Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  This may seem to be so inevitable as to be obvious, but I don't believe anyone has pointed it out before. Many writers never realize it or sense its naturalness. Even major authors sometimes recognize only the effects of it and not the theory.

  Henry James, for instance, discovered this for himself when he was writing Roderick Hudson. James later became the absolute master of technique in fiction; but, as he explains in his preface to the New York edition, thirty-five years later, this was his first attempt at writing a novel, and he couldn't seem to render convincingly the stages of the disintegration of his central figure, the young sculptor Roderick Hudson, as described by his point-of-view character, Rowland Mallet. James mentions various solutions that he considered, then describes "what really saved" the book. "My subject," he says, "had defined itself—and this in spite of the title of the book—as not directly, in the least, my young sculptor's adventure." The "centre of interest," he discovered, was "in Rowland Mallet's consciousness, and the drama is the very drama of that consciousness ... of what 'happened' to him."

  Thus what "happened" in the novel is not the disintegration of Roderick Hudson, but what happened to the point-of-view character, Rowland Mallet, as a result of his perception of this disintegration. As R. P. Blackmur says, in his introduction to James's Art of the Novel: "James never put his readers in direct contact with his subjects; he believed it was impossible to do so, because his subject really was not what happened but what someone felt about what happened, and this could be directly known only through an intermediate intelligence."

  This, I believe, is what will always be the case in successful fiction: that either the character moved by the action of the story will be the point-of-view character, or else the point-of-view character will become the character moved by the action. Call it "Hills' Law."

  Another example is what happened to Norman Mailer when he was writing The Deer Park. "Originally," he tells us in Advertisements for Myself, "The Deer Park had been about a movie director and a girl with whom he had a bad affair, and it was told by a sensitive but faceless young man. In changing the young man, I ... put a disproportion upon [the book] because my narrator became too interesting, and not enough happened to him in the second half of the book, and ... before I was finished, I saw a way to write another book altogether."

  Almost any successful novel or short story will provide proof of this thesis—that the point-of-view character is the moved character or will become so—but let me just refer as examples to two short novels everyone interested in fiction will know: Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

  The central figure in Gatsby may be the title character, but the point-of-view figure is of course the narrator, Nick Carraway, and the book eventually focuses on the effects of the action on him. This is made very clear at the beginning, in several key sections in the middle, but most forcefully at the end: Gatsby can lie out there, shot dead on a raft in his pool; Daisy and Tom can cozily eat chicken in the kitchen forever; it's clear they haven't changed. What's "happened" in the novel is what's happened to Nick, the movement by action that makes him decide to return to the Midwest at the end, with all the associations that has for him.

  Heart of Darkness also seems at first to be about what happened to someone other than the point-of-view character; supposedly it is about a character named Kurtz and what he experienced in deepest Africa. "I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally," begins the narrator, Marlow. But then he goes right on. "Yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap." And by the time the story is over it is obvious that what's important is what "happened" to the narrator, Marlow, what he experienced (from Kurtz's experience), as far upriver into the heart of darkness as it is possible to go, about the way good and evil are mixed in human actions, so that it is possible for him—he who hates a lie, as it is made clear at the beginning—to tell a lie at the end.

  In Lord Jim, where Marlow also appears as narrator, the point-of-view structure is more complicated, but the same thesis applies. Where the action is of consequence to Jim, Jim himself narrates it in long first-person sequences which Marlow then reports as he heard it to his assembled listeners, one of whom, it is suggested—the unidentified "privileged man"—wrote it all down.

  Even in novels where point of view shifts from one character to another, the thesis remains valid within the sections. In an X-shaped novel like Anna Karenina, for instance, in those sections where the subject is the decline of Anna, the point of view is likely to be Anna's; where the subject is the rising of Levin, the point of view of those sections is his.

  This effect can be noted in reading any novel or short story. To test it in writing, a useful exercise for a beginning writer is to tell a story a la Rashomon —that is, tell the same story from the point of view of each participant. Immediately the writer will see how the significance of the action changes to become of consequence to the narrator.

  This fact of fiction corresponds naturally to a fact of life. As a character in John Barth's marvelous novel The End of the Road says: "Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story." Then he gives this example.

  Suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom's viewpoint, he's the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bride and groom both are minor figures ... Every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character.

  So, the fact is, as Barth's character goes on to say, that "Fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life." And that distortion, that shaping of the materials of the narration by the point-of-view character, is inevitable, because "Not only are we the heroes of our own life stories—we're the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters."

  The Focusing Power of Point of View

  Many novels and short stories are undoubtedly written neglecting the relation between angle of narration and focus of narration. The unsuccessful ones often seem to just sit there, the action having even less impact on the reader than on the unmoved point-of-view character. To start a narrator-perceiver out on a long account of how an action affects someone else is virtually to ask for trouble in the writing. If the teller of the story doesn't feel the consequences of the action, how can the reader be expected to? If what "happens" hasn't happened to him, then it's as if it hadn't happened at all.

