The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (10 page)

We have said that Helen’s surprise at the arrival of the Achaians is to be, in the fiction we are making up, an implied discovery from which springs, for the reader and perhaps for
Helen, some affirmation or recognition of a value. The question we have not quite answered is: How does the writer’s working out of plot lead him to Helen’s discovery and his own discovery of what he means? Having analyzed what he must dramatically show to make his climax (her surprise and implied recognition) meaningful and convincing, the writer introduces fictional elements each of which carries its burden of meaning. Like any good liar, the writer makes up the most convincing explanations he can think of for why the things that did not really happen might have happened. He toys with various theories of why the Achaians might have behaved as they do—for example, the possibility that, to a man, they are greedy for the treasures of Troy and glad to use any excuse to go after them, or the possibility that they are moved to their action by the extraordinary charisma of Menelaos, or the possibility (absurd but traditional) that they are aroused to action by Helen’s beauty. Taken singly, none of these possible explanations will wash, because what they say about reality (what they “mean”) does not strike us as true. Our experience of humanity makes it hard for us to believe that
that
many Achaians (or members of any other group) could be so strongly motivated by greed, though some might join in for that reason; we cannot believe in charisma so powerful it could move that many kings, each of whom must have his own concerns and troubles; and as for Helen’s beauty, we cannot help feeling that no young woman’s beauty can to that degree excel the beauty of all other young women, including some who are sure to say, “Miklos, don’t go! Think of the children!” The Achaian code of honor, on the other hand—especially when combined with such lesser motivations as greed (which the legend gives us in Agamemnon at his weaker moments), Menelaos’ charisma, and Helen’s beauty—offers persuasive cause. By the same process, the writer figures out why the Trojans do what they do and why Helen does not guess what she should have guessed.

Since Helen, in this story, is the central character, her nature
and motivation will be of special importance to the convincingness of the lie. One possible choice, it might seem at first glance, is to make her an innocent victim. Sheltered and coddled, brought up among women, married in her girlhood to mighty Menelaos, she has no real knowledge of her hard-working, hard-fighting kinsmen, their fanatical loyalty to one another, and their puritanical code. Though all these qualities might prove useful to the writer, the decision to make her a victim will be disastrous. No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others. (Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners.) We care how things turn out because the character cares—our interest comes from empathy—and though we may know more than the character knows, anticipating dangers the character cannot see, we understand and to some degree sympathize with the character’s desire, approving what the character approves (what the character values), even if we sense that the character’s ideal is impractical or insufficient. Thus though we can see at a glance that Captain Ahab is a madman, we affirm his furious hunger to know the truth, so much so that we find ourselves caught up, like the crew of the
Pequod
, in his lunatic quest. And thus though we know in our bones that the theory of Raskolnikov is wrong, we share his sense of outrage at the injustice of things and become accessories in his murder of the cynical and cruel old pawnbrokeress. If we’re bored by the debauched focal characters of the Marquis de Sade, on the other hand, the reason is that we find their values and goals repugnant, their world view too stupid (threatening?) to hold our interest.

Helen, then, must bring her trouble on herself, through the active pursuit of some goal we believe not wrong-headed. The nobler the goal, the more interesting the story. We need not elaborate in detail here the possibilities—her wish, as a child of Zeus, for more intelligent and sophisticated company, her horror
at the ethnocentricity of the Greeks, her desire for greater dignity and independence, and so on. Whatever the writer’s choice for the motivation of Helen, he must think out the implications of her motive, its relationship with the differing community values of the Trojans and the Achaians, and its origins. We may fully realize the implications of her motive only at the moment of recognition, the climax—how (for example) her desire for independence is caught in the crossfire of conflicting community values—but long before that moment we must be shown clearly, not just told, what her driving motive is. To be shown, we must be shown by action; the proof must appear in plot. We must be shown the relationship between Helen’s ideal and the functional beliefs of Trojans, on one side, Achaians, on the other, and this too must appear in plot. Some action of Helen’s might elicit one reaction from Menelaos, another from Paris, early in the story, and something in the nature of Helen’s character, or something in the nature of that early event, should give us clues as to why Helen underestimates Menelaos and the Achaians and perhaps overestimates her potential security with Paris and the Trojans. Finally, if Helen’s motive is to be perfectly convincing, we must be shown its origins; and that too means plot. She might remember from her early childhood, for example, some event involving a beloved nurse, once a queen, now a slave—an event that helped to shape Helen’s defiant and independent character. All these events, the authenticating proofs for every significant element of the story, the writer must weave into a smoothly flowing, inevitable-seeming plot.

