The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (19 page)

But there remains one question, a central concern in all serious modern art, as in contemporary science; namely, the implications of the Heisenberg principle: To what extent does the instrument of discovery change the discovery, whether the instrument be “the process of fiction” or the particle bombardment of an atom?

Just as an anthropologist’s presence among the group he is studying can alter the behavior of the group, or as the bombarding of an atom alters the pattern it means to illuminate, so the style in which an artist explores reality may alter the thing explored. Anyone can discern that, in music, emotion explored tonally differs from emotion explored atonally; and though it’s impossible to prove that the generating emotions in the consciousness of the composer were in any way similar in the two cases, composers themselves have often expressed the opinion that having first chosen the musical form, one then bends one’s thought to it, exactly as, having committed oneself to the key of D minor, one adapts the generative emotion to the resonance of that key; one would have said something different in the “happier” key of G major.

A few years ago, or so I’ve been told, a group of sound technicians conducted an experiment to discover whether they could heighten the “presence” of recorded music by multiplying tracks and speakers. The result was quadraphonic sound, but on the way to that result a strange thing occurred. A group of composers, musical performers, and critics were assembled to listen to music designed for four speakers, then eight speakers, then more. When listening to music on eight speakers, some of the musicians noted that what they were getting was not more accurate representation of music as we hear it in a hall but
something quite new and different: One began to be able to locate the sounds in space. The clarinet seemed to occupy a particular point or area in the room, the trumpet another area, the piano another—not areas correspondent to the seating of the group recorded but areas related as the head, arms, and legs of a sculpture might be related. The music, in short, had become visual, something new under the sun. Writing music for eight speakers, a composer might theoretically shape music—physically shape it—as no one had ever done before. Whether or not any composer has explored that possibility I do not know, but the story, if it is true, illustrates a fact well known among artists, that art does not imitate reality (hold the mirror up to nature) but creates a new reality. This reality may be apposite to the reality we walk through every day—streets and houses, mailmen, trees—and may trigger thoughts and feelings in the same way a newly discovered thing of nature might do—a captured Big Foot or Loch Ness monster—but it is essentially itself, not the mirror reflection of something familiar.

The increasingly sharp recognition that art works in this way has generated the popularity, in recent years, of formalist art—art for art’s sake—and metafiction, of which we spoke earlier. The general principle of the former has been familiar for centuries. The first modern thinker to define the mode clearly may have been Robert Louis Stevenson in his preface to the Chesterfield edition of the translated
Works of Victor Hugo.
There Stevenson pointed out that all art exists on a continuum between poles he calls “objective” and “subjective.” At one extreme, the subjective, we have novels like those of Hugo, wherein we feel as we read that we are among the French mobs, surrounded by noise and smoke, transported from the room in which we read to Hugo’s imaginary Paris. At the other extreme we have Fielding’s
Tom Jones
, wherein we are never allowed to imagine for long that the hero is a “real” young man. As soon as we begin to incline to that persuasion, Fielding introduces a Homeric simile, or an interchapter, or something from the tradition
of puppeteering, forcing us once more to recognize the novel as an object, not “real life.” By way of illustration from the visual arts, Stevenson compares the effect of early-and middle-period Turner, when Turner landscapes were like vivid scenes seen through a window, and, on the other hand, the work of some unnamed French painter (one suspects that Stevenson may have made him up) who pasted real sand on his beach-scape in order that no one should mistake what he’s looking at for a real beach on which a family might arrive to spread its picnic.

All literary parodists are inescapably creators of objective, or formalist, art. The parody becomes meaningless the moment we forget that the work is a literary object jokingly or seriously commenting on another literary object. In ordinary “realistic” fiction—what Stevenson would call subjective fiction—the writer’s intent is that the reader fall through the printed page into the scene represented, so that he sees not words and fictional conventions but the dream image of, say, a tumbleweed crossing Arizona. In formalist fiction we are conscious mainly of the writer’s art, or of both the tumbleweed and the art that makes it tumble. Excellent contemporary examples might be drawn from the fiction of William Gass but to save going and looking something up, I will use one from my own work. In my novella “The King’s Indian” I parody, among other writers, Edgar Allan Poe. At one point I borrow directly from Poe: “My hair stood on end, my blood congealed, and I sank again into the bilgewater.” If my effort is successful, the reader both sees the image in his mind—less a realist’s image than one drawn from nineteenth-century magazine illustration—and sees Poe grinning and waving from the wings.

In the nineteenth century, most writers, though not all, trusted their implements and presented fictions unapologetically mimetic of life. If a writer emphasized the cartoon or puppet-stage quality of his art, as did Dickens, Thackeray, and Stevenson,
he did so not because he distrusted art’s relevance to life but either because he felt more or less indifferent to that relevance or because he enjoyed pure artifice, as we still do. The same may be said of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, “Monk” Lewis, or Smollett. If pressed, they would probably have said that they believed art directly relevant to life, but they loved artifice. Think of
Tristram Shandy.
The work is of course a spoof, a send-up of the novel and of story-telling in general, but no one doubts that Sterne intended Uncle Toby to seem to us lifelike. Poe is, among writers in English, the great nineteenth-century exception. The sad disparity between life and art (art kills or transforms life) is both his favorite subject and the principle behind his invention of new fictional forms. (He was the inventor of such forms—as we know them now—as the detective story, the horror story, the pirate story, the doppelganger story, the story-as-painting [“Landor’s Cottage”], and the fiction that is all denouement [“The Cask of Amontillado”].) For Poe, as for his great French translator, art’s relation to life was far from innocent. In “Ligeia” he suggests allegorically that in pursuit of the ideal, the “dream memory” of Platonic philosophy (the narrator’s memory of his lost Ligeia), the artist murders actuality. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the resurrection of the lost beauty—blood-stained and horribly battered when she appears—is helped along by the narrator’s reading of an old romance. Again and again in Poe’s psychological allegories, the artist does his work much as witches do theirs, by following ancient formulas, creating art’s effects with the daemonic help of older works of art.