  But then, in good stories by good writers, one often sees a point-of-view method that started off "wrong"—or at least indirectly—being worked around to focus on the real consequences of the action. And it's fascinating to notice this, once one's started to read with this sense of the necessary dynamics of fiction.

  Take the beginning of Hemingway's "The Killers," for instance. When the two killers enter the lunch room, the story is presented almost as if it were a play—that is, dialogue plus a few stage directions, like this: " 'You better go around, bright boy,' said Al. Nick went around behind the counter." This is the pure "scenic" method. We don't enter the mind of any of the characters, ever in the story. But we follow Nick later, as he goes to warn the ex-prizefighter about the killers and then returns to the restaurant. It is only by being with Nick that we could be told all that we are told. We learn only what he learns. And then at the end we learn his reaction: "I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damn awful." And we see that he has been moved by the action: " 'I'm going to get out of this town,' Nick said." We realize that it is Nick's story, that what happened in it is what's happened to him.

  You can see the same shift in point of view and consequence in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." The story begins semi-scenic, then it becomes the older waiter's story; it is he who is moved by
it at the end.

  Or take a far more confused case of shifting point of view, D. H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," for instance, where point-of-view conventions seem not to be observed at all. The story opens with three brothers and one sister at the breakfast table, on the day they must give up their father's farm. Point of view begins in the older brother's consciousness, and we're told what the other brothers are thinking, briefly, but we are given no idea of what is in the daughter's mind. Here the withholding of point of view is used as a suspense device: the brothers, and a young doctor who joins them, all want to know what the daughter is going to do; indications are given that she has something unexpected in mind; some dissonant note is thus sounded which will be resolved later; the very fact that we are excluded from her thoughts evokes and increases this tension in the story. The daughter goes to her mother's graveside with flowers, and in a passage of exposition we enter her mind, historically, so to speak, learning how she felt about her family's fall in fortunes. The doctor observes her in the cemetery; she sees him watching. "Their eyes met." And in this extraordinary way, point of view switches to the doctor. With the doctor's eyes we watch the daughter walk down a hill in the twilight to a pond and walk into the pond, attempting suicide. We are with the doctor as he rescues her, experience with him the symbolic death of being under the dark water. He carries her back to the house and revives her. "She looked full into his face." And thereafter point of view switches back and forth between them, more and more rapidly, as they discover love for one another. More and more closely their thoughts are intertwined until, in the final sentence, point of view is marvelously, entirely mutually-held between them: " 'No, I want you, I want you,' was all he answered, blindly, with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her."

  I don't for a minute suggest that Lawrence manipulated point of view consciously this way. I rather imagine he was pretty much totally unaware of it. Lawrence was not the master of technique that James was. What I am saying is that the dynamics of fiction, in the hands of a great writer, exert a control of their own, and that as a story comes closer finally to what it is really about, to "what happened" and who it is that it happened to, then the focusing power of point of view will narrow down accordingly. You can see this happen in any story you read, once you have learned to read this way.

  And as far as the writer is concerned, we've seen that even when an author has misconceived his story, and attempted to tell it from the point of view of an unmoved character, he often finds that things begin to change on him. Despite the author's intentions, the point-of-view character will tend to occupy the center of his stage, and the interest and focus of his story will slip away from the character or characters he had originally intended to be central. "I'm wasting too much time just setting up this character who's seeing the story," the author may think to himself, if things aren't going well, or "My narrator's getting too interesting and throwing everything out of proportion."

  But, if things do seem to be going well, he may just accept these new developments as an offering of the muse. "The story is changing to a new direction all on its own," he may say, or "The characters seem to be coming to life and taking over for themselves."

  Mysteriously creative moments like these, experienced by most authors at one time or another, may just be the traditional and inevitable dynamics of fiction asserting themselves, a gradual triumph of technique over an initial misconception. It's in this sort of way that technique always liberates inspiration.

  Monologues, and the Pathological First Person

  Stories told in the monologue form would seem to be exceptions to our "rule" that the point-of-view character is the character moved by action or will become so. The monologist, after all, is presumed to be the same after he ends his harangue as he was before he began it. The monologist exists in a peculiar point of time. In regular first-person narration, the narrator tells of something that has happened to him that affected him, while in the monologue, the narrator simply reveals a state of mind: we can imagine him compulsively saying the same thing over and over. Monologues do in fact sometimes provide examples of exceptions to our rule—but for the most part it's endless examples of unsuccessful exceptions.

  The monologue form, in all its versions, is probably the most awkward way to tell a story there is, and unfortunately beginning writers seem attracted to it unerringly. Even in the hands of an author skilled in dialogue or dialect, a monologue creates a very unsatisfactory story, and when used by a beginner it can make for very painful reading.

