How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition) Read online

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  For Norman and Elsa Rush

  And for C.D.M.

  There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery.

  —Henry James

  Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

  In 1857, John Ruskin wrote a small book called The Elements of Drawing. It’s a primer, an introduction, a short history; but it’s also a very individual essay, full of passionate bias. It speaks to both the ordinary art lover and the better-versed painter. Above all, it is a book about looking. Ruskin begins by urging his reader to study nature—to study a leaf, say, and then to copy it in pencil. He includes his own drawing of a leaf. He moves from a leaf to a painting by Tintoretto: notice the brushstrokes, he says, see how he draws the hands, look at how he pays attention to the shading. Ruskin’s authority comes not from his own authority as a draftsman, but from what his eye has seen and how well, and his ability to transmit that vision into prose.

  There are surprisingly few books like this about the art of fiction—that might speak simultaneously to the common reader, the hungry writer, the student, and even the scholar. E. M. Forster’s book of lectures, Aspects of the Novel, is deservedly famous, but it was written in 1927. I admire the critical work of Milan Kundera, of Roland Barthes, of Viktor Shklovsky, but in different ways those writers also frustrate. Kundera is a novelist and essayist rather than a practical critic; occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text. Shklovsky and Barthes, two great twentieth-century critics of narrative prose, attend brilliantly to questions of style, to words, form, codes, metaphor, and imagery. But they thought like writers who had become somewhat alienated from creative instinct, yet who were drawn, like larcenous bankers, to raid again and again the very source that sustained them—literary style. This was especially true in the case of Roland Barthes, who had a guilty love-hate relationship with novelistic realism: he was its greatest, most acutely hostile anatomist, but he couldn’t stop returning to his source, to remind himself once more of all the ways it seemed fraudulent.

  Shklovsky and Barthes were formalist critics: they privileged formal literary questions over political, historical, or ethical ones. Like the formalist Nabokov, they sometimes have a way of speaking about literature as if its content—what a novel is about—were of little consequence. Barthes concluded indeed that fictional narrative, from the referential point of view, is actually about nothing: “‘what happens’ is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming,” he wrote in 1966. Since the 1950s, certain postmodernists, similarly hostile to the empiricist or positivist claims of realism—and taking as their example Flaubert’s dream of writing a novel “about nothing,” a book with no matter in it, held together only by style—have put Barthes’s theoretical admonitions into practice.

  But Virginia Woolf wisely reminded her readers that novelists write not only in sentences but also in paragraphs and chapters, by which she meant, I think, that novels can’t be only fine assemblages of words, can’t succeed if they are only strings of “beautiful sentences.” She understood that fiction also has an ethical form, and that the form of this ethics is constituted both by a writer’s style and by a novel’s substance; this is how the novel justifies itself as a species of moral enquiry, what Ford Madox Ford called “a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.”

  As I understand literature, everything is at once a moral question and a formal one (as it surely was for Ruskin, and for Ruskin’s devoted reader, Proust). The formalist is ideally very interested in matters of content, since the selection of content is always a formal dilemma. And the moralist is ideally very interested in formal devices, because these are truth-bearing devices, not just beautiful ones. Fiction is not only a music, though there has long been aesthetic tension over the slightly tormenting question of just how musical it should be. How stylish should the novel be? Is it a mirror or a music, a camera or a painting? Iris Murdoch reframed this old debate by dividing contemporary fiction into the journalistic and the crystalline—the former being the hearty, content-filled, relaxed, reportorial formlessness of traditional realism, the latter being the more self-conscious stylishness and artifice of modern formalism.

  I’m not untormented by these questions myself. But my instinct is to resolve them by recourse to both/and, rather than either/or. In this book, I like to move between poles rather than plant flags. A particular novel, or particular writer, will seem artificial and lifeless—at which moment my critique might sound as if it’s coming from the hearty journalistic camp; another novel or writer will seem not stylish enough, not artificial enough—at which moment my critique might sound as if it’s coming from the crystalline aesthete camp. (Likewise, I find that when I’m talking to religionists, I sound like an atheist, and when I’m talking to atheists, I sound religious…) But at all times the writer must be wary of the conventional, whereby novelistic devices get flattened into an easy, lazy grammar, and writing resembles some hideous old boarding school that has never seen a compelling reason to change any of its rules.

  When this book was first published in 2008, it was sometimes seen as a defense of classic realism. I hope this revised version makes clearer, ten years later, that on the contrary, I’m wary of conventional realism but drawn to a kind of deep realism, which I do believe runs through the novelistic tradition. Far from wanting to defend realism—and anyway, it needs no defense—I want to interrogate it, and to demonstrate the ways in which it is at once natural and highly artificial; I want to show how it works (and to be respectful of those mysteries that can’t be explained). Of course fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and it isn’t difficult to hold together these possibilities. How Fiction Works was not, in fact, the title I had originally chosen; it was The Nearest Thing to Life, from an essay by George Eliot on German realism, in which she says that “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” I like this phrase, because the great Victorian realist is being precise. Art isn’t the same as life, but very close to it, and that apparently slight distance (“nearest thing”) is actually a canyon, the large distance of artifice.

