we play at compassion, weeping for Little Nell or Ophelia, we exercise faculties we know to be vitally important in real life. If the assembly of made-up materials in a fiction creates a portrait of the artist, the importance of the portrait is not that it tells us what the artist looks like but that it provides us with a focus, an aperture, a medium (as in a séance) for seeing things beyond and more important than the artist. In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world. Granted, no two artists reveal to us exactly the same world, just as no two windows do; and granted, moreover, since artists are human and therefore limited, some dedicated and serious artists may be windows smudged by dirt, others may distort like blistered and warped panes, still others may be stained glass. But the world they frame is the world that is really out there (or in here: Insofar as human nature is everywhere the same, it makes no difference). A powerful part of our interest as we read great literature is our sense that we’re “onto something.” And part of our boredom when we read books in which the vision of life seems paltry-minded is our sense that we are not.