This is a revision of my essay "On Fiction." I submitted this version as a 'Sample of Critical Work' in my application to the English Masters program. The most dramatic changes are its structure, presentation, and focus, but there are a few better-presented and new ideas in this version.
November 29, 2009
Storytelling is a fundamental human experience. Our lives are dependent on the telling of stories. It drives our ability to learn and to plan, to reason and feel empathy. This is why children create stories every time the play: it is practice for a lifetime of personal storytelling. This is also why we are best able to learn and understand our world through narrative--why science and history and medicine are best apprehended through the form of story.
In the novel, the most fundamental component of artistic expression, of Narrative Art, should be story. No well-designed plot or argument, no perfectly drawn character, no artistic prose, no marvelous or inventive idea or theme can ever make up for a lack of story. It is story which must be the ultimate goal of a human novel. And yet, every feature that goes into the makeup of story should limn more than that story. Narrative Art has the power to reach beyond story and pierce the fundamental issues of what it means to be human. This potential to insight is an emergent phenomenon built out of the confluence of the fundaments of what makes up a novel: what I will call ‘Argument’ and ‘Mimesis.’
Argument is closely related to Aristotle’s idea of mythos, the structure of dramatic action. It is the progression of events, the causal relation of actions and reactions, the occurrence of one thing after another. An egregious example of story built strictly on this single principle is the genre of the modern Thriller. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a primary representation of the Thriller. Brown’s novel is merely a setting forth of an argument--in this case the revelation of secrets (religious secrets, which gives the novel an extra level--however false--of cultural interest). The progression of events stands as a series of markers for each revelation of new information. The momentary experience of the novel is entertaining, as learning trivia and encountering puzzles does give a margin of enjoyment, but the emergent Story offers little else. This is not the kind of novel that a reader might take her time with, dig around and find anything deeper than its deliberate Argument. Thrillers like Brown’s are concerned with page-turning tension, a narrative that seizes the reader through progressive event, where the reader’s only real suspense is to wonder, “What will happen next?” This falls far short of Narrative Art.
It is important, nonetheless, for Art to have an energetic plot, a story that draws the reader along so that she asks the question, “What will happen next?” Narrative Art must offer the tension of discovery of what will happen next, or there will be no interest in the novel’s first reading. A novel must engage its readers, must draw them along. Rambling or wandering novels are meaningless. If a reader cannot bear to force herself through the narrative at least once—if a novel offers nothing familiar (a Story) to which the reader might anchor herself--why should she ever return to the book for a later, deeper study?
It is precisely this failure (of Argument) that novels concerned primarily with language or linguistic examination are guilty of. Despite his lyricism and evocation, I would put Nabokov on thin ice for some of his digressions in Lolita. The novel is gorgeously written, and the plot is in places progressive and energetic, but sometimes his linguistic frolic gets a little out of hand. What (partially) saves it is that the novel is presented in the first person so that much of that excessiveness is a characteristic of the narrator, himself an emotional and recognizable mimetic human being.
Mimesis is the mimicry of nature or ‘real’ life, and mimetic prose focuses on creating believable characters and settings. Mimesis, especially of character, should be the driving force of any Argument. Characters in fiction must be well-rounded and emotionally realized individuals who have goals and purpose that the reader can recognize as human. A reader should feel confident enough in character that she believes it would be possible for that character to exist outside the novel. A poorly-made character will undermine the narrative by calling into question the motivation of the Argument. In a lecture on Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1949, Jorge Borges said of poorly-made characters, that they
can produce, or tolerate, admirable stories because their brevity makes the plot more visible than the actors, but not admirable novels, where the general form (if there is one) is visible only at the end and a single badly invented character can contaminate the others with unreality. (53)
For Narrative Art, it is Character--not Plot--that rules the novel. Aristotle suggested the opposite: “the Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of tragedy: Character holds the second place.” (21) Northrop Frye clarified, “The plot is, as Artistotle called it, the ‘soul’ or shaping principle, and the characters exist primarily as functions of the plot.” (52) This seems to be the guiding principle of many works, and the tangle of Character and Plot cannot always be unwound. Which came first to Shakespeare as he composed: irresolute and uncertain Prince Hamlet, or the narrative conflict of an intermediary in the revenge plot between the Ghost of King Hamlet and King Claudius? Could any other character enter into that plot and have it come out the same way? Did the plot demand the character, or did the character demand the plot? John Gardner offers an answer in On Becoming a Novelist:
Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand, something that can help define him, something he can pick up and throw, if necessary, or eat, or give to his girlfriend. Plot exists so the character can discover for himself (and in the process reveal to the reader) what he, the character, is really like: plot forces the character to choice and action, transforms him from a static construct to a lifelike human being making choices and paying for them or reaping the rewards. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody: theme is elevated critical language for what a character’s main problem is. (52)
I prefer Gardner’s answer to that of Aristotle. It seems to me that a human Art should reflect humanity. It should be interested in the fundamental questions of humanity: what does it mean that we are what we are? The truest expression of humanity in fiction is character and character choice. Setting can be reflective and plot can be revealing, but the search for human revelation begins and ends in human beings. It is through character in fiction that this exploration plays itself out. Character discovers plot and directs it.