Twentieth-century writers, for whom Poe and his followers opened the way, often have no confidence that art has relevance to life. Like their colleagues in science and philosophy, they make much of the fact that “a change of style is a change of subject.” They know that eight speakers do not bring us closer to the reality of the concert hall, but create a new actuality, and
the tendency of the writers is to pursue not life but the new actuality, the invention. Hence the fashion of linguistic sculpture and “opaque language.”

It is, as we’ve seen, this same nervous fascination with art’s untrustworthy character that has led to the popularity of metafiction, the piece of fiction on the subject of making fiction. Some of the more interesting recent examples—some of the less boring—are William Gass’s
Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife
, Ron Sukenick’s “What’s Your Story?” and John Barth’s “Life-Story.” A central concern in all such fiction is the extent to which technique or medium may be art’s sole message. One of the most elegant of recent American metafictions is John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” the story of a boy who goes to a fun-house with his older sister and her lover, a sailor. All that is moving and beautifully written in the story, by customary standards, Barth interrupts with comments from real or imagined manuals on the art of fiction. We like and affirm the story’s unsophisticated lovers, responding to the beauty of the prose that represents them; but the constant interruption of that prose with comments on how effective prose is written makes us irritably conscious of the extent to which moving prose is not natural but achieved. As a result, we doubt our naive response to the lovers, as Barth intends us to. We share—as in ordinary fiction we are never meant to do—the doubts and problems of the artist, but also his pleasure in his work, and in doing so lose the innocence of our delight in the funhouse and the experience of the lovers. Like the bright younger brother, we get no real pleasure from the sensations of life’s funhouse; we slip in to where the lovers are pulled and become “lost.”

Barth is not claiming that masterful technique is a thing to be avoided but only that, if possible, once one has captured it one should keep it on its chain. On one hand, showy technique is thrilling, as much in a work of fiction as in the work of a brilliant trapeze artist or animal trainer. No one would ask that the master artist hide his abilities. On the other hand, cleverness
can become its own end, subverting higher ends, as when style overshadows character, action, and idea. The question is whether the artist can ever hold a balance between subject and presentation. Perhaps it is in the nature of art that actuality must be murdered, as it is in “Ligeia,” and that what art brings forth is not some higher reality but a blood-stained thing that, like Madeline Usher, can flicker with apparent life for only an instant before collapsing back to death.

One curious result of the current, though not exactly new, fascination with the altering effect of technique on subject matter is what L. M. Rosenberg has identified as “fictional superrealism.” The aim of writers in this mode (Mary Robison, Laura Furman, Ann Beattie, and others) is identical to that of photo-realists in painting or the sculptural exact copyist Duane Hansen, to get down reality without the slightest modification by the artist. As a group, they reject what would ordinarily be called “interesting plot.” In one typical story, a character inherits a house in Hoosick Falls, New York, goes there to live in it and fix it up, and has brief, seemingly inconsequential conversations with neighbors. Plot profluence is limited to the fact that time passes, progressing to a moment of slight emotional rise (usually signaled by the transformation of descriptive details to a full-fledged image, the objectification of an unstated, trivial emotion); the conventional division of narrative into organized scenes is scrupulously avoided; if some insight is awakened or emotion stirred, the fact is simply reported, like any other fact. The writer makes an effort to choose images with the disinterest of a camera, and wherever possible he suppresses or carefully undercuts words with emotive effect. As Rosenberg points out, the writer does not allow himself even such dialogue tags as “she hollered” or “he exclaimed”; even questions—such as “Where in hell is the salt?”—are tagged “she said.” The writers seek to bring to perfection the scientific ideal of Zola or William Dean Howells, treating nothing in nature as unworthy of notice and nothing as more worthy of notice than anything else. H. D.
Raymond, commenting on super-realist visual artists, offers a modern version of the old scientific ideal. “In omitting ideology, sublimity, and morality from their vision they are sworn to a phenomenologist credo. They stare unblinkingly at what is ‘really’ out there, ignoring the mental constructs through which they are peering.”

One objection to the credo is old and obvious: We simply do not believe that reality is what these writers (and painters) maintain it to be. The realism is not “lifelike” because it seems to us dead. We may even suspect in the writer’s suppression of emotion a certain unwitting dishonesty. Certainly no one who looks at the paintings of Philip Pearlstein, with their strong frontal lighting and accurate but slightly cartoonish emphasis of features—“stupid paintings,” he calls them—can deny a faint suspicion that Pearlstein feels an unacknowledged contempt for the human form, even when the paintings are of his daughters.

Even the composer who writes for eight speakers, producing visual music, is likely to do more than simply follow out the possibilities of some new actuality. His emotion selects one visual music as more interesting than another. The suppression of the artist’s personality can be virtually total, as in the fictional super-realism of Robison, Furman, and Beattie, writers whose abnegation of individual style is so complete that, except under the closest scrutiny, we cannot tell one writer’s work from another’s; yet the very suppression of style is a style—an aesthetic choice, an expression of emotion.

An opposite response to the current fascination with the effect of technique on subject matter may be found in the work of a group of contemporary non-realistic movements—Kafkaesque expressionism, surrealism, and the formalist “irrealism” of writers like Borges and Barthelme. At its most expressionistic this movement produces, for example, the
Tropisms
of Nathalie Sarraute. In one of the tropisms, Sarraute describes an encounter between a young woman and an earnest old gentleman. Their conversation is awkward and intense: