How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

  But on the other hand, she also complained that “life escapes” from the fiction of Arnold Bennett and his Edwardian generation, and that “perhaps without life nothing else is worth while.”9 She praised Joyce for coming closer to “life,” and sweeping away a host of dead conventions. Alain Robbe-Grillet, in his book Pour un nouveau roman, rightly says, “All writers believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic.” But, he goes on to say, if all these writers are mustered under the same flag, it is not because they agree about what realism is; it is because they want to use their different idea of realism to tear each other apart.

  If we add to these examples the invocations of “Nature” beloved of neoclassical critics, the overwhelmingly strong Aristotelian tradition with its distinction between probability and the improbably marvelous (accepted by Cervantes, Fielding, Richardson, Dr. Johnson), the claim made by Wordsworth and Coleridge that the poems in Lyrical Ballads offer “a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents,” and so on, we are likely to think of the desire to be truthful about life—the desire to produce art that accurately sees “the way things are”—as, if not a universal literary motive, then the broad central language of the novel and drama: what James in What Maisie Knew calls “the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.” “Realism” and the technical or philosophical squabbles it has engendered seem like a school of bright red herrings.

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  And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit’s house to its foundations: King Lear asking forgiveness of Cordelia; Lady Macbeth hissing at her husband during the banquet; Pierre almost executed by French soldiers in War and Peace; the tattered band of survivors wandering the city streets in Saramago’s Blindness; Dorothea Brooke in Rome, realizing that she has married a man whose soul is dead; Gregor Samsa, being pushed back into his room by his own, horrified father; Kirilov, in The Possessed, writing his suicide note, with the awful Peter Verkhovensky by his side, suddenly and ridiculously bursting out: “Wait! I want to draw a face with the tongue out on the top … I want to tell them off!” Or the beautiful little scene in Persuasion when Anne Elliot, kneeling on the floor, and keen to get a heavy two-year-old boy off her back, is suddenly relieved of the burden by the man she secretly loves, Captain Wentworth:

  Someone was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

  Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings.

  Or the last chapter of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, some of the most exquisite pages ever written in American fiction.10 Father Latour has returned to die in Santa Fé, near his cathedral: “In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one’s body feel light and one’s heart cry ‘To-day, to-day,’ like a child’s.” Lying in his bed, he thinks about his old life in France, about his new life in the New World, about the architect, Molny, who built his Romanesque cathedral in Santa Fé, and about death. He is lucid and calm:

  He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.

  Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life—some part of which they knew nothing.

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  Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind—lifeness—is the origin. It teaches everyone else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. All the greatest realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists. But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. Chekhov’s challenge—“Ibsen just doesn’t know life. In life it simply isn’t like that”—is as radical now as it was a century ago, because forms must continually be broken. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.

  Notes

  Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

    1.  David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)

    2.  Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (2016): “The true heart of every story is its literary truth, and that is there or not there, and if it’s not there, no technical skill can give it to you. You ask me about male writers who describe women with authenticity. I don’t know whom to point you to. There are some who do it with verisimilitude, which is very different, however, from authenticity.”

  Narrating

    1.  See Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing for examples of this rare success.

    2.  This interview can be found in The New Brick Reader, ed. Tara Quinn (2013).

    3.  Barthes uses this term in his book S/Z (1970; translated by Richard Miller, 1974). He means the way that nineteenth-century writers refer to commonly accepted cultural or scientific knowledge, for instance shared ideological generalities about “women.” I extend the term to cover any kind of authorial generalization. For instance, an example from Tolstoy: at the start of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three of Ivan Ilyich’s friends are reading his obituary, and Tolstoy writes that each man, “as is usual in such cases, was secretly congratulating himself that it was Ivan who had died and not him.” As is usual in such cases: the author refers with ease and wisdom to a central human truth, serenely gazing into the hearts of three different men.

    4.  I like D. A. Miller’s phrase for free indirect style, from his book Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (2003): “close writing.”

