The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (2 page)

No one will deny that the principle is useful, especially when applied in obvious ways, as in the examples above or when Chekhov shows us the gun ostentatiously loaded in Act One of
The Seagull
. No one will deny that each time a writer believes he’s completed a new work, he ought to look it over in the light of this general principle. But the fact remains that the supposed aesthetic law is far from absolute, since from the beginning of time great writers have shown impatience with it.
Every reader of Homer’s
Iliad
is stirred to ask whether Achilles really loves Briseus or simply thinks of her—as Agamemnon does—as a war prize. The point is important because it profoundly affects our judgment of Achilles’ character. If he both loves Briseus and considers her his rightful prize (as of course she is), we have adequate motivation for his withdrawal from the war, a withdrawal that must result in the death of friends. If he does not love her, he is likely to seem to us petty and vindictive, a sulky child too sensitive, even for a Greek, about his honor. Critical good will and Homer’s high valuation of his hero lead us to assume that Achilles does love Briseus—though also, as the twenty-fourth book makes clear, he exaggerates the value of honor of the sort bestowed by others. But except once, briefly, through the mouth and point of view of a secondary character (Achilles’ friend Patroklos), Homer refuses any answer to our question. It’s as if the whole matter seemed to him beneath epic dignity, mere tea-table gossip. Perhaps, as some scholars have argued, Greek heroes thought it unmanly to care very much about women. Or, on the other hand, perhaps with his deep sense of what is right and his Greek certainty of love’s place in the all-embracing order of Zeus (a subject treated in the
Odyssey
), Homer would be shocked by our doubt of his hero’s great-heartedness; that is, perhaps he thought Achilles’ love went without saying. But whatever his reason, Homer gives us only what Patroklos thinks—or claims he thinks, in a situation that might incline him to lie—and offers, in his own voice, no clue.

Take another, more modern example. In Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
we naturally ask how it is that, when shipped off to what is meant to be his death, the usually indecisive prince manages to hoist his enemies with their own petard—an event that takes place off stage and, at least in the surviving text, gets no real explanation. If pressed, Shakespeare might say that he expects us to recognize that the fox out-foxed is an old motif in literature—he could make up the tiresome details if he had
to—and that the point throughout is not Hamlet’s indecisiveness in general (any prince worth his salt can knock off a pair of his enemy’s fawning underlings) but his self-destructive anxiety as he faces a specific metaphysical dilemma, that of violating law for a higher law in an uncertain universe; that is, murdering a step-father and king on the say-so of a ghost. (I simplify, of course. The proofs are clear enough for the rationalist Horatio; but Horatio is not Hamlet. The center of every Shakespearean play, as of all great literature, is character; and it is Hamlet’s panic, rage, and indecisiveness that raise the question of what made him act so decisively this once—the question Shakespeare does not answer.) But the explanation I’ve put in Shakespeare’s mouth is probably not the true one. The truth is very likely that almost without bothering to think it out, Shakespeare saw by a flash of intuition that the whole question was unimportant, off the point; and so like Mozart, the white shark of music, he snapped straight to the heart of the matter, refusing to let himself be slowed for an instant by trivial questions of plot logic or psychological consistency—questions unlikely to come up in the rush of drama, though they do occur to us as we pore over the book. Shakespeare’s instinct told him, “Get back to the business between Hamlet and Claudius,” and, sudden as lightning, he was back.

This refusal to be led off to the trivial is common in great literature, as is its comic opposite, the endlessly elaborated explanation of the obvious we find in, for instance, the opening chapter of
Tristram Shandy
. This is no proof that the general principle with which we began—the principle that a work should in some way give answers to the questions it raises—is valueless. But the example of Homer, Shakespeare, and others does suggest that aesthetic laws can sometimes be suspended. Suspending recognizable aesthetic laws of course means taking risks, and the teacher who wishes to play it safe may say to his students, “That’s all right for Shakespeare, but not for a beginner.” The trouble with this solution is that it tries to teach
the art of fiction by shrinking the art, making it something more manageable but no longer art.

Art depends heavily on feeling, intuition, taste. It is feeling, not some rule, that tells the abstract painter to put his yellow here and there, not there, and may later tell him that it should have been brown or purple or pea-green. It’s feeling that makes the composer break surprisingly from his key, feeling that gives the writer the rhythms of his sentences, the pattern of rise and fall in his episodes, the proportions of alternating elements, so that dialogue goes on only so long before a shift to description or narrative summary or some physical action. The great writer has an instinct for these things. He has, like a great comedian, an infallible sense of timing. And his instinct touches every thread of his fabric, even the murkiest fringes of symbolic structure. He knows when and where to think up and spring surprises, those startling leaps of the imagination that characterize all of the very greatest writing.

Obviously this is not to imply that cool intellect is useless to the writer. What Fancy sends, the writer must order by Judgment. He must think out completely, as coolly as any critic, what his fiction means, or is trying to mean. He must complete his equations, think out the subtlest implications of what he’s said, get at the truth not just of his characters and action but also of his fiction’s form, remembering that neatness can be carried too far, so that the work begins to seem fussy and overwrought, anal compulsive, unspontaneous, and remembering that, on the other hand, mess is no adequate alternative. He must think as cleanly as a mathematician, but he must also know by intuition when to sacrifice precision for some higher good, how to simplify, take short cuts, keep the foreground up there in front and the background back.

The first and last important rule for the creative writer, then, is that though there may be rules (formulas) for ordinary, easily publishable fiction—imitation fiction—there are no rules for real fiction, any more than there are rules for serious
visual art or musical composition. There are techniques—hundreds of them—that, like carpenter’s tricks, can be studied and taught; there are moral and aesthetic considerations every serious writer must sooner or later brood on a little, whether or not he broods in a highly systematic way; there are common mistakes—infelicities, clodpole ways of doing things—that show up repeatedly in unsuccessful fiction and can be shown for what they are by analysis of how they undermine the fiction’s intended effects; there are, in short, a great many things every serious writer needs to think about; but there are no rules. Name one, and instantly some literary artist will offer us some new work that breaks the rule yet persuades us. Invention, after all, is art’s main business, and one of the great joys of every artist comes with making the outrageous acceptable, as when the painter makes sharply clashing colors harmonious or a writer in the super-realistic tradition introduces—convincingly—a ghost.

This is not to say that no one really knows what fiction is or what its limits are; it is simply to recognize that the value or “staying power” of any piece of literature has to do, finally, with the character and personality of the artist who created it—his instincts, his knowledge of art and the world, his mastery. Mastery holds fast. What the beginning writer needs, discouraging as it may be to hear, is not a set of rules but mastery—among other things, mastery of the art of breaking so-called rules. When an artist of true authority speaks—someone like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Dostoevsky, or Melville—we listen, all attention, even if what he says seems at first a little queer. (At any rate we listen if we’re old enough, experienced enough, so that we know what kinds of things are boring, juvenile, simple-minded, and what things are not. To read well, one also needs a certain kind of mastery.)

On reflection we see that the great writer’s authority consists of two elements. The first we may call, loosely, his sane humanness; that is, his trustworthiness as a judge of things, a stability
rooted in the sum of those complex qualities of his character and personality (wisdom, generosity, compassion, strength of will) to which we respond, as we respond to what is best in our friends, with instant recognition and admiration, saying, “Yes, you’re right, that’s how it is!” The second element, or perhaps I should say
force
, is the writer’s absolute trust (not blind faith) in his own aesthetic judgments and instincts, a trust grounded partly in his intelligence and sensitivity—his ability to perceive and understand the world around him—and partly in his experience as a craftsman; that is (by his own harsh standards), his knowledge, drawn from long practice, of what will work and what will not.

