The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (13 page)

Critics who have focused their attention on unconventional recent fiction have used a variety of terms to identify it, most of them apparently interchangeable—“fabulation,” “post-modernism,”
“metafiction,” “deconstructive fiction,” and so forth. To get a clear sense of the kinds of interest and truth available in unconventional fiction as it is presently practiced, it will be useful to begin by clearing up the critical language. For our present discussion, let us scrap the terms “post-modernism” and “fabulation,” since “post-modernism” sets up only a vague antithesis to “modernism,” meaning only, in effect, more like Italo Calvino than like Saul Bellow, and since “fabulation” seems to mean nothing but “unconventional.” “Metafiction,” as critics generally use the word, is a more precise term. It means fiction that, both in style and theme, investigates fiction. As we have seen, conventional fiction can be an instrument for examining the world; and, like any humanly devised instrument, it can malfunction. Like a faulty microscope or telescope, it can persuade us of things that are not true. For example, the conventional love-story ending as we find it in Jane Austen can subtly persuade the careless reader (though Jane Austen never intended it) that for every woman there is some one perfect man. Needless to say, the more powerful a literary convention becomes—the more frequently people write books in careful or shabby imitation of Jane Austen’s—the more perverse the convention’s impact. Human beings can hardly move without models for their behavior, and from the beginning of time, in all probability, we have known no greater purveyor of models than story-telling. Put it this way: Say that, at a certain time in a certain country, some writer—perhaps imitating someone he admires—creates a hero whose life motto is “Never complain, never explain.” The motto has a certain ring to it; it’s the kind of thing one might consider putting up on the wall in the bathroom of one’s children. In one lifelike situation after another, we see this hero bearing up under adversity, scorned for things he is not guilty of, laughed at for things he would be praised for if the whole truth were known. Again and again (in this same, thrilling book), we see our hero giving orders he secretly wishes he didn’t need to give, making painful decisions that, for certain lofty reasons, he cannot explain
to his friends and loved ones. The effect on the reader of this lonely, lofty hero could be very great indeed—but not necessarily healthy. If such heroes occur in very many plays and novels, if the appeal of such a character becomes widespread, then democracy, even common decency, is undermined. We have been taught to admire, submit to, or behave like the well-meaning Nazi officer, the business-world tyrant, or the moral fanatic. Nothing in the world has greater power to enslave than does fiction.

One way of undermining fiction’s harmful effects is the writing of metafiction: a story that calls attention to its methods and shows the reader what is happening to him as he reads. In this kind of fiction, needless to say, the law of the “vivid and continuous dream” is no longer operative; on the contrary, the breaks in the dream are as important as the dream. This general method is far from new, though for reasons I’ve suggested it is especially popular at the moment. In the
Argonautica
, Apollonios repeatedly jerks the reader awake with some seemingly perverse misuse of epic tradition, or with some unexpected, slightly frigid joke, or some seemingly needless, ponderous comment. But when we’ve finished the poem, we can never again look with the same innocent admiration at the machismo of Homer’s epics, or praise the warrior’s shame culture above the civilized man’s guilt culture. We find a gentler use of metafictional techniques in Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
or Fielding’s
Tom Jones.
In recent fiction, works that call insistent attention to their artifice are everywhere—Ionesco, Beckett, Barth, Barthelme, Borges, Fowles, Calvino, Gass, and so on.

It is useful to distinguish between metafiction and fictional deconstruction, though technically the latter term encloses the former. All metafictions are deconstructions; not all deconstructions are metafictions.

