How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

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  No one would deny that writing of this sort has indeed become a kind of invisible rule book, whereby we no longer notice its artificialities. One reason for this is economic. Commercial realism has cornered the market, has become the most powerful brand in fiction. We must expect that this brand will be economically reproduced, over and over again. That is why the complaint that realism is no more than a grammar or set of rules that obscures life is generally a better description of le Carré or P. D. James than it is of Flaubert or George Eliot or Isherwood: when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques. The efficiency of the thriller genre takes just what it needs from the much less efficient Flaubert or Isherwood, and throws away what made those writers truly alive. And of course, the most economically privileged genre of this kind of largely lifeless “realism” is commercial cinema, through which most people nowadays receive their idea of what constitutes a “realistic” narrative.

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  Decomposition like this happens to any long-lived and successful style, surely; so the writer’s—or critic’s, or reader’s—task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style—in any style—which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced.

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  But rather than do that, Barthes and Moody and Giles and Willam Gass and many other opponents of fictive convention conflate different complaints. Here is Barthes in 1966: “The function of narrative is not to ‘represent,’ it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order … ‘What takes place’ in the narrative is, from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.”4 Now, to charge fiction with conventionality is one thing; to move from this charge to the very skeptical conclusion that fictive convention can therefore never convey anything real, that narrative represents “literally nothing,” is extreme. First, all fiction is conventional in one way or another, and if you reject a certain kind of realism for being conventional, you will also have to reject for the same reason surrealism, science fiction, self-reflexive postmodernism, novels with four different endings, and so on. Convention is everywhere, and triumphs like old age: once you have reached a certain seniority, you either die of it, or with it. One of the nice comedies of Cyril Connolly’s essay is that by blacklisting every conceivable convention he effectively bans the writing of any fiction at all—“anybody over six feet, or with any distinction whatever.” Second, just because artifice and convention are involved in a literary style does not mean that realism (or any other narrative style) is so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality. Narrative can be conventional without being a purely arbitrary, nonreferential technique like the form of a sonnet or the sentence with which Snoopy always begins his stories (“It was a dark and stormy night…”).

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  Paul Valéry was hostile in a Barthes-like way to the claims of fictional narrative, and his example of an entirely arbitrary fictional premise was a sentence like: “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” Valéry felt, as William Gass did when discussing James’s Mr. Cashmore, that this sentence is exchangeable with an infinite number of other possible sentences, and that this kind of provisionality robs narrative fiction of its necessity and its claim to probability. But as soon as I place a second sentence on the page—“That letter, received in the morning, had irritated the Marquise, and she was going to do something about it,” say—the first sentence no longer looks quite as arbitrary or peremptory or merely formal. A system of relations and affiliations is beginning to quicken. And as Julien Gracq points out,5 “Marquise” and “five o’clock” are not arbitrary at all, but full of limit and suggestion: a marquise is not an ordinary, interchangeable citizen, and five o’clock is still late afternoon while six is drinks time. So what is the Marquise going out for?

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  The point to make about convention is not that it is untruthful per se, but that it has a way of becoming, by repetition, steadily more and more conventional. Love becomes routine (and indeed Barthes once claimed that “I love you” is the most clichéd thing anyone can say), but falling in love is not nullified by this fact. Metaphors become dead through overuse, but it would be insane to charge metaphor itself with deadness. When the first caveman, shivering, said that he was as cold as ice, his interlocutor probably exclaimed: “That is pure genius!” (And after all, ice is cold.) Likewise, if someone were now to paint in the style of Rembrandt, he would be a third-rate copyist, not an original genius. These are the simplest arguments, and one should not have to make them, were it not for a persistent tendency among those hostile to verisimilitude to confuse convention with an inability to refer to anything truthful at all. Brigid Lowe6 argues that the question of fiction’s referentiality—does fiction make true statements about the world?—is the wrong one, because fiction does not ask us to believe things (in a philosophical sense) but to imagine them (in an artistic sense): “Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that tomorrow it will be sunny. One experience is all but sensual, the other wholly abstract. When we tell a story, although we may hope to teach a lesson, our primary objective is to produce an imaginative experience.” She proposes that we restore the Greek rhetorical term “hypotyposis,” which means to put something before our eyes, to bring it alive for us. (Somehow I don’t think that “hypotyposis” will displace “realism” as the preferred term any time soon.)

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  Karl Ove Knausgaard has a productive way of thinking about the fatigue of convention. In the second volume of My Struggle, Knausgaard writes that, like many contemporary writers, he had lost faith in contemporary fiction. He would read the new novels, and they invariably struck him as false, artificial, too obviously “made up.” This boring sameness, as he saw it, had to do with verisimilitude and its unchanging relation to the real: “verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant.” He came to the conclusion that fictional narration had no value, and instead turned to those forms where he could still find value and meaning: diaries and essays, “the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet.”

