The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (11 page)

Finally, the writer must find for his story what seem to him the most appropriate genre and style. Here too his choices have implications. In origin, the story of Helen is of course epic—a dead form. What happens if, throwing caution to the winds, the writer decides to revive it? As practiced by Homer, the epic was a queer sort of serious yarn: The poet tells, often, of impossible things and makes no bones about the fact of their impossibility; yet he does not, like the yarn-spinner, wink at us, encouraging us to enjoy the lie for the cunning and wit of the liar. Neither does he, like a tale narrator, make a point of distancing his story in time and space, or of persuading us by tone and atmosphere that we should suspend disbelief. When human beings are involved (Achilles’ talking horses warning him of his death), the poet speaks seriously. We must read the event as expressionistic truth, as when Gregor Samsa woke up and discovered himself changed to a cockroach. When the gods are involved, the poet may speak in a way more troublesome to our modern mind-set. For Homer and his audience, the gods are simply, somehow, outside forces that can daemonically enter or otherwise act on human beings, influencing their lives. (Some of Homer’s gods have traditional names like Zeus; others have names like Confusion.) Since the way in which the gods work can never be known, Homer makes up humanlike behavior for them, sometimes apologizes by comedy for the artifice, yet means what he
says. When divine wisdom gives way to some other force, it is
as if
Hera has put Zeus to sleep by a sexual seduction. The event is comic, the effect partly tragic; and to make things more confusing, these same divine artifices can feel sorrow we respect, not at all the comic wailing of clowns. Though on reflection we may understand Homer’s method and reconstruct the ancient mindset, I think we must say that we simply cannot think like that. To revive the epic, the modern writer must commit himself to irony and a detached, self-conscious objectivity foreign to the original epic style. He cannot write an epic but only an earnest parody that works chiefly as a study of the artistic mind or as a comment on art by art. Perhaps this parodic revival of the genre might work for the writer who has chosen to treat the Helen story as a fictional exploration of Life versus Art, but if the writer’s theme is private and community values, the revival of epic form seems fruitless.

What happens if he chooses to tell the story as a tale? The inherent dignity and solemnity of the form would obviously be suitable to the content of the story, and at first glance the materials seem easily adaptable to the tale’s basic rules. The setting of a tale is customarily remote in either time or space or both and is presented with a mixture of vagueness and generality on one hand and with meticulously exact detail on the other. The writer’s care in supplying exact detail encourages credence; and the remoteness, together with the vagueness and generality, tends to prevent the reader from considering the reality or unreality of the setting. The landscape of a tale is of a kind likely to inspire the reader’s wonder—lonely moors, sunny meadows, wild mountains, dark forests, desolate seacoasts—and both natural and man-made features of the setting are frequently of great age, suggesting a past charged with traditions and values that impose themselves on the will of the characters.

Tale characters are designed to be convincing without suggesting comparison with real people. They behave in recognizably human ways, but they may be supernatural beings; and
even when they seem to be in most respects like ordinary men and women, they tend to be a little larger than life and may possess extraordinary powers. Like the settings in the tale, the characters usually have a certain remoteness. They may be counts, kings, knights, rich merchants, peasants, cobblers. Often they are entirely evil or entirely good (the superlative is common in the tale—“the richest,” “the fairest,” “the oldest,” “the wisest”). Although characters may be complex, the details of their complexity are often blurred, as if by time. Only the significant aspects are retained in the narrator’s memory, and often the narrator, it is clear, has the story at second hand, perhaps by ancient oral tradition. The characters’ actions—the plot of the tale—may or may not obey the laws of cause and effect operative in the actual world, but even when they do not, they seem natural because of their psychological or poetic truth. The reality of the world of the tale, in other words, is that of a moral universe. What ought to happen, possible or not, does happen.

