The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (21 page)

“Normally,” I’ve said. In a certain kind of fiction clunky symbolism, or the appearance of wooden allegory, can be a source of delight, and a vocabulary of extremely odd words like “furfuraceous,” “venditate,” or “ignivomous,” words that function like baubles or textural blisters, calling attention to the story’s artificiality, can give interest. For comic effect, one can do anything that’s funny. And to those who appreciate it, part of the appeal of Chaucer’s
Man of Law’s Tale
is its stiffness, its rigidity of idea and emotion. Cunstance never seems to us a real
woman. She has the hard angles of a primitive carving or a figure in stained glass; her story starts and stops with the jerks and creaks of old machinery, and we enjoy it precisely because of what nowadays we would call its irreality—its base in an outmoded set of literary conventions. The same is true of Chaucer’s
Second Nun’s Tale
and of any number of modern parodic works both serious and comic. By making one’s symbolism unusually obvious, as in the best moments of Barth’s
Giles Goat-Boy
, one can sometimes get a pleasing effect of artifice without in fact sacrificing the symbolic load. We smile at the clunkiness of the allegory but at the same time follow the allegory out, much as in puppet shows or Noh plays we enjoy both the emphasis on technique and its import.

Normally, however, the symbolist or allegorist works more subtly. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville uses, as he often does, a narrator capable of orbicular language because it allows him to introduce double meanings—allegorizing puns—without disturbing the surface of the story. On its most obvious level, the story is of a compassionate lawyer rendered helpless by the dilemma of both keeping up his work in the ordinary business world and dealing humanely with what turns out to be the cosmic despair, in fact madness, of his copyist Bartleby. On a deeper level, the lawyer is a kind of Jehovah figure, Bartleby a pathetic and ineffective Christ who binds Jehovah to a new idea of justice. The lawyer-narrator’s formal, even ponderous diction allows Melville to treat the surface story with full respect for the dignity of his characters and their pathetic situation but at the same time to work in signals of the deeper meaning. Melville writes:

At first glance, these sentences are merely descriptive of the narrator’s suite of offices, with a white wall at one window, a brick wall at another. But the narrator’s elevated diction allows in language that hints at the deeper meaning that Bartleby will call to his attention: His comfortable “upstairs” chambers are surrounded by death. This kind of thing runs all through the story, establishing its full symbolic meaning.

I have spoken so far only of ornate vocabulary. A common problem among beginning writers is that even their vocabulary of ordinary words is limited to a degree almost crippling. Ordinary words, like rare words, give textural interest. The good writer is likely to know and use—or find out and use—the words for common architectural features, like “lintel,” “newel post,” “corbelling,” “abutment,” and the concrete or stone “hems” alongside the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters’ or plumbers’ tools, artists’ materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them, such as “pinch-clippers” (for cutting fingernails). The writer, if it suits him, should also know and occasionally use brand names, since they help to characterize. The people who drive Toyotas are not the same people who drive BMW’s, and people who brush with Crest are different from those who use Pepsodent or, on the other hand, one of the health-food brands made of eggplant. (In super-realist fiction, brand names are more important than the characters they describe.) Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms—words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives—“galumph” and
“amble,” “quagmire,” “scoop” (n.), “pustule,” “hippodrome,” “distraught,” “recalcitrant,” “remiss,” The casual way to build vocabulary is to pay attention to language as one reads. The serious-minded way is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages—learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties.

The immediate risk for the writer who works hard at developing vocabulary is that his style may become texturally over-rich, distracting from the fictional dream. But practice teaches balance. Limited vocabulary, like short legs on a pole-vaulter, builds in a natural barrier to progress beyond a certain point.

After the individual word, the writer’s most basic unit of expression is the sentence, the primary vehicle of all rhetorical devices. One of the things that should go into the writer’s notebook is a set of experiments with the sentence. A convenient and challenging place to begin is with the long sentence, one that runs to at least two pages. (For a
tour-de-force
example see Donald Barthelme’s piece of short fiction “Sentence”—in fact not a long, long sentence but a fragment.) Long sentences, one soon learns—and I mean not fake long sentences, wherein commas, semicolons, and colons could be changed into periods with no loss of emotional power or intellectual coherence, but
real
sentences—can be of many kinds, each with its own unique effects. The sentence may be propelled by some driving, hysterical emotion, like William Faulkner’s long sentence in the occasionally included introduction to
The Sound and the Fury
, in
which the town librarian finds Caddy’s picture in a magazine, closes the library, and rushes with the picture, her wits flying and her heart wildly pounding, to Jason’s store; or the sentence may be kept aloft—that is, held back from the relief of a final close, a full stop for breath, in other words, a period—by some neurotic sense of hesitation in the character whose troubled mental processes the sentence is designed to reflect—some intelligent middle-aged housewife, for example, who has read about women’s liberation in her magazines and feels an increasingly anxious inclination, hedged in by doubts and on-the-other-hands, to take a nightschool course—one in flower-arranging, or ceramics, or self-awareness—perhaps telling her domineering mother and husband what she’s doing and then again perhaps not—though money will be a problem if she takes the course secretly: She has only her household and grocery allowance—and there are always the children, though Mark (let us call him) might possibly be talked into staying after school Thursday nights to play basketball, and Daniel, on the other hand … but would Daniel even miss her if she went out, in fact?—glued every night to the TV in his room, smoking (if that’s what the smell is) pot?—but it would be risky, no doubt of it; if they found her out—Harold and her mother—there would be scenes, tiresome dramas; better to find some more foolproof plan … or the sentence may be kept going by the complexity of its thought, or by the ornateness of its imagery, or by the “sheer plod” of the drudge it illustrates, or by some other cause, or motor, before at last it quits.

Short sentences give other effects. Also sentence fragments. They can be trenchant, punchy. They can suggest weariness. They can increase the drabness of a drab scene. Used for an unworthy reason, as here, they can be boring.

Between these extremes, the endless sentence and the very short sentence, lies a world of variation, a world every writer must eventually explore.

Compare the above. Reading at the natural speed we use for prose, faster than the natural speed of verse or prose poetry, we find that item 2 is slower, more plodding, than item 1; and item
3, because of the fairly regular occurrence of stressed syllables and the number of unstressed syllables between them, runs along more lightly than either 1 or 2 and much more lightly than item 4, where the juxtaposed stresses slow the sentence to a trudge.