  So this book is an exercise in formalist criticism and an exercise in ethical criticism. I’m excited by questions of style (how metaphors work, which details are more powerful than others and why, how point of view functions, and so on) and equally excited by questions of content (what is this novel about, what does it tell us about human motive, about how we live) or literary metaphysics (what makes a novelistic character seem alive, how does the novel disclose the real, what is the nature of the fictional enquiry into consciousness, what is “the real” anyway, and so on). Most of these are old literary questions, but my hope is to answer them practically, as Ruskin appr
oached the leaf and the Tintoretto painting—or to put it differently, I want to answer a critic’s questions with a writer’s answers.

  And there are many answers. Readers rightly dislike the idea of being told, from on high, “how fiction works,” as if there were one kind of fiction and one kind of explanation. There isn’t, because the history of the novel is a history of exceptions, of books that gloriously won’t fit. How could it be otherwise, for a tradition in which Tolstoy could claim that War and Peace was “not a novel”? As there are many varieties of fiction, so there are many ways (more or less fumbling and partial) of trying to describe and anatomize that variety. I might as well have called my book How Some Fiction I Like a Lot Tends to Work. (Though I was doubtless tempted to call it He Knew He Was Right.) To that end, I deliberately immerse myself and the reader in storms of quotation—page after page of examples. The idea isn’t to intimidate, but to show and show and show; to honor the idea of criticism as, above all, the art of passionate re-description; to say to the reader, again and again, “Here! Look! It’s like this! Or this. Or this.” I take seriously Walter Benjamin’s ideal: a critical book made up only of quotation, a generous anthology of re-presentation.

  How Fiction Works is not a textbook, nor a history; it is very personal, and reflects its author’s biases and limitations. I wanted to write an essay that resembled the kind of criticism I loved reading when I first discovered it, before university—partial, even polemical in places; argumentative, passionate, sometimes ecstatic; emanating not from the study but blowing in from life; the kind of thing written by Hazlitt and Coleridge and Woolf and Ford Madox Ford and Orwell. A textbook about the novel would have had a chapter about “plot.” But because I felt I had nothing very interesting to say about plot (along with a prejudice against heavy or manipulative plotting in fiction), I chose to pass over it. Yet How Fiction Works has now been assigned, as a kind of textbook, in many creative writing and literature courses, so it seemed worthwhile to take the chance to revise and update it here and there. I have added a new chapter on form—on the possibilities and uses of form (a way, I guess, of writing about plot without actually writing about plot), and I have added new paragraphs and commentary on a number of contemporary writers, including, among others, Jenny Offill, Teju Cole, Ali Smith, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Lydia Davis, and Alejandro Zambra.

  These writers have all been productive since 2007, when I was writing the first edition, and their newer work excites and intrigues me. Fiction has been invigorated in the last decade by a new energy around questions of realism. Again and again, serious contemporary writers express their wariness of, dissatisfaction with, hostility to, or weariness with novelistic convention. They want to break the forms, do something different. The impulse isn’t particularly new, though it’s hardly invalidated by the lack of novelty. For a century or longer, the novel has been blamed, in repeated spasms of correction, for ossified convention: for the paraphernalia of plot, the rigid doxology of “conflict,” development, epiphany, scene-setting, dialogue, and so on, and for the fraudulent transparency of realism. I call this liturgy of conventional ways of writing, “novelism.”

  These corrective energies have resulted in interesting, brilliant work—certainly from the writers I mentioned above, and also from people like Sheila Heti, Nicole Krauss, Aleksandar Hemon, Geoff Dyer, Ben Lerner, Zadie Smith, Javier Marías, Jenny Erpenbeck, among many others. Perhaps these writers have less confidence in the exact shape of their revolutionary solutions than their modernist and postmodern predecessors did. They probably don’t feel like revolutionaries. But they know what they don’t want to do. (The Sex Pistols’ great lines rise up: “Don’t know what I want/But I know how to get it.”) And these days, their fiercest disaffection is reserved for the artificiality or secondhandedness of make-believe, with its reliance on manufactured otherness (that is, its reliance on invented characters who are very different from the author). The British novelist David Szalay sounds the contemporary complaint when he tells an interviewer that “I sat down to think about writing a new book and just didn’t see the point of it. What’s a novel? You make up a story and then you tell that story. I didn’t understand why or how that would be meaningful.” The Canadian writer Sheila Heti says something similar: “I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just—I can’t do it.” Heti’s solution was to write what she called “a novel from life”; her book, How Should a Person Be? (2010), uses transcribed conversations and actual emails. Parts of it are written out in the style of a play, other sections are essayistic. The characters appear to have been taken directly from the author’s own circle of friends, and share the names of the author and her friends. Szalay’s novel, All That Man Is (2016), divests the form of conventional plotting and presents instead a group of stories, barely bound together and striking in their journalistic immediacy. The entire book is written in an urgent, poking, present tense.

