| talking about fiction |
what is fiction? Let me move into my topic by touching upon a related matter. Just what is the reader’s relationship to a work of literature? An answer elegant in its simplicity is Coleridge’s shrewd formulation: that we bring to literature “the willing suspension of disbelief.” That cannot be taken, of course, to mean that we believe in the literal existence of characters and events in, say, a stage play. After all, when one character puts six slugs into another character, we don’t rush to a phone to dial 911. Coleridge was wise then to have given his formula an agnostic spin. To suspend disbelief is not necessarily to believe. To put the issue less elegantly than Coleridge did, what we willingly suspend on behalf of a work of fiction is our inattention, our concern with other natters: the weather report; the latest trial of the century; our upcoming IRS audit. But that willingness is quite provisional; only initially do we offer our attention for free. To keep it, the fiction at hand must take us into its confidence. If it does so, then the relationship we’re concerned with comes into being, and we experience the invented world as having a powerful credibility. But it’s a peculiar credibility, not like the kind that governs in our own world, the one we live in. As we know, a fiction can violate the principles of OUR existence as much as it pleases without losing credibility. In fiction, a man can be transformed into a bug, as Kafka has demonstrated. A woman can give birth through her left ear—Rabelais. A priest can levitate by drinking hot chocolate—Garcia Marquez. Beyond all else—and there is a great deal else, of course—the quality by which an achieved fiction takes us into its confidence is its viridity, its greenness, that is, its feeling of life. Henry James said it a hundred years ago: “The only divisions of the novel that I can understand are into that which has life and that which has it not." The reference is not to liveliness (though that is not to be shunned) but to liveness, thereness, the texture, the feel of actuality. Without that, all the rest is nothing: our unique events; our profound ideas, our admirable sympathies. They give us only an extended abstract for a fiction that is yet to be rendered. I’ve heard it said—perhaps you have too—that every word in a fiction must go toward moving one’s story forward. But a writer who too closely follows that advice is likely to find that her story has fallen dead. It’s imperative that one’s words go first of all toward raising the level of actuality, of felt life. This imperative is hard to exemplify since the sense of life is achieved through the cumulative effect of all the passages in a fiction. Nevertheless, an example: this is from the first attempt at a novel by a writer who had published two books of non-fiction but was new to fiction; in other words, a writer who was literate but not yet literary. In this segment, two teen-aged boys, young men, have decided to spend their summer away from home, working at a vacation resort. They’ll meet to discuss that plan after one of them checks it out with his widowed mother. Okay, the scene: Danny was waiting for him on the corner. “Well?” he asked when Mike reached him. “I can’t go with you this summer,” Mike said. ‘Why not? You said you wanted to.” “It would be fun working at a summer resort waiting on tables,” Mike said. “And I like the mountains. But I have to have a regular paycheck that I can depend on. My mother lost her job at the bakery and will need my support.” That passage is merely moving the story forward. Notice the planted quality of that last speech by Mike. He seems simply to be conveying information to the reader, rather that talking, really talking, to his friend. A scene like this one—it’s a confrontation really—should convey not only the information the two characters offer each other but the attitudes, the pressures, from which their words well up. Here’s a reorientation of the material: Danny was waiting for him on the corner, in the glow of the streetlight. “Well?” he said when Mike reached him. Mike shrugged, looked down at the sidewalk. “Can’t go,” he said.” "Huh?" Danny took a couple of steps toward him.“Why the hell not? You change your mind or something?” A kid on a bike came along the sidewalk and they stepped apart to let him pass. Mike shook his head. "I didn't change my mind." Danny looked at him. "Then what the hell..." “Don’t you think I wanna go?” Mike blew out a long breath. “Fool bakery let her go. My mother. I gotta stay here, man. Pick up a job.” In this version, Mike does not seem to be talking to the reader, but to his friend and to the problem. Both boys speak in part through physical behaviors, that sub-lexicon of talk. In life, people speak not only with their voices but with their eyebrows, hands, shoulders. They rub their noses, point their fingers, look at the ground, look at the sky. And this time our two characters use the language of talk, not of formal report. Talk is a language of elisions; it backs and fills, revises itself in mid-air, so to speak: “Fool bakery let her go. My mother.” But why should the author have intruded that kid on a bike? Surely he doesn’t move the story forward. What de does do, of course, is manifest the fact that our two characters inhabit a world, that things go on around them, that they’re not standing on the moon. Which brings us to the matter of physical backgrounds, surroundings. Here we can refer to the same example. The author could have filled in the scene, described the tailor shop on the opposite corner, the different houses along the street on each side, the cars that drove by—blue Honda, grey Buick. But instead, she has followed Checkov’s good advice: that generally it is best simply to touch in a detail or two—street corner, light post—and let the reader sense the surroundings from experience. Too much detailing and a fiction can lose its animation and go static. The same holds true for descriptions of people, a few details will evoke a stronger visual impression than will the whole works. Okay, we shift the focus to the writing of introspections, the inner life of a character, her thoughts and feelings. My example is from the work of a quite inexperienced writer: Laura parked her car and went into the supermarket. She was in a hurry. As she pushed the shopping cart along, Laura wondered what to get for dinner for her husband Curt and the children. After a bit of thought, she decided on spaghetti, though they’d had spaghetti last night, too. She felt that that was all Curt deserved. Laura suspected that Curt was having an affair. He often phoned lately to say he had to work late. Instead of spaghetti, she decided to get fish because Curt hated fish. Well, Laura’s fishy revenge does tell us something of her feeling regarding Curt’s fishy behavior. But it’s only by deduction that we think so. As far as the passage is concerned, she may have decided on fish simply because she likes it. After all, Curt probably won’t be home in time for dinner anyway. But never mind all that. The passage doesn’t really bring the character, her situation, her feelings into being. As Flannery O’Connor has said, “fiction is an incarnational art.” Our words must become flesh. So, an incarnation Laura pulled into a parking space, switched off the ignition and slid out of the car, slamming the door behind her. She grabbed the nearest shopping cart and shoved it through the automatic door into the A&P. Why, why did she have to worry about supper for a man who was probably cheating on her right this very minute. If it weren’t for the kids.... She turned the cart down the pasta aisle. The damn thing had a stuck wheel and she had to force it to go straight. Pasta. Again. She slid a box of ziti off the shelf and tossed it into the cart. The kids loved the stuff. Even three nights in a row. And if he came home on time for a change...well, it was still more than he deserved. Then it hit her. She put the ziti back on the shelf. Fish, that’s what they’d have. Curt hated fish. This version turns her sense of urgency into an action by getting her from car to market in a rushed manner instead of asserting that she’s in a hurry. And rather than offer a series of announcements about her thoughts, it gets her thinking the thoughts themselves, a matter of orientation. When we first come to the writing of fiction, most of us have an expository orientation developed by way of all those papers we wrote in high school and college. The term paper, that formal creature with its insatiable appetite for information. But fiction is a different beast. It walks on all fours and feeds on raw meat. Feed it right.
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