The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (12 page)

If the writer’s work is fully successful, we are likely to say of it, without thinking too carefully what it is that we mean, that the work is “true.” We are in a position to see now that our judgment, however unconsidered, may well be accurate. We have seen that even such a relatively trivial decision as the choice of diction level can alter the story’s implications in striking ways. Those who claim that fiction has no relationship to truth make much of this. They point out that if we use short sentences, short vowels, and hard consonants, we get a totally different effect, on any subject, than we do if we use long sentences, long vowels, and nasal or liquid consonants. No one
would deny that this is true. But what needs to be noticed is that the good writer makes each choice he makes because it seems to him appropriate. A fictional element can be appropriate or not by only one of two standards: It is appropriate to the work as an art object without reference to reality, or it is appropriate as we test it against our sense of the actual. It seems doubtful that art’s elements can ever be appropriate only to one another. The colors in a painting without recognizable images may be said to be appropriate only to one another, but it is human emotion that judges, testing against itself. As for fiction, in any case, it seems fair to argue that, since no narrative beyond a certain length can hold interest without some such profluence as a causal relation of events (by either real-world logic, comic mock-logic, or poetic logic), no narrative except a very short one can escape real-world relevance: Our comparison of the work and reality is automatic and instantaneous. To say that a style feels appropriate to a subject is to say, then, that we believe it in some way helps us to see the subject truly.

Fiction seeks out truth. Granted, it seeks a poetic kind of truth, universals not easily translatable into moral codes. But part of our interest as we read is in learning how the world works; how the conflicts we share with the writer and all other human beings can be resolved, if at all; what values we can affirm and, in general, what the moral risks are. The writer who can’t distinguish truth from a peanut-butter sandwich can never write good fiction. What he affirms we deny, throwing away his book in indignation; or if he affirms nothing, not even our oneness in sad or comic helplessness, and insists that he’s perfectly right to do so, we confute him by closing his book. Some bad men write good books, admittedly, but the reason is that when they’re writing they’re better men than when they beat their wives and children. When he writes, the man of impetuous bad character has time to reconsider. The fictional process helps him say what he might not have said that same night in the tavern.
Good men, on the other hand, need not necessarily write good books. Good-heartedness and sincerity are no substitute for rigorous pursuit of the fictional process.

None of this high-minded rhetoric is meant to deny the fact that fiction is a kind of play. The writer works out what he thinks as much for the joy of it as for any other reason. Yet the play has its uses and earnestness. It is sometimes remarked, not by enemies of fiction but by people who love it, that whereas scientists and politicians work for progress, the writer of fiction restates what has always been known, finding new expression for familiar truths, adapting to the age truths that may seem outmoded. It is true that, in treating human emotion, with which we’re all familiar, the writer discovers nothing, merely clarifies for the moment, and that in treating what Faulkner called “the eternal verities,” the writer treats nothing unheard of, since people have been naming and struggling to organize their lives around eternal verities for thousands of years. It may even be true that many good writers feel indifferent to their work once they’ve finished it. When they’ve checked through the galley proofs, they may never look again at the labor they’ve devoted so much time to. But the fact remains that art produces the most important progress civilization knows. Restating old truths and adapting them to the age, applying them in ways they were never before applied, stirring up emotion by the inherent power of narrative, visual image, or music, artists crack the door to the morally necessary future. The age-old idea of human dignity comes to apply even to the indigent, even to slaves, even to immigrants, now recently even to women. This is not to say that great writing is propaganda. But because the fictional process selects those fit for it, and because a requirement of that process is strong empathetic emotion, it turns out that the true writer’s fundamental concern—his reason for finding a subject interesting in the first place—is likely to be humane. He sees injustice or misunderstanding in the world around him, and he cannot keep it out of his story. It may be
true that he writes principally for the love of writing, and that in the heat of creation he cares as much about the convincing description of Helen’s face as he does about the verities her story brings to focus, but the true literary artist is a far cry from those who create “toy fiction,” good or bad—TV entertainments to take the pensioner’s mind off his dismal existence, self-regarding aesthetic jokes, posh super-realism, where emotion is ruled out and idea is thought vulgar, or nostalgia fiction, or pornography. The true writer’s joy in the fictional process is his pleasure in discovering, by means he can trust, what he believes and can affirm for all time. When the last trump plays, he will be listening, criticizing, figuring out the proper psychic distance. It should be added, for honesty’s sake, that the true literary artist and the man or woman who makes “toy fiction” may be the same person in different moods. Even on the subject of high seriousness, we must beware of reckless high seriousness.

Not all fiction, old or new, works by the principles we’ve been examining so far; in fact, though the theory we’ve been tracing out has been the dominant theory of fiction since the seventeenth century or so, most of the literature of humanity works by other sets of principles. The
Iliad
has no “characters,” at least not in the modern sense—rounded, complex human beings.
The Divine Comedy
and
Beowulf
have, at least in the Aristotelian sense, no “plot”—no causally related sequence of events. And many great works, from the
Gilgamesh
to
Paradise Lost
—if not Pound’s
Cantos
—proceed not by rendered actions, as Henry James would have events proceed, but by set speeches.