  The similarities with Roland Barthes’s anti-realism are obvious, but the differences are powerful, too. The problem, Knausgaard implies, is not that there is no such thing as the real, or that artists shouldn’t be concerned with the real, or that narration cannot possibly capture it. The problem is not even with the claims or ambitions of verisimilitude per se. The problem is with endlessly reproducing the same kind of verisimilitude, and the same fixed relation to the world it is describing. (“Fixed” in both senses: unchanging and somehow rigged or faked, because it is unchanging.)

  Knausgaard has produced the creative work you might expect from a writer with these particular philosophical and aesthetic scruples. He has adjusted the lens, he has closed the gap between writing and the world; he shakes things up. He cares little about shapely narrative form; he floods his narratives with voice and personality—autobiography, essayistic interventions, opinions about art and music and philosophy; he avoids “obvious” fiction-making (dramatic scenes, domestic arguments, clever dialogue, punchy “conflict”); and he writes directly about the difficulty of writing truthful fiction in our age. But he is not an anti-realist; on the contrary, he is intensely interested in the real, in what writing can authentically disclose. He is tired of conventional verisimilitude—tired of novelism—not because he wants less of the real but because he wants more of it, differently produced. You could say he is a super-realist, the world’s most fanatical realist.

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  The dilemma, for creative writers stil
l interested in making things up, is that the consequences of Barthes’s epistemological radicalism are ultimately self-defeating. If fictive language only falsifies reality, and is only about itself, then the logical response would be to atone for such falsity by ceasing to invent fictions, and to create, instead—well, to create perhaps, the body of work that Roland Barthes himself made, a beguiling mixture of criticism, theory, fragment, memoir, and commentary about the falsity of conventional fiction-making.

  In practice, most postmodern novelists hedge their bets. Postmodern novelists continue to make up fictions, but they want to do so on different terms, the most prominent being that they simultaneously acknowledge that they are making up those fictions. So the metafictional7 or self-reflexive novel tends to have an atmosphere of confession, of knowing or ironic acknowledgment—admitting to, sometimes atoning for, often knowingly and joyfully delighting in the fact that it is a fiction. Of course, there are multiple ways of performing such acknowledgment. There is the story within the story, or the character with the same name as the author (Paul Auster likes to use both of these devices); the novel that is about the experience of reading the novel you hold in your hand (Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler); the novel that is being written by one of the characters you are reading about (Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home, Ian McEwan’s Atonement). There are books that offer the reader the chance to arrange the order in which they read them (Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both), or to choose between different endings (John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman), or to ask that the reader construct a coherence—a story—that the fiction itself seems to refuse or obstruct (Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road, Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives).

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  Such writers reach back into the novelistic tradition, because one of the first great novels, Don Quixote, is a vibrant, funny, tender, and deeply serious fiction that is also a joyous commentary on the making of fiction, and indeed on the fictionality of reality. (In the second part of Cervantes’s novel, the “real” Don Quixote, our beloved hero, must face down an imposter who claims that he is the real Don Quixote.) Perhaps most profound fictions—even ones we don’t think of as experimental or avant-garde or postmodern—include or encode some acknowledgment of their own fictionality, or some kind of critique of the perils and obligations of fiction-making; that’s a part of what makes them serious and profound. Serious artists like Cervantes are engrossed by the ways in which we go about constructing our realities, the fictions that we use to support and propel our often fantastic interior lives; so by implication (and often explicitly), they are interested in their own, analogous methods of such construction. I have in mind, for instance, the way that Shakespeare often reminds us of the staginess of the stage (in King Lear, when Gloucester thinks he is falling off a cliff, he is just dropping down onto the stage); the intrusive authorial narrators of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, who break in with advice and exegesis and thus disrupt the illusion, the flow, of novelistic artifice (Fielding, George Eliot, Gogol, Melville, Stendhal, Tolstoy); the many supposedly “conventional” novels, following Cervantes’s model, that are about heroes and heroines who have been reading too much fiction (Eugene Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, Notes from Underground, Madame Bovary, Niels Lyhne, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Fortress of Solitude).

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  My own taste in postmodern art tends toward those works that simultaneously disrupt and validate our sense of reality, works that comment on story-making and which are, at the same time, intensely invested in the world we inhabit. These are almost magical instances of construction and deconstruction, of addition and subtraction. I have mentioned Saramago, Sebald, Spark, Philip Roth, Beckett, Lydia Davis, Alejandro Zambra. But take, as one final instance, Abbas Kiarostami’s film, Through the Olive Trees. As in everything he does, Kiarostami narrates a complex self-conscious tale with the utmost simplicity. An Iranian director is making a film, in rural northern Iran, and needs a leading man and woman. The young actor who is eventually selected turns out, in his ordinary life, to be actually in love with the woman who is playing opposite him. He has asked her to marry him, but she has refused because he has no house and is illiterate. On the film set, however, the couple must act as husband and wife. Kiarostami wrings the most tender comedy out of such small things as the woman’s refusal to address the actor, on set, as “Mr. Hossein,” as she would do if he were her husband. The actors have to do a scene in which the husband asks his wife where his socks are. They are not very good at it, and numerous takes ensue. Off the set, the young man, filled with ardor, assures the skeptical young woman that if they were really married he would actually know where his socks were.

