The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (26 page)

The writer’s basic problems when he thinks forward from an initial situation are essentially the same as when he thinks backward from a climax. As his plot line takes shape and he gradually makes out what his climax or series of climaxes is to be, he must figure out what he must dramatically prove to make the climax or series meaningful and convincing. He must figure out his theme—in this case, clearly, the relationship between art and life, and the moral responsibility of the artist. He must work out major details of characterization and think out what some of his major images imply (the extent, that is, to which they function as symbols); he must work out his story’s natural length and rhythm and decide on the appropriate style.

So far we’ve talked mainly about short-story plotting. Let us look now at longer forms; that is, the novella and the novel. I will treat at length only energeic plots, since for long works those are the kind most likely to succeed.

The novella can be defined only as a work shorter than a novel (most novellas run somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 words) and both longer and more episodic than a short story. I use the word “episodic” loosely here, meaning only that the novella usually has a series of climaxes, each more intense than the last, though it may be built—and perhaps in fact ought to be built—of one continuous action. William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid” is a more or less perfect example of the form. Discounting
brief flashbacks which show what Big Hans (the hired man), Pa, and Ma were like before the opening of the central action and how they came to be the people they are now, the action is a continuous stream moving through a series of climaxes, focused throughout on a single character, young Jorge. The story runs as follows: In some desolate rural landscape (Wisconsin, perhaps North Dakota), in the dead of winter, a neighbor’s child, the Pedersen kid, arrives and is discovered almost frozen to death near Jorge’s father’s barn; when he’s brought in and revived, he tells of the murderer at his house, a man with yellow gloves; Big Hans and Pa decide to go there, taking young Jorge; when they get there, Jorge, making a dash from the barn to the house, hears shots; Big Hans and Pa are killed, apparently—Jorge is not sure—and Jorge slips inside the house and down cellar, where at the end of the novella he is still waiting. The stream of action is complete and uninterrupted, from the initial situation (the cause of the sequence of events; that is, the arrival of the Pedersen kid with his strange story, challenging the courage and humanity of Big Hans and Pa) to the closing event, Jorge’s recognition that he has done what he must, has kept his word and so has achieved identity, or human status. But the continuous stream nevertheless has its progression of increasingly powerful climaxes, each, if we look closely, symbolic and ritualistic as well as intense on the level of pure action. The writer, in other words, has organized his continuous action as a group of scenes or scene-cluster segments, loosely, “episodes.”

The blocking of Gass’s novella might be laid out as follows:

The Pedersen kid arrives and is brought into the kitchen and there thawed out or “resurrected” by Jorge’s mother. (Here, as throughout the novel, suggestions of mystic ritual abound. Ma works on the frozen Pedersen kid as she works when baking bread. The boy’s whiteness reminds Jorge of flour, and Ma works on him, kneading him, on the kitchen table, where customarily she kneads her breaddough. Notice, by the way, how
thoroughly realistic all this is, for all its symbolic freighting. The details of the scene have the sharp-edged vividness of Edward Weston photographs or realistic painting. Yet nearly every detail works symbolically as well as literally.)

For the thawing of the boy, Ma needs some of Pa’s whiskey (an ironic permutation of the wine that goes with eucharistic bread, the Pedersen kid’s “dead” body), and we learn what a dangerous, mean drunkard Pa is, a man both violent and spiritually debased, snakelike, capable of dumping the contents of his bedpan on Big Hans’ head. The scene began with intense pressure (the whole family is slightly crazy: Ma trembles in fear of Pa; Jorge resists, almost psychotically, the thawing of the kid found in the snow) and builds urgently to the novella’s first climax, Big Hans’ challenge of Pa and the decision to go to the Pedersens’ house and look for the man with yellow gloves.