No common contemporary critical term raises hackles more quickly than the term “deconstruction,” and rightly so, since those who use the term almost always sound wildly confused.
Probably the truth is that they are not so much confused as hamstrung by worship of Heidegger. At any rate, behind the deconstructionists’ dazzling cloud of language lie certain more or less indisputable facts: that language carries values with it, sometimes values we do not recognize as we speak and would not subscribe to if we noticed their presence in what we say; and that art (music, painting, literature, etc.) is language. That language carries values is obvious. Again and again this book speaks of the writer as “he,” though many of the best writers I have read or have taught in writing classes are female. English, like most languages, is covertly male chauvinist. It is also, as the novelist Harold Brodkey points out, covertly Christian. Nearly all our most resonant words and images carry a trace of Neoplatonic Christianity. Even so innocent a word as “friend” has overtones. In feudal times it meant one’s lord and protector; in Anglo-Saxon times it meant the opposite of “fiend.” We can of course read a book about friends without ever consciously invoking the undercurrents of the word; but where the friendship grows intense, in this story we’re reading, we are almost sure to encounter images of light or warmth, flower or garden imagery, hunger, sacrifice, blood, and so on. The very form of the story, its orderly beginning, middle, and end, is likely to hint at a Christian metaphysic.

Deconstruction is the practice of taking language apart, or taking works of art apart, to discover their unacknowledged inner workings. Whatever value this approach may or may not have as literary criticism, it is one of the main methods of contemporary (and sometimes ancient) fiction. Deconstructive fiction is parallel to revisionist history in that it tells the story from the other side or from some queer angle that casts doubt on the generally accepted values handed down by legend. Whereas metafiction deconstructs by directly calling attention to fiction’s tricks, deconstructive fiction retells the story in such a way that the old version loses credit. Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
can be seen as a work of this kind. In the revenge tragedies Shakespeare’s
audience was familiar with, some ghost or friend or other plot-device lays on the hero the burden of avenging some crime. The genre is by nature righteous and self-confident, authoritarian: There is no doubt that vengeance is the hero’s duty, and our pleasure as we watch is in seeing justice done, however painful the experience. Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
deconstructs all this. Despite Horatio’s certainty, we become increasingly doubtful of the ghost’s authority as the play progresses, so that we become more and more concerned with Hamlet’s tests of people and of himself; and even if we choose to believe that the ghost’s story was true, we become increasingly unclear about whether Hamlet would be right to kill the king who usurped his father’s throne—at any rate, Claudius becomes less and less the stock villain, and Hamlet, as he proceeds through the play, becomes more and more guilty himself.

Except for the earliest literature we know about—the Akkadian
Gilgamesh
, certain parts of the Bible, and the epics of Homer—all great literature has, to some extent, a deconstructive impulse. This is of course only natural: If the business of the first man is to create, the business of the second is at least partly to correct. Throughout the history of Western civilization, we encounter a few great moments of creation—moments when the deconstructive impulse seems relatively slight—and a great many stretches of time that seem mainly devoted to taking the machinery apart and putting it together again in some new wrong way. Though the Beowulf-poet was deconstructing old pagan legends of heroic derring-do, his main impulse seems to have been
con
structive: the creation of a myth that would fuse all that was best in the old pagan and the new Christian vision. Dante, too, was mainly constructive, fusing the classical and the modern by means of a new truth-principle, what might be described (not quite fairly) as a form of emotivism: “Truth is that which one can say without shame before Beatrice.” And one might mention other such moments, most recently the advent of James Joyce.

The interest in metafiction and the interest in deconstructive fiction (when the last is not cast in metafictional form) differ in obvious ways. The appeal of metafiction may be almost entirely intellectual. If we laugh, we do not do so heartily, as when we laugh at or with an interesting lifelike character; we laugh thinly, with a feeling of slight superiority, as we laugh at wisecracks or “wit.” If we grieve, we grieve like philosophers, not like people who have lost loved ones. Mainly, we think. We think about the writer’s allusions, his use of unexpected devices, his effrontery in breaking the rules. Other forms of deconstruction—other than metafictional, that is—can achieve greater emotional power. For example, retelling the Beowulf story from the point of view of the monster Grendel, one gets not only whatever emotional effect can be wrung out of Grendel’s tragedy, but also whatever grief the experienced reader may feel in seeing the grand old forms of Western civilization revealed as rather shoddy, certainly manipulative and tyrannical, and probably poetic lies in the first place.

None of this is meant to suggest that deconstructive fiction is better than metafiction, or vice versa, or that either of these is better or worse than conventional fiction. That each has its values is evident from the fact that each has its earnest adherents, some of them ready to kill at the faintest hint that what they love is not loved universally.