What I have called ‘Argument’ is not merely Plot, however. Argument can also be an intentional message that drives the narrative, such as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Orwell spends very little narrative space on Winston’s fear of rats on which the final resolution is based. There is no foreshadowing of his reaction, no prior examination of how such an emotional state might affect him. In truth, that does not matter: the novel is intended as a warning against totalitarianism and in that respect is entirely polemical. Winston’s climactic reaction is a feature of Orwell’s dystopia, not a discovered implication of Winston’s character. The characters of Nineteen Eighty-four approach a mimetic ideal in their representation; but they do not achieve it, and the story is not theirs--it is the author’s. The narrative serves as a tour of Orwell’s polemic argument.
The feature of Mimesis that Orwell does rely heavily on for his interaction with Argument is the Mimesis of setting. In Narrative Art, setting should relate to character: it should be reflective of or contrapuntal to the characters that inhabit it or act within it. Setting might lend perspective on an argument, especially in the ways it drives character conflict and reaction or the way it reflects an aspect of the Argument. In a book like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the setting itself can often be interpreted as a character, offering its own voice in the narrative exploration of argument. The Lord of the Rings explores the idea of domination and salvation, and many of the settings within the narrative are explorations on those themes. Tolkien’s notion of the ‘eucatastrophe’ is embodied in places of resting (Rivendell and Lothlórien), while his hero’s descent into a mental Hell is reflected in the physical Hell of Mordor. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby also uses mimetic setting (in this case a drawing of real places) to give comment on both character and argument.
However, the settings of a work of Fantasy such as Tolkien’s are mimetic despite never having truly existed, just as invented characters are mimetic despite not being real people. Narratives like Tolkien’s that use the fantastic must be mimetic in detail: the setting must mimic a ‘real’ world with consistent application of governing laws, even where they conflict with our known reality. Tolkien’s invented world is heavily based on recognizable mythology and place, but even speculative fiction surfeited with magic and invented physical rules can still be mimetic so long as it is regulated and consistent. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism:
The poet, like the pure mathematician, depends, not on descriptive truth, but on conformity to his hypothetical postulates. The appearance of a ghost in Hamlet presents the hypothesis “let there be a ghost in Hamlet.” It has nothing to do with whether ghosts exist or not, or whether Shakespeare or his audience thought they did. A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas. (76)
The mimetic features of Narrative Art should become personifications or representations of features of the Argument. Character must remain a mimetic construct and recognizably human, but his choices and emotions might suggest a point of view. The narrative then becomes an exploration of the Argument, its characters offering alternate points of view, so long as they are always mimetic in presentation. In this way, the novel grows into more than a mere story to be enjoyed. It strives for something greater, a window upon the wider world and a chance for the reader to understand better herself or her circumstances as a human being. A character becomes a study of life and humanity, as Gardner describes in On Moral Fiction:
scrutiny of how people act and speak, why people feel precisely the things they do, how weather affects us at particular times, how we respond to some people in ways we would never respond to others, leads to knowledge, sensitivity, and compassion. In fiction we stand back, weigh things as we do not have time to do in life; and the effect of great fiction is to temper real experience, modify prejudice, humanize. (114)
It is not the mere progression of events in a narrative that addresses humanity and offers a window upon our souls: it is the way in which a recognizable human being (a mimetic character) acts and reacts against the plot that offers insight. Narrative Art does not merely create believable character but suffers upon that character a series of rigorous tests. The way in which a character changes and reacts to these exigencies is what drives the plot. It is not up to the author to decide beforehand how it will turn out: he must discover it through experiment, to see what course is ‘true’ for the character he has made. Gardner in On Moral Fiction again:
The writer’s sole authority is his imagination. He works out in his imagination what would happen and why, acting out every part himself, making his characters say what he would say himself if he were a young second-generation Italian, then an old Irish policeman, and so on. [...] True moral fiction is a laboratory experiment too difficult and dangerous to try in the real world but safe and important in the mirror image of reality in the writer’s mind. (115-6)
The interactions of mimetic characters with each other and their conflicts with the exigencies of the Argument become the driving force of the narrative. Suspense (like Story) emerges out of the interactions of Mimesis and Argument. It is Suspense in which the reader finds interest, but Suspense must come from the moral dilemma of character and arise naturally out of a character’s struggle with choice.