For the Helen story we’ve been working out, much in the genre of the tale seems promising. The supernatural elements in the Helen tradition fit naturally with tale presentation, though the essential gothicism of the genre might incline us to treat Greek gods and goddesses as rather like witches; the traditional effect of the story’s main characters, all larger than life, is appropriate for the genre; and the tale’s customary emphasis on oldness and tradition might naturally spring interesting ideas and developments not guessed in advance by the writer. Yet we notice certain problems that may in the end prove insurmountable. The principle of causality in a tale is psychological and morally expressionistic, or poetic: It should not be the Achaians who come to fill Helen with surprise—forces outside her—but a necessary doom arising from her own psychology, some suppressed truth that at last rises to take revenge. If we say that Helen left her people from vanity, as the “fairest of all the Achaians,” then the claims of a tale version of the Helen story might be something like this: She is told that a thousand
Achaian ships have been sighted, and when she flies out, terrified, to look, she sees that they are all filled with armed women who look exactly like herself. The possibilities in this are perhaps interesting and might encourage the writer to work back from the climax to fill in the logical necessities of this different conclusion; but here we encounter the second large problem in presenting the story of Helen as a tale.

Though it’s partly a matter of the individual writer’s intuition and taste, it may seem that the new ending clashes too noticeably with the Greek story as we know it. Indeed, the whole tone of the tale genre clashes rather fiercely with our feelings about Greece and Troy. Though the war between the two took place long ago and in a far-away country, it does not feel to us remote in time and space. One might conceivably write a tale in which Queen Elizabeth and King Henry (any King Henry) have parts as minor characters; one might possibly write a tale about Napoleon and Josephine; or one might write a tale including Charlemagne—as Calvino does in
The Nonexistent Knight
(not a pure tale but a generic hybrid). But Greek tradition seems somehow too full of sunlight and sharp imagery, too charged with Homeric immediacy, to accommodate the mood of a tale. The only possible solution, perhaps, would be to change the locale and all the characters’ names, placing the arrival of the mysterious ships off the coast of, say, ancient Norway.

How the story would work set as a yarn we need not elaborate. We see at once that a yarn-spinner would have to be introduced; and some implied reason for his spinning of the yarn; and justification would have to be found for telling so serious a story comically. Such adaptations are not impossible, though the project may seem unpromising. The yarn-spinner might be, for once, an old woman, and her purpose in telling the story might be subtly feminist. Making Helen her heroine, a shrewd woman who at every turn comically outwits her male “superiors,” she escapes to freedom. Here, if not sooner, the yarn
might go dark, becoming a generic hybrid (yarn crossed with realistic story): Helen’s ultimate failure, tonally conflicting with all that went before, might give, however subtly, an angry, revolutionary tone to the conclusion. The reader’s indignation at the unhappy ending might be made to release the meaning—or, in this case, implied message—that women, however they may struggle and whatever their brilliance, are always beaten in the end by male chauvinism, a condition that ought not to prevail. If all this were done in too obvious a fashion, the story would of course be boring; but for the writer with sufficient lightness of touch and a gift for authentic humor, the yarn hybrid might have a good deal of subtlety and interest, every detail serving its feminist theme, the relative power of men and women.

Finally, the story might be told more or less realistically, as Gide treats Greek legend in his novella “Theseus.” The story’s supernatural elements, if not suppressed entirely, would in this case be carefully played down, treated as givens and quickly left behind for the story’s main action, already realistic in nature. Since the plot we’ve worked out is inherently one suitable for realistic presentation, we need say no more.