    5.  See, for instance, Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (2013).

    6.  Nabokov is a great creator of the kind of extravagant metaphors that the Russian formalists called “estranging” or defamiliarizing (a nutcracker has legs, a half-rolled black umbrella looks like a duck in deep mourning, and so on). The formalists liked the way that Tolstoy, say, insisted on seeing adult things—like war, or the opera—from a child’s viewpoint, in order to make them look strange. But whereas the Russian formalists see this metaphorical habit as emblematic of the way that fiction does not refer to reality, is a self-enclosed machine (such metaphors are the jewels of the author’s freakish, solipsistic art), I prefer the way that su
ch metaphors, as in Pnin’s “leggy thing,” refer deeply to reality: because they emanate from the characters themselves, and are fruits of free indirect style. Shklovksy wonders out loud, in Theory of Prose, if Tolstoy got his technique of estrangement from French authors like Chateaubriand, but Cervantes seems much more likely—as when Sancho first arrives in Barcelona, sees on the water the galleys with their many oars, and metaphorically mistakes the oars for feet: “Sancho couldn’t imagine how those hulks moving about on top of the sea could have so many feet.” This is estranging metaphor as a branch of free indirect style; it makes the world look peculiar, but it makes Sancho look very familiar.

    7.  As soon as we imagine a Christian version of this narration, we can gauge Updike’s awkward alienation from his character. Imagine a devout Christian schoolboy walking along, and the text going something like this: “And wouldn’t His will always be done, as described in the fourth line of the Lord’s Prayer?” Free indirect style exists precisely to get around such clumsiness.

    8.  See the brilliant, but taxing long story, “The Depressed Person,” which sinks us into the repetitive feedback loop of the “depressed person.”

    9.  Letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, October 5, 1901, in Henry James, Selected Letters, edited by Leon Edel (1974).

  10.  This is Gérard Genette’s term, from Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin (1980). Elmore Leonard calls these the boring parts that readers tend to skip: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

  Flaubert and Modern Narrative

    1.  The ants crawling across the face represent almost a cliché of cinematic grammar. Think of the ants on the hand in Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, or on the ear at the start of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

  Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur

    1.  See Baudelaire’s seminal essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863).

    2.  The differences between Balzacian and Flaubertian realism are threefold: First, Balzac of course notices a great deal in his fiction, but the emphasis is always on abundance rather than intense selectivity of detail. Second, Balzac has no special commitment to free indirect style or authorial impersonality, and feels wonderfully free to break in as the author/narrator, with essays and digressions and bits of social information. (He seems decidedly eighteenth-century in this respect.) Third, and following on from these two differences: he has no distinctively Flaubertian interest in blurring the question of who is noticing all this stuff. For these reasons, I see Flaubert and not Balzac as the real founder of modern fictional narrative.

  Detail

    1.  Sándor Márai, Embers, translated by Carol Brown Janeway (translation from the German version, 2001).

    2.  The Guermantes Way, Part 2, Chapter 1.

    3.  It is from Anna Karenina, and is a nice example of self-plagiarism. In that novel, not one but two babies—Levin’s and Anna’s—are described as looking as if string is tied around their fat little arms. Likewise, in David Copperfield, Dickens likens Uriah Heep’s open mouth to a post office, and Wemmick’s open mouth, in Great Expectations—to a post office. Stendhal writes, in The Red and the Black, about how politics ruins a novel in the way a gunshot would spoil a music concert, and then repeats the image in The Charterhouse of Parma. Henry James wrote that Balzac, in his monkish devotion to his art, was “a Benedictine of the actual,” a phrase he liked so much he used it later about Flaubert. Cormac McCarthy writes, in Blood Meridian, “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand,” and returns to that lovely verb seven years later in All the Pretty Horses: “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.” Why shouldn’t he? Such things are rarely examples of haste and more often proof that a style has achieved self-consistency. And that a kind of Platonic ideal has been reached—these are the best, and therefore unsurpassable words, for these subjects.

    4.  The image was heavily borrowed by Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men (2005), where people are forever having their boots fill up with blood—usually their own, however.