What this means, in practical terms for the student writer, is that in order to achieve mastery he must read widely and deeply and must write not just carefully but continually, thoughtfully assessing and reassessing what he writes, because practice, for the writer as for the concert pianist, is the heart of the matter. Though the literary dabbler may write a fine story now and then, the true writer is one for whom technique has become, as it is for the pianist, second nature. Ordinarily this means university education, with courses in the writing of fiction, and poetry as well. Some important writers have said the opposite—for instance, Ernest Hemingway, who is quoted as having said that the way for a writer to learn his craft is to go away and write. Hemingway, it may help to remember, went away for free “tutorials” to two of the finest teachers then living, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein.

It is true that some writers have kept themselves more or less innocent of education, that some, like Jack London, were more or less self-made men; that is, people who scratched out an education by reading books between work-shifts on boats, in logging camps or gold camps, on farms or in factories. It is true that university education is in many ways inimical to the work of the artist: Rarely do painters have much good to say of aestheticians or history-of-art professors, and it’s equally uncommon
for even the most serious, “academic” writers to look with fond admiration at “the profession of English.” And it’s true, moreover, that life in the university has almost never produced subject matter for really good fiction. The life has too much trivia, too much mediocrity, too much soap opera, but consider:

No ignoramus—no writer who has kept himself innocent of education—has ever produced great art. One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one’s argument, never understands that the argument is an old one (all great arguments are), never understands the dignity and worth of the people one has cast as enemies. Witness John Steinbeck’s failure in
The Grapes of Wrath
. It should have been one of America’s great books. But while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing about the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to, or interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil. Objectivity, fair-mindedness, the systematic pursuit of legitimate evaluation, these are some of the most highly touted values of university life, and even if—as is no doubt true—some professors are as guilty of simplification as John Steinbeck was, the very fact that these values are mouthed must have some effect on the alert student. Moreover, no student can get far in any university without encountering the discussion method; and what this means, at least in any good university, is that the student must learn to listen carefully and fair-mindedly to opinions different from his own. In my experience, this is not common elsewhere. In most assemblies, people all argue on the same side. Look at small-town papers. Truth is not much valued where everyone agrees on what the truth is and no one is handy to speak up for the side
that’s been dismissed. However bad university professors maybe in general, every great professor is a man or woman devoted to truth, and every university has at least one or two of them around.

But what makes ignoramuses bad writers is not just their inexperience in fair argument. All great writing is in a sense imitation of great writing. Writing a novel, however innovative that novel may be, the writer struggles to achieve one specific large effect, what can only be called the effect we are used to getting from good novels. However weird the technique, whatever the novel’s mode, we say when we have finished it, “Now
that
is
a novel
!” We say it of
Anna Karenina
and of
Under the Volcano
, also of the mysteriously constructed
Moby-Dick
. If we say it of Samuel Beckett’s
Watt
or
Malone Dies
, of Italo Calvino’s
The Baron in the Trees
, or Kobo Abe’s
The Ruined Map
, we say it because, for all their surface oddity, those novels produce the familiar effect. It rarely happens, if it happens at all, that a writer can achieve effects much larger than the effects achieved in books he has read and admired. Human beings, like chimpanzees, can do very little without models. One may learn to love Shakespeare by reading him on one’s own—the ignoramus is unlikely to have done even this—but there is no substitute for being taken by the hand and guided line by line through
Othello, Hamlet
, or
King Lear
. This is the work of the university Shakespeare course, and even if the teacher is a person of limited intelligence and sensitivity, one can find in universities the critical books and articles most likely to be helpful, the books that have held up, and the best of the new books. Outside the university’s selective process, one hardly knows which way to turn. One ends up with some crank book on how Shakespeare was really an atheist, or a Communist, or a pen-name used by Francis Bacon. Outside the university it seems practically impossible to come to an understanding of Homer or Vergil, Chaucer or Dante, any of the great masters who, properly understood, provide the highest
models yet achieved by our civilization. Whatever his genius, the writer unfamiliar with the highest effects possible is virtually doomed to search out lesser effects.