  The two young characters in Through the Olive Trees are utterly solid and realized; and, paradoxically, their solidity is not softened by Kiarostami’s postmodern self-consciousness but magically enhanced by it. (I would happily forever watch the two of them rehearsing the scene about the socks.) Kiarostami’s fascination with fictionality—his films often collapse the theatrical fourth wall—emerges naturally from his great interest in the real, as one might be very interested, say, in colors because one loved flowers, or in angels because one believed in God.

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  If we reexamine Aristotle’s original formulation of mimesis, in the Poetics, we find that his definition is not about reference. History shows us, says Aristotle, “what Alcibiades did”; poetry—i.e., fictional narrative—shows us “the kind of thing that would happen” to Alcibiades. Hypothetical plausibility—probability—is the important and neglected idea here: probability involves the defense of the credible imagination against the incredible. This is surely why Aristotle writes that a convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The burden is instantly placed not on simple verisimilitude or reference (since Aristotle concedes that an artist may represent something that is physically impossible), but on mimetic persuasion: it is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude. And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage.

  So let us replace the always problematic word “realism” with the much more problematic word “truth” … Once we throw the term “realism” overboard, we can account for the ways in which, say, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Hamsun’s Hunger and Beckett’s Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts. This, we say to ourselves, is what it would feel like to be outcast from one’s family, like an insect (Kafka), or a young madman (Hamsun), or an aged parent kept in a bin and fed pap (Beckett). There is still nothing as terrifying in contemporary fiction, not even in the blood-bin of Cormac McCarthy or the sadistic eros of Dennis Cooper, as the moment when Knut Hamsun’s narrator in Hunger, a starving young intellectual, puts his finger in his mouth and starts eating himself. None of us, I hope, has done this, or will ever want to. But Hamsun has made us share it, has made us feel it. Dr. Johnson, in his “Preface to Shakespeare,” reminds us, “Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.”

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  Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying. So the artist is always trying to outwit it. But in outwitting it, the artist is always establishing another dying convention. It is this paradox that explains the further, well-known literary-historical paradox, one we have witnessed through the course of this book, from Flaubert to Knausgaard, namely that poets and novelists repeatedly attack one kind of realism only to argue for their own kind of realism. It is summarized in Flaubert’s remark about pornography: “Obscene books are immoral because untruthful. When reading them, one says, ‘That’s not the way things are.’ Mind you, I detest realism, though I am claimed as one of its pontiffs.” On the one hand, Fl
aubert wants nothing to do with the movement of “realism”; on the other, he deems certain books “untruthful” because they do not depict things as they are. (Chekhov used a similar formulation when watching an Ibsen play: “But Ibsen is no playwright … Ibsen just doesn’t know life. In life it simply isn’t like that.”) Thomas Hardy argued that art wasn’t realistic because art is “a disproportioning—(i.e. distorting, throwing out of proportion)—of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence ‘realism’ is not Art.” Yet Hardy, of course, no less than Flaubert, strove to write novels and poems that show “the way things are.” Who has written more beautifully or more truthfully than Hardy about rural communities, or about grief?

  These writers rejected mere photographic fidelity, because art selects and shapes. But they revered truth and truthfulness.

  Most major movements in literature in the last two centuries have invoked a desire to capture the “truth” of “life” (or “the way things are”), even as the definition of what is “realistic” changes (and of course even as what counts as “life” changes somewhat, too—but that this definition changes does not mean that there is no such thing as life). Woolf rightly complained that E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, was always invoking “life,” and that it reflected a residual hearty Victorianism on Forster’s part. Woolf properly argued that we judge fiction’s success not just for its ability to evoke “life” but for its ability to delight us with more formal properties, like pattern and language:

  At this point perhaps the pertinacious pupil will demand: but what is this “life” that keeps on cropping up so mysteriously in books about fiction? Why is it absent in a pattern and present in a tea party? Why, if we get a keen and genuine pleasure from the pattern in the Golden Bowl, is it less valuable than the emotion which Trollope gives us when he describes a lady drinking tea in a parsonage? Surely the definition of life is too arbitrary and requires to be expanded? Why, again, should the final test of plot, character, story and the other ingredients of a novel lie in their power to imitate life? Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?8