Changes in narrative method reflect changes in the way human beings see—or think they ought to see—the world. In a strongly authoritarian age, an age in which kings and counsellors are revered as innately better than ordinary men and women, people tend to see fiction as a vehicle of instruction. By means of fiction, things the authorities know to be true are sugar-coated and passed down to those for whom the truth is not so visible. It is hard to speak fairly of authoritarian ages, both because they’re naturally repugnant to the democratic spirit and because they are forever watching from the wings, hoping to
seize the stage again. But some of the greatest literature in the world comes out of such ages, and we need to understand how that literature works to understand how our own works and why our own, too, is fated to suffer constant change.

Authoritarian literature tends to work by the allegorical method, or at least gets its profluence from abstract logic (the development of an argument from
a
to
b
to
c
), not by
energeia.
Take the greatest work of this type in English (or, rather, ancient English),
Beowulf.
The narrative is presented in three large sections. In the first, a monster called Grendel persecutes the Danish people until a heroic friend from another tribe, Beowulf, kills the monster; in the second section, the monster’s mother attacks the Danes, hoping to avenge her monstrous son’s death, and Beowulf kills her too; and in the third section, Beowulf, now an old, old man and king of the Geatish nation, fights a dragon and dies himself in the act of killing it. The second section—Beowulf and Grendel’s mother—proceeds causally from the first, but only by accident; and the third section—Beowulf and the dragon—has no causal roots in the first or second sections. It is not because Beowulf killed Grendel and his dam that he must now kill the dragon. Many years have passed, and so far as we can tell the dragon never met Grendel or his mother.

The principle of profluence in
Beowulf
is abstract, not dramatic. Grendel is identified in the poem as a symbol of unreason, one who wars against all order and loves chaos. Grendel, in other words, represents a total malfunction of one of the three parts of the Platonic tripartite soul (cf. Plato’s
Republic
), the
intellectual.
Grendel’s dam represents a total malfunction of the second part of the tripartite soul, the
irascible
(the part that, like a good watchdog or soldier, should fight for right against wrong). And the dragon represents a total malfunction of the third part, the
concupiscent
(that is, the part that deals with things physical, such as food, wealth, comfort). The coming of Grendel’s dam in the second section of the poem seems causally
related to the death of Grendel, but in fact this is not the principle of selection the poet was using; otherwise he could have found some causal way of bringing in the dragon. Causality was simply not what interested him; he was shaping a poem that would illustrate, or demonstrate, the relationship between the soul’s three parts, showing them at their best in Beowulf and at their worst in the monsters. Readers familiar with the poem will realize that the poet was doing much more besides; but the whole ingenious structure works by the principle I’ve been pointing out, not dramatization (in Aristotle’s sense) but allegorical expression, or demonstration. The poet who truly dramatizes a conflict, carefully exploring causal-event chains, cannot be sure what the end of his story will be until he gets there. For him, fiction is a means of discovery. For the allegorist, on the other hand, fiction is largely, though perhaps not exclusively, a means of expressing what the writer already knows.

A literary work need not be allegorical to be a demonstration rather than an exploration. Any narrative that moves from scene to scene and episode to episode not according to the exigencies of cause and effect but according to some abstract scheme is likely to be a demonstration. The picaresque novel, which conventionally follows some hero from one social setting to another and another, demonstrating the folly of each social context, is essentially as abstract and instructional as
Pilgrim’s Progress.
Or a novel in the shape of a fictional biography may proceed according to the requirements of some abstract design. In
David Copperfield
, for instance, episodes seem to progress randomly, like real life, until one notices the controlling concern with love and marriage. Dickens chooses events, in other words, for their relevance to an abstract central question. At Dickens’ point in the development of the novel, it is hard to tell whether we are dealing mainly with exploration or mainly with demonstration. (Obviously both are involved.) In some Dickens novels, such as
A Tale of Two Cities
, we sense pretty strongly the preacherly method, demonstration as opposed to exploration; in others, especially
late novels like
Great Expectations
, we may feel the two impulses warring in the writer’s mind.

Cataloguing narratives as one thing or another would serve no useful purpose at the moment. What counts here is the general observation that fiction has for centuries existed on a continuum running between authoritarian and existential. Certain books, like the
Iliad
, served their original audience as, in effect, trustworthy history, lawbook, even bible; others, like Apollonios Rhodios’
Argonautica
, show only comic or ironic respect for the traditions and accepted patterns of their culture and seem to offer no answers, only difficult questions. One kind of narrative, the kind I describe as authoritarian, is sometimes said to look at its story line “spatially,” each of its elements existing for the sake of a predetermined “end” or conclusion. This is almost inevitably the kind of fiction produced by a writer who composes his narrative by working backward from the climax, and in practice any well-made story may be suspected of having been built this way, since in the final draft, we can be sure, the writer will have introduced whatever preparation his ending needs—however existentially he may in fact have arrived at his ending. For some contemporary readers and critics, a narrative that seems to them spatially conceived is morally distressing. This may be no more than a personal quirk of those readers and critics affected; but the quirk does have some root in reality: Metaphysics and unjustified notions of human certainty had more than a little to do with the holocaust and American fire-bombings, not to mention atomic bombings, napalm, and the rest. It is perhaps largely for this reason that we have seen since World War II, all over the world, a rise of non-profluent fiction (actions leading nowhere, as in the plays of Samuel Beckett) and unended fiction (as in John Fowles’
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
).