The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (24 page)

But there will always be those writers, rightly enough, who insist on creating some new style of their own, as Joyce did, or Faulkner, or William Gass. All that can be said to such writers is: Go to it. The risks are obvious: that the style will attract too much attention to itself; that the style may seem mannered; and that instead of freeing the writer to express himself it may limit the number and kinds of things he can say. (We see such limitations in Hemingway’s early experiments with the third-person-objective point of view done with tough-guy simplicity.) Good criticism will help, if the writer can get it, and will take it. Failing that, time is likely to soften the style’s excesses.

Plotting

When designing a profluent plot, we’ve said, the writer works in one of three ways, sometimes two or more at once: He borrows some traditional story or action drawn form life; he works backward from his climax; or he works forward from an initial situation. Without repetition of what has been said already, this chapter will examine all three of these methods as they apply to plotting short fiction, the novella, and the novel, and also examine ways of plotting other kinds of fiction, including the kind we call “plotless.” The discussion cannot hope to be exhaustive, but it should give the beginner some practical guidance on the hardest job a writer ever does.

Though causal sequence gives the best (most obvious) kind of profluence, it is not the only possible means to that necessary end. A story or novel may develop argumentatively, leading the reader point by point to some conclusion. In this case events occur not to justify later events but to dramatize logical positions; thus event
a
does not cause event
b
but stands in some logical relation to it. So, for example, the writer might impose onto the twelve labors of Hercules—or some action from real life, or some fictional action—some logical sequence that, like any other interesting argument, keeps us reading. By dramatized
concrete situations the writer argues, say, “If
a
does not work, try
b
; if
b
does not work, try
c
”—and so on through twelve possible modes of action or value possibilities. More specifically, the writer might show his central character trying to cope by charitable behavior, then, after failing, trying to cope by selfish behavior, and, failing again, trying to cope by a mixture of charity and selfish cunning, and so on until all options seem exhausted. Such a story or novel might be interesting, even brilliant, but it can never achieve the power of an energeic action because the control of action is intellectual, it does not rise out of the essence of things: It discusses reality the way a lecturer does (though perhaps more vividly), it does not reveal the modality of things. It does not capture process.

A related kind of profluence, which can also organize both made-up stories and traditional or real-life stories (found objects, so to speak), is the straight or modified picaresque plot. In traditional or pure form the picaresque narrative follows some character, often a clever rascal, from level to level through society, showing us the foibles and absurdities of each. The writer can make any substitutions he may please to pump new life into the old formula. Instead of the customary picaresque hero, he might use some monster from the fens—the monster Grendel, from
Beowulf
, for instance—and instead of the customary movement through the strata of society, he might choose a list of Great Ideas of Western Civilization (love, heroism, the artistic ideal, piety, and so forth) to which one by one he introduces his skeptical monster. This structuring of plot is likely to be more interesting or less depending on the extent to which the sequence raises questions involving the welfare of the character, each value, for instance, putting increasing pressure on the monster’s skepticism. Insofar as the sequence of ideas provides some threat, the reader’s involvement may be almost as great as it is in the well-built energeic plot, though here too the final energy is missing: the power of inexorable process.

Or again a plot may be constructed by symbolic juxtaposition.
The epic
Beowulf
, discussed earlier, works in this way. All tales of quest, or nearly all, have this structure.

In the final analysis it seems unlikely that an essentially intellectual structure can have the same power and aesthetic validity, all other things being equal, as a structure that appeals simultaneously to our intellect and to subtler faculties, our deepest emotions (sympathy and empathy) and our intuition of reality’s process. However that may be, an intellectual structure is easier to create than is a powerful energeic plot. With intellectual structures the writer always knows exactly where he stands and exactly where he’s heading, though the reader may be baffled until he figures out the key. If the writer is very clever at fleshing out the skeleton, covering it with vivid details drawn from life or literature, the reader’s initial bafflement, combined with his intuitive sense that the fiction has some order, may lead to the reader’s at first overvaluing the work—and his later disappointment, when he figures it out. We sense at once some mysterious logic in Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,” and our first impulse is to attribute this mysterious coherence to some ingenious penetration of the nature of things. But once we learn that the story is tightly allegorical, as neat as mathematics or a sermon on the seven deadly sins, we may begin to find it thin and too obviously contrived. All this may be vain argument; certainly it does not deny Dante his status as the greatest of medieval poets. But in an age fond of intellectual structures, it is a thought worth considering that those writers who move us more profoundly than all others—Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, for example—differ not in degree but in kind from those masters whose structures are intellectual, not energeic—writers like Dante, Spenser, and Swift.