Having done all this, the writer is not quite at the end of his troubles. Every proof the writer thinks up in support of the story’s larger elements will have its own implications and exert its own subtle pressure on the story. The old slave he invented in support of Helen’s character, if she’s to do the work required of her (motivate Helen), must be a vivid and interesting character; otherwise we cannot understand why her influence should be so powerful. But once a vivid and interesting character has
been introduced, he or she cannot simply be dropped, forgotten henceforward. Once the character is gone—hanged, let us say—we miss the character; or, to put it another way, we expect the character’s return, at least in Helen’s memory. It will not be sufficient, the writer will find, simply to mention the old slave’s name from time to time. Though her work for the story is done, she must come back, at least briefly, and the question is: What is she to do when she comes back? She can’t just stand there. Forced by the necessity of his story to bring her back and provide her with some action, however brief, the writer is forced to think up some further meaning for the character (it may help to ask, in this case, how the slave’s defiant independence differs from Helen’s). It is partly in this way that the fictional process forces the writer to say more than he thought he could; that is, to make discoveries.

At some point the writer stops planning and starts writing, fleshing out the skeleton that is his plan. Here too he is partly in control of and partly controlled by the fictional process. Again and again, in the process of writing, he will find himself forced to new discoveries. He must create, stroke by stroke, powerfully convincing characters and settings; he must more and more clearly define for himself what his overall theme or idea is; and he must choose and aesthetically justify his genre and style.

Character is created partly by an assembly of facts, including actions, partly by symbolic association. The first needs no comment. Menelaos is, say, rather older than Helen, a famous warrior, a poor rhetorician, a stern king but one easily moved to tears. These are simply facts. The writer makes up or borrows from legend as many of them as he needs, supports them with appropriate habits and gestures, and shows in the behavior of other characters when they deal with Menelaos that the king is who and what he seems. But often our deepest sense of character comes from symbolic association. We frequently learn about fictional characters as we identify people in the game called Smoke, or sometimes called Essences.

In this game the player who is it thinks of some famous personage living or dead, such as Gandhi, Charles de Gaulle, or Frank Sinatra, then tells the other players, “I am a dead Asian,” “I am a dead European,” “I am a living American,” or whatever. The players, in order, try to guess the name of the personage by asking such questions as “What kind of smoke are you?” “What kind of weather are you?” “What kind of animal are you?” “What part of the human anatomy?” And so on. The player who is it answers not in terms of what the personage might have liked to smoke, what weather he might have preferred, etc., but what the personage would
be
if he were incarnated not as a human being but as, say, a certain kind of smoke—cigarette, cigar, pipe, or, more specifically, Virginia Slims, White Owl, or Prince Albert pipe tobacco. As they ask their questions, the players develop a powerful sense of the personality they’re seeking, and when finally, on the basis of the information they’ve been given, someone makes the right guess, the result is likely to be an orgasmic sense of relief. Obviously the game cannot be played with the intellect; it depends on metaphoric intuition. Yet anyone who plays the game with good players will discover that the metaphors that describe the personage whose name is being sought have, at least cumulatively, a remarkable precision.

In fiction, characterization by symbolic association can be infinitely more precise than it can ever be in the game, partly because (in the final draft) the metaphors are carefully considered, and partly because we are dealing with a consistently good player. The writer may use metaphor directly, as when he tells us Paris is like a dapper, slightly foolish fox, or he may work for symbolic association in subtler ways. He may place a character in the weather that metaphorically expresses his nature, so that unwittingly we make a connection between the gloom of Menelaos and the gloom of the weather at his back. Or the writer may subtly incline us to identify Helen’s character with the elegantly wrought knife with which she carves.