  One basic trouble with the monologue form is that it disorients the reader. Who is it exactly that is talking? And then, is the reader being addressed directly? Or is a captive "visitor" there, in the barber chair or wherever, just somehow listening? Why is it the listener never says anything? And is the monologist anyway actually saying all this out loud? Or just thinking it to himself?

  There are different kinds of monologues, with their own conventions and variations. There is the direct monologue, where the reader is being addressed directly. Then there is the dramatic monologue, in which a listener is supposedly or "actually" somehow there, between the monologist and the reader—an uneasy state of existence, to say the best of it. And there is the interior monologue, in which the narrator is not speaking aloud at all, but just somehow "thinking," either in complete sentences or in a sort of Freudian free association of fragmented thoughts, the "stream of consciousness" method more or less invented by James Joyce for Molly Bloom's "soliloquy" toward the end of Ulysses, and never used by anyone so well since, although it was once thought the method would revolutionize writing.

  As passages in novels, monologues can certainly sometimes be vehicles for fine writing, just as the soliloquy can sometimes be brought alive on the stage with heightened writing. But one reason the soliloquies in drama are sometimes so beautiful is that dramatists realize how awkward and unreal the convention is and hence produce their absolute best to cover over the artificiality of the occasion. Where the soliloquy is useful, though, or perhaps even necessary in the theater, in order to establish motivation or characterization, or whatever, it is never really necessary in fiction, where the reader can easily be made privy to a character's thoughts or emotions in more straightforward, less "dramatic" ways. For a fiction writer to use the monologue form is to take up one of the playwright's disadvantages for no necessary reason.

  As far as telling a whole short story in the monologue is concerned, the disadvantages are terrible. There's the monotony of the single voice, for instance. Exposition's difficult, especially in the interior monologue, where the character is in the ridiculous position of saying or thinking, aloud to himself in some way, things he perfectly well knows he knows already. In many monologue stories, the character either fails to perceive the significance of the events he is describing, or has so different a reaction to them that the discrepancy between his reaction and the reader's is pretty much the whole intended effect of the story. In these cases, where the narrator is self-deceived, it often happens that he betrays himself "too early" and the alert reader grasps it all right away and then has to read on and on and on just to have it finally made obvious.

  Some of us learned to dislike the monologue form early in life, with our first exposure, in high school, to that wretched poem of Robert Browning's, "My Last Duchess." It's entirely a monologue, the Duke looking up at a portrait of his last Duchess hanging up there on the wall, addressing some silent visitor-listener. As he runs on, he gradually reveals by his remarks about his pretty young wife, now dead of heartbreak or something, just what a coldhearted bastard he really is. He complains about how she smiled at everyone and everything, without regard to his situation in life, how she loved the flowers and cows in the fields just as much as she loved him, and so forth and so on, revealing himself unwittingly (as monologists often do) more and more as he goes on. Browning does more or less the same thing in another terrible
poem in which one of the monks in a monastery complains about another: as the monologue develops, it becomes clear that the complaining monk is an awful fellow and the object of his hatred is a saint. Whatever the monologist is antagonistic to is invariably sentimentalized—the pathological narrator having stated the case against in such unfair and unperceptive terms that the reader is supposedly forced to sympathize with the object of his attack. (I've always felt, though, about "My Last Duchess" that the Duke had some cause for complaint: who wants a Duchess who cares as much about some cow out in the pasture as she does about you, and goes around simpering at the field hands all the time?)

  Ring Lardner's famous monologue story, "Haircut," uses exactly the same method as "My Last Duchess," except he just flip-flopped it. Here the long-winded barber admires the practical joker he tells about; the reader is supposed to realize the joker is a sadist and hate him. (Actually, naturally, I always thought the fellow was fairly funny.) But the point I'm making remains the same. In most monologues we're supposed to perceive something entirely different from what we're being told; we're supposed to read between the lines exactly the opposite of what the lines say.

  Why writers, especially beginning writers, are continually attracted to this form is hard to see. Why would a writer want to tell a story from a point of view totally alien to him, from the point of view of a character whose every utterance must be designed secretly to convey the very opposite of what he's intending to say? The form violates rhetoric and denies the dynamics of fiction. Monologists in the pathological first person are presented as static: their attitudes toward the events of the story they describe are fixed, cannot be moved as a consequence of the action. This is a natural consequence, for in the pathological first person, the point-of-view figure is presented as being too warped or stupid for the events to have any effect on him. He won't even know what "happened" in the story, and, in fact, nothing has. Most monologues, then, are not really stories, but simply static character sketches of pathological types presented as imperceptive, unchanging first-person narrators. If the reason for writing such a monologue were to present a study of an unbalanced mind, then the interesting thing, surely, would be to show how the character got that way.