The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (27 page)

In his exposition, the writer presents all that the reader will need to know about character and situation, the potential to be “actualized.” Obviously he cannot plan his exposition without a clear idea of what the development section is to contain and at least some inkling of what will happen in the denouement, since in the novel, as in the short story or novella, what the reader needs to know is everything that is necessary if he is to believe and understand the ensuing action. If the plot is to be elegant, not sloppy and inefficient, then for the ensuing action the reader must know the full set of causes and (essentially) nothing else; that is, no important information in the exposition should be irrelevant to the action that ensues. And here, as in the shorter forms, what the reader learns in the exposition he must be shown through dramatic events, not told. (It is not enough that we be authorially informed that a character is vicious beyond belief. We must see him slit a baby’s throat.) Finally, if anything is to come of the initial situation and characterization, the matter presented in the exposition, the situation must be somehow unstable: The character must for some reason feel compelled to act, effecting some change, and he must be shown to be a character capable of action.

This means, in effect, that in the relationship between character
and situation there must be some conflict: Certain forces, within and outside the character, must press him toward a certain course of action, while other forces, both within and outside, must exert strong pressure against that course of action. Both pressures must come not only from outside the character but also from within him, because otherwise the conflict involves no doubt, no moral choice, and as a result can have no profound meaning. (All meaning, in the best fiction, comes from—as Faulkner said—the heart in conflict with itself. All true suspense, we have said, is a dramatic representation of the anguish of moral choice.) The famous Fichtean curve is in effect a diagram of this conflict situation:

Let line
a
represent the “normal” course of action; that is, the course the character would take if he cared only for safety and stability and so did not assert his independent will, trying the difficult or impossible in the hope of effecting change. Let line
b
represent the course of action our character does take, struggling against odds and braving conflict. The descending arrows (
) represent forces (enemies, custom, or natural law) that work against the character’s will, and the ascending arrows (
) represent forces that support him in his enterprise. The peak of the ascending line (
b
) represents the novel’s climactic moment; and line c represents all that follows—that is, the denouement: The
conflict is now resolved, or in the process of resolving, either because the will of the central character has been overwhelmed or because he has won and his situation is once more stabilizing. A chart of the novel’s emotional development (our feeling of suspense, fascination, or anxiety as we read) is, then, Fichte’s curve. Since the ascending action is in fact not smooth but moves through a series of increasingly intense climaxes (the episodic rhythm of the novel), a refined version of the curve might be the following:

I was told many years ago, I forget by whom, the plot of a novel-in-progress that perfectly illustrates all this. The central character is a keen-witted, tough young Apache Indian—let us call him Jim—who spent his early years on the Indian reservation but has now earned a degree in American anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. His mother is old and in need of his financial help, and his younger brother needs money for college (he wants to be, say, a Methodist minister). Jobs in our hero’s field are scarce, but he manages to land one, without interview, in a small university in Ohio—let us call it Twin Oaks—formerly a teachers’ college. At Twin Oaks a program in Indian studies is just being established, supported by a federal grant. Jim loads his few possessions on his Harley-Davidson and travels to Ohio, where he discovers that a terrible
mistake has been made: What Twin Oaks University thinks it is getting is a specialist in
Asian
Indian studies. No one knows yet that Jim is an Apache and a specialist in American Indians—urban ones at that. What to do? The “normal” course of action would be to ride back to Berkeley and try again. The more daring course of action is to make an attempt to fake it as an Asian Indian. He gets himself a turban. Now the writer’s business is to put pressure on his hero and also to line up those who will encourage and abet him, on one hand, and those who will oppose him, on the other. We have reached what we may call the development section.

The writer arranges a set of crises for his hero. Another Apache may come to give a lecture, or a real Asian Indian may arrive. A faculty member may develop a powerful dislike for our hero and for some reason may take to spying on him, trying to get him fired. Certain students may grow suspicious; or his brother, overzealous in piety, may come to visit; or a woman he goes to bed with may hear him talking in his sleep and suspect his secret. At the same time, the writer arranges forces on the hero’s side—friendly students and fellow teachers, increasing pressures from home that force our hero to keep going (his mother breaks her hip and has greater need of money), and so on. Finally the novel’s main climax comes, and the conflict is in one way or another resolved, moving the novel into its denouement. (Here the diagram can be slightly misleading. The denouement may be a winding down of the action, a return to rest, or it may be high-pitched, as in the case of a triumphant closing section or a closing section that is terrible and dark—for example, the hero burns down the university and many people die. Either way, the conflict is resolved; our initial concern, the keeping of the secret, changes to something else—the result of the secret’s having been discovered.)

When he knows what is to happen in his development section, and something of what it means philosophically (thematically), the writer is ready to work out the details of his
exposition. If the action requires Jim to have a violent streak, we must be shown dramatically how this violent streak developed. If he forms a friendship with one of the deans because they both play the cornet, we must hear where and how Jim learned to play. Or, to put it generally, the writer must show us everything of importance to Jim’s character and everything of importance about his situation, which means mainly the character of all those who will support or oppose him at Twin Oaks U, their political affiliations and biases, everything about them that will have some bearing on the action.

This exposition, we’ve said, cannot be set down all in a lump at the beginning of the book. If the story is to be profluent, the action must get going almost immediately, and the writer must slip in exposition as he can, the only limit being that by the time we reach the peak of the Fichtean curve there should be no more exposition to be presented. When a novel’s denouement has been properly set up, it falls like an avalanche, and the writer’s chief job is to describe stone by stone how it falls. Having worked out what he must present in his exposition and development sections, the writer comes to the most difficult part of his plotting, what medieval rhetoricians called
dispositio
, the disposition or organization of the various materials he has selected.

In theory the writer may decide to start his action anywhere, but in practice his options are limited. If he starts too far back (with Jim in his first year of college, say), the novel will be slow starting and almost certainly tedious; and if he starts too near the end—for instance, with the novel’s dramatic last event—the result will look gimmicky and self-regarding. The writer who wishes to avoid such faults as mannerism and frigidity will figure out where the action actually begins—probably with Jim’s arrival at Twin Oaks—and start there. (Thus Homer—to shift for a moment to the sublime—begins not with the opening of the Trojan war, not even with Agamemnon’s seizing of Briseus, but with the argument of Achilles and Agamemnon, the argument
that shows the contrast between Agamemnon’s cynicism and Achilles’ extreme idealism, the argument that sets off Achilles’ withdrawal from the war and will ultimately bring down tragedy on his head.) Having decided where he will start, the writer then plans his rhythmical climaxes, then figures out in detail where he will work in the necessary exposition. At every stage of his work, the writer may revise his earlier plan. He may discover, for example, that he needs more time for exposition in chapter 2, and he may therefore insert some new minor climax, with a trough on each side of it, giving himself more room.

I will leave it to the reader to figure out the plotting of the enormous cousin of the energeic novel, the so-called architectonic novel; that is, a novel with two or more parallel energeic plots, each focused on a central character or group of characters. (This was a favorite form of the Victorians, not to mention Tolstoy, and can still be used, as William Gaddis proves in
JR.
) All the plots must be philosophically related. Think, for example, of the two main plots of
Anna Karenina
, one leading to Anna’s symbolic damnation—her suicide among mumbling voices and sudden, strange light—the other leading to Levin’s symbolic and actual salvation. Basically the plotting process is the same as for the simple energeic novel, only harder and also more risky, since too much neatness in the parallel plots may make the novel seem contrived, and too little will make it sprawl, as if out of control. I also leave to the reader the problem of working out the novel that imitates the biographical form (e.g.,
David Copperfield
). Here the plotting is energeic, at least for long stretches, but the novel breaks into large episodes from various periods of the hero’s life, and the choice of these episodes (as opposed to other possible episodes) follows theme. Again the risks are self-evident. If the thematic connection between the various episodes is too neat, the novel will seem contrived and unlifelike; and if the connections are too vague, the novel may lack focus.