How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

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  In New York City, the garbage collectors call maggots “disco rice.”8 That is as good as anything I have been discussing, and indeed there is a link between that kind of metaphor-making and Hardy’s handful of fire, or Mansfield’s grandmother saying her prayers like someone rummaging through tissue paper, or Marilynne Robinson’s “weedy little mortality patch.” This returns us to one of our continued questions, how the stylist manages to be a stylist without writing over his or her characters. Metaphor that is “successful” in a poetic sense but that is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor—the kind of metaphor that this particular character or community would produce—is one way of resolving the tension between author and character; we saw this when discussing the “leggy thing” of the nutcracker in Pnin. Shakespeare’s fisherman likens a fish caught in a net to “a poor man’s right hanging in the law.” We might assume, by extension, that he sometimes likens the law to a fisherman’s net: he finds the image which is near at hand. Chekhov describes a bird’s nest as looking as if someone has left a glove in a tree—in a story about peasants. Cesare Pavese, in The Moon and the Bonfire, a great novel set in a poor, backward Italian village and its rural environs, describes the moon as yellow, “like polenta.” In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Angel and Tess are riding in a milk cart, and the milk is slopping in the pails behind them—except that Hardy says that the milk is “clucking” in the pails, which is first of all true to life (we can instantly hear the milk clucking in the pails) and is also very homely and farmlike. (Likewise, in the same novel he describes a cow’s udder as having teats that stick out like the short little legs on the bottom of a Gypsy’s cooking pot.) In Loving, Henry Green describes a pretty housemaid’s eyes as glowing “like plums dipped in cold water”—in a novel almost exclusively about domestic servants in a large castle. In all these cases except the Shakespearean one, metaphor is not explicitly tied to a character. It issues forth in third-person narration. So it seems to be produced by the stylish, metaphor-making author, but it also hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character’s world.

  Dialogue

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  In 1950, Henry Green gave a little talk on BBC radio about dialogue in fiction.1 Green was obsessively concerned with the elimination of those vulgar spoors of presence whereby authors communicate themselves to readers: he never internalizes his characters’ thoughts, hardly ever explains a character’s motive, and avoids the authorial adverb, which so often helpfully flags a character’s emotion to readers (“she said, grandiloquently”). Green argued that dialogue is the best way to communicate with one’s readers, and that nothing kills “life” so much as “explanation.” He imagined a husband and wife, long married, sitting at home one evening. At 9:30, the husband says that he is going across the road to the pub. Green noted that the wife’s first response, “Will you be long?,” could be rendered in scores of different ways (“Back soon?” “When will you be back?” “Off for long?” “How long will it be before you are back?”), each one capable of a distinct resonance of meaning. The crucial thing, maintained Green, was not to hedge the dialogue with explanation, as in:

  “How soon d’you suppose they’ll chuck you out?”

  Olga, as she asked her husband this question, wore the look of a wounded animal, her lips were curled back from the teeth in a grimace and the tone of voice she used betrayed all those years a woman can give by proxy to the sawdust, the mirrors and the stale smell of beer of public bars.

  Green felt strongly that such kind of authorial “assistance” was overbearing, because in life we don’t really know what people are like. “We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?”

  Green, counseling against being overbearing, is laying down a fair amount of prescription himself, and we do not need to take his doctrine scripturally. Notice that when Green does his parody of explanation, he also falls into a deliberately breathy, second-rate style (“wore the look of a wounded animal”), whereas we can imagine something more continent, less offensive: “Olga knew what time he would come home, and in what state, stinking of beer and tobacco. Ten years of this, ten years.” Fulsome explainers like George Eliot, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, and many others would all have to retire themselves in Green’s universe.

  However, his larger argument, that dialogue should be carrying multiple meanings, and that it should mean different things to different readers at the same time, is surely right. (It can carry several indeterminate meanings for the reader and still be “explained” by an author, I think, but this takes great tact.) Green offered an example of how he might proceed:

  He: I think I’ll go across the way now for a drink.

  She: Will you be long?

  He: Why don’t you come too?

  She: I don’t think I will. Not tonight, I’m not sure, I may.

  He: Well, which is it to be?

  She: I needn’t say now, need I? If I feel like it I’ll come over later.

  In this passage, notice that Green tries to answer one question with another, and that, very characteristically of Green’s writing, the woman slides in hesitation—“Not tonight, I’m not sure, I may.” She may be in several moods at once. As a result, the man’s response, “Well, which is it to be?” becomes harder to read, too. Is he irritated, or just mildly resigned? Does he in fact want her to come to the pub at all, or was he just saying it in the hope that she would decline? The reader tends to plump for one reading, while being aware that multiple readings are also possible; we sew ourselves into the text, becoming highly invested in our version of events.

  There is a very good example of Green’s doctrine in action in V. S. Naipaul’s great novel A House for Mr Biswas. Mr. Biswas has decided to build a house, but he only has a hundred dollars. He visits a black builder, Mr. Maclean (one of the few portraits in the novel of a black Trinidadian), and gingerly poses the question. What is beautifully done is that both men are dancing a little pas de deux of pride and shame; each is maintaining a fiction. Mr. Biswas wants Maclean to think he has enough money for a grand house; Maclean wants Biswas to think he is very busy, with lots of orders for work. And each sees through the other’s fiction, of course.

