The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (8 page)

Aristotle’s idea of the energeic action is not really refuted by
Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” though those works may lead us to understand the theory in a new way, a way Aristotle never thought of, working as he did from the practice of Greek tragedians, but one to which he might without too great an effort adapt himself. Poe and Kafka begin not with exterior situations whose potential is to be actualized in the progress of the work, but with situations that are, in one case literally and in the other expressionistically, interior. Whereas Sophocles’ initial situation in
Oedipus Rex
is a plague in Thebes and the king’s dark history, as yet unknown to the king himself, Poe’s initial situation is almost entirely a psychological state, the central character’s hunger for revenge (whether or not the hunger is even justified the reader cannot tell), and Kafka’s initial situation is a psychological state expressionistically transformed: Where the realist would say, “One day Gregor Samsa woke up to the realization that he was like a cockroach,” the expressionist heightens or intensifies reality by turning the metaphor to fact. In place of the classical writer’s clear distinction between the outside world and the inside world—“situation,” on one hand, “character,” on the other—the two modern writers see outer reality and inner reality as interpenetrating: The world is whatever we feel it to be, so that the situation character must deal with is partly character. Either way, the unfolding of the story is the actualization of its initial potential.

Two central tenets, for the traditional point of view, are, first, the Coleridgian notion that true literary art is “the repetition in the finite mind of the infinite ‘I AM’”—the idea, that is, that, like God opening his fist, the writer creates everything at once, his characters, their actions, and their world, each element dependent on the others—and, second, the concomitant notion that an important part of what interests us in good fiction is our sense, as we read, that the writer’s imitation of reality’s process (“the ineluctable modality of the visible,” as Stephen Dedalus puts it) is accurate; that is, our feeling that the work, even if it
contains fabulous elements, is in some deep way “true to life.” The obvious question is: How can the writer possibly do so much at once?

The answer is that he does and he doesn’t. He can think, consciously, of only a few things at a time; but the process by which he works eventually leads him to his goal. To anyone who thinks about it carefully, this must at first seem a rather strange statement: “The process by which he works eventually leads him to his goal”—as if the process had some kind of magic in it, some daemonic will of its own. Indeed, some writers—not the least of them Homer—have taken that point of view, speaking without apology of Muses as, in some sense, actual beings, and of “epic song” and “memory” (not quite in our sense) as forces greater than and separate from the poet. We often hear even modern writers speak of their work as somehow outside their control, informed by a spirit that, when they read their writing later, they cannot identify as having come from themselves. I imagine every good writer has had this experience. It testifies to the remarkable subtlety of fiction as a mode of thought.

The fictional process is the writer’s way of thinking, a special case of the symbolic process by means of which we do all our thinking. Though it’s only an analogy, and in some ways misleading, we might say that the elements of fiction are to a writer what numbers are to a mathematician, the main difference being that we handle fictional elements more intuitively than even the subtlest mathematicians handle numbers. As Hobbes said, “We cannot think about things but only about the names of things”; in other words, to build up a complicated argument we need abstractions. If we wish to think usefully about wildlife preservation, we must abstract the dying white rhinoceros at our feet to dying white rhinoceroses in general, we must see the relationship (another abstraction) between dying white rhinoceroses and dying tigers, etc., and rise, finally, to the abstraction “dying wildlife.” In the same way, a writer consciously or unconsciously abstracts the elements of fiction.

By the elements of fiction I mean all of the discrete particles of which a story is built, particles that might be removed, undamaged, from one story and placed in another; for example, particles of the action, “event ideas” such as kidnapping, pursuit of the elusive loved one, a murder, loss of identity, and so on; or particles that go to make up character, such as obesity and each of the things obesity may imply, or stinginess, or lethargy; or particles that go to make up setting and atmosphere. In isolation, each element has relatively limited meaning; in juxtaposition to one another, the elements become more significant, forming abstractions of a kind—higher units of poetic thought. All the arts are made up of such fundamental elements, which we find repeated in painting after painting, symphony after symphony, arranged and built up (as complex molecules are built up from atoms) in an infinite variety of ways. From painting we might take the example of the mountain (one element) and the tree (another) that in juxtaposition have a standard but variable function: The majestic mountain is silhouetted against the sky and compared to a single, equally isolated tree in the foreground, the one remote, unchanging, and divine in connotation, the other accessible, ever-changing, and humanized. We find this juxtaposition of elements expressed in its classical form in Titian, Poussin, and other masters; in several of the late works of Cézanne—the Mont-Sainte-Victoire paintings of 1902–1906—we find the traditional juxtaposition ingeniously varied, the tree mysteriously dominating the mountain and treated in such a way (swirling brushstrokes, vague outlines) that it seems at least as mystical as the mountain; or the tree and the mountain so identified, by color and frantic brushstrokes, that the accessible and the remote, or human emotion and the ideal, seem to merge; and so forth.

Though no one can say what the number is, the number of fictional elements that exist is finite, like the number of words in the English language. Like the tree and the mountain in our example from painting, or like words in the English language,
the elements of fiction may mean one thing in one place, another in another; they slip and slide and occasionally overlap; but they have meaning—or, at any rate, meaning domains—and so do their standard, increasingly complex juxtapositions. Good writers use them as skillfully and comfortably, and sometimes as unconsciously, as plumbers and roofers use language. No new elements are likely to be discovered; this is what we mean, or ought to mean, when we say that “literature is exhausted.” What writers do discover is new combinations. The search for new combinations is both guided by and one with the fictional process.

Perhaps the logical first step in the fictional process is the writer’s conscious or intuitive recognition of the nature of narrative, and his acceptance of the shackles imposed by his decision to tell a story (instead of, say, to write a philosophy book or paint a picture). By definition—and of aesthetic necessity—a story contains profluence, a requirement best satisfied by a sequence of causally related events, a sequence that can end in only one of two ways: in resolution, when no further event can take place (the murderer has been caught and hanged, the diamond has been found and restored to its owner, the elusive lady has been captured and married), or in logical exhaustion, our recognition that we’ve reached the stage of infinite repetition; more events might follow, perhaps from now till Kingdom Come, but they will all express the same thing—for example, the character’s entrapment in empty ritual or some consistently wrong response to the pressures of his environment. Resolution is of course the classical and usually more satisfying conclusion; logical exhaustion satisfies us intellectually but often not emotionally, since it’s more pleasing to see things definitely achieved or thwarted than to be shown why they can never be either achieved or thwarted. Both achievement and failure give importance to the thing sought; we can feel about it as we feel about values. Logical exhaustion usually reveals that the character’s supposed exercise of free will was illusory.

It might be objected here that no law requires art to be “pleasing.” A story that raises expectations, then shows why they can neither be satisfied nor denied, can be as illuminating, and as interesting moment by moment, as any other kind of story, though the ending may annoy us. The trouble, from the traditionalist point of view, is this. First, the revelation that the character’s exercise of free will was illusory raises suspicions, which may or may not be justified, about the author’s honesty and artistic responsibility. It may be that the writer was as surprised and disappointed by the inescapable conclusion to his fictional argument as we have been; yet we cannot help wondering how much real interest he felt from the beginning in his characters and events: The conclusion suggests that he has used them rather than cared about them, much as a preacher uses old stories and straw men to drive home some point. In rousing our concern about the characters and events—such is our suspicion, right or wrong—he has set us up, treating us not as equals but as poor dumb mules who must be hollered and whipped into wisdom. Second, we suspect the writer of a kind of frigidity. By the nature of our mortality, I pointed out earlier, we care about what we know and might possibly lose, dislike that which threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has no visible bearing on our safety or the safety of what we love. Though we do not read fiction primarily in order to find rules on how to live or, indeed, to find anything that is directly useful, we do sympathetically engage ourselves in the struggle that produces the fictional events. Reading a piece of fiction that ends up nowhere—no win, no loss; life as a treadmill—is like discovering, after we have run our hearts out against the timekeeper’s clock, that the timekeeper forgot to switch the clock on. The only emotions such fiction can ordinarily produce are weariness and despair, and those emotions, though valid and perhaps even justified (finally) by the nature of the universe, are less useful to the conduct of our lives than are the emotions we exercise in other kinds of fiction. Not even Aristotle would
argue that fiction
ought
to be cathartic; he says only that such fiction is most satisfying. But certainly more is involved than simple pleasure or displeasure. At least in comparison with the resolved ending (Aristotle would have said if the question had come up), the ending in logical exhaustion is morally repugnant.

We have said that by definition and aesthetic necessity a story contains profluence, and that the conventional kind of profluence—though other kinds are possible—is a causally related sequence of events. This is the root interest of all conventional narrative. Because he is intellectually and emotionally involved—that is, interested—the reader is led by successive, seemingly inevitable steps, with no false steps, and no necessary steps missing, from an unstable initial situation to its relatively stable outcome. It seems a pity that it should be necessary to argue a point so obvious, and I will not, at any length; to instruct the reader that he should quit when he gets bored, or instruct the writer that he should try not to be boring, seems absurd. Nevertheless, current fictional theory and the practice of some fashionable writers make at least some discussion of the matter worthwhile.

A basic characteristic of all good art, then—all man-made works that are aesthetically interesting and lasting—is a concord of ends and means, or form and function. The
sine qua non
of narrative, so far as form is concerned, is that it takes time. We cannot read a whole novel in an instant, so to be coherent, to work as a unified experience necessarily and not just accidentally temporal, narrative must show some profluence of development. What the logical progress of an argument is to nonfiction, event-sequence is to fiction. even if it’s a page of description, raises questions, suspicions, and expectations; the mind casts forward to later pages, wondering what will come about and how. It is this casting forward that draws us from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. At least in conventional fiction, the moment we stop caring where the story will go next, the writer has failed, and we stop reading. The
shorter the fiction, needless to say, the less the need for plot profluence. A story of three or four pages may still interest though it has practically no movement. And of course not all fiction need move at the same pace. Runners of the hundred-yard dash do not take off in the same way runners of the marathon do. If the opening pages of a thousand-page novel would serve equally well as the opening pages of a short story, the likelihood is that the novel-opening is wrong. (This is not quite a firm rule, admittedly. A long novel may begin with great urgency, then gradually settle into its long-distance stride. But the writer’s timing in his opening pages is a signal to his reader’s expectations.)

In any case, any narrative more than a few pages long is doomed to failure if it does not set up and satisfy plot expectations. Plotting, then—however childish and elementary it may seem in comparison with the work of surgeons, philosophers, or nuclear physicists—must be the first and foremost concern of the writer. He cannot work out his sequence of events without at least some notion of who the characters are to be or where the action is to take place, and in practice he will never design a plot without some notion of what its elements imply. To say that plot must be the writer’s first concern is not to say that it is necessarily the first thing that dawns on him, setting off his project. The writer’s first idea for the story—what Henry James calls the “germ”—may not be an event but an interesting character, setting, or theme. But whatever the origin of the story idea, the writer has no story until he has figured out a plot that will efficiently and elegantly express it. Though character is the emotional core of great fiction, and though action with no meaning beyond its own brute existence can have no lasting appeal, plot is—or must sooner or later become—the focus of every good writer’s plan.