In fleshing out his characters, the writer does not ordinarily
think out every implication of every image he introduces at the time he introduces it. He writes by feel, intuitively, imagining the scene vividly and copying down its most significant details, keeping the fictional dream alive, sometimes writing in a thoughtless white heat of “inspiration,” drawing on his unconscious, trusting his instincts, hoping that when he looks back at it later, in cool objectivity, the scene will work. So he proceeds through the story, event by event, character by character. Each time he sits down for another day’s work, he may read over what he’s done, making minor revisions and getting a run on the passage where he stopped. Different writers have different ways of working, but the likelihood is that the writer’s chief concern, at this stage, is with achieving a totally convincing, efficient, and elegant action. With some exceptions, the details he brings in he brings in for that purpose, none deeper.

But at some point, perhaps when he’s finished his first draft, the writer begins to work in another way. He begins to brood over what he’s written, reading it over and over, patiently, endlessly, letting his mind wander, sometimes to Picasso or the Great Pyramid, sometimes to the possible philosophical implications of Menelaos’ limp (a detail he introduced by impulse, because it seemed right). Reading in this strange way lines he has known by heart for weeks, he discovers odd tics his unconscious has sent up to him, perhaps curious accidental repetitions of imagery: The brooch Helen threw at Menelaos the writer has described, he discovers, with the same phrase he used in describing, much later, the seal on the message for help sent to the Trojans’ allies. Why? he wonders. Just as dreams have meaning, whether or not we can penetrate the meaning, the writer assumes that the accidents in his writing may have significance. He tries various possibilities; for instance, the possibility that Helen’s wish for independence is partly self-delusion. The idea grows on him. He reads through the story again and becomes increasingly convinced. He makes tiny alterations. Helen’s character deepens and flowers. In response, Menelaos slightly
changes; so does Paris. Slowly, painstakingly, with the patience that separates a Beethoven from men of equal genius but less divine stubbornness, the great writer builds the large, rockfirm thought that is his fiction.

What happens in the writer’s development of characters happens also in his development of atmosphere and setting. The megaliths and walls that form the salient feature of the cities of the Achaians, antithetical to the flowered walkways and the topless towers of Ilium, grow more stern, more alarming in their solidity with each revision. Menelaos’ scepter, which he uses as a cane, takes on daemonic force.

Since somewhere near the end of his planning of the fiction, the writer has known pretty clearly what the general idea or
theme
of the work is to be. By theme here we mean not “message”—a word no good writer likes applied to his work—but the general subject, as the theme of an evening of debates may be World-Wide Inflation. Since early on, it has been clear that in our Helen story the theme has had to do with community and individual values. (Another writer, making different choices about plot and character, might well have emerged with a different theme, such as Life versus Art—the Achaians on one side, the Trojans on the other, with Helen in the crossfire as both wife and lover, both keeper of the household goods and fanatical artist when she works at her loom—or the writer might have organized the story in terms of Body and Soul.) Given his choice of community and individual values as his theme, the writer sharpens and clarifies his ideas, or finds out exactly what it is that he must say, testing his beliefs against reality as the story represents it, by examining every element in the story for its possible implications with regard to his theme. He thinks about Menelaos’ scepter, for example. It occurs to him that the scepter might be a legacy from Menelaos’ father, hence a symbol of, among other things, tradition or continuity (the detail might not come up if the theme were Life and Art); and once this has occurred to him he may be led to wonder if tradition is
viewed in the same way or in different ways by the Achaians and the Trojans, and, if the latter, whether Paris might also be given some appropriate symbol, and if so, what? And precisely what does this symbol imply? The thought of tradition brought down from fathers to sons—a thought reinforced by the inevitable prominence of old King Priam, Paris’s father, in the story’s later segments—may lead him to muse on Helen’s lineage, half human, half divine. Granted that the writer would have difficulty believing in the literal rape of Helen’s mother by Zeus, what might the symbolic double heritage mean? What legitimacy can be found for the metaphor?