by
John Gardner
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Since Helen, in this story, is the central character, her nature and motivation will be of special importance to the convincingness of the lie. One possible choice, it might seem at first glance, is to make her an innocent victim. Sheltered and coddled, brought up among women, married in her girlhood to mighty Menelaos, she has no real knowledge of her hard-working, hard-fighting kinsmen, their fanatical loyalty to one another, and their puritanical code. Though all these qualities might prove useful to the writer, the decision to make her a victim will be disastrous. No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others. (Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners.) We care how things turn out because the character cares—our interest comes from empathy—and though we may know more than the character knows, anticipating dangers the character cannot see, we understand and to some degree sympathize with the character’s desire, approving what the character approves (what the character values), even if we sense that the character’s ideal is impractical or insufficient. Thus though we can see at a glance that Captain Ahab is a madman, we affirm his furious hunger to know the truth, so much so that we find ourselves caught up, like the crew of the Pequod, in his lunatic quest. And thus though we know in our bones that the theory of Raskolnikov is wrong, we share his sense of outrage at the injustice of things and become accessories in his murder of the cynical and cruel old pawnbrokeress. If we’re bored by the debauched focal characters of the Marquis de Sade, on the other hand, the reason is that we find their values and goals repugnant, their world view too stupid (threatening?) to hold our interest.
[...] Helen’s ultimate failure, tonally conflicting with all that went before, might give, however subtly, an angry, revolutionary tone to the conclusion. The reader’s indignation at the unhappy ending might be made to release the meaning—or, in this case, implied message—that women, however they may struggle and whatever their brilliance, are always beaten in the end by male chauvinism, a condition that ought not to prevail. If all this were done in too obvious a fashion, the story would of course be boring; but for the writer with sufficient lightness of touch and a gift for authentic humor, the yarn hybrid might have a good deal of subtlety and interest, every detail serving its feminist theme, the relative power of men and women.
Both for the writer and for the careful reader after him, everything that happens in a well-constructed story, from major events to the most trifling turn of phrase, is a matter of aesthetic interest. Since the writer has chosen every element with care, and has revised and repeatedly re-revised in an attempt to reach something like aesthetic perfection, every element we encounter is worth savoring. Every character is sufficiently vivid and interesting for his function; every scene is just long enough, just rich enough; every metaphor is polished; no symbol stands out crudely from its matrix of events, yet no resonance goes completely unheard, too slyly muffled by the literal. Though we read the work again and again and again, we can never seem to get to the bottom of it.
Naturally such subtlety—a story containing such a treasury of pleasures—is achieved at some cost. To work so beautifully, it cannot work as quickly or simply as does a comic book. (The greater the subtlety, the greater the sacrifice.) It is for this reason that the reader who loves great fiction is willing to put up with an opening as slow as that of Mann’s “Death in Venice,” an opening that might seem tedious to those who read nothing but Howard the Duck. This clearly does not mean that the serious writer should make a point of being tiresome and intellectual to drive away dolts. If he respects the reader, if he honestly considers what he himself would like to read, the writer will choose the most immediately and powerfully interesting characters and events he can think of. He will go for, as they say, dramaturgy. No two writers, as we’ve recognized, will think of quite the same characters and events when they look for what appeals to them. Some writers enjoy stories of the end of the world; some prefer fascinating tea parties. But if the writer writes only of what honestly interests him, and if he thinks of his work not simply as thoughtful exploration, as it should be, but also as entertainment, he cannot fail to have, at least for some group of serious, devoted readers, both immediate and lasting interest.
Fiction seeks out truth. Granted, it seeks a poetic kind of truth, universals not easily translatable into moral codes. But part of our interest as we read is in learning how the world works; how the conflicts we share with the writer and all other human beings can be resolved, if at all; what values we can affirm and, in general, what the moral risks are. The writer who can’t distinguish truth from a peanut-butter sandwich can never write good fiction. What he affirms we deny, throwing away his book in indignation; or if he affirms nothing, not even our oneness in sad or comic helplessness, and insists that he’s perfectly right to do so, we confute him by closing his book. Some bad men write good books, admittedly, but the reason is that when they’re writing they’re better men than when they beat their wives and children. When he writes, the man of impetuous bad character has time to reconsider. The fictional process helps him say what he might not have said that same night in the tavern. Good men, on the other hand, need not necessarily write good books. Good-heartedness and sincerity are no substitute for rigorous pursuit of the fictional process.
[...] because the fictional process selects those fit for it, and because a requirement of that process is strong empathetic emotion, it turns out that the true writer’s fundamental concern—his reason for finding a subject interesting in the first place—is likely to be humane. He sees injustice or misunderstanding in the world around him, and he cannot keep it out of his story. It may be true that he writes principally for the love of writing, and that in the heat of creation he cares as much about the convincing description of Helen’s face as he does about the verities her story brings to focus, but the true literary artist is a far cry from those who create “toy fiction,” good or bad—TV entertainments to take the pensioner’s mind off his dismal existence, self-regarding aesthetic jokes, posh super-realism, where emotion is ruled out and idea is thought vulgar, or nostalgia fiction, or pornography. The true writer’s joy in the fictional process is his pleasure in discovering, by means he can trust, what he believes and can affirm for all time. [...]
Deconstruction is the practice of taking language apart, or taking works of art apart, to discover their unacknowledged inner workings. Whatever value this approach may or may not have as literary criticism, it is one of the main methods of contemporary (and sometimes ancient) fiction. Deconstructive fiction is parallel to revisionist history in that it tells the story from the other side or from some queer angle that casts doubt on the generally accepted values handed down by legend. Whereas metafiction deconstructs by directly calling attention to fiction’s tricks, deconstructive fiction retells the story in such a way that the old version loses credit. Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be seen as a work of this kind. In the revenge tragedies Shakespeare’s audience was familiar with, some ghost or friend or other plot-device lays on the hero the burden of avenging some crime. The genre is by nature righteous and self-confident, authoritarian: There is no doubt that vengeance is the hero’s duty, and our pleasure as we watch is in seeing justice done, however painful the experience. Shakespeare’s Hamlet deconstructs all this. Despite Horatio’s certainty, we become increasingly doubtful of the ghost’s authority as the play progresses, so that we become more and more concerned with Hamlet’s tests of people and of himself; and even if we choose to believe that the ghost’s story was true, we become increasingly unclear about whether Hamlet would be right to kill the king who usurped his father’s throne—at any rate, Claudius becomes less and less the stock villain, and Hamlet, as he proceeds through the play, becomes more and more guilty himself.
cool. i prob should have known this lol
It might be argued that a clever writer of metafictions could make fun, if he wishes, of any of the standard points of view. That is true and not true. It is probably the case that any human activity can legitimately be made fun of, and that a clever metafictionist could make us laugh at the noblest devices of Dostoevsky or Mann. But the smart writer of metafictions is selective about what he pokes fun at, and part of our interest as we read his work comes from our recognition that the folly he points out is significant; that is, it is not only silly, once we look at it closely, but it is in some sense perverse: It pushes wrong values.
A scene will not be vivid if the writer gives too few details to stir and guide the reader’s imagination; neither will it be vivid if the language the writer uses is abstract instead of concrete. If the writer says “creatures” instead of “snakes,” if in an attempt to impress us with fancy talk he uses Latinate terms like “hostile maneuvers” instead of sharp Anglo-Saxon words like “thrash,” “coil,” “spit,” “hiss,” and “writhe,” if instead of the desert’s sand and rocks he speaks of the snakes’ “inhospitable abode,” the reader will hardly know what picture to conjure up on his mental screen. These two faults, insufficient detail and abstraction where what is needed is concrete detail, are common—in fact all but universal—in amateur writing. Another is the failure to run straight at the image; that is, the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: “Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks.” Compare: “She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting.” (The improvement can of course be further improved. The phrase “two snakes were fighting” is more abstract than, say, “two snakes whipped and lashed, striking at each other”; and verbs with auxiliaries [“were fighting”] are never as sharp in focus as verbs without auxiliaries, since the former indicate indefinite time, whereas the latter [e.g., “fought”] suggest a given instant.) Generally speaking—though no laws are absolute in fiction—vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as “she noticed” and “she saw” be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.
Though we run across exceptions, philosophical novels where explanation holds interest, the temptation to explain is one that should almost always be resisted. A good writer can get anything at all across through action and dialogue, and if he can think of no powerful reason to do otherwise, he should probably leave explanation to his reviewers and critics. The writer should especially avoid comment on what his characters are feeling, or at very least should be sure he understands the common objection summed up in the old saw “Show, don’t tell.” The reason, of course, is that set beside the complex thought achieved by drama, explanation is thin gruel, hence boring. A woman, say, decides to leave home. As readers, we watch her all morning, study and think about her gestures, her mutterings, her feelings about the neighbors and the weather. After our experience, which can be intense if the writer is a good one, we know why the character leaves when finally she walks out the door. We know in a way almost too subtle for words, which is the reason that the writer’s attempt to explain, if he’s so foolish as to make the attempt, makes us yawn and set the book down.
Sentimentality, in all its forms, is the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause. (I take it for granted that the reader understands the difference between sentiment in fiction, that is, emotion or feeling, and sentimentality, emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration. Without sentiment, fiction is worthless. Sentimentality, on the other hand, can make mush of the finest characters, actions, and ideas.) The theory of fiction as a vivid, uninterrupted dream in the reader’s mind logically requires an assertion that legitimate cause in fiction can be of only one kind: drama; that is, character in action. Once it is dramatically established that a character is worthy of our sympathy and love, the story-teller has every right (even the obligation, some would say) to give sharp focus to our grief at the misfortunes of that character by means of powerful, appropriate rhetoric. (If the emotional moment has been well established, plain statements may be just as effective. Think of Chekhov.) The result is strong sentiment, not sentimentality. But if the story-teller tries to make us burst into tears at the misfortunes of some character we hardly know; if the story-teller appeals to stock response (our love of God or country, our pity for the downtrodden, the presumed warm feelings all decent people have for children and small animals); if he tries to make us cry by cheap melodrama, telling us the victim that we hardly know is all innocence and goodness and the oppressor all vile black-heartedness; or if he tries to win us over not by the detailed and authenticated virtues of the unfortunate but by rhetorical clichés, by breathless sentences, or by superdramatic one-sentence paragraphs (“Then she saw the gun”)—sentences of the kind favored by porno and thriller writers, and increasingly of late by supposedly serious writers—then the effect is sentimentality, and no reader who’s experienced the power of real fiction will be pleased by it.