What we enjoy we enjoy; dispute is useless. And one of the things human beings most enjoy is discovery. We may go along for years without ever noticing that the third-person-limited point of view is essentially sappy. And then one day in metafiction one sees that point of view mocked, all its foolishness laid bare, and one laughs with delight. The metafictionist shows us, for instance, that the third-person-limited point of view forces the writer into phony suspense. Say a story begins with this event: A man named Alex Strugatsky is taking his Saturday morning ballet class when his mistress, the wife of the local Chief of Police, comes in to stand watching. Alex is distressed—
he does not want their affair known, lest the police chief shoot him; but also he does not want to be impolite, because his mistress, Genevieve Rochelle, is a beauty. If we start off this story in the sensible omniscient point of view, as Chekhov would, we can get the important facts in right away and get on to what’s really interesting, such as: What will Alex do? Do his fellow dancers notice? And so on. In the omniscient point of view one might write:

Notice what happens when the writer limits himself to the thoughts of the central character, mentioning nothing not directly present in the character’s mind.

Needless to say, there is a place—in comedy—for such silly hysteria. But it’s odd to think how serious all those writers of the
thirties and forties were who used this point of view—the same people who, in movies, used solemn voice-over. Or again, the metafictionist may show us, by cunningly misusing this point of view, how third person limited makes narcissists of us all. Alex has gotten away from his dance class and is sitting with Genevieve in her car:

All this analyzing of every little gesture on Genevieve’s part and Alex’s own would be, in real life, the mark of a man deeply paranoid. In our fiction it occurs because the writer has no other way of saying what happens except by somehow putting it into Alex’s head.

It might be argued that a clever writer of metafictions could make fun, if he wishes, of any of the standard points of view. That is true and not true. It is probably the case that any human activity can legitimately be made fun of, and that a clever metafictionist could make us laugh at the noblest devices of Dostoevsky or Mann. But the smart writer of metafictions is selective about what he pokes fun at, and part of our interest as we read his work comes from our recognition that the folly he points out is significant; that is, it is not only silly, once we look at it closely, but it is in some sense perverse: It pushes wrong values.

Theoretically all non-conventional fiction can be described as either metafiction or deconstructive fiction or both, but secretly—intuitively—we know that much of what we read, or
see on stage or on the screen, is neither. It has no theory, it makes no grand claims. It’s just jazzing around.

One of the best things narrative can do is jazz around. The Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton, old-time Saturday morning cartoons (not the new, cheap ones), certain great fake-profound movies like
The Magician
and
La Strada.
There can be no point in making up an aesthetic theory for jazzing around, but if some fool were to do it, he would find it hard to avoid at least the following basic principles. When a writer is jazzing around, he may not feel a powerful need to create consistent, profound, well-rounded characters. In fact, he might start with an elderly Jew crying on a bus and transform him without notice to a boy of eleven, then to a sparrow, then to the Queen of Poland. All the ordinary, decent-hearted reader will ask is that the transformation be astonishing and interesting and that the story in some way appear to make sense, keep us reading. Or the writer may use a cast of clown characters—eagerly heroic nitwits like the Keystone Cops, or fiendish daemonic plotters with heads full of straw, like the Marx Brothers stealing a piano, etc. Where plot is concerned, anything can happen that wants to, so long as it holds interest; and setting may change as whimsically as it did from panel to panel in the
Krazy Kat
comics. Jazzing around may cover anything from parody to whimsey to heavy European surrealism. Unfortunately, it is what most beginning writers do most of the time; that is, they start with some character for whom they feel some sort of affection—an electric-guitar player, say—and they describe him playing his guitar in his room, and then they ask themselves, “Now what can I make happen?” Something dreary occurs to them—the guitar player’s roommate comes in—and they write it down. The roommates smoke some pot. They go to a party. They meet a girl with a large white wolf. And so on. All of which is to say: Jazzing around is the hardest kind of fiction in the world. When a writer is good at it, the world is his—what’s the expression?—
oyster
?
Yet in the end, alas, the world’s greater praise will go to the serviceable drudge who writes about more or less lifelike people who, laboring through energeic plots, find their destinies and stir us to affirmation.