That Little Extra

"Truth, Convention, Realism": This is the title of the last chapter of How Fiction Works by James Wood. Here, he takes on the argument that "realism" in fiction is simply another genre one of whose chief proponents, he says, is the novelist Rick Moody.

Wood, too, is impatient with what he calls "commercial realism"—"intelligent, stable, transparent story-telling," the sort of conventional writing that gives us sufficient details to convince us that what is going on in the novel is really happening. Indeed, "[c]ommercial realism has cornered the market, has become the most powerful brand in fiction. We must expect that this brand will be economically reproduced, over and over again...when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques." (p. 175) It does not give us "the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced." The conventionally realistic novel can be translated into film with little or no loss of content. Styles are interchangeable. Voice is absent.

He wants to draw a distinction between conventional fiction and realism as he would like to see it. Certainly, conventional fiction uses the techniques of realism as derived from Flaubert, but they are flat, efficient, merely utilitarian. Dead. Something more is needed.

Wood takes a quick detour from the thread of this argument to quarrel some more with Barthes and Gass. They move from the argument against convention to the charge that "fictive convention can therefore never convey anything real" (p. 176). Wood feels this move is unwarranted. It is never a question of reference—after all, fiction, by definition, has abandoned all claim on reference. Rather, it is what Wood calls "mimetic persuasion": "it is the artist's task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage." (p. 179) This, I presume, is a shot at Tom Wolfe's 'billion-footed beast'.

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind—lifeness—is the origin...the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. (pp. 186-87)

The novelist is forever seeking after new forms to capture the substance of life. That, it seems to me, is the novel's vitality. It is also trying to capture or portray something about human life—call it meaning, truth, reality, lifeness, or whatever. My own qualm (as someone with philosophical training) with the use of such words as 'truth' (see also here) and realism in relation to fiction aside, Wood is on to something here. It is the "studiedly irrelevant" detail that works for him, such as Orwell's watching a condemned man walking toward the gallows swerving to avoid a puddle.

There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is aways more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. ...the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive. (pp. 68-69)

Again, the devil is in the details. My own impatience with Wood's effort in this thought-provoking and book has to do with his failure to show how the details, beyond providing a means to understand characters, add up in fiction to make a compelling story. Roughly, stories provide something for us. Whether it is organization, order, form, structure, meaning, closure, WISDOM, or whatever I'm not prepared to say. But neither is he. This is why we keep reading stories and why they keep moving us. Sure, the brush-strokes are nice, the details (essential or superfluous) persuading us of the lifelikeness of the illusion (of the character)—and the raging debate here is whether the critic should focus chiefly on the way in which the illusion is presented (Gass) or on the illusion itself and its congruence with reality perceived or imagined (Wood). But stories wrap up, even Chekhov's; they end. And they begin as well. From our reading of Wood, however, we have no way of understanding how they get from the latter to the former. That is to say, how fiction really works.

Dialogue

JW: "The penultimate chapter in my new book, How Fiction Works, is entitled "Dialogue".

JH: "Great. I've been particularly anxious to hear what you have to say on that critical topic."

JW: "It's a pretty short chapter, actually."

JH: "Oh, I see."

JW: "I do like good dialogue."

JH: "Okay. I believe you. Can you give me a brief summary then?"

JW: "Yes."

JH: "Ahem. Well would you?"

JW: "Sure. Here goes: 'Henry Green writes good dialogue. He never intrudes on his characters' speeches by using excess explanatory words like "he said knowingly", or "she sputtered angrily", or "he explained", etc. Like a good dramatist, he lets the words speak for themselves, often doing double duty in the narrative."

JH: "That's it? Isn't there anything else?"

JW: "Well, V.S. Naipaul writes good dialogue, too. Except when he doesn't."

[Crickets]

"Sailing in atmosphere"

Today, we look at "Language", the antepenultimate chapter of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Words must be well-chosen, unexpected, stylish. Bellovian. Still, with style, the poet in the writer threatens to overwhelm the point-of-view in character. Language, then, must be fitting and pretty—though never prettified.

Wood makes a stab at defining the nebulous concept "voice" (footnote 53, p. 150): "It is partly by shifts in register that we gain a sense of a human voice speaking to us... Likewise, by dancing between registers a character sounds real to us... Movements in diction capture some of the waywardness and roominess of actual thinking..." By employing a mix of erudition and vulgate—a "mélange" he calls it of different levels of diction—"[b]y insisting on equalising [sic] all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalising different registers." (pp. 151-2) In this last, he is speaking specifically about a passage from Roth, but it has applicability across the board.

Wood's definition is insufficiently robust to account for the "voice" that animates and takes over so much of what passes for popular literary fiction, e.g., The Lovely Bones, Vernon God Little. It is more than mixing levels of diction; it has to do with attitude and sentiment and it reflects the form, plot, and even story of the narrative. In fact, from Wood's depiction it's not entirely clear what he feels about "voice" in this broader sense—if anything. Yet, this "unique voice" is what literary agents and editors are eager to lap up and foist on the public.

Next, he moves to a discussion of metaphor. "Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. ...Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story." (p. 153) This, of course, is all well and good, but it begs the questions: how does metaphor work? and what, precisely, does it mean "to work"?

"Metaphor which is 'successful' in a poetic sense but which is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor—the kind of metaphor which this particular character or community would produce—is one way of resolving the tension between author and character..." (p. 159) Okay. I guess we all saw that one coming. Not a real stretch. And not very informative either, though he provides a number of good examples in context.

I think we can agree that good fiction makes good use of figurative language. Figurative language (such as simile, metaphor, etc., etc.) falls under the rubric of "rhetoric". Rhetoric (the subject of another nonfiction book I've been working on) is traditionally opposed to logic, though both are means of persuasion; logic relying on the appeal to reason and argument, rhetoric to the senses, to emotion, and to the sentiments and mores of the community. Metaphors, in other words, provide narrative color and, as in any good work of art, shouldn't clash. Metaphors et al., to my mind, are useful in fiction to persuade us of the "reality" of the character.

Here again, Wood falls victim to his own schema. This is where his analysis stops. He says fiction 'works' when the metaphors (the figurative language, the rhetoric) seem organic to the character's own POV and not the author's. And he provides a number of sweet examples of metaphors and shows how they work. That's fine and a good and important lesson for fiction writers and prospective critical readers, as far as it goes. But it fails to see through the curtain of figurative language and recognize the essential illusion of fiction. It misses the forest for the trees and is why Wood can give no account for story, plot, and form and their place in understanding the function of fiction.

"What is it like to be a bat?"

"Sympathy and Complexity" is the title of the seventh chapter of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Wood tells us fiction works by allowing us to put ourselves in another's shoes (as the cliche goes) and to ask complex moral and philosophical questions. He refers us to the work of two contemporary philosophers, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams.

Nagel, in a famous 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?," argues that because bats are so radically alien from us, we cannot very well imagine what it would be like to be one. This is en route to arguing that 'consciousness' or 'mind' cannot be reduced (as we attempted in our previous post) to mere neuronal activity. Wood uses a rather glib recounting of this argument as a straw man which he promptly swats down with a quote from J.M. Coetzee's alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, to the effect that that is, after all, simply what it means to be a novelist. It is a deft, but pointless move. He leaves his 'ghost' again to ramble about in his fictional 'machine', neither of which concept, as we've noted in previous posts, he fully examines.

When we read fiction, we are not searching to find out what it is like to be any other sort of animal than the human one. Even John Hawkes in his marvelous Sweet William: A Memoir of an Old Horse, told entirely from the POV of an old racehorse, is engaged in the ultimate humanist question: "What is like to be a human being?" and "What does it mean to be human?" This, after all, is where our true sympathies lie. There are many other—and less interesting—examples. The point being: in fiction, we do not read to understand what it is like to be some sort of radically different being, we read to understand what it is like to be human. And that is something we share in common.

[It bears noting here that Nagel's 1974 understanding of neurophysiology is radically different from a more contemporary understanding. Again making it puzzling why Wood chooses him as an example.]

Wood brings in Bernard Williams to highlight the moral subtlety and complexity that novelists have brought to our understanding of what it means to be an individual human being. He states: "Of course, the novel does not provide philosophical answers (as Chekhov said, it only needs to ask the right questions). Instead, it does what Williams wanted moral philosophy to do—it gives the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric."

Here, Wood's humanism seems properly placed, if, like Williams's, highly individualistic in bias—though I can't be sure yet whether he has taken out a promissory note with respect to the place of 'morality' and 'moralizing' in fiction that, in the cashing, would lead us to further serious disagreement about the aims of fiction, no matter its precise mechanisms. Wood provides examples from Ian MacEwan and Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf.

Fiction works by allowing us to get a feeling for what it would be like to be in another specific 'character's' shoes in the middle of a particular situation, to truly sympathize with his/her individual plight as he/she responds and acts given his/her specific capabilities and limitations, and to get a grasp of the [moral] complexity of being just such a human and at the mercy of competing principles and desires. Stated this way (with an appropriately agnostic skew on 'character' and bracketing the concept of morality for the time being), I find myself, as writer, quite in agreement.

The Ghost in the Wood(s)

In "A Brief History of Consciousness," the sixth chapter of How Fiction Works, James Wood traces the evolution of fictional characterization from King David in the Old Testament to Shakespeare's Macbeth to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The differences lie in their respective audiences: David—the god, to whom the psalms and prayers are addressed; Macbeth—the audience, to whom the soliloquies; Rasky—the readers, to whom his interior is revealed over the course of the book. It is, in other words, a descent into subjectivity.

I return to Wm. Gass. In his book Finding a Form, in the essay "The Book as a Container of Consciousness" he explains:

..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about...[pp. 348,351]

The notion of "character" is at the bottom of Wood's inquiries in this book. He believes they have some 'reality', some 'truth' somehow. Clearly, he doesn't believe that fictional characters are flesh-and-blood entities and he doesn't believe we should judge them by whether we would want to have them as friends—that may be the case with memoir and autobiography, those popularity contests that now predominate the booklists. Obversely, he doesn't believe they are merely 'men made out of words'; their reality is more substantive somehow.

Maybe, they're zombies. Maybe not, since zombies, by all accounts, seem to have bodies. They're more akin to ghosts: identities without bodies. Disembodied consciousnesses. These are the sorts of things you have to believe in if you hold any sort of religious belief. The idea of the 'soul' as some sort of eternally-existing individuated entity is fundamental to the religious delusion. The 'soul delusion' necessarily precedes the 'god delusion'.

If, like this blog, you take an agnostic approach to such matters, you find yourself in disagreement with a fundamental philosophical position of Wood. The mechanistic view of 'soul' or 'mind' is that there is no such thing absent the 'body' or the 'brain'. They are functions of complex neuronal activity, which itself is a function of genetic attributes, etc., etc. And it is the utmost hubris to assume either of the former [soul, mind] exists absent the platform provided by the latter [body, brain]. By analogy, it would seem folly to assume that the consciousness or the character or the reality or the truth of fiction—as Wood would have it—can exist apart from the form of fiction or apart from the textual words in which they are presented.

I don't want to get too analytical here, but I think it bears exploring. Now, we can say of the current President of the U.S.: "George Bush has beady eyes." All good fiction readers know how to interpret the connotations of such a statement and may or may not agree. And anyone who knows what beady eyes look like can then go to a picture of President Bush, or indeed examine the man himself, and determine for themselves whether it is true. There may be disagreement in the interpretation, but we have a way of testing that statement's truth or falsity, or at least a common ground for argument.

However, if I say of the fictional Thane of Caldor "Macbeth has beady eyes," there's no real way to verify or falsify that statement—short of a pronouncement to that effect in the Shakespearean text. The only thing we can know about Macbeth is what we are given. But, that begs the question of realism here. What is it, in fact, that we are given?

What we are given is something like a model. This model is presented to us in the same words and language we would use to describe a real flesh-and-blood person's character. It's just that the flesh-and-blood part doesn't exist. The language fools us. Indeed, it deludes us (however usefully). It makes us believe this character is real and elicits responses from us as if this character were real. We see the character in action, we see the character carrying out his/her routines, we see the character responding to certain situations, we see the character making certain decisions. Often, depending on the book's POV, we see the character's limitations, we understand his/her current state of knowledge, we recognize his/her flaws. And, with certain exceptions, we see the changes the character goes through over a period of time (or their refusal to change). That is art.

And the question of how this art works is the question Wood is proposing to answer in his book. Yet, I don't see how he can quite accomplish what he sets out to do if he truncates his analysis at the purported middle-ground of 'realism' or 'truth'. His analysis does not give us an account of the forms of fiction, of narrative (in the technical sense), of dialogue, of action, of story, of plot, or, for that matter, of dramatic structure. He stops short of showing us how these tools and techniques work together to achieve this illusion of reality, this illusion of character, this illusion of truth to which he stubbornly clings.

Character: Once Again Into the Breach

"There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character." James Wood starts off his central chapter with this bit of hyperbole. But we buy it because it's JAMES F'in WOOD fer chrissakes! And we read on. "We can tell a great deal from a character by how he talks, and whom he talks to—how he bumps up against the world." Do tell.

Wood, in How Fiction Works carves out an interesting middle-ground for his view of character:

A great deal of nonsense is written every day about character in fiction—from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are : we should get to 'know' them; they should not be 'stereotypes'; they should have an 'inside' as well as an outside, depth as well as surface; they should 'grow' and 'develop'; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. ...In other words, artists should not ask us to try to understand characters we cannot approve of—or not until after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them. On the other side, among those with too little belief in character, we hear that characters do not exist at all.

And he goes on to insult again that bête noire of "aestheticism", William Gass.

So, Wood says, fiction works somewhere in the space between "I didn't like that book because I just couldn't identify with the main character" (the point of view I satirize in my review of Bernhard's The Loser), and "I didn't like that book because it wasn't really well enough written."

How? "My own taste," he says "tends towards the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows."

Understanding and defining fictional character is akin to understanding and defining the manifold and polymorphous human self. This seems to be Wood's point, though he is nowhere quite so explicit.

So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.

Vitality, complexity, opacity of motive: these are the values Mr. Wood holds dear with respect to character. Reader—and more particularly writer—take heed!

Btw: if you haven't read the book or the on-line article and are wondering why Monty Python and The Office top the posts about character, Wood traces a certain sort of self-theatricalizing British character he loves from Shakespeare "...and on into the superb pantomimic embarrassments of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais's David Brent." There is a method in't.

Character

Wood's next chapter on "Character" has appeared (in a slightly different form) in The Guardian here. You can read it for yourself. More later...

The Devil Is in the Details

In paragraph 49 of his How Fiction Works, James Wood gives us a peek inside his skull: "I confess to an ambivalence about detail in fiction. I relish it, consume it, ponder it. ...But I choke on too much detail, and find that a distinctively post-Flaubertian tradition fetishes it: the over-aesthetic appreciation of detail seems to raise, in a slightly different form, that tension between author and character we have already explored. If the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style, it can no less be told as the rise of detail."

We are now reaching the soul of his book. Wood is beginning to distinguish himself from two giants of contemporary criticism: Roland Barthes and William Gass.

Of detail, there can be too much or too little, according to Wood; but what it must never do is explain its presence. Never apologize, never explain. Never comment. Let the detail itself illuminate the character, even if it is superfluous. These gratuitous bits are "reality effects" (Barthes's term for the illusion of reality fiction delivers). Wood agrees, but only up to a metaphysical point: "fictional reality is indeed made up of such 'effects', but realism can be an effect and still be true. It is only Barthes's sensitive, murderous hostility to realism that insists on this false division." Details are more than mere effects, more than the furniture of the narrative. They somehow give us the truth.

William Gass, another detail-oriented realism-murdering critic, takes the hit of over-aestheticization in his essay "The Test of Time," quoting from Thoreau:

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. (Walden, chapter 9, "The Ponds")

We cannot say with certainty what will live, and survival, by itself is no guarantee of quality; but I think we can say something about what is deserving. Thoreau's two unsimple sentences put me out on that pond, in prose as clear as its water is. ... There's no moment too trivial, too sad, too vulgar, too rinky-dink to be unworthy of such recollection, for even a wasted bit of life is priceless when composed properly or hymned aright...

Gass is saying that it is not the 'what' of fiction, but the 'how' that allows the work to stand the test of time. For Wood, it is not so much the 'how' as the "what and only the what' and the 'how much'.