Having, in effect, vowed to do so, Pa, Big Hans, and Jorge set out, armed and angrily tormenting one another, and, on their way to the Pedersens’, find the murderer’s dead horse, nearly buried in snow. (Throughout the novella, snow-burial and spring resurrection are seminal ideas.) Their discovery of the horse—and the loss of Pa’s whiskey—brings on the second climax: Because they’ve said they’ll go to the Pedersens’ and are too stubborn to back down, Pa and Big Hans confirm their resolve. They make it to the Pedersens’, Jorge reaches the wall of the house, and (in the novella’s third main climax) Pa and Big Hans are shot by someone inside. Rather than freeze to death, though he expects to be killed anyway, Jorge goes inside. The novella’s final climax is Jorge’s recognition of what it is that he has achieved, whether or not he will live to tell of it.

“The Pedersen Kid” is, I’ve said, a more or less perfect example of the novella form—a single stream of action focused on one character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes. We find the same structure in many of the novellas of Henry James—“The Turn of the Screw” and “The Jolly Corner,” for instance—and in the work of various other writers:
Flaubert in “A Simple Heart,” Gide in “Theseus” and “The Pastoral Symphony,” William Faulkner in “The Bear,” and several of the novellas of Thomas Mann. Though this form of the novella is the most elegant and efficient novella structure, it is not the only structure possible, however. Some novella writers write, in effect, baby novels, shifting from one point of view (or focal character) to another and using true episodes, with time breaks between, instead of a continuous stream of action. D. H. Lawrence, in his novella “The Fox,” uses this more complicated form with some success. The choice makes it possible for him to cover a longer span of time than is customary in the novella and also a greater latitude of style. One pays for these advantages in that the progress of events has less urgency than Gass and Faulkner achieve, while the brevity of the work prohibits his achieving the powerhouse effect usual in the final section of a good full-length novel.

Another possible structure is fictional pointillism, used interestingly in Robert Coover’s “Hansel and Gretel” and masterfully by William Gass in what is to date probably his finest work, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In this form the writer lets out his story in snippets, sometimes called “crots,” moving as if at random from one point to another, gradually amassing the elements, literal and symbolic, of a quasi-energeic action. No rule governs the organization of such a work but that the writer be a prose-poet of genius. Even if he has some intellectual system for arranging his crots, the basic principle of his assembly is feeling: He shuffles and reshuffles his fragments to find the most moving of possible presentations, and he achieves his climaxes not, as in linear fiction, by the gelling of key events, but by poetic force. Depending, as it does, so largely on texture—having abandoned structure in the traditional sense (events causally related and presented more or less in sequence)—the mode runs the great risk of overrichness, the writer’s tendency to push too hard, producing an effect of sentimentality. The great advantage, on the other hand, is the necessary focus on imagery
whereby repeated images accrue greater and greater psychological and symbolic force.

A good novella, whatever its structure, has an effect analogous to that of the tone poem in music. A good novel, on the other hand, has an effect more like that of a Beethoven symphony. Let me try to make these analogies a little clearer.

The chief beauty of a novella is its almost oriental purity, its elegant tracing of an emotional line. Whereas the short story moves to an “epiphany,” as Joyce said—in other words to a climactic moment of recognition or understanding on the part of the central character or, at least, the reader—achieving its effect by fully justifying, through authenticating background, its climactic event or moment, the novella moves through a series of small epiphanies or secondary climaxes to a much more firm conclusion. Through the sparest means possible—not through the amassing of the numerous forces that operate in a novel but by following out a single line of thought—the novella reaches an end wherein the world is, at least for the central character, radically changed. Jorge, if he ever gets home again, will be a different young man: He has survived and triumphed in his rite of passage, has achieved his adult identity. The “fox” at the end of D. H. Lawrence’s novella has won his woman and murdered his enemy. The bear, at the end of Faulkner’s novella, is gone, and Ike McCaslin is changed forever. Nothing can be more perfect or complete than a good novella. When a novel achieves the same glassy perfection—as does Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
—we may tend to find it dissatisfying, untrue. The “perfect” novel lacks the richness and raggedness of the best long fictions. We need not go into the reasons for this except to notice that the novella normally treats one character and one important action in his life, a focus that lends itself to neat cut-offs, framing. The novel, on the other hand, at least makes some pretense of imitating the world in all its complexity; we not only look closely at various characters, we hear rumors of distant wars and marriages, we glimpse characters whom, like people on the subway,
we will never see again. As a result, too much neatness in a novel kills the novel’s fundamental effect. When all of a novel’s strings are too neatly tied together at the end, as sometimes happens in Dickens and almost always happens in the popular mystery thriller, we feel the novel to be unlifelike. The novel is by definition, to some extent at least, a “loose, baggy monster”—as Henry James said irritably, disparaging the novels of Tolstoy. It cannot be too loose, too baggy or monstrous; but a novel built as prettily as a teacup is not of much use.

