The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (20 page)

Here, as in some of the works of Kafka, particular details of psychological reality are directly translated into physical reality. Technique is not suppressed but emphasized, yet no real divorce of actuality and the expression of actuality is suggested. Neither is there any real divorce between actuality and expression in surrealist fiction (Jerzy Kosinski, William Palmer, sometimes John Hawkes); the difference is that here the reality imitated is, not in one or two details but in many, that of our dreams. In this fiction (as sometimes in the conventional tale), things happen as if at random; only coherent emotion gives order. At other times—here as in Kafka’s dream stories (“A Country Doctor”)—a progression of events carries an emotional charge not at first fully explained by the events themselves. The presentation tends to be that of conventional realistic fiction; only the subject matter has changed. As the critic and writer Joe David Bellamy puts it:

So-called absurdist fiction offers another variation. In Eugène Ionesco’s play
Rhinoceros
, the people of a town begin changing, one by one, into rhinoceroses—all but the narrator, who at the end of the story wishes he could change into a rhinoceros but can’t, and possibly his girlfriend, who perhaps changes as the others have done, and then again perhaps simply pines away of loneliness and guilt and disappears. The characters’ transformation into rhinoceroses cannot be explained expressionistically, since some of those who change are rhinoceroslike (stubborn, ferocious, incapable of reasoning) and others are not; and neither can the story be interpreted as a dream. If anything, the transformations reflect the workings of an absurd universe to which all human responses (“our own moral code,” “our philosophy,” “our irreplaceable system of values,” “humanism,” even love) are inadequate. (The story is commonly interpreted as having to do with the acceptance of Nazi fascism.)

Among the more interesting and various of the “irrealists,” a group of writers who work out of fictional convention, abandoning the attempt to deal directly with reality, is Donald Barthelme. All his work, from
Snow White
to
The Dead Father
, might be read as, among other things, a
tour-de-force
study in literary (and visual) technique. His worldview, in all his fiction, is essentially absurdist: Characters struggle with problems that cannot be solved and either accept their fate or struggle on. Except for the fact that superficially Barthelme’s method is comic, and the fact, also, that the pathos of Barthelme’s stories is always muted, the emotional effect of his work is the same one we get from naturalist fiction, irony and pity. One of the things that make his writing interesting is his seemingly limitless ability to manipulate techniques as modes of apprehension. It goes without saying that, for Barthelme, they apprehend nothing: Reality is a place we cannot get to from here. (The short story
“City Life” is in part a parody of super-realist fiction.) Yet at his best Barthelme can juggle techniques in a way that does express emotion and an attitude toward life. Take, for example, his well-known story from the collection
City Life
, “Views of My Father Weeping.”

The story combines literary parody and surrealism (normally conflicting modes, the first “objective,” in Stevenson’s terms, the other “subjective”), together with snippets of other modes and styles, to tell a non-realistic story of a son’s attempt to understand and avenge his father’s death. The story opens:

The materials (e.g., “an aristocrat”) are those of the conventional tale; the style, flat-statement realism; the surface emotion, absurdist: “Then I remembered: he was run over by a carriage.” Abruptly, a surrealist image breaks in:

The portrait of the impossible dead father is of course ambiguous. The son is both concerned and dutiful, on one hand, and annoyed by the father’s vulgarity and childishness, on the other (“yammer”), an ambivalence to be developed throughout the story. Two juxtaposed images show the contrast clearly, one showing the father as magical, hence vastly superior to the son, the other showing him as embarrassingly childlike, the very antithesis of “an aristocrat.”

