The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (4 page)

The same holds true for literature. Novelty comes chiefly from ingenious genre-crossing or elevation of familiar materials. As an example of genre-crossing, think of the best of the three versions of Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses” (the one that begins with the words “That Flem”), where techniques of the yarn—mainly diction, comic exaggeration, and cruel humor—are combined with techniques of the realistic-symbolic short story. Genre-crossing of one sort or another is behind most of the great literary art in the English tradition. Chaucer again and again plays one form off against another, as in the
Knight’s Tale
, where, along with other, less-well-known forms, he blends epic and romance. The greatest of all medieval alliterative poems,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, blends elements of the earthy
fabliau
(in the temptation scenes) with romance elements. Shakespeare’s most powerful techniques are all results of genre-crossing: his combination of prose and verse to expand the emotional range of drama; his combination of Roman high-style convention with conventions drawn from the English folk plays, rowdy medieval mystery plays (or guild plays), and so on; and his crossing of tragic convention and comic convention for the “dark comedies.” Milton’s fondness for genre-crossing is one of the commonplaces of scholarship. As for the elevation of popular materials or trash—alone or in combination with nobler forms—think of John Hawkes’ blend of the psychological-symbolic novel and the American hard-boiled mystery, Italo Calvino’s blend (in
t-zero
and
Cosmicomics
)
of sci-fi, fantasy, comic-book language and imagery, movie melodrama, and nearly everything else, or Donald Barthelme’s transformation of such cultural trash as the research questionnaire, the horror-show and animated cartoon, the travelogue and psychiatrist’s transcript. Like genre-crossing, the elevation of popular or trash materials is an old and familiar form of innovation. It was a favorite method of late Greek poets like Apollonios Rhodios (in the
Argonautica
), Roman comic poets, many of the great medieval poets (think of Chaucer’s
Rime of Sir Thopas
), and poets of the Renaissance. The noblest of modern literary forms, equivalent in range and cultural importance to the noblest of musical forms, the symphony, began in the elevation and transformation of trash when Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding began transmuting junk into art.
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders
spring, respectively, from the naive shipwreck narrative and the rogue’s confession;
Pamela
and
Clarissa
add character and plot to the popular collection of epistolary models for the guidance of young ladies;
Jonathan Wilde
comes from the gallows broadside, or story of the character and horrible crimes of the felon about to be hanged.

None of these writers, ancient or modern, sat down to write “to express himself.” They sat down to write this kind of story or that, or to mix this form with that form, producing some new effect. Self-expression, whatever its pleasures, comes about incidentally. It also comes about inevitably. The realistic writer may set out to conjure up the personality of his aunt, creating for her, or copying from life, some story through which her character is revealed, and thus he reveals his strong feelings about his aunt; that is, he expresses himself. The fabulist—the writer of nonrealistic yarns, tales, or fables—may seem at first glance to be doing something quite different; but he is not. Dragons, like bankers and candy-store owners, must have firm and predictable characters. A talking tree, a talking refrigerator, a talking clock must speak in a way we learn to recognize, must influence events
in ways we can identify as flowing from some definite motivation; and since character can come only from one of two places, books or life, the writer’s aunt is as likely to show up in a fable as in a realistic story. Thus the process by which one writes a fable, on one hand, or a realistic story, on the other, is not much different. Let us look more closely at the similarities and differences.

In any piece of fiction, the writer’s first job is to convince the reader that the events he recounts really happened, or to persuade the reader that they might have happened (given small changes in the laws of the universe), or else to engage the reader’s interest in the patent absurdity of the lie. The realistic writer’s way of making events convincing is verisimilitude. The tale writer, telling stories of ghosts, or shape-shifters, or some character who never sleeps, uses a different approach: By the quality of his voice, and by means of various devices that distract the critical intelligence, he gets what Coleridge called—in one of the most clumsy famous sentences in all literature—“the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” The yarn writer—like Mark Twain in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” or “Baker’s Bluejay Yarn”—uses yet another method: He tells outrageous lies, or has some character tell the poor narrator some outrageous lie, and he simultaneously emphasizes both the brilliance and the falsehood of the lie; that is, he tells the lie as convincingly as he can but also raises objections to the lie, either those objections the reader might raise or, for comic effect, literal-minded country-bumpkin objections that, though bumpkinish, call attention to the yarn’s improbabilities.

All three kinds of writing, it should be obvious at a glance, depend heavily on precision of detail. In writing that depends on verisimilitude, the writer in effect argues the reader into acceptance. He places his story in some actual setting—Cleveland, San Francisco, Joplin, Missouri—and he uses characters we would be likely to meet in the setting he has chosen. He gives us
such detail about the streets, stores, weather, politics, and concerns of Cleveland (or whatever the setting is) and such detail about the looks, gestures, and experience of his characters that we cannot help believing that the story he tells us must be true. In fact it may be true, as is Truman Capote’s novel
In Cold Blood
or Norman Mailer’s
The Executioner’s Song
. The fact that the story is true of course does not relieve the novelist of the responsibility of making the characters and events convincing. Second by second we ask, “Would a mother really say that?” “Would a child really think that?” and if the novelist has done his work well we cannot help answering, “Yes.” If he has done his work badly, on the other hand, the reader feels unconvinced even when the writer presents events he actually witnessed in life. What has gone wrong, in this case, is that the writer missed or forgot to mention something important to the development of the scene. For instance, if a fictional husband and wife are arguing bitterly and the wife suddenly changes her tactics, speaking gently, even lovingly, the reader cannot understand or believe the change unless some clue is provided as to the reason for it. The clue may be an event, perhaps a noise in another part of the house, that reminds her that the children are nearby; or it may be a thought, perhaps the wife’s reflection that this is how her mother used to argue with her father; or the clue may be a gesture, as when the wife, after something the husband says, turns and looks out the window, providing a pause that allows her to collect herself. When the realist’s work convinces us, all effects, even the most subtle, have explicit or implicit causes. This kind of documentation, moment by moment authenticating detail, is the mainstay not only of realistic fiction but of all fiction.

