How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

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  But to repeat, what is a character? I am thicketed in qualifications: if I say that a character seems connected to consciousness, to the use of a mind, the many superb examples of characters who seem to think very little, who are rarely seen thinking, bristle up (Gatsby, Captain Ahab, Becky Sharp, Widmerpool, Jean Brodie). If I refine the thought by repeating that a character at least has some essential connection to an interior life, to inwardness, is seen “from within,” I am presented with the nicely opposing examples of those two adulterers, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest, the first of whom does a lot of reflection, and is seen internally as well as externally, the second of whom, in Theodor Fontane’s eponymous novel, is seen almost entirely from the outside, with little space set aside for represented reflection. No one could say that Anna is more vivid than Effi simply because we see Anna doing more thinking.

  If I try to distinguish between major and minor characters—round and flat characters—and claim that these differ in terms of subtlety, depth, time allowed on the page, I must concede that many so-called flat characters seem more alive to me, and more interesting as human studies, however short-lived, than the round characters they are supposedly subservient to.

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  The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as “a novelistic character.” There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes. Some of them are solid enough that we can speculate about their motives: Why does Hurstwood steal the money? Why does Isabel Archer return to Gilbert Osmond? What is Julien Sorel’s true ambition? Why does Kirilov want to commit suicide? What does Mr. Biswas want? But there are scores of fictional characters who are not fully or conventionally evoked who are also alive and vivid. The solid, nineteenth-century fictional character (I count Biswas in that company) who confronts us with deep mysteries is not the “best” or ideal or only way to create character (though it does not deserve the enormous condescension of postmodernism). My own taste tends toward the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows: Why does Onegin reject Tatiana and then provoke a fight with Lenski? Pushkin offers us almost no evidence on which to base our answer. Is Svevo’s Zeno mad? Is the narrator of Hamsun’s Hunger mad? We have only their unreliable narration of events.

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  Perhaps because I am not sure what a character is, I find especially moving those postmodern novels, like Pnin, or Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, or Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, or W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, or Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, in which we are are confronted with characters who are at once real and unreal. In each of these novels, the author asks us to reflect on the fictionality of the heroes and heroines who give the novels their titles. And in a fine paradox, it is precisely such reflection that stirs in the reader a desire to make these fictional characters “real,” to say, in effect, to the authors: “I know that they are only fictional—you keep on suggesting this. But I can only know them by treating them as real.” That is how Pnin works, for instance. An unreliable narrator insists that Professor Pnin is “a character” in two senses of the word: a type (clownish, eccentric émigré) and a fictional character, the narrator’s fantasy. Yet just because we resent the narrator’s condescension toward his fond and foolish possession, we insist that behind the “type” there must be a real Pnin, who is worth “knowing” in all his fullness and complexity. And Nabokov’s novel is constructed in such a way as to excite that desire in us for a real Professor Pnin, a “true fiction” with which to oppose the false fictions of the overbearing and sinister narrator.

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  José Saramago’s great novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis works a little differently, but to the same effect, and, like Pnin, becomes a moving investigation of what a real self is. Ricardo Reis, a doctor from Brazil, is an aloof, conservative aesthete who has decided to return to his native Portugal. It is the end of 1935, and the great poet Fernando Pessoa has just died. Reis is himself a poet and mourns Pessoa’s departure. He is not sure what to do. He has saved some money, and for a while he lives in a hotel, where he has an affair with a chambermaid. He writes several beautiful lyrics, and is visited by the now-ghostly Pessoa, with whom he converses. Saramago describes these conversations in a frankly literal and direct manner. Reis wanders the streets of Lisbon, as 1935 curdles into 1936. He reads the newspapers, and is increasingly alarmed by the baying of Europe’s dogs: in Spain civil war and the rise of Franco, in Germany Hitler, in Italy Mussolini, and in Portugal the fascist dictatorship of Salazar. He would like to retreat from this bad news. He reflects fondly on the story of the ninety-seven-year-old John D. Rockefeller, who has a specially doctored version of The New York Times delivered every day, altered to contain only good news. “The world’s threats are universal, like the sun, but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow.”

  But Ricardo Reis is not a “real” fictional character, whatever that means (like David Copperfield or Emma Bovary). He is one of the four pen names that the actual Pessoa—the poet who worked and lived in Lisbon and died in 1935—assumed, and in whose persona he wrote poetry. The special flicker of this book, the tint and the delicacy that make it seem hallucinatory, derive from the solidity with which Saramago invests a character who is fictional twice over: first Pessoa’s, then Saramago’s. This enables Saramago to tease us with something that we already know, namely that Ricardo Reis is fictional. Saramago makes something deep and moving of this because Ricardo also feels himself to be somewhat fictional, at best a shadowy spectator, a man on the margin of things. And when Ricardo reflects thus, we feel a strange tenderness for him, aware of something that he does not know, that he is not real.