A novel is like a symphony in that its closing movement echoes and resounds with all that has gone before. This is rare in the novella; the effect requires too much time, too much mass. Toward the close of a novel, the writer brings back—directly or in the form of his characters’ recollections—images, characters, events, and intellectual motifs encountered earlier. Unexpected connections begin to surface; hidden causes become plain; life becomes, however briefly and unstably, organized; the universe reveals itself, if only for the moment, as inexorably moral; the outcome of the various characters’ actions is at last manifest; and we see the responsibility of free will. It is this closing orchestration that the novel exists for. If such a close does not come, for whatever theoretically good reason, we shut the book with feelings of dissatisfaction, as if cheated. This is of course tantamount to saying that the novel, as a genre, has a built-in metaphysic. And so it does. The writer who does not accept the metaphysic can never write a novel; he can only play off it, as Beckett and Barthelme do, achieving his own effects by visibly subverting those traditional to the novel, working like the sculptor who makes sculptures that self-destruct or the composer who dynamites pianos. I am not saying, of course, that the artist ought to lie, only that in the long run the anti-novelist is probably doomed to at least relative failure because we do not believe him. We are not profoundly moved by Homer, Shakespeare, or Melville because we would
like
to believe the metaphysical assumptions their fictions embody—an
orderly universe that imposes moral responsibility—but because we do believe those assumptions. We cannot—except in very subtle ways—believe both Homer and Samuel Beckett.

Successful novel-length fictions can be organized in numerous ways: energeically, that is, by a sequence of causally related events; juxtapositionally, when the novel’s parts have symbolic or thematic relationship but no flowing development through cause and effect; or lyrically, that is, by some essentially musical principle—one thinks, for example, of the novels of Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf.

The lyrical novel is the most difficult to talk about. What carries the reader forward is not plot, basically—though the novel may contain, in disguised form, a sequence of causally related events—but some form of rhythmic repetition: a key image or cluster of images (the ocean, a childhood memory of a swingset, a snow-capped mountain, a forest); a key event or group of events, to which the writer returns repeatedly, then leaves for material that increasingly deepens and redefines the meaning of the event or events; or some central idea or cluster of ideas. The form lends itself to psychological narrative, imitating the play of the wandering or dreaming mind (especially the mind troubled by one or more traumatic experiences); and most practitioners of this form of the novel create works with a marked dream-like quality. The classic example is
Finnegans Wake
. A more manageable example is John Hawkes’ powerful and mysterious early novel,
The Beetle-Leg
, a nightmare story in which the narrative moves with increasing speed and pressure from one to another of a few key images—a beetle-leg-sized crack in the wall of a dam, a motorcycle gang, and so forth.

The most common form of the novel is energeic. This is both the simplest and the hardest kind of novel to write—the simplest because it’s the most inevitable and self-propelled, the hardest because it’s by far the hardest to fake. By his made-up word
energeia
, as we’ve said, Aristotle meant “the actualization of the potential that exists in character and situation.” (The fact
that Aristotle was talking about Greek tragedy need not delay us. If he’d known about novels, he’d have said much the same.) Logically, the energeic novel falls into three parts, Aristotle’s “beginning, middle, and end,” which we may think of as roughly equal in length and which fall into the pattern exposition, development, and denouement. In practice, no sane novelist would devote the first third of his total number of pages to exposition, the second third to development, and the last to denouement, if only because exposition has no profluence, and after five or ten pages the reader would quit. It is for this reason that Aristotle recommends that the writer begin “in the middle of things” and fill in the exposition as he can. But for purposes of discussion it will be useful to treat the three components separately.