The story continues in alternating passages of parodic nineteenth-century gothic detective fiction (with modifications), surrealist fiction, and other styles. With the help of witnesses, the son traces the driver of the aristocrat’s carriage, a man named Lars Bang; we learn that, just as he is ashamed of his father, the son feels ashamed of his own inadequacy by the aristocratic standard (“When I heard this name [Lars Bang], which in its sound and appearance is rude, vulgar, not unlike my own name, I was seized by repugnance….”); and finally, in company with other listeners, the son learns from the carriage driver (an elegant man in comparison to the son) that the father’s death was a result of his own foolishness—he was drunk and attacked the horses with a switch. Instead of winning justice for a murdered father, the son has learned—and caused others to learn—of his father’s shame and guilt, thereby increasing his own. Yet perhaps this is wrong (reality is impenetrable). A beautiful young girl, who has sat silent and sullen through Bang’s recitation, abruptly speaks up (using language slightly
vulgar): “ ‘Bang is an absolute bloody liar,’ she said.” The story ends, as it must: “Etc.” As in
The Dead Father
, the burden of sons goes on and on.

What is most striking about the story is the range of styles orchestrated for a single effect: gothic detective fiction, surrealism, old-style melodrama (as here):

Or again, absurdist verbal comedy:

Et cetera. What holds it all together is the narrative voice, a comic-pathetic troubled mind.

All of these approaches to fiction—expressionist, surrealist, absurdist, irrealist—produce interesting work if the writer is any good, however shaky the philosophical base. When the writer creates something new, he can hardly help doing it at least by analogy to the familiar creative process, turning street sounds or electronic bleeps into “music” by analogy to the process by which Bach and those before him made music of notes, or creating an oral sculpture by a method analogous to that of the traditional sculptor or film-maker. At the “objective” end of Robert Louis Stevenson’s continuum, the end that attracts the irrealists, the only human reality that remains is the selecting process of the artist. We get from the work his emotional set, the affirmation—even if he doesn’t wish to make it—of his eye’s
relationship (and therefore his heart’s) to things. The same goes for the super-realists. As Robbe-Grillet keeps pointing out, you cannot get down the reality of the refrigerator when no one is in the room; in other words, writers cannot suppress “the mental constructs through which they are peering.” The whole question of the uncertainty principle is in a sense a red herring. We choose techniques as we choose words in English, either to say what we mean, as nearly as we can, or to find out what happens when we choose those techniques, those words. “I hate you,” the child says to his father, watching shrewdly for reaction. “Marriage is a strange thing,” says the lover, and glances at his love. So I propose in a piece of fiction that a certain man had three hundred sons, all red-heads, and I muse on what that makes me say next.

Let us turn to specifics. Out of the horde of technical matters that might be mentioned I will choose seven that seem to me basic: learning technique by imitation, development and control of vocabulary, sentence handling, poetic rhythm, point of view, delay, and style. On all these matters, my discussion is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive.

For centuries, one of the standard ways of learning techniques has been imitation, as when, in the eighteenth century, the student took some classical model—for example, the Pindaric hymn or the Horatian ode—and wrote, in Greek, Latin, or English, an original work in imitation of that model. The approach is still instructive. Two kinds of imitation seem especially worthwhile: careful use of an old, generally unfamiliar form for the presentation and analysis of modern subject matter, and the more direct, even line-by-line imitation that enables the writer to learn “from inside” the secrets of some great writer’s style.