Characters that are mere reflections of a pre-arranged plot as Aristotle would suggest cannot reveal anything more than the fundamental limitations of the Argument. True characters, given both mimetic reality and the ability to grow and reflect and choose, to learn and change through the natural unfolding of their interactions with an Argument, can and will offer the kind of insight that Art should strive for. Consider for example Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The overall exploration within the narrative, the ‘theme’ if one may call it that, is the human concern for Death. Throughout the narrative, characters ruminate on their individual mortality, on what it has been like or might be like to kill another person, and on what it might mean to them if and how they were themselves to die. There is much narrative discussion among the characters on the ramifications of personal murder and impersonal killing. The story takes place during war, and there are many scenes of characters facing almost-certain death and discovering how they finally react to it. The strength of the narrative arises out of the mimetic characters’ own introspection, the way each of them varies in their concerns over these questions. Each character is a facet on a broad lens that explores death from many different points of view. It is because the characters are fully realized, complementary, and various that such a broad range of perspective can be explored.
It is out of the interactions of Mimesis and Argument that Story and Narrative Art arise, but it is language that creates the illusion of both. It is the careful selection of linguistic expression that builds up both Mimesis and Argument and the Narrative Art that emerges, and truly it is word-by-word that every novel must be both created and experienced. Thus there is real value in taking the time to care about words and linguistic and grammatical flare as Nabokov does and many other authors do. J. D. Salinger builds a mimetic character in The Catcher in the Rye out of the very language the character uses.
It is a crime that we so undervalue language in our culture. While storytelling is a primary mode of thought, language is one of its muscles. And yet, much of what we hear and read--political rhetoric, corporate advertisement, and national propaganda--would be held to a much higher account if we as a people were more aware of empty, meaningless language when we encountered it. Nabokov lived in language, and a writer like Hemingway agonized for weeks over a choice of word, while on the first page of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown tosses off a clumsy sentence such as, “the curator lay a moment, gasping for breath, taking stock.” There is only minimal literal meaning in this collection of words: the piling of two meaningless clichés upon a nearly meaningless predicate. Worse, it suggests nothing more: there is no extra-textual meaning that might inform the narrative. The sentence is supposed to describe a stunned man on the floor: a man lying in the Louvre at the opening of a narrative that will touch on the fundamentals of Christianity and doubt and divinity. It is an opportunity to adumbrate the entire conflict through imagery, to foreshadow and portend by some contraposition of the curator on the floor and any number of painted subjects in the museum. But the only care Brown takes in any of his prose throughout the novel is to make it grammatical at least, and at best slippery--in the sense that it pushes the reader from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph.
It is the power of prose for evocation outside its immediate imagery and not mere reportage that a novel should strive to. “Words form a chain of association,” says John Gardner in On Moral Fiction:
To say the word crate to a native English speaker is to summon up an image of a crate and, with it, the natural background of that image, which is a different background from that summoned up by casque or trunk or cube. To say that a character is built like a crate is to suggest far more than just the character’s shape: it is to hint at his personality, his station in life, even his behavior. This becomes obvious when we place the character in some setting not at all natural for a crate and then linguistically reinforce the unnaturalness: He sat at the tea table, fiddling with his spoon, as stiff and unnatural as a crate. (112)
Language is, by its very nature as a system of representational symbols, imprecise. Although as a symbol there is a measure of universality among a group of native speakers in the understanding of any single word, it is impossible through words for a human being to communicate the complete picture or feeling within his own mind to the mind of another. We generally agree on what a table is, but there is too broad a set of tables for anyone to know the specific picture in my mind when I say table. My table is different than the table of my wife, and each of those is also different from Hemingway’s or Dan Brown’s table. It is the writer’s dilemma to choose which words will translate his thoughts and impressions and emotions to another person. Mark Twain, in a letter to George Bainton, 1888, said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Twain’s metaphor itself is suggestive of the power of language: by which light would the fundamental questions of humanity be best revealed?
It is through language that a writer brings about his Argument and Mimesis (and through them the story). The effectiveness of the whole can be winnowed down to the bare words chosen. Inappropriate words or stumbling metaphors, fragments that give pause or confound the reader’s immediate understanding, all can hamper communication and spoil the effectiveness of the novel by undercutting its Mimesis and Argument.
An author might describe a character in action with, ‘he ran fast’. The reader immediately has a problem: what is fast? Compared to what? The sense is quite meaningless, and it really creates more confusion that anything it might reveal. In the end, all that is communicated is he ran, and fast can be dismissed from semantic consideration.