  Mr. Biswas begins by suggesting that they take the thing very slowly (that way, he can pay some money each month rather than place a huge sum down immediately). Ideally, Biswas would have Maclean take about a year to build the place:

  “We not bound and ’bliged to build the whole thing right away,” Mr Biswas said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.”

  “So they say. But Rome get build. Anyway, as soon as I get some time I going to come and we could look at the site. You have a site?”

  “Yes, yes, man. Have a site.”

  “Well, in about two-three days then.”

  He came early that afternoon, in hat, shoes and an ironed shirt, and they went to look at the site.

  At the site, Mr. Biswas announces that he wants concrete pillars, plastered and smooth. Maclean wants his cash:

  “You think you could give me about a hundred and fifty dollars just to start off with?”

  Mr Biswas hesitated.

  “You musn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs. I just wanting to know how much you want to spend right away.”

  Mr Biswas walked away from Mr Maclean, among the bushes on the damp site, the weeds and the nettles. “About a hundred,” he said. “But at the end of the month I could give you a little bit more.”

  “A hundred.”

  “All right?”

  “Yes, is all right. For a start.”

  They went through the weeds and over the leaf-choked gutter to the narrow gravelly road.

  “Every month we build a little,” Mr Biswas said. “Little by little.”

  “Yes, little by little.”

  The dance of pride is so delicately done. Biswas first couches his shame in a
classical allusion, hoping to give it a bit of grandeur (“Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know”), to which Maclean replies with a practical grunt: “So they say. But Rome get build,” Naipaul subtly using Trinidadian patois—“But Rome get build”—to separate the two men and their social status. Mr. Biswas is aware of this social difference, too, because, when Maclean then asks if he has a site, he tries to close the gap by also using “black” patois: “Yes, yes, man. Have a site.” (Whenever Biswas wants a bit of borrowed bravado, he employs the pally Caribbean word “man.”) Maclean affects to be so busy that he cannot come for several days, and then arrives “early that afternoon.”

  And then it all begins again, over the question of money. Maclean is perfectly aware that Mr. Biswas is trying to save face, and flatters him with the absurd “You mustn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs.” And relentlessly, Naipaul reminds the reader that the site itself is leaf-choked and weed-infested, that the whole thing is doomed from the start. (In this, he is a good deal more of an explainer and pointer than the very reticent Henry Green.)

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  And the same novel reminds us that Green is not necessarily right to assume that “dialogue is the best way for the novelist to communicate with his readers.” As much can be communicated with no speech at all. It is Christmas, and Mr. Biswas, on a whim, decides to buy a hideously expensive doll’s house for his daughter. He can’t possibly afford it. He blows a month’s wages on the gift. It is an episode of madness and bravado, of aspiration and longing and humiliation.

  He got off his bicycle and leaned it against the kerb. Before he had taken off his bicycle clips he was accosted by a heavy-lidded shopman who repeatedly sucked his teeth. The shopman offered Mr Biswas a cigarette and lit it for him. Words were exchanged. Then, with the shopman’s arm around his shoulders, Mr Biswas disappeared into the shop. Not many minutes later Mr Biswas and the shopman reappeared. They were both smoking and excited. A boy came out of the shop partly hidden by the large doll’s house he was carrying. The doll’s house was placed on the handlebar of Mr Biswas’s cycle and, with Mr Biswas on one side and the boy on the other, wheeled down the High Street.

  Not a word of dialogue—indeed the opposite, the report of a dialogue we do not witness: “Words were exchanged.” Again, this is both funny and terribly painful, because of the way Naipaul writes it up. He resolutely refuses to describe the purchase itself. Instead, he describes the scene as if the author had set up a camera outside the shop. We watch the men smoke, we watch them go in, and a minute later we watch them come out, “smoking and excited.” The scene is thus like something out of the silent movies, and almost begs to be run at double speed, as farce. Passive verbs are used, precisely because Biswas is a weak, comically gentle man who thinks he is asserting himself while he is in fact generally being acted upon: “was accosted by … the doll’s house was placed on the handlebar … [was] wheeled down the High Street.” Naipaul deliberately describes this event as if Mr. Biswas had nothing much to do with it, which is probably how Biswas self-forgivingly thinks of this moment. Most subtle is the decision not to represent the scene of purchase itself, the moment where money changes hands. This is the epicenter of shame for Mr. Biswas, and it is as if the narrative, knowing this, is too embarrassed to represent this shame. Naipaul is superbly aware of this, superbly in control. He knows that the sentence “Words were exchanged” is the pivot of the paragraph—because, of course, it is not words that are importantly exchanged but money that is crucially exchanged. And this is what cannot, must not, be described.

  Several days later, the doll’s house will be smashed to bits by Mr. Biswas’s wife, because she thinks it unfair that their daughter got such a present while none of the other children that constitute Mr. Biswas’s horribly extended family received anything.

  Truth, Convention, Realism

  Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.1

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  Here are two recent statements about literary realism, statements so typical of their age, so finely characteristic, so normative, that a realist novelist would have been proud to have imagined them into life. The first is by the novelist Rick Moody, writing in Bookforum:

  It’s quaint to say so, but the realistic novel still needs a kick in the ass. The genre, with its epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement, its conventional humanisms, can still entertain and move us on occasion, but for me it’s politically and philosophically dubious and often dull. Therefore, it needs a kick in the ass.

  The second is by Patrick Giles, contributing to a long, raucous discussion about fiction, realism, and fictional credibility on a literary blog called The Elegant Variation: “And the notion that this [the realistic novel] is the supreme genre of the lit tradition is so laughable that I ain’t even gonna indulge myself.”

  A style unites the two statements, a down-home relaxation of diction (“kick in the ass,” “ain’t even gonna”), which itself informs us about the writers’ attitudes toward realism’s own style: it is stuffy, correct, unprogressive, and the only way even to discuss it is to mock it with its stylistic opposite, the vernacular. Moody’s three sentences efficiently compact the reigning assumptions. Realism is a “genre” (rather than, say, a central impulse in fiction-making); it is taken to be mere dead convention, and to be related to a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings; it deals in “round” characters, but softly and piously (“conventional humanisms”); it assumes that the world can be described, with a naively stable link between word and referent (“philosophically dubious”); and all this will tend toward a conservative or even oppressive politics (“politically … dubious”).

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  Still, we know what Rick Moody means. Let’s call this “novelism.” We have all read many novels in which the machinery of convention is so rusted that nothing moves. Why, we say to ourselves, do people have to speak in quotation marks? Why do they speak in scenes of dialogue? Why so much “conflict”? Why do people come in and out of rooms, or put down drinks, or play with their food while they are thinking of something? Why do they always have affairs? Why is there always an aged Holocaust survivor somewhere in these books? And please, whatever you do, don’t introduce incest …

  In a very witty essay written in 1935, Cyril Connolly demanded that a whole family of conventions should be butchered—“all novels dealing with more than one generation or with any period before 1918 or with brilliant impoverished children in rectories,” all novels set in Hampshire, Sussex, Oxford, Cambridge, the Essex coast, Wiltshire, Cornwall, Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead, Hyde Park, and Hammersmith.

  Many situations should be forbidden, all getting and losing of jobs, proposals of marriage, reception of love-letters by either sex … all allusion to illness or suicide (except insanity), all quotations, all mentions of genius, promise, writing, painting, sculpting, art, poetry, and the phrases “I like your stuff,” “What’s his stuff like?” “Damned good,” “Let me make you some coffee,” all young men with ambition or young women with emotion, all remarks like “Darling, I’ve found the most wonderful cottage” (flat, castle), “Ask me any other time, dearest, only please—just this once—not now,” “Love you—of course I love you” (don’t love you)—and “It’s not that, it’s only that I feel so terribly tired.”

  Forbidden names: Hugo, Peter, Sebastian, Adrian, Ivor, Julian, Pamela, Chloe, Enid, Inez, Miranda, Joanna, Jill, Felicity, Phyllis.

  Forbidden faces: all young men with curly hair or remarkable eyes, all gaunt haggard thinkers’ faces, all faunlike characters, anybody over six feet, or with any distinction whatever, and all women with a nape to their neck (he loved the way her hair curled in the little hollow at the nape of her neck).2

  Realism, for Moody and Giles, is like Connolly’s opinion of a character named Miranda or Julian; it is just another convention reflecting the aspirations of petit bourgeois readers. Barthes argued that there is no “realistic” way to narrate t
he world. The nineteenth-century author’s naive delusion that a word has a necessary and transparent link to its referent has been nullified. We move merely among different, competing genres of fiction-making, of which realism is just the most confused, and perhaps the most obtuse because the least self-conscious about its own procedures. Realism does not refer to reality; realism is not realistic. Realism, said Barthes, is a system of conventional codes, a grammar so ubiquitous that we do not notice the way it structures bourgeois storytelling.3

  In practice, what Barthes means is that conventional novelists have pulled the wool over our eyes: a smooth wall of prose comes toward us, and we rather lazily gasp out loud: “How did it all come about?”—just as Flaubert wanted us to. We no longer bother to notice such elements of fiction as the convention that people speak within quotation marks (“‘Nonsense,’ he said, firmly”); that a character is briskly summarized in external description when he or she first enters a novel or story (“She was a shortish, broad-faced woman of about fifty, with rather poorly dyed hair”); that detail is carefully chosen and helpfully “telling” (“She noticed that his hands shook slightly as he poured the whisky”); that dynamic and habitual detail is conflated; that dramatic action is nicely broken up by characters’ reflections (“Sitting quietly at the table, his head propped on one arm, he thought again about his father”); that characters change; that stories have endings; and so on. We are mired in novelism.