How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

  A Brief History of Consciousness

    1.  This is Harold Bloom’s formulation, in The Western Canon (1994) and elsewhere, borrowed from Hegel.

    2.  Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1990.

    3.  To my mind, this is also a weakness with a certain kind of postmodern novel—say Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day—still in love with the rapid, farcelike, overlit simplicities of Fielding. There is nothing more eighteenth-century than Pynchon’s love of picaresque plot accumulation; his mockery of pedantry, which is at the same time a love of pedantry; his habit of making his flat characters dance for a moment on stage and then whisking them away; his vaudevillian fondness for silly names, japes, mishaps, disguises,; silly errors, and so on. There are pleasures to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases, and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists. The massive turbines of the incessant story-making produce so much noise that no one can be heard. The Nazi Captain Blicero in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the ruthless financier Scarsdale Vibe in Against the Day, are not truly frightening figures, because they are not true figures. But Gilbert Osmond, Herr Naphta, Peter Verkhovensky, and Conrad’s anarchist professor are very frightening indeed.

    4.  And it is no accident that this leap forward in characterization is accompanied by great technical developments: Stendhal’s loose, relaxed, chatty kind of writing allows him to write a kind of interior monologue that is very close to stream of consciousness; one passage of this kind of narration, fairly late in the novel, continues for four pages without interruption.

    5.  Dostoevsky’s analysis of ressentiment has turned out to have great prophetic relevance for the troubles we currently find ourselves in. Terrorism, clearly enough, is the triumph of resentment (sometimes justified); and Dostoevsky’s Russian revolutionaries and underground men are essentially terroristic. They dream of hard revenge on a society that seems too soft to deserve sparing. And just as the narrator of Notes from Underground “admires” the cavalry officer he hates, so perhaps a certain kind of Islamic fundamentalist both hates and “admires” Western secularism, and hates it because he admires it (hates it, in Dostoevsky’s psychological system, because it once did him a good turn—gave him medicine, say, or the science that could be used to crash planes into buildings).

    6.  Am I the only reader addicted to the foolish pastime of amassing instances in which minor characters in books happen to have the names of writers? Thus Camus the chemist in Proust, and another Camus in Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, and the Pyncheons in The House of the Seven Gables, and Horace Updike in Babbitt, and Brecht the dentist in Buddenbrooks, and Heidegger, one of Trotta’s witnesses in Joseph Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb, and Madame Foucault in Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, and Father Larkin in David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Count Tolstoy in War and Peace, and a man named Barthès in Rousseau’s Confessions, and come to think of it, a certain Madame Rousseau in Proust …

    7.  Swann’s Way (“Combray”).

  Form

    1.  The thought occurs to me that the book you are currently reading uses a similar form, for similar reasons: numbered paragraphs allow me to dart around, float an idea, return to an earlier idea, and then to contradict myself a bit later.… And it was a convenient way to write, because like Jenny Offill’s narrator, maybe like Offill herself, I was a busy parent, with two young children (four and six when I was writing the first edition of this book in 2007). Short paragraphs allowed me to write the book in small pieces, at home, amidst family interruptions and obligations (mostly joyful).

    2.  Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (1980).

    3.  Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson (New York Edition, 1907).

  Sympathy and Complexity

    1.  See “Words on the Street,” by Angel Gurria-Quintana, in Financial Times, March 3, 2006. I am grateful to Norman Rush for drawing my attention to this article.

    2.  We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on—because it is alive and we are alive. It is amusing to watch evolutionary psychology tie itself up in circularities when trying to answer the question “Why do humans spend so much time reading fiction when this yields no obvious evolutionary benefits?” The answers tend either to be utilitarian—we read in order to find out about our fellow citizens, and this has a Darwinian utility—or circular: we read because fiction pushes certain pleasure buttons.

    3.  “The Natural History of German Life” (1856).