The question, to pose it one last way, is this: Can an argument manipulated from the start by the writer have the same emotional and intellectual power as an argument to which the writer is forced by his intuition of how life works? Comparisons are odious but instructive: Can a
Gulliver’s Travels
, however
brilliantly constructed, ever touch the hem of the garment of a play like
King Lear
? Or: Why is the
Aeneid
so markedly inferior to the
Iliad
?

From all we have said about plotting in general it should be evident that even in those “modern” plots in which events happen by laws not immediately visible—as when, for instance, the tattooed man in the circus reveals in the course of a whimsical conversation that he has on his chest a tattoo of the little girl now looking at him, a child he has never before seen, or as when, in Isak Dinesen, a decorous old nun turns abruptly into a monkey—there must be some rational or poetically persuasive basis. We can enjoy a story that has some secret logic we sense but cannot immediately guess; but if we begin to suspect that the basis of profluence is nothing but mad whimsey, we begin to be distracted from the fictional dream by our questions, doubts, and puzzlement, our feeling that the story is getting nowhere. The “mad” story—surrealist, expressionist, or whatever—must be as carefully plotted as the story with causally related actions.

One can plot such fiction in a variety of ways. The most common is the technique of setting up basic philosophical oppositions and then disguising them, translating ideas into appropriate characters and generating events by the method of the old-fashioned allegorist, each event expressing in mysterious but concrete terms the active relationship between the central ideas. Thus, for example, wishing to talk about materialism and spirituality, one might choose as allegorical “central characters” a fat banker and a pigeon; and wishing to say that body cannot live without soul or soul without body, we might set up a situation in which an elderly pigeon keeps up its strength by living off the crumbs that fall from the Oreo cookies the banker eats between cigars, and the banker is kept from dying of cigar-smoke asphyxiation by the necessity of from time to time opening the window to let the pigeon in and out. For contrast we might set up in the office next door an identical fat banker who does not have a pigeon, and an identical pigeon who has nothing
for sustenance but rain. All of the images, needless to say (starting with the banker and the pigeon), are chosen both for their emblematic significance and for their inherent interest. (By an “emblem” I mean an image that has one signification. The banker means materialism and only materialism. By a “symbol” I mean an image that may mean several things.) And everything in the story—setting, dialogue, anything else—must be selected by the same principles, both immediate and emblematic interest.

Or one might work, as Chaucer often does, by the obverse of the allegorical method, choosing traditional allegorical emblems (the rose, the lamb, the crown, the grail) and exploring them in quasi-realistic terms. Thus, for example, a literal-minded, practical philosopher—an inventor of household appliances, or a complaints-department supervisor—might find himself in the company of the dying Fisher King. By either of the basic allegorical methods, the writer thinks out first what he wants to say in general, then translates his ideas into people, places, objects, and events, and then, in the process of writing, follows out suggestions that rise from his story, perhaps saying more than he at first thought he had to say.

Expressionistic and surreal fiction is superficially like allegory, but the meaning is much less imposed from without. The expressionist translates some basic psychological reality to actuality: Gregor Samsa becomes not
like
a cockroach but a cockroach, and the story develops, from that point on, realistically. In surreal fiction the writer translates an entire sequence of psychological events, developing his story as the mind spins out dreams. Plotting the story, in either of these modes, is essentially like plotting a realistic piece. The writer shows us dramatically all that we need to know (within the mode) to follow the story to its climax. He does not simply tell us things but dramatizes all that is crucial to our belief in the climax.