The last major element that may modify the fictional thought is style. In true yarn and tale presentation, style is a given. If the story is presented in the form of a realistic novel, novella, or short story, or in some hybrid cross of realism and something else, the writer’s choice of style becomes a serious consideration. We need not spell out all the various possibilities of stylistic choice (to do so would be impossible in any case); it will be enough simply to suggest that each choice has implications. The writer must decide what point of view he will use, what diction level, what “voice,” what psychic-distance range. If he has Helen tell the story in the first person, he has the problem, at once, of establishing the information Helen herself misses (the nature of the Achaians and the Trojans). In any long fiction, Henry James remarked, use of the first-person point of view is barbaric. James may go too far, but his point is worth
considering. First person locks us in one character’s mind, locks us to one kind of diction throughout, locks out possibilities of going deeply into various characters’ minds, and so forth. What is sometimes called the “third-person-limited point of view,” or “third person subjective,” has some of the same drawbacks for a long piece of fiction. (This point of view is essentially the same as first person except that each “I” is changed to “she” or “Helen.”) The traditional third-person-omniscient point of view, in which the story is told by an unnamed narrator (a persona of the author) who can dip into the mind and thoughts of any character, though he focuses primarily on no more than two or three, gives the writer greatest range and freedom. When he pleases, this narrator can speak in his own voice, filling in necessary background or offering objective observations; yet when the scene is intense and his presence would be intrusive, he can write in the third-person-limited point of view, vanishing for the moment from our consciousness. A related point of view is that of the essayist-narrator, much like the traditional omniscient narrator except that he (or she) has a definite voice and definite opinions, which may or may not be reliable. This narrator may be virtually a character in the story, having a name and some distant relationship to the people and events he describes, or may be simply a particularized but unnamed voice. The choice of point of view will largely determine all other choices with regard to style—vulgar, colloquial, or formal diction, the length and characteristic speed of sentences, and so on. What the writer must consider, obviously, is the extent to which point of view, and all that follows from it, comments on the characters, actions, and ideas. Vulgar diction in the telling of the Helen story would clearly create a white-hot irony, probably all but unmanageable. Colloquial diction and relatively short sentences would have the instant effect of humanizing once elevated characters and events. Highly formal diction and all that goes along with the traditional omniscient narrator might seem immediately appropriate for the seriousness of the story, but it
can easily backfire, providing not suitable pomp but mere pompousness. And some choices in point of view, as well as in other stylistic elements, may have more direct bearing on the theme than would others. For instance, the “town” point of view, in which the voice in the story is some unnamed spokesman for all the community—among the most famous examples is Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”—might have the immediate effect of foregrounding the story’s controlling idea, conflicting community values versus personal values.

We have looked enough at the fictional process to see how the conventional writer’s choices, from such large choices as subject, plot, character, setting, and theme to choices about the smallest detail of style, can all help him discover what it is he wants to say. We have seen that the process is at every stage both intuitive and intellectual: The writer chooses his subject because it appeals to him—a matter of feeling—but in developing it, first in his plan, then in his writing, he continually depends both on intellectual faculties, such as critical abstraction and musing speculation, and on intuition—his general sense of how the world works, his impulses and feelings. Having come this far, we can get better perspective on our original questions about aesthetic interest and truth in conventional fiction.

Both for the writer and for the careful reader after him, everything that happens in a well-constructed story, from major events to the most trifling turn of phrase, is a matter of aesthetic interest. Since the writer has chosen every element with care, and has revised and repeatedly re-revised in an attempt to reach something like aesthetic perfection, every element we encounter is worth savoring. Every character is sufficiently vivid and interesting for his function; every scene is just long enough, just rich enough; every metaphor is polished; no symbol stands out crudely from its matrix of events, yet no resonance goes completely unheard, too slyly muffled by the literal. Though we
read the work again and again and again, we can never seem to get to the bottom of it.

Naturally such subtlety—a story containing such a treasury of pleasures—is achieved at some cost. To work so beautifully, it cannot work as quickly or simply as does a comic book. (The greater the subtlety, the greater the sacrifice.) It is for this reason that the reader who loves great fiction is willing to put up with an opening as slow as that of Mann’s “Death in Venice,” an opening that might seem tedious to those who read nothing but
Howard the Duck.
This clearly does not mean that the serious writer should make a point of being tiresome and intellectual to drive away dolts. If he respects the reader, if he honestly considers what he himself would like to read, the writer will choose the most immediately and powerfully interesting characters and events he can think of. He will go for, as they say, dramaturgy. No two writers, as we’ve recognized, will think of quite the same characters and events when they look for what appeals to them. Some writers enjoy stories of the end of the world; some prefer fascinating tea parties. But if the writer writes only of what honestly interests him, and if he thinks of his work not simply as thoughtful exploration, as it should be, but also as entertainment, he cannot fail to have, at least for some group of serious, devoted readers, both immediate and lasting interest.