De gustibus non est disputandum

James Wood ends the third chapter of How Fiction Works with this observation: "Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time-signatures. ...The artifice lies in the selection of detail."

You've gotta' love that 'tattoo of randomness.'

Spongeworthy!

We continue blogging our reading of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Today we will be looking at the third chapter, "Flaubert and the Rise of the Flâneur." This is Wood's second chapter concerning Flaubert. In Chapter Two, he pointed out Flaubert's use of "different time signatures" to present details in a realistic, almost cinematic manner; there is a sort of temporal foreshortening in modern writing wherein short-term occurrences sit side-by-side with long-term or even eternal occurrences.

In this chapter, he cites the invention of the flâneur as a sort of "porous scout" for the author, a walking camera (or sponge) whose perceptions and impressions control the narrative. This combines the idea of the close third person POV with the modernist attention to detail; we only see what the character sees and we only see it the way s/he does.

Again, there is nothing controversial here: writers are always chastening their workshop fellows for using description as mere decor, or as travelogue. Description must characterize, they say, or perform some double function—more, say, than mere mood setting. When we see the streets of London through our hero's eyes, we are given privileged insight into his state of mind. This fiction does better even than, many would claim, film.

Flo Bear

"Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him." So James Wood begins the second chapter of How Fiction Works. This seems non-controversial.

"We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible." Wood at 32.

Ah, the protagonist of this study strides upon the stage. Flaubert. We are either of him or in contradistinction to him. The telling detail and the essential gesture, the cool cinematic eye, the tale that tells itself: however romantic they feel in Flaubert (for whom the act of writing is a heroic act of self-sacrifice, an Atlas shrugging off a world, if you will), these are the 19th Century precipitants of the so-called 'death of the author.' The withdrawing valet becomes the absent god. T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Monroe Beardsley, and the New Critics, generally, warned us about resorting to biography and authorial intentions in our attempts to understand texts—they understood the potential authoritarian implications. Barthes merely drove the point home.

Yet, nowadays we live in a world of James Frey and JT LeRoy. A world of Oprah and the ascendancy of the memoir. Post-modern identities. Authenticity. Confession. The cult of CELEBRITY. Personal struggles illuminate texts, indeed imbue them with meaning. Are we, then, witnessing the re-birth of the author (what's the correct word here? resurrection? reincarnation?)? Is AUTHOR-ity once again on the rise?

Let's turn our attention back to the work, Wood seems to be telling us. Let's focus in on those luscious telling details. He hasn't yet (on my reading) explicitly staked out a position on this 'death of the author' vs. the 'cult of celebrity' brouhaha; though, with his emphasis on textual detail and stylistic modernism, it feels like he is leaning for the former. This is, in any case, orthogonal to his real subject in this book: realism. And I'm pretty sure we'll have a bone or two to pick with his uses of the words 'truth' and 'reality' with regard to fiction.

No, Not that James Woods

Disambiguation. A good word I learned, frankly, from Wikipedia.

The other James Wood (no 's') gives a close analysis of the free indirect style in a passage from Henry James's What Maisie Knew. He focuses on one word in one passage that shows James's true mastery; that is to say, he shows us how James steps back and allows us to see the scene through the eyes of Maisie through the use of one perfectly-modulated word: embarrassingly. [Of course, you can hear the chorus of MFA students bellowing in the background about the use of -ly adverbs.] Wood then traces the use of this technique back, interestingly, to the mock-heroic poetry of Alexander Pope. All he is really saying is: the writer needs to stand back and let the language reflect the character's own POV. The writer's style interferes with our being able to see the world through the eyes of the characters. With any given word or phrase or literary device, as a writer, ask yourself: "Is this my character speaking or am I intruding?" Call it "method writing"—after so-called method acting. The greater artistry, Wood is telling us, comes in getting the characters just right.

Now, what's fun about Wood's first chapter, called "Narrating", is his delicious take on other writers. He takes Updike to task for grievous authorial interference (or, offsides in soccer jargon) in Terrorist. He takes a first run at Nabokov, in Pnin saying: " Nabokov is here using a kind of free indirect style, probably without even thinking about it." I guess VN got lucky, huh? Wood notes how Faulkner's, Joyce's, and Shakespeare's characters all manage to sound like Faulkner, Joyce, and Shakespeare respectively.