In other words, while verisimilar fiction may be described generally as fiction that persuades us of its authenticity through real-world documentation, using real or thoroughly lifelike locations and characters—real cities or cities we believe to be real although their names have been changed, real-life characters
with actual or substituted names, and so forth—the line-by-line bulk of a realist’s work goes far beyond the accurate naming of streets and stores or accurate description of people and neighborhoods. He must present, moment by moment, concrete images drawn from a careful observation of how people behave, and he must render the connections between moments, the exact gestures, facial expressions, or turns of speech that, within any given scene, move human beings from emotion to emotion, from one instant in time to the next.

Compare the technique of the writer of tales. Whereas the realist argues the reader into acceptance, the tale writer charms or lulls him into dropping objections; that is, persuades him to suspend disbelief. Isak Dinesen begins one of her tales: “After the death of his master Leonidas, Angelino Santasillia resolved that he would never again sleep. Will the narrator be believed when he tells the reader that Angelino kept this resolve? Nevertheless, it is the case.” No realist, of course, could tell this story, since no amount of argument will convince us that a character really might stay awake for weeks, months, years. The tale writer simply walks past our objections, granting that the events he is about to recount are incredible but winning our suspension of disbelief by the confidence and authority of the narrator’s voice. Yet after establishing the impossible premise, one that opens the door to further improbabilities—in the case of Isak Dinesen’s tale, as it happens, the appearance of Judas, at the end of the narrative, counting his silver in a small, dimly lit room—the tale writer documents his story moment by moment by details of exactly the kind realists use. The opening lines slightly alter natural law, but granting the alteration, what follows is made to seem thoroughly probable and at least poetically true by the writer’s close attention to the natural flow of moral cause and effect, a flow minutely documented with details drawn from life. As the story progresses, the sleepless Angelino walks, talks, and thinks more and more slowly. Sometimes whole days pass between the beginnings and ends of his sentences. We “believe”
the narrative not just because the tale voice has charmed us but also, and more basically, because the character’s gestures, his precisely described expression, and the reaction of others to his oddity all seem to us exactly what they would be in this strange situation. The images are as sharp and accurately rendered as any in Tolstoy’s
Childhood
or
Anna Karenina
. The streets he walks, the weather, the city’s sounds and smells all authenticate the sleepless man’s existence. There is, admittedly, one great difference between the use of authenticating detail by a realist and the use of the same by a tale writer. The realist must authenticate continually, bombarding the reader with proofs; the writer of tales can simplify, persuading us partly by the beauty or interest of his language, using authenticating detail more sparingly, to give vividness to the tale’s key moments. Thus, for example, once the writer of a tale has convinced us, partly by charm, partly by detail, that a certain king has a foul temper, he can make such bald statements as: “The king was furious. He sent everyone home, locked all the doors, and had chains wrapped tight around his castle.” Nevertheless the difference is one of degree. Neither the realist nor the writer of tales can get by without documentation through specific detail.

It’s the same in the yarn. Consider the following, from Mark Twain’s “Baker’s Bluejay Yarn.”

Baker, we understand, has been out in the wilderness too long and has gone a little dotty—or else (more likely) he’s pulling the leg of the credulous narrator who reports his story as gospel. Either way, no one but the narrator imagines for a moment that what Baker is saying is true. What makes the lie delightful is the pains Baker takes to make it credible. The cabin with the knothole in the roof exists: It has a history and physical features—in fact Baker can point to it. Details convince us that Baker really did sit looking at it: It was a Sunday morning; his cat was with him; he was looking at and listening to specific things, thinking specific thoughts. The bluejay really did speak—the acorn is the proof—and further details labor valiantly to persuade us that bluejays think: the cocked head, the one closed eye, the vivid image of the open eye pressed to the knot-hole “like a ’possum looking down a jug.”

In all the major genres, vivid detail is the life blood of fiction. Verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief through narrative voice, or the wink that calls attention to the yarn-teller’s lie may be the
outer
strategy of a given work; but in all major genres, the inner strategy is the same: The reader is regularly presented with proofs—in the form of closely observed details—that what is said to be happening is really happening. Before we turn to the technical implications of this fact, let us look, briefly, at a few
more examples, since the point is one of great importance. Take a short scene from Peter Taylor’s “The Fancy Woman.” George has brought Josephine, the “fancy woman” or prostitute he loves, home to meet the family. Josephine has been drinking, and George is determined to sober her up.