Living by Fiction (3 page)

Now, what do we make of this curious assertion of Magritte's, that surrealist images may be right or wrong? What can be right about a surrealist image? I am certainly not going to endorse as an artistic criterion Magritte's vague, emotional phrase “something right about it.” But I do endorse his notion that the right image will “stand up to examination.” After all, there is nothing too mysterious about the rightness of an egg's replacing a bird. The two have met. In other words, the “something right” which “will stand up to examination” is ordinary unity. Notice that Magritte's surrealism by no means intends to traffic in “accidental” or “arbitrary” images. He uses these words to damn. Must arbitrariness always be damning? Must it forever be out of bounds not as a subject but as a technique? I think so.

Let me insert here a regret that criticism has no other terms than “device” and “technique” for these deliberate artistic causes which yield deliberate artistic effects. In painting and in music, the word “technique,” at least, has a respectable sound; but in fiction, and especially to laymen, both “device” and “technique” sound sinister, as though writers were cold-blooded manipulators and gadgeteers who for genius substitute a bag of tricks. They are; of course they are. But the trick is the work itself. The trick is intrinsic. One does not produce a work and then give it a twist by inserting devices and techniques here and there like acupuncture needles. The work itself is the device. In traditional fiction the work is device made flesh; in contemporary modernist fiction the work
may be technique itself or device laid bare.

All this is not to say that the fragmentation of the great world is the only theme of narrative collage: far from it. These techniques—abrupt shifts, disjunctive splicings and enjambments of time, space, and voice—are common coin. Almost all contemporary writers, including writers of traditional fiction, use them toward any number of different ends. For that matter, the historical Modernists themselves used them for various, often traditional ends. In Joyce's
Ulysses
, in Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
, the use of segmented narrative deepens the reader's sense of the fictional world and its complex characters and scenes. The technique serves the works' other themes, as it does in Garrett's
Death of the Fox
, Ellison's
Invisible Man
, Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
, and Durrell's
Alexandria Quartet
. And even when a work's theme is fragmentation, the work may itself be unified, and the fragmentation may not be bad news; James and many other writers have celebrated the world's “blooming, buzzing confusion.”

Note, then, that the fragmentation of narrative line may be, and usually is, as formally controlled as any other aspect of fiction. There is nothing arbitrary whatsoever about fragmentation itself. In fact, as a technique it may elicit
more
formal control than a leisured narrative technique which imitates the thickened flow of time in orderly progression, if only because it requires the writer clearly to identify the important segments of his work and skip the rest. No charming narrative dalliances prevent our seeing his scenes as parts of a whole; no emotional coziness lulls our minds to sleep.

The virtues of contemporary modernist fiction are literary, are intellectual and aesthetic. They are the solid excellences of complex, formally ordered pattern. Most con
temporary modernist fiction, and the best of it, does not claim these virtues
and
the incidental virtues of realistic fiction as well. You do not find Calvino promoting “verisimilitude”; you do not read Nabokov as a document of the times. This is as it should be. I bring up the question of integrity here only because it is here that a writer may most readily fool himself—always an attractive possibility. On one hand, sophisticated, hurried readers continue to judge works on the sophistication of their surfaces. On the other hand, our culture continues to pay lip service to the incidental and dull virtues of realism. So a writer may combine the two sets of excellence inappropriately. He may fool himself into reproducing the broken, sophisticated-looking forms of good contemporary modernist fiction without its unified content, in the hope that the narrative technique,
as an end in itself
, has an intrinsic significance. It not only looks good, it is “realistic.” It is “social criticism.” He may fool himself into shirking the difficult, heartbreaking task of structuring a work of art on the grounds that art is imitation (all of a sudden) and a slapdash fiction imitates a seriously troubled world.

But I am exaggerating, and speaking here more in theory than in fact. I am pummeling an unnamed straw man, a straw author, who composes, like Dadaist Tristan Tzara, by stirring a hatful of scraps. I am certainly not thinking here of a great writer like Cortázar, or Coover. In fact, I know for certain of no such writer of fiction, and I'm afraid I would not name one if I did. Serious writers are not consciously dishonest. I mean only to mutter darkly that in the present confusion of technical sophistication and significance, an emperor or two might slip by with no clothes.

Anyone with wit and training can search a work for
sense. And sense is by no means an obsolete virtue: sense, and not the skill to dazzle, is the basal criterion for art. Surface obscurity is, of course, by no means a sign of its absence. On the contrary, such obscurity usually proves to be smoke from some wonderfully interesting fire. We simply must not mistake the smoke for the fire. I am certain that much, if not most, of today's lasting fiction derives from contemporary modernist writers of integrity (writers like Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Calvino). That other writers may produce fictional surfaces similar to theirs, but without their internal integrity, does not in any way dim their achievement. But someone must distinguish between art and mere glibness.

All we need are responsible readers who demand real artistic coherence from a work. And we need book reviewers who understand how literature works and do not forget their training when they read a dust jacket. After all, new, subtle, and intellectualized forms of sense demand, and must continue to produce, detailed critical effort. We need much more serious textual criticism of contemporary work—work to whose formal intentions publishers and reviewers are usually indifferent—and we need a wide forum for such criticism. It's a pity it's so dull. Nevertheless, such effort gave us Wallace Stevens and Nabokov; it must continue, undaunted by fluff, to locate the great work being produced today. (Or the philistines will get us, or the paperbacks won't.)

Let me conclude this excursus with a few bald assertions. Meaninglessness in art is a contradiction in terms. Meaning in art is contextual. What does a whale mean? A whale means whatever an artist can make it mean in a given work. Art is the creation of coherent contexts. Since words necessarily refer to the world, as paint does not,
literary contexts must be more responsible to the actual world than painting contexts must be. That is, it is easily conceivable that a painted blue streak should represent a ship's hull in one painting and a curved arm in another. But that fictional element in
Moby-Dick
had better be a whale or something mighty like one. The blue streak can hold up its end of the artistic structure in virtually any context, but whales belong at sea. Writers do not create whales; whales are known and given; you can only do so much with them. You would be hard put in your serious novel to make a whale stand for a repressive Middle Eastern regime, or baseball, or agriculture. You would violate the bonds of unity if you tried to force a serious narrative connection between a vicious whale and, say, Isabel Archer. It would be precious to yoke them together without just cause. It would be mere comedy. It would be painting a shoe in the cage.

In all the arts, coherence in a work means that the relationship among parts—the jointed framework of the whole—is actual, solid, nailed down. (Of course, a proper demonstration of valid connection among parts would require a full-scale exegesis of a text, an interruption which I am unwilling to suffer. There are solid readings of standard works. Reliable readings of intelligent lyric poetry usually demonstrate the relationship of parts very clearly, if only because the texts at hand are so small. I could refer the reader to, say, Bloom or Ellman on Yeats, Frye on Blake, Vendler or Sukenick on Stevens. In contemporary fiction, the
Hollins Critic
essays such as those collected in
The Sounder Few
give intelligent exegeses of contemporary texts.) In all the arts, coherence and integrity go hand in hand. One cannot toss onto one's canvas a patch of blue paint and hope one's friends like it or some
clever critic finds a reason for it. Similarly, one cannot add the weight of idea to a piece of fiction by setting a whale swimming through it, or by inserting Adolf Hitler with a larding needle, or by scrambling the world's contents with a pen.

Contemporary modernist fiction, in fact, requires
more
coherence than traditional fiction does. For one of the things this new fiction does is bare its own structure. (How long a novel would
Pale Fire
be in the hands of Thomas Mann?) This fiction sees that the formal relationship among parts is the essential value of all works of art. So it strips the narration of inessentials: like Hugo's excursions into the history of all aspects of human culture, like the unities of time, space, and action, like emotion. It bares instead its structural bones, as
Pale Fire
does, and
Invisible Cities
, and
Ficciones
; it bares its structural bones, brings them to the surface, and retires. Those bones had better be good. If a writer is going to use forms developed by intelligent people, he should use them intelligently. It does not do to mimic results without due process. Traditional fiction has the advantage here, I think. In a conservative work well fleshed, we may not notice at once that the joints do not articulate, nor the limbs even meet the torso. There may in fact be so much flesh that the parts cohere as it were bonelessly. But it is easy to see, if we look, taped joints on a skeleton.

It is interesting that John Fowles rewrote
The Magus. The Magus
is in many ways a contemporary modernist piece of fiction—in its fantastic transfigurations, its object-like and grotesque characters, and its emphasis on the irrational. But the first edition of
The Magus
—now it can be told—was dishonest work, the relationship of whose parts was pleaded. Its structure collapsed at a
touch. It is interesting that Fowles rewrote it because, I fancy, Fowles understood that in order to make his bid as an important writer he needed to set his house in order and redress his crimes against integrity.

At best, integrity and intelligence go hand in hand to ensure against laziness, false analogies, pleaded connections, and sleight of word. Integrity demands of intelligence that it forge true connections on the page. Intelligence calls for integrity for the challenge of it, and from intelligent respect for the audience of literature, and respect for the art of literature itself, and for its capacity to mean.