    5.  From The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Tolstoy likens talking about death, which polite society must ignore, to someone making a bad smell in a drawing room.

    6.  Lawrence’s story “Odour of Chrysanthemums” begins like this: “The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston—with seven full wagons.” Ford Madox Ford, who published it in the English Review in 1911, said that the precision of the “Number 4” and the “seven” wagons announced the presence of a real writer. “The ordinary careless writer,” he said, “would say ‘some small wagons.’ This man knows what he wants. He sees the scene of his story exactly.” See John Worthen’s biography D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912 (1991).

    7.  A nice index of this can be found in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762–63), in which he says that poetic and rhetorical description should be brief, to the point, and not lengthy. But, he goes on, “it is often proper to Choose out some nice and Curious” detail. “A Painter in Drawing a fruit makes the figure very striking if he not only gives it the form and Colour but also represents the fine down with which it is covered.” Smith recommends this in such a fresh and ingenuous way—as if he is saying, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to notice the fine down on a piece of fruit?”—that he makes the very concept of detail sound somewhat novel and newfangled.

    8.  Maupassant, “The Novel,” preface to Pierre and Jean (1888).

    9.  Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense (1948), translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (1964).

  10.  From Nabokov, “First Love” (1925) and Updike, Of the Farm (1961). And one can hear how David Foster Wallace comes out of this tradition, too, even if he renders comically or ironically a level of obsessive detail that Updike renders more earnestly.

  11.  The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, edited by Simon Karlinsky (1979).

  12.  Collected in The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard (1986).

  13.  Système de la mode (1967).

  14.  Book Four, Chapter 11.

  15.  “A shot can be a word, but it’s better when it’s a sentence,” says Francis Ford Coppola in Live Cinema and Its Techniques (2017). He means that details are stronger when complex and enigmatic.

  Character

    1.   Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett, edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson (2006).

    2.  Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970).

    3.  As, by report, Pushkin spoke of Onegin and Tatiana: “Do you know my Tatiana has rejected Onegin? I never expected it of her.”

    4.  Philip Roth’s The Counterlife is an example of another novel that takes what it needs from metafictional game-playing to make a grave and fundamentally metaphysical argument about the different ways of living, and narrating, a life. Gabriel Josipovici discusses Beckett in this spirit in his book On Trust (2000). He points out that Foucault liked to quote from The Unnamable, as evidence of the death of the author: “No matter who is speaking, someone says, no matter who is speaking,” wrote Beckett. Josipovici comments that Foucault forgets that “it is not Beckett saying this but one of his characters, and that the point about that character is that he is desperately seeking to discover who speaks, to recover himself as more than a string of words, to wrest an ‘I’ from ‘someone says.’”

    5.  Except for the hero and narrator of Frederick Exley’s one good novel, A Fan’s Notes, who explicitly invokes the example of Augie.

    6.  “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (1997).

    7.  Spatial metaphors, of depth, shallowness, roundness, flatness, are inadequate. A better division—t
hough not perfect, either—is between transparencies (relatively simple characters) and opacities (relative degrees of mysteriousness). Many of the most absorbing accounts of motive, from Hamlet to Stavrogin to the subjects of W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, are studies in mystery. Stephen Greenblatt argues in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) that in his tragedies, Shakespeare systematically reduced the amount of “causal explanation a tragic plot needed to function effectively and the amount of explicit psychological rationale a character needed to be compelling. Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity.” Why does Lear test his daughters? Why can’t Hamlet effectively avenge the death of his father? Why does Iago ruin Othello’s life? The source texts that Shakespeare read all provided transparent answers (Iago was in love with Desdemona, Hamlet should kill Claudius, Lear was unhappy with Cordelia’s impending marriage). But Shakespeare was not interested in such transparency. Greenblatt’s argument also touches on section 88, where I show how the novel threw off the essential juvenility of plot in favor of “unconsummated” stories, and section 111, where I discuss the novel’s possible contribution to Bernard Williams’s desire for complexity in moral philosophy.