We saw earlier how the writer works back from a climax (Helen’s surprise) to discover what materials he must dramatize to make the climax meaningful and convincing. In the case
of the Helen of Troy story, certain basic facts are given by legend and archeological evidence (what the Trojans were like, what the Achaians were like), and the writer is to some extent stuck with those facts. If he changes things too noticeably, the reader may feel that the writer has made things too easy for himself—playing tennis without the net, as Robert Frost said of poetry without rhyme. Working with a well-known traditional story, or working with material we can find in the newspapers, the writer automatically raises the expectation that we will get not only an interesting story but an interpretation of the facts that we too know—an interpretation that must convince us, if it is to hold our full interest. Theoretically the writer may violate this principle; by tone and style he may establish at once that he is treating the story as a fable from which he can withdraw at any time. Italo Calvino’s comic tale of life at the end of the dinosaur age, “The Dinosaurs,” is a special case of the well-known event reinterpreted. Because of Calvino’s way of telling the story—and also because mutation is a part of the subject—we are not shocked but delighted when the narrator, a dinosaur, surprisingly concludes: “I traveled through valleys and plains. I came to a station, caught the first train, and was lost in the crowd.” But though the rule is not firm, it is generally true that old stories retold get much of their interest from our pleasure in the writer’s interpretation.

Let us look at how the writer works when he plots backward from the climax of a story that is entirely made up. Any event that seems to the given writer startling, curious, or interest-laden can form the climax of a possible story: A roadside vendor’s pickup is struck by a transcontinental tractor-trailer; a woman purposely runs over a flagman on the street. Depending on the complexity of the writer’s way of seeing the event—depending, that is, on how much background he feels our understanding of the event requires—the climax becomes the high point of a short story, a novella, or a novel. Since plotting is ordinarily no hasty process but something the writer broods and
labors over, trying out one approach, then another, carrying the idea around with him, musing on it casually as he drifts off to sleep, writers often find that an idea for a short story may change into an idea for a novella or even a novel. But for convenience here, let us treat the two climaxes I’ve mentioned—the wreck of the roadside vendor’s pickup and the woman’s attack on the flagman—as ideas that remain short-story ideas.

A roadside vendor’s pickup is hit by a transcontinental tractor-trailer. Let us say the vendor is the story’s central character. In any climax in which the central character is in conflict with something else (another character, some animal, or some more or less impersonal force), the climactic encounter may come about either through the knowledge and volition of both parties or by significant accident. (Accident without significance is boring.) The semi driver may hit the pickup on purpose, accidentally, or for some reason we do not know because we lack access to his thoughts. If the semi driver hits the pickup on purpose, the writer working back from the climax is logically required to show dramatically, in earlier scenes, (1) what each of the two focal characters is like; (2) why the semi driver hits the vendor’s pickup. (The writer might conceivably get around both 1 and 2, telling us only what the vendor is like; but the introduction of a malevolent semi driver who simply happens into the story, bringing on the climax, has become such a cliché in modern fiction as to be almost unusable.) The story containing 1 and 2 is a relatively easy kind of story to think out and write, which is not to say that it cannot be an excellent story if well done. The value of the standard feud story always depends on the writer’s ability to create powerfully convincing characters in irreconcilable conflict, both sides in some measure sympathetic—that is, both sides pursuing real, though mutually exclusive, values. For the climax to be persuasive, we must be shown dramatically why each character believes what he does and why each cannot sympathize with the values of his antagonist; and we must be shown dramatically why the conflicting
characters cannot or do not simply avoid each other, as in real life even tigers ordinarily do. For the climax to be not only persuasive but interesting, it must come about in a way that seems both inevitable and surprising. (In a form as standard as the feud story, this last is exceedingly important.) Needless to say, no surprise will be convincing if it rests on chance, however common chance may be in life.