How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

  How does this kind of stylishness avoid the dilemma we explored earlier, in Flaubert and Updike and David Foster Wallace, in which the stylish novelist uses words that his more hapless fictional character could never have come up with? It doesn’t. The tension is still there, and Bellow has to remind us that Newark “held his [Isaac’s] attention minutely,” as if to say, “you see, Isaac really is looking as hard as I am at these things.” But Bellow’s details and rhythms are so mobile, so dynamic, that they seem less vulnerable to the charge of aestheticism than do Flaubert’s or Updike’s. That smooth, premade wall of prose that Flaubert wanted us to gasp at—“How does it all come about?”—is here a rougher lattice, through which we seem to see a style apparently in the process of being made. This roughened-up texture and rhythm is, for me at least, one of the reasons that I rarely find Bellow an intrusive lyricist, despite his high stylishness.3

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  One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers. An efficient thriller will often be written in a style that is locked into place: the musical analogue of this might be a tune, proceeding in unison, the melody separated only by octave intervals, without any harmony in the middle. By contrast, rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out of place. In writing, a “register” is nothing more than a name for a kind of diction, which is nothing more than a name for a certain, distinctive way of saying something—so we talk about “high” and “low” registers (e.g., the highish “Father” and the lower “Pop”), grand and vernacular diction, mock-heroic diction, clichéd registers, and so on.

  We have a conventional expectation that prose should be written in only one unvarying register—a solid block, like everyone agreeing to wear black at a funeral. But this is a social convention, and eighteenth-century prose, for instance, is especially good at subverting this expectation, wringing comedy out of the jostling together of different registers that we had not thought should share the same family space. We saw how well Jane Austen made fun of Sir William Lucas, by writing that he built a new house, “denominated from that period Lucas Lodge.” With the phrase “denominated from that period,” and especially the fancy verb “denominated,” Austen uses a grand register (or pompous diction) to mock Sir William’s own pomposity. More subtly, in Emma, Mrs. Elton, on the trip to Donwell Abbey to pick strawberries, is described as dressed in “all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket.” The phrase “apparatus of happiness” is of course absolutely killing, and, as in the Lucas Lodge passage, the comedy emanates from the little lift in register, the move upward, to that word “apparatus.” Suggestive of technical efficiency, the word belongs to a scientific register that puts it at odds with “of happiness.” An apparatus of happiness sounds more like an inverted torture machine than a bonnet and basket, and it promises a kind of doggedness, a persistence, that fits Mrs. Elton’s character, and which makes the heart sink.

  Austen’s tricks can be found in modern writers as different as Muriel Spark and Philip Roth. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, one of the little girls, Jenny, is confronted one day by a flasher; or as Spark wittily has it, “was accosted by a man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith.” That adverb, “joyfully,” is marvelously unexpected, and seems to have no place in the sentence. It robs the incident of menace, and makes it a kind of fairy tale. The capitalized “Water of Leith” introduces an absurd mock-heroic register that Pope would have applauded. The Water of Leith is a small river; to insist on identifying it makes further fun of the incident, and the aural suggestion of Lethe is very funny. You can hear the comedy in these different dictions—and laugh—without necessarily knowing why.4

  Philip Roth does something similar in this long sentence from Sabbath’s Theater. Mickey Sabbath, satanic seducer and misanthrope, has been having a long, juicy affair with a Croatian-American, Drenka:

  Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts—uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit—suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may have once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.

  This is an amazingly blasphemous little mélange. This sentence is really dirty, and partly because it conforms to the well-known definition of dirt—matter out of place, which is itself a definition of the mixing of high and low dictions. But why would Roth engage in such baroque deferrals and shifts? Why write it so complicatedly? If you render the simple matter of his sentence and keep everything in place—i.e., remove the jostle of registers—you see why. A simple version would go like this: “Lately, when Sabbath sucked Drenka’s breasts, he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late mother.” It is still funny, because of the slide from lover to mother, but it is not exuberant. So the first thing the complexity achieves is to enact the exuberance, the hasty joy and chaotic desire, of sex. Second, the long, mock-pedantic, suspended subclause about the Latin origin of “uberous” and Tintoretto’s painting of Juno works, in proper music-hall fashion, to delay the punchline of “he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.” (It also delays, and makes more shocking and unexpected, the entrance of “cunt.”) Third, since the comedy of the subject matter of the sentence involves moving from one register to another—from a lover’s breast to a mother’s—it is fitting that the style of the sentence mimics this scandalous shift, by engaging in its own stylistic shifts, going up and down like a manic EKG: so we have “suckled” (high diction), “breasts” (medium), “uberare” (high), “Tintoretto’s painting” (high), “where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit” (low), “unrelenting frenzy” (high, rather formal diction), “as Juno herself may have once groaned” (still quite high), “cunt” (very low), “pierced by the sharpest of longings” (high, formal diction again). By insisting on equalizing all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, and the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalizing different registers. Sabbath’s Theater is a passionate, intensely funny, repellent, and very moving portrait of the scandal of male sexuality, which is repeatedly linked in the book to vitality itself. To be able to have an erection in the morning, to be able to seduce women in one’s mid-sixties, to be able to persist in scandalizing bourgeois morality, to be able to say every single day, as the aging Mickey does, “Fuck the laudable ideologies!” is to be alive. And this sentence is utterly alive, and is alive by virtue of the way it scandalizes proper norms. Is it Drenka or Juno or Mickey’s late mother who is being fucked in this sentence? All three of them. Roth brilliantly catches the needy, babyish side of male sexuality, in which a lover’s breast is still really mommy’s suckling tit, because mommy was your first and only lover. Drenka, then, inevitably, is both Madonna (mother, Juno) and whore (because she can’t be as good as mommy was). In classic misogynistic fashion, the woman is adored and hated by men because she is the source of life—the Milky Way flows out of her breasts, and children come from between her legs (“the Monster of the Beginning Womb,” as Allen Ginsberg calls it in Kaddish). Men cannot rival that, even as they, like Mickey or late Yeats, rage on about male “vitality.” And notice the subtle way that, with his verb “pierced” (“pierced by the sharpest of longings”), Roth inverts the presumed male-female order. Mickey, who is presumably piercing (in a sexual sense) this mother-whore by entering her, is really being pierced or entered—fucked back in turn—by the woman who gave birth to him. All this in one superb sentence.

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  Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. If I compare the slates
on a roof to an armadillo’s back, or—as I did earlier—the bald patch on the top of my head to a crop circle (or on very bad days, to the kind of flattened ring of grass that a helicopter’s blades make when it lands in a field), I am asking you to do what Conrad said fiction should make you do—see. I am asking you to imagine another dimension, to picture a likeness. Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story. Near the end of The Rainbow, Ursula looks out at London from her hotel balcony. It is dawn, and “the lamps of Picadilly, stringing away beside the trees of the park, were becoming pale and moth-like.” Pale and moth-like! We know, in a flash, exactly what Lawrence means, but we had not seen those lights like moths until this moment.

  And of course this explosion of fiction-within-fiction is not exclusively visual, any more than detail in fiction is exclusively visual. “As he spoke he stroked both sides of his mutton-chop whiskers as if he wished to caress simultaneously both halves of the monarchy.” That is from Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March, which chronicles the decline of a family in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The two halves of the monarchy, then, are the Austrian side and the Hungarian side. It is a fantastical image, excitingly surreal and strange, but you could not say that the simile brings the two halves of the whiskers to our eye, any more than Shakespeare (or his cowriter) intends us to visualize something when a fisherman in Pericles exclaims: “Here’s a fish hangs in the net, like a poor man’s right in the law.” Instead, Roth’s is the kind of hypothetical or analogical—“as if”—metaphor that Shakespeare is very fond of. It wittily tells us something about the devotion of this Hapsburg bureaucrat; it arrests him in an outlandishly symbolic gesture.

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  Wittgenstein once complained that Shakespeare’s similes were “in the ordinary sense, bad.”5 Doubtless he meant Shakespeare’s fondness for metaphorical extravagance, and his tendency to mix his metaphors, as when Henry complains about “the moody frontier of a servant brow” in Henry IV, Part 1. There are readers who will object that a brow cannot be a frontier, and that a frontier cannot be moody. But again, as in the Lawrence example, metaphor is doing here what it is supposed to do; it is speeding us, imaginatively, toward a new meaning. A better example—also involving a brow—occurs in Macbeth, when Macbeth is watching his wife sleepwalking, and implores the doctor to help her: “Raze out [i.e., erase] the written troubles of the brain.” Wittgenstein would not approve, but Wittgenstein was not, in the end, a very literary reader. That strange image manages to combine the idea of our trouble as a sentence of judgment, “written” by the gods; the customary idea of the mind as a book upon which are written our thoughts; and the idea of the lines on a troubled brow, lines written into the brow by distress. Readers and theatergoers storm upon these meanings in a flash, without having to unpack them in the laborious way I have just done.

  Actually, there is a way in which mixed metaphor is perfectly logical, and not an aberration at all. After all, metaphor is already a mixing of disparate agents—a brow is not really like a frontier—and so mixed metaphor can be said to be the essence, the hypostasis, of metaphor: if a brow can be like a frontier, it follows that a frontier can be moody. In contemporary parlance, what people dislike about mixed metaphor is that it tends to combine two different clichés, as in, say, “out of a sea of despair, he has pulled forth a plum.” The metaphorical aspect is actually dimmed, almost to nonexistence, by the presence of two or more mixed clichés (which by definition are themselves dim or dead metaphors). But Shakespeare’s metaphors more often inhabit a speculative realm rather than a mechanical one, in which readers and audience have already been asked to abandon a customary world of familiar correspondence (as, for instance, when Macbeth likens pity to a newborn babe). Henry James was once reproved for using mixed metaphors in a novel, and he replied to his correspondent that he used not mixed but “loose metaphors”: “Lastly, the metaphor about muffling shame in a splendor that asks no questions is indeed a trifle mixed; but it is essentially a loose metaphor—it isn’t a simile—it doesn’t pretend to sail close to the wind.”6 (And notice that the inveterately metaphorical James has to provide another metaphor, about sailing close to the wind, to explain his own metaphors.)7

  But most similes and metaphors, certainly of the visual kind, do pretend, of course, to sail close to the wind, and give us that sense that something has been newly painted before our eyes. Here, for instance, are four metaphorical descriptions of fire, all of them tremendously successful. Lawrence, seeing a fire in a grate, writes of it as “that rushing bouquet of new flames in the chimney” (Sea and Sardinia). Hardy describes a “scarlet handful of fire” in Gabriel Oak’s cottage in Far from the Madding Crowd. Bellow has this sentence in his story “A Silver Dish”: “The blue flames fluttered like a school of fishes in the coal fire.” And Norman Rush, in his novel Mating, which is set in Botswana, has his hero come upon an abandoned village, where he sees that “cooking fires wagged in some of the lalwapas” (a lalwapa is a kind of African courtyard). So: a rushing bouquet (DHL); a scarlet handful of fire (TH); a school of fishes (SB); and a wagging fire (NM). Is one better than the others? Each works slightly differently. The Bellow and the Lawrence are perhaps the most visual—we can see in our mind’s eye the flames as bright as flowers and rippling like fish (notice that Bellow writes “a school of fishes” not “a school of fish,” precisely because the plural sounds more numerous, more rippling). Hardy is the most homely, perhaps, but he is daring in his way: we might think of a handful of dust but never of a handful of fire, since we keep our hands away from fire. Rush’s is marvelous. Flame does indeed wag (i.e., bend, flap, dip, decrease, increase), but when would most of us ever think to use the verb “wag”? Like Hardy’s handful, wag is daring precisely because it is a strikingly unfiery verb. Tails wag, and jokers are called wags, but flame belongs to a different realm from this coziness. Lawrence’s is the most verbally daring, because, along with the likening of flames to a bouquet of flowers (and of course, flames are indeed gathered in a grate for us as a bouquet gathers flowers in a vase), there is the pairing of “rushing” with “bouquet”—“a rushing bouquet”—which is a further metaphor within the larger metaphor, since while flames can rush at us, bouquets cannot. In a way, it is a mixed metaphor. So Lawrence is the only writer in this group to give us two metaphors for the price of one. (New flames, to go with the idea of new flowers, perhaps introduces a third.)

  These four examples tell us that often the leap toward the counterintuitive, toward the very opposite of the thing you are seeking to compare, is the secret of powerful metaphor. Flame is as far from flowers, fish, handfuls, and wagging as can be imagined. Clearly this is the principle, if not quite the effect, of the technique made famous by the Russian formalists, ostranenie, or defamiliarization. Céline, in his novel Journey to the End of the Night, shocks us out of the familiar by likening rush hour in Paris to catastrophe: “Seeing them all fleeing in that direction you’d think that there must have been some catastrophe at Argenteuil, that the town was on fire.” Nabokov, showing his Symbolist and formalist roots, likens a rainbow-colored oil slick in The Gift to “asphalt’s parakeet.” Obviously, whenever you extravagantly liken x to y, and a large gap exists between x and y, you will be drawing attention to the fact that x is really nothing like y, as well as drawing attention to the effort involved in producing such extravagances.

  The kind of metaphor I most delight in, however, like the ones above about fire, estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling of inevitability. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay says goodnight to her children, and carefully closes the bedroom door, and lets “the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock.” The metaphor in that sentence lies not so much in “tongue,” which is fairly conventional (since people do talk about locks having tongues) but is secretly buried in the verb, “lengthen
.” That verb lengthens the whole procedure: Isn’t this the best description you have ever read of someone very sl-o-w-ly turning a handle of a door so as not to waken children? (Tongue is good, too, because tongues make noise, while this particular tongue has to stay silent. And the now blissfully silent children have of course been using their noisy tongues all day.) In the opposite spirit, in Katherine Mansfield’s “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Kate, the cook, has a habit of “bursting through the door in her usual fashion, as though she had discovered some secret panel.” It would take the repetition of weekly episodes, and the full panoply of actors and set to reproduce, in Kramer’s similar antics on Seinfeld, what Mansfield captures in one simile. Mansfield is very good at simile; in another of her stories, “The Voyage,” a girl on a boat listens to her grandmother, lying in a bed above her saying her prayers, “a long, soft whispering, as though someone was gently, gently rustling among tissue paper to find something.”