  Fiction-making seems labored and obstructive because our age has a powerful “reality hunger,” to borrow the title of a manifesto by David Shields1, published in the same year as Heti’s novel. Shields argues against conventional fictional artifice in favor of what he calls “reality-based” art. “I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless,” he writes. He has no time for characters’ names, plot developments, blocks of dialogue, and the like. He prefers essays, memoirs, fragments, short stories. If he has to read novels, he likes the kind in which the author is felt as an autobiographical presence: thinking, arguing, opining. Shields is surely not alone. The literary essay, which has indeed absorbed some of the prestige of the novel form along with some of its fictive conventions, is very vital at present; there are many writers currently doing really interesting work in a generic borderland between fiction and nonfiction.

  But why not try to hold together reality hunger and fiction hunger? After all, it’s one thing to throw out the traditional novel, but another to throw out fictionality tout court, as Shields does. I, too, like reading books of fragments, aphorisms, philosophy, essays by writers that move between fiction, autobiography, and critique—Nietzsche, Pessoa, Barthes, Cioran, Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, Knausgaard, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and so on. There’s a special charge in such writers, something immediate and personal and contemporary. Knausgaard calls these “books that just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet.” But isn’t it also beautiful, at times, to encounter material that has been invented, to meet not a familiar gaze but the visage of something that has been made out of nothing? I often think, as I open a new novel, before this novel existed, there was nothing. Someone created it. Out of thinnest air. This creation out of nothing has, I feel, a sacred aspect. And fictional form can also have about it a useful quality of “religious” (that’s to say, moral) exercise. We rightly tire of seeing invented characters, in predictable novels, put through what Sheila Heti calls “the paces of a fake story.” But the pressure of that formal testing ideally exerts a moral pressure, too. Invented dilemmas—that’s essentially what fiction is—can feel strangely meaningful precisely because someone is being put through paces which are not our own, and which have no reason to be. Having no reason to be, these invented dilemmas must justify, aesthetically, their own invention, which then puts those fictional paces through a further set of ethical paces. When we readers ask, as we invariably do, the important aesthetic-ethical questions—“What’s morally at stake here? Does this novel earn its existence? Do I believe in it aesthetically, do I grant its right to exist?”—we are putting fiction through its own paces. In this sense, fiction is a hypothesis that is always testing itself.

  Moreover, in certain artworks, the otherness of fictionalized form is a precious thing. The three-minute songs we hear on the radio and listen to
on our phones are part of the tempo of our daily lives and bleed in and out of those lives (the fade-out being the perfect formal emblem of this bleed); they are continuous with our minutes and hours, and have been since we were teenagers. We will never forsake them. But there are works of art that also insist on a shimmering or almost spectral autonomy; we are overwhelmed by their sheer majestic difference, their separateness: a poem by Louise Glück, a Beethoven piano sonata or Bartók’s third piano concerto, a Bresson film, novels by Ondaatje, Sebald, Kawabata, Marguerite Dumas. You know the kind of rare autonomy I am describing: it is bound up with invention, if not exactly with fictionality. Such pieces will not be so easily linked to our own lives. The author is not readily visible or audible; there is no familiar gaze. They have nothing to say about Donald Trump, thank God! They are discontinuous with our own times. Perhaps they seem almost to turn away from us.

  And on the other side, what could it mean to promote “reality” over fictional artifice? I like precisely the reality of fictionality. The fiction I return to, year after year, already has an enormous power of reality: a hunger and an ability to satisfy hunger. (I’m thinking of Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Chekhov, Woolf, Pavese, Christina Stead, V. S. Naipaul, Spark, Bellow, Lydia Davis, Thomas Bernhard. Provide your own names.) Whose work has greater “reality-power” than Shakespeare’s? What about the reality of The Magic Mountain? Or The Castle? I can’t think of a novel with a more beautiful reality hunger than A House for Mr. Biswas. (Oh, in fact I can: Christina Stead’s ravenous and ravaging novel The Man Who Loved Children.) And couldn’t Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest novelist, also be called the greatest “reality-artist”? Tolstoy was probably not joking when he said that he lacked imagination—he did indeed copy down a great deal from life. When you first read Tolstoy, you feel as if tight clothes are being undone. The nineteenth-century novelistic conventions have fallen away: coincidence, eavesdropping, kindly benefactors, foundling babies, cruel wills, and so on. All gone. That’s a large part of his “reality effect.” There may be no greater piece of reality art than The Death of Ivan Ilyich—an excruciating, seventy-page account, still unmatched in fictional or nonfictional literature, of a man’s illness and slow death.