Though human experience is universal in many ways, attitudes
change from age to age, and one way of coming to understand our ideas and emotions is to study them through the spectacles of some earlier form or set of aesthetic premises. For a number of reasons, we cannot quite share the Romantic experience of nature. For one thing, nature itself has changed. Whereas the Romantic artist might make a painting he calls “Tree and Stream” or “View of Mont-Sainte-Victoire, Late Afternoon,” the painter today, whether from disillusionment or from a curious but authentic attachment to the world he knows, may make a painting he calls “Pontiac with Treetrunk” or “Chevy in Green Fields.” In the same way, the writer may copy some old idea—the dream vision, the imaginary voyage, the hymn to the state, the saint’s legend, or the framed narrative—and may translate the form to suit modern experience. So in
Jason and Medeia
I copied the
Argonautica
of Apollonios Rhodios (with some additions from Euripides and others), asking myself at every turn what the characters and events might mean to a modern sensibility—asking, that is, how much of the original would still hold, how much we are forced to alter and why, whose reading of experience is more accurate (that of Apollonios or our own), and how much experience itself has changed. So Donald Barthelme plays off the medieval tradition of the allegorical mountain (mainly off Chaucer’s
The House of Fame
) in “The Glass Mountain,” Stanley Elkin imitates
The Canterbury Tales
in
The Dick Gibson Show
, John Barth imitates Scheherazade in
Chimera
, and James Joyce in a sense imitates the
Odyssey
. Working closely with some earlier work, scrutinizing the older writer’s way of doing things, the modern writer gets an angle on his material. He learns how the speech of modern heroes must differ from that of old-fashioned heroes (he learns the advantages and drawbacks of decadence), learns why the innocent Homeric simile has given way to modern, more ironic simile, learns why traditional allegory has become for us an all but dead option except in comic works.

The imitations I’ve mentioned—Barthelme, and so on—are all fairly sophisticated; that is, far removed from the base of imitation. Much closer following of the model can achieve equally interesting—and new—results. Many of Poe’s stories are imitations or parodic comments. His “Imp of the Perverse,” for instance, imitates the style of Washington Irving and attacks the philistinism and anti-intellectualism of Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Though we sometimes associate parody with college humor magazines or such popular organs as
Mad
magazine and the
National Lampoon
, the use of parodic technique, both comic and serious, has proved a rich vein for contemporary writers. (It has been a mainstay of poets for centuries.) The parodist may use only the general style of his model, as Robert Coover in “A Pedestrian Accident” (from
Pricksongs and Descants
) uses slapstick film-comedy and vaudeville routines for a grim new purpose, or he may follow his model almost line for line, merely changing details of action, character, and setting. Whether or not the result is art will depend on the writer’s wit. Either way, the exercise will produce a clearer knowledge of how the writer achieved his effects.

A huge vocabulary is not always an advantage. Simple language, for some kinds of fiction at least, can be more effective than complex language, which can lead to stiltedness or suggest dishonesty or faulty education. One of the surest signs of limited taste or intellectual mediocrity—though sometimes it signals only shyness and insecurity—is continual use of the same polysyllabic or foreign words everyone else uses, fashionable words like “serendipity,” or “ubiquitous”; “
genre
,” “
milieu
,” and “
ambiance
” when emphasized as French; worn-out German words or phrases like “
Weltanschauung
,” “
Gestalt
,” or “
Sturm und Drang
”; or jargon words like “fictional strategy.” And the writer who uses his own fancy language, not just that which is in style,
can be equally offensive. If we sense that, though working as a realist, he writes mainly for elegant verbal effect, choosing his characters for the cleverness of their chatter or even violating character out of deference to his ear, using “calculate” for “think” or giving all his characters the right to say “dastardly,” “
comme il faut
,” or “my man,” we sense mannerism and frigidity and at once back off. This rule, like all rules, must be applied with good sense. Dostoevsky chooses characters for the kinds of things they’ll talk about. And a noticeably ornate vocabulary can be a splendid thing if well used. For the writer who handles difficult or obscure words well, giving the appearance of introducing them smoothly and effortlessly, violating neither the authorial tone nor fidelity to character, ornate vocabulary can extend the writer’s range of tone and give textural richness, to say nothing of increased precision. For symbolists and allegorists like Hawthorne and Melville, ornate vocabulary may be an absolute requisite. In effective writing—normally—the writer slips in symbols and allegorical emblems with the cunning of a flim-flam man gulling his country victim. The symbol that stands out too sharply from its matrix may distract the reader’s eye from the fictional dream, with the unpleasing effect of making the writer seem frigid and his story disingenuous, more sermon than honest presentation of imagined events—a work, in short, in which the reader feels manipulated, pushed toward some opinion or view of the world not inherent in the fictional materials but imposed from above.