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  Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves? This is something like Saramago’s question; but it is worth noting that he reaches his question by traveling in the opposite direction of those postmodern novelists who like to remind us of the metafictionality of all things. A certain kind of postmodern novelist (like John Barth, say) is always lecturing us: “Remember, this character is just a character. I invented him.” By starting with an invented character, however, Saramago is able to pass through the same skepticism, but in the opposite direction, toward reality, toward the deepest questions. Saramago asks, in effect: But what is “just a character”? And Saramago’s uncertainty is more searching than William Gass’s skepticism, for in life we anxiously question our existence rather than deny it.

  In Saramago’s novels, the self may cast only a shadow, like Ricardo Reis, but this shadow implies not the nonexistence of the self, but only its difficult visibility, its near invisibility, rather as the shadow cast by the sun warns us that we cannot look directly at it. Ricardo Reis is aloof, ghostly. He does not want to get pulled into real relationships, including the real relationships of politics. Europe is scrambling for war, but Ricardo luxuriously sits around wondering if he exists. He writes a poem that begins “We count for nothing, we are less than futile.” Another poem begins: “Walk empty-handed, for wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world.” Yet the novel suggests that perhaps there is something culpable about being content with the spectacle of the world when the world’s spectacle is horrifying.

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  The question of this novel, and of much of Saramago’s work, is not the trivial “metafictional” game-playing of “Does Ricardo Reis exist?” It is the much more poignant question, “Do we exist if we refuse to relate to anyone?”

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  What does it mean to “love” a fictional character, to feel that you know her? What kind of knowledge is t
his? Miss Jean Brodie is one of the best-loved novelistic characters in postwar British fiction, and one of the very few to be something of a household name. But if you dragged a microphone down Princes Street in Edinburgh and asked people what they “know” about Miss Brodie, those who had read Muriel Spark’s novel would likely recite a number of her aphorisms: “I am in my prime,” “You are the crème de la crème,” “The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd,” and so on. These are Jean Brodie’s famous sayings. Miss Brodie, in other words, is not really “known” at all. We know her just as her young pupils knew her: as a collection of tags, a rhetorical performance, a teacher’s show. At Marcia Blaine School for Girls, each member of the Brodie set is “famous” for something: Mary Macgregor is famous for being stupid, and Rose is famous for sex, and so on. Miss Brodie, it seems, is famous for her sayings. Around her very thinness as a character we tend to construct a thicker interpretative jacket.

  Nearly all of Muriel Spark’s novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved. Her brilliantly reduced style, of “never apologize, never explain,” seems a deliberate provocation: we feel compelled to turn the mere crescents of her characters into solid discs. But while some of her refusal to wax explanatory or sentimental may have been temperamental, it was also moral. Spark was intensely interested in how much we can know about anyone, and interested in how much a novelist, who most pretends to such knowledge, can know about her characters. By reducing Miss Brodie to no more than a collection of maxims, Spark forces us to become Brodie’s pupils. In the course of the novel we never leave the school to go home with Miss Brodie. We never see her in private, offstage. Always, she is the performing teacher, keeping a public face. We surmise that there is something unfulfilled and even desperate about her, but the novelist refuses us access to her interior. Brodie talks a great deal about her prime, but we don’t witness it, and the nasty suspicion falls that perhaps to talk so much about one’s prime is by definition no longer to be in it.

  Spark always exercises ruthless control over her fictional characters, and here she flaunts it: she spikes her story with a series of “flash-forwards,” in which we learn what happened to the characters after the main action of the plot (Miss Brodie will die of cancer, Mary Macgregor will die at the age of twenty-three in a fire, another pupil will join a convent, another will have an ordinary marriage, another will never again be quite as happy as when she first discovered algebra). These coldly prophetic passages strike some readers as cruel; they are such summary judgments. But they are moving, because they raise the idea that if Miss Brodie never really had a prime, then for some of the schoolgirls their primes occurred in their childhoods—during those days earnestly praised, at least by one’s teachers, as the “happiest days of your life.”