    4.  Book 4, Part 4, Chapter 13.

    5.  “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in Mortal Questions (1974).

    6.  See, especially, Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), and Making Sense of Humanity (1995).

    7.  Book 4, Part 4, Chapter 13.

  Language

    1.  Stephen C. Heath, in Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1998).

    2.  Though one wonders if a great deal of time was not spent just sleeping and masturbating (Flaubert likened sentences to ejaculate). Often, the excruciation of the stylist seems to be a front for writer’s block. This was the case with the marvelous American writer J. F. Powers, for instance, of whom Sean O’Faolain joked, in Wildean fashion, that he “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon wondering whether or not he should replace it with a semicolon.” More usual, I think, is the kind of literary routine ascribed to the minor English writer A. C. Benson—that he did nothing all morning and then spent the afternoon writing up what he’d done in the morning.

    3.  Lukács, in Studies in European Realism, distinguishes between the frozen detail of Flaubert and Zola, and the more dynamic detail of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Balzac. Lukács borrowed this idea from Lessing’s Laocoön, in which Lessing praises Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield, not as something finished and complete, but “as a shield that is being made.”

    4.  It is partly by shifts in register that we gain a sense of a human voice speaking to us—Austen’s, Spark’s, Roth’s. Likewise, by dancing between registers a character sounds real to us, whether Hamlet or Leopold Bloom. Movements in diction capture some of the waywardness and roominess of actual thinking: David Foster Wallace and Norman Rush exploit this to considerable effect. Rush’s two novels, Mating and Mortals, are full of the most fantastic shifts in diction, and the effect is the creation of a real but strange American voice, at once overeducated and colloquial: “This jeu maintained its facetious character, but there came a time when I began to resent it as a concealed way of short-circuiting my episode of depression, because he preferred me to be merry, naturally.” Or: “I was manic and global. Everything was a last straw. I went up the hill on passivity and down again.”

    5.  Culture and Value, edited by G. H. Von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter Winch (1980). The italics are Wittgenstein’s.

    6.  Letter to Grace Norton, March 1876, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, edited by Philip Horne (1999).

    7.  James can, when he wants to, sail close to the wind in simile, thus nicely disproving Nabokov’s slanderous complaint to Edmund Wilson. In The American Scene, written in 1907, James likens the already crowded Manhattan skyline to a pincushion whose pins have been put in at nighttime, any old how. Later in the same book he compares it to an upturned comb, with teeth missing.

    8.  See Elizabeth Royte, Garbarge Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (2005).

  Dialogue

    1.  Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, edited by Matthew Yorke (1992).

  Truth, Convention, Realism

    1.  George Eliot, Adam Bede.

    2.  “More About the
Modern Novel” in The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927–1944 (1945).

    3.  See S/Z (1970).

    4.  From “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966). Quoted in Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, translated by Carol Cosman (2004). Notice that Barthes sounds very little different, in the end, from Plato, for whom mimesis was merely an imitation of an imitation. The real reason for the French obsession with the fraudulence of realism—and with fictional narrative in general—has to do with the existence in French of the preterite, a past tense reserved exclusively for writing about the past, and not used in speech. French fiction, in other words, has its own, dedicated language of artifice, and thus must seem, to certain minds, unbearably “literary” and artificial.

    5.  En lisant en écrivant (1980).

    6.  Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy (2007).

    7.  One of the best guides to these terms is Linda Hutcheon’s classic work, A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988).

    8.  “Is Fiction an Art?” (1927).

    9.  “Modern Fiction” (1922).

  10.  Pages surely influenced by Chekhov’s story about a dying bishop, “The Bishop,” and an influence, in turn, on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

  Bibliography

  Novels, short stories, and narratives referred to or quoted from in this book are listed below. In the interest of evoking a sense of historical passage and context, I have ordered them by first date of publication in their original language. Translators have been credited in those cases in which I have quoted at any length from one particular translation.

  Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605 and 1615)

  The Bible, King James Version (1611)

  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

  Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749)

  Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew (written in the 1760s, published in 1784)

  Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818)

  Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1823–31)

  Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830, translated by Margaret Shaw)

  Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (1831), Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1839–47)

  Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)

  Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1840)

  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

  William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)

  Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

  Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857, translated by Geoffrey Wall)

  George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866)

  Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869, translated by Robert Baldick)

  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude)

  George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72)

  Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

  Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

  Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne (1880)

  Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

  Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

  Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)

  Guy de Maupassant, Pierre and Jean (1888)

  Knut Hamsun, Hunger (1890)

  Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)

  Anton Chekhov, “Ward 6” (1892), “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (1894)

  Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (1894)

  Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

  Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897)

  Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog” (1899)

  Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

  Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901)

  Anton Chekhov, “The Bishop” (1902)

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

  Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Gloucester (1903)

  Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910, translated by Stephen Mitchell)

  Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad (1912)

  Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

  James Joyce, Dubliners (1914)

  Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)

  D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

  D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921)

  James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

  Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)

  Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

  Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno (1923)

  Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)

  Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

  Isaac Babel, “My First Fee” (1928)

  William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)

  Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

  Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (1932)

  Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939)

  Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings (1941)

  Henry Green, Loving (1945)

  Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

  Vladimir Nabokov, “First Love” (1948)

  Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire (1950)

  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

  Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)

  Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)

  Claude Simon, The Flanders Road (1960)

  V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961)

  Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

  Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (1963)

  John Updike, Of the Farm (1965)

  John Williams, Stoner (1965)

  Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

  Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (1968)

  B. S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973)

  Italo Calvino, If on a writer’s night a traveler (1979)

  Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1982)

  José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984)

  Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)

  Philip Roth, The Counterlife (1986)

  Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

  Norman Rush, Mating (1991)

  Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992)

  W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992)

  Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (1995)

  Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (1995)

  Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (1998)

  Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

  J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003)

  Norman Rush, Mortals (2003)

  Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003)

  Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

  David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories (2004)

  Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006)

  John Updike, Terrorist (2006)

  Lydia Davis, Collected Stories (2009)

  Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle (2009–2011)

  Alice Munro, Selected Stories (2011)

  Teju Cole, Open City (2011)

  Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (2011)

  Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2012)

  Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2012)

  Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

  Ali Smith, How to Be Both (2014)

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in you
r e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  aestheticism

  Against the Day (Pynchon)

  Akhmatova, Anna

  All That Man Is (Szalay)

  All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy)

  Alter, Robert

  Amador, Jorge

  The American Scene, (James)

  Amis, Martin

  Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

  anti-aestheticism

  anti-sentimentality

  Antonioni, Michelangelo

  The Argonauts (Nelson)

  Aristotle

  As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)

  Aspects of the Novel (Forster)

  The Aspern Papers (James)

  Atonement (McEwan)

  Auden, W. H.

  Austen, Jane

  characters of

  detail depiction by

  narration by

  realism and

  registers used by

  Austerlitz (Sebald)

  author-character overlaps

  in free indirect style narration

  in metaphors/similes

  The Awkward Age (James)

  Babbitt (Lewis)

  Babel, Isaac

  Balzac, Honoré de

  detail depiction by

  Barthes, Roland

  on detail depiction

  on literary style

  on narration

  on realism

  Baudelaire, Charles

  “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (Munro)

  Beckett, Samuel

  Bellow, Saul

  characters of

  detail depiction by

  metaphor use by

  narration and

  style/language of

  Benjamin, Walter

  Bennett, Arnold

  Berlin, Isaiah

  Bernhard, Thomas

  Berryman, John

  Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)

  the Bible

  Blake, William

  Blindness (Saramago)

  Blood Meridian (McCarthy)

  The Blue Flower (Fitzgerald)

  Bolaño, Roberto

  Bookforum