The Art of Fiction • Juan's blog

01

Seize the trunk of any science securely, and you have control of its branches.

02

The realistic writer's way of making events convincing is verisimilitude.

03

He must present, moment by moment, concrete images drawn from a careful observation of how people behave, and he must render the connections between moments, the exact gestures, facial expressions, or turns of speech that, within any given scene, move human beings from emotion to emotion, from one instant in time to the next.

04 ❦

In great fiction, the dream engages us heart and soul; we not only respond to imaginary things sights, sounds, smells-as though they were real, we respond to fictional problems as though they were real: We sympathize, think, and judge. We act out, vicariously, the trials of the characters and learn from the failures and successes of particular modes of action, particulaf attitudes, opinions, assertions, and beliefs exactly as we learn from life. Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.

05

Metafiction: They give the reader an experience that assumes the usual experience of fiction as its point of departure, and whatever effect their work may have depends on their conscious violation of the usual fictional effect.

06

The snobbery or limited range of teachers is one of the reasons we forget to think about interest in the sense of immediate appeal; but another cause may be more basic. The business of education is to give the student both useful information and lifeenhancing experience, one largely measurable, the other not; and since the life-enhancing value of a course in literature is difficult to measure-since, moreover, many people in a position to put pressure on educational programs have no real experience in or feeling for the arts-it is often tempting to treat lifeenhancement courses as courses in useful information, putting them on the same "objective" level as courses in civics, geometry, or elementary physics. So it comes about that books are taught (officially, at least) not because they give joy, the incomparably rich experience we ask and expect of all true art, but because, as a curriculum committee might put it, they "illustrate major themes in American literature," or "present a clearly stated point of view and can thus serve as a vehicle for such curriculum objectives as (1) demonstrating an awareness of the author's purpose, (2) reading critically, and (3) identifying organizational patterns in literary selections used to support a point of view." One cannot exactly say that such teaching is pernicious, but to treat great works of literature in this way seems a little like arguing for preservation of dolphins, whales, chimps, and gorillas solely on the grounds of ecological balance.

07

In place of the classical writer's clear distinction between the outside world and the inside world "situation," on one hand, "character," on the other-the two modern writers see outer reality and inner reality as interpenetrating: The world is whatever we feel it to be, so that the situation character must deal with is partly character. Either way, the unfolding of the story is the actualization of its initial potential.

08 ❦

What the logical progress of an argument is to nonfiction, event-sequence is to fiction.

09

It's by the whole process of first planning the fiction and then writing it— elaborating characters and details of setting, finding the style that seems appropriate to the feeling, discovering unanticipated requirements of the plotthat the writer finds out and communicates the story's significance, intuited at the start. He knows that his first job is to authenticate what I earlier called the story's primary meaning: Helen's surprise. The surprise is a feeling, one that strikes us as conclusive, an implied discovery. But, like all conclusive feelings, Helen's surprise suggests some larger, secondary meaning, not just one person's feeling but a universal human feeling, some affirmation or recognition of a value. It is usually in this larger, secondary sense that we speak of the "meaning" of works of art.

10

A few years ago, or so I've been told, a group of sound technicians conducted an experiment to discover whether they could heighten the "presence" of recorded music by multiplying tracks and speakers. The result was quadraphonic sound, but on the way to that result a strange thing occurred. A group of composers, musical performers, and critics were assembled to listen to music designed for four speakers, then eight speakers, then more. When listening to music on eight speakers, some of the musicians noted that what they were getting was not more accurate representation of music as we hear it in a hall but something quite new and different: One began to be able to locate the sounds in space. The clarinet seemed to occupy a particular point or area in the room, the trumpet another area, the piano another—not areas correspondent to the seating of the group recorded but areas related as the head, arms, and legs of a sculpture might be related. The music, in short, had become visual, something new under the sun. Writing music for eight speakers, a composer might theoretically shape music-physically shape it-as no one had ever done before. Whether or not any composer has explored that possibility I do not know, but the story, if it is true, illustrates a fact well known among artists, that art does not imitate reality (hold the mirror up to nature) but creates a new reality. This reality may be apposite to the reality we walk through every day-streets and houses, mailmen, trees-and may trigger thoughts and feelings in the same way a newly discovered thing of nature might do a captured Big Foot or Loch Ness monster-but it is essentially itself, not the mirror reflection of something familiar.