But then, then my friends, he breaks out the stiletto: "David Foster Wallace is very good at becoming the whole of boredom." Pow! Do you get the feeling he doesn't particularly care for DFW? Wood praises Chekhov's use of what he calls the unidentified free indirect style, or the "village chorus." Then, he shows how Wallace takes that style to extremes in imitating the jargon and mangled lingo of Madison Avenue. Wallace's predecessors, he notes, include Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Pynchon, and DeLillo who let the "debased" language of the contemporary American idiom debase their own language. His point is a good one. There really is a balancing act, let's call it 'artistry', involved. But, then, Wood really drives the point through the heart of DFW. And twists.

In concluding this section, Wood gets it just right, I think:

So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging.

In essence, the novelist is a bit of a juggler. The balancing act is to keep these three balls (if you will) of language in the air simultaneously. Writers often talk about getting the words just right. Wood provides the matrix, or context, in which we can locate this rightness.

James Wood Needs a Blog

I've just received my copy of James Wood's new book: How Fiction Works. It's out in England, but not the U.S. yet, so I ordered it on amazon.uk.

Try as I might, I couldn't find a James Wood blog on the internets (you know, that series of tubes...) so I will be posting some of my responses to the book as a fiction writer as I work my way through it. You might find more of the same over at Mark Sarvas's excellent litblog: The Elegant Variation.

I will say this, I think Wood starts his book at just the right place; one of the first and most important decisions a writer has to make concerns the point of view of the story. All serious novelists struggle with it. Many do a draft in one POV, then re-write in another. Thus, Wood's first chapter is called "Narrating" and addresses this crucial early step in the writing process. I'm sure he agonized over how and where to start his book. I think he got it just right.

He argues for the primacy of what he calls the "free indirect style", or what others refer to as "close third person POV". Writers often say it's like a little homunculus (or angel) hovering over the shoulder of whichever character predominates the scene. The viewpoint then shifts freely from character to character throughout the book. Wood gives a convincing argument for the obsolescence of the so-called omniscient POV as a relic of a by-gone era (though it seems there's a place for an ironic omniscient POV after the work of Donald Barthelme). An "antique cheat" he calls it, borrowing a phrase from Sebald. He does not so persuasively dismiss the first-person POV; he spends only one paragraph on the so-called unreliable narrator, but he nails that oftentimes confusing concept.

One shortcoming of this first chapter is Wood's failure to distinguish between narrative in general and narrative as a specific technique of fiction-writing. To wit: there are several ways to tell a story—through dialogue and action or through narrative. On this score, you might find a story told in the form: "John spent the next three years in prison. The day he got out he went to the nearest WalMart and bought a gun. He went home and stared at the gun until evening. Then, when night fell, he took his new gun, loaded it, and went to his ex-wife's house and shot the man who'd stolen her and had him sent away." That is straight narrative. In Forster's and MFA terms, it is 'telling' not 'showing.' Narrative is a way of telling a story by condensing time and has its effective uses—though what those are you won't learn from Wood.

The same story, of course, could be told quite differently and at greater length by focusing more closely on our protagonist's daily routines, say, in jail. Showing him getting his bus token as he leaves, his wobbly knees as he climbs on the bus and heads away from the prison and into a new and frightening world of freedom. His voice quivers as he asks the bus driver how to get to the nearest WalMart. Through his eyes, we see the overflowing shelves of toys and cheap clothes and appliances and useless bric-a-brac in the giant warehouse-like store and we start to feel how much like a prison this icon of consumer culture seems until, with him, we find ourselves at the gun counter. The whole gun purchase could be comic or tragic as the clerk is shown to be incompetent in not doing a background check and our ex-con a slick, motivated operator with a deft way of avoiding direct questions, etc., etc. Much, if not all, of this could and should be shown through dialogue and action as opposed to narrative (strictly speaking). It is a more specific, closer, and more detailed technique.

I believe there is a good answer to the question of when and how to use narration in the specific sense in writing fiction (witness, e.g.. One Hundred Years of Solitude), but I do not feel Wood has given it, choosing to focus instead on narrative in the broader sense to include dialogue and action.

More to come as I read further.