  These flash-forwards do something else: they remind us that Muriel Spark has powers of ultimate control over her creations; and they remind us of … Miss Brodie. This tyrannical authority is precisely what Miss Brodie’s most intelligent pupil, Sandy Stranger, hates, and finally exposes, in her teacher: that she is a fascist and a Scottish Calvinist, predestining the lives of her pupils, forcing them into artificial shapes. Is this what the novelist does, too? That is the question that interests Spark. The novelist adopts Godlike powers of omniscience, but what can she really know of her creations? Surely only God, the ultimate author of our lives, can know our coming and our going, and surely only God has the moral right to decide such things. Nabokov used to say that he pushed his characters around like serfs or chess pieces—he had no time for that metaphorical ignorance and impotence whereby authors like to say, “I don’t know what happened, but my character just got away from me and did his own thing. I had nothing to do with it.”3 Nonsense, said Nabokov, if I want my character to cross the road, he crosses the road. I am his master. Nabokov’s fiction, like Spark’s, explores the implications of such potency: Timofey Pnin finally refuses to be pushed about by Nabokov’s bullying narrator, who seems suspiciously like Nabokov himself. Pnin memorably says that he refuses to “work under” the narrator (who is coming to head the department where Professor Pnin teaches). This was one of Spark’s abiding concerns, from her early novels like The Comforters and Memento Mori to her very last, The Finishing School. She used fiction to reflect on the responsibilities and limitations of fiction itself, and indeed on the difficulties and limitations of all fiction-making. (The Scottish novelist Ali Smith, a great admirer of Muriel Spark, continues this metafictional tradition, in a more exuberant and playful vein.)

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  This fictional self-consciousness, and her devotion to spare forms, made Spark resemble at times a nouveau romancier like Alain Robbe-Grillet or the British avant-gardist B. S. Johnson, who once published a novel, The Unfortunates, made of looseleaf pages in a box, to be arranged as the reader saw fit. Johnson’s slightly more conventional novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, is very funny, and studded with amusing metafictional self-consciousness. Christie’s mother says things like: “My son: I have for the purposes of this novel been your mother for the past eighteen years and five months to the day…” At his mother’s funeral, “Christie was the only mourner, economy as to relatives (as to so many other things) being one of the virtues of this novel.” Like Nabokov and Spark, B. S. Johnson saw the comparison between God the omniscient author and the omnipotent novelist, who can do anything he likes with his “chess pieces.” At one point, Christie’s mother explains how Adam and Eve first ate from the tree. Of course, she says, the whole thing is absurd, because God could have stopped it any time He liked, being omniscient. “But no: God has been making it all up as He goes along, like certain kinds of novelist…”

  But the difference between Johnson and Spark is instructive, too. Johnson plays with these questions but does not finally inhabit them as Spark or Nabokov or Saramago does. In the end there is nothing like the pressure of inquiry you feel in those writers. Johnson is content to ask, again and again—and very entertainingly—the metafictional question “Does Christie exist?” but not the metaphysical question “How does Christie exist?”—which is really the question “How do we exist?” The reason for the atmosphere of postmodern lightness in this novel is that Johnson is not able to be gravely skeptical, because he is not able to be gravely affirmative (the opposite of Saramago, as we saw, who wrings skepticism out of affirmation). Jean Brodie, though we see her in only a handful of scenes that are shuffled like a pack of cards, exists for Spark, has metaphysical presence, and does for us, too. That is why the questions “Who was Jean Brodie? Who really knew her?” have power and affect. But Christie Malry does not really exist for Johnson. He is denied before he is believed in.4

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  To argue that we can know Jean Brodie just as deeply as we can know Dorothea Brooke, to argue that lacunae are as deep as solidities, that absence in characterization can be a form of knowing as profound as presence, that Spark’s and Saramago’s and Nabokov’s characters can move us as much as James’s and Eliot’s, is to concede little to William Gass’s skepticism. Not all of these characters have the same amount of realized “depth,” but all of them are objects of perception, to use Gass’s words, all of them are more than mere bundles of words (though of course they are bundles of words), and things that can be correctly said of persons can also be said of them. They are all “real” (they have a reality) but in different ways. That reality level differs from author to author, and our hunger for the particular depth or reality level of a character is tutored by each writer, and adapts to the internal conventions of each book. This is how we can read W. G. Sebald one day, and Woolf the next, and Philip Roth the next, and not demand that each resemble the other. It would be an obvious category mistake to accuse Sebald of not offering us “deep” or “rounded” characters, or to accuse Woolf of not offering us plenty of juicy, robust minor characters in the way of Dickens. I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach
us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level. In such cases, our appetite is quickly disappointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author for not giving us enough—the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough. Yet we would not dream of accusing Sebald or Woolf or Roth—none of whom is especially interested in creating character in the solid, old-fashioned nineteenth-century sense—of letting us down in this way, because they have so finely tutored us in their own conventions, their own expansive limitations, to be satisfied with just what they give us.

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