The author might instead write something a bit more evocative: He ran, strides stretching to clumsiness, as if his sprint were a mad stumble, downhill, so that he struggled to keep his balance. This paints a much more vivid picture, and we know automatically that the character is moving fast and to what degree without the author resorting to some abstracted word. More than that, we get a sense of the character’s physicality, of the way in which he moves, and even a hint at his emotion, despite it not being specifically addressed: is he frightened? Why is he running in this manner? It seems the kind of sprint one might see in a pursuit: is he chasing or being chased? It is in this way that strict description can suggest far more than what it immediately describes. We see the man running (I think of him more as a boy, clumsy, perhaps an adolescent uncertain of his growing legs), but we can infer more. Evocative and suggestive prose allows a reader to look deeper into the scene and see more than what is being described.
In addition, the rhythm of a sentence can itself be suggestive: notice the repetitive S-sound in the example and the meter of the ST/SP(R) syllabic onset. This repetition, coupled with the comma-separated downhill (commas can be so much more evocative than the strictest grammar would allow) creates a cadence evocative in itself of the man’s desperate, stumbling sprint. Heavy syllables such as clum-, stum-, and (the relatively lighter) bal- reinforce the stumbling effect. The way in which any reader rolls over a sentence will always vary, but writers can work toward effects like this in prose by using the tools of evocative language.
Nabokov begins Lolita with this:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
There is rhythm and music in the sentences, a gliding lyricism that seizes the reader and pulls her along. The alliteration and meter of the main sentence of this paragraph is both descriptive and evocative, but at the same time it mirrors its precise literal meaning: when you read aloud the words ‘a trip of three steps down the palate,’ your tongue is mimicking the described action, tapping along the palate of your mouth in a steady rhythm. Later, the narrator declares, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” explicitly declaring himself to be a beautiful monster, but couching the confession so we are drawn to him despite our revulsion. Carried by his music, we settle into the tale, wary of the murderer, though quickly we put aside his confession. The line prepares the way for the entire novel in a way Brown’s line does not even attempt.
Out of this linguistic precision and care arises Mimesis, the presentation of true-to-life Character and Setting, and Argument, the progression of moral dilemma. Out of the collective of these elements emerges Story and Theme. There seems to be a tendency in criticism to label as ‘theme’ the kinds of ideas an author might use in the construction of Argument. For instance, an analysis of Nineteen Eighty-four might identify ‘themes’ of Censorship or Totalitarianism. I would place these particular features in the domain of Argument, and additionally I would point out that neither addresses the fundamental questions of humanity. Obviously there is nothing inherently lacking in these ideas as ‘themes’ (or constructional Argument), as they are quite important explorations, and indeed Orwell’s emphasis in the novel is looking at the human cost of such pursuits.
The ideal of Narrative Art, however, should strive to greater Theme, more fundamental to the common experience of all humanity. I will turn away from a novel as example to the television series Battlestar Galactica (the 2003 edition) to illustrate this idea. My watching of the series excited me because it seemed that the writers had done exactly what only speculative fiction can do: they redefined the rules of humanity (the hypotheses Frye mentioned) as a means of reflecting on them. The Cylon characters (robotic humans), through their ability to resurrect (and their consequent fearlessness of death and indeed the utility of death as a tactic) gave the writers space to explore the human experience of death. Human beings are biologically horrified by death, but it turns out that they are horrified as well by deathlessness (at least as the writers imagined it). There is a terrifying scene where one character kills herself so that through her rebirth she will be able to effect a rescue of her daughter. (Only in speculative fiction could this kind of scenario ever come about.) This dichotomy of deathless and mortal was fertile ground in which to explore the notions of death and life as they relate to who we are as human beings. This is the kind of thing that I mean by ‘fundamental questions of humanity.’ However, very few reviews or studies (none that I have found) have even mentioned Death as a theme. In fact, I would contend that the writers fell far short in their exploration of this emergent Theme. Reviewers have cited such topics as terrorism or insurgency or other such parochial questions as the major themes of the series without ever looking for something more grand, more fundamental.
Narrative Art should strive to more. Through an open and honest exploration of humanity, revealed by the Mimesis of human beings and the moral dilemma of an Argument that strives to the heart of our most fundamental inquiry, a Narrative Art will emerge that seeks where nothing else can or will. It will be timeless and hearken to inquiry universal to all humankind. This is the purview of Art. This is the opportunity which a novel has the potential to open.
Aristotle. Poetics and Rhetoric. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005
Borges, Jorge Luis. Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Gardner, John. On Becoming a Novelist. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Lolita. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958.
Twain, Mark. Letter to George Bainton, 15 Oct 1888
Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Larson, Glen A. Battlestar Galactica.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Lolita.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Novel.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings.