How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

  Anyway, one can accept Barthes’s stylistic proviso without accepting his epistemological caveat: 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.

  57

  In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight.14 The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself. In other words, the category of the irrelevant or inexplicable exists in life, just as the barometer exists, in all its uselessness, in real houses. 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 always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.

  58

  The barometer, the puddle, the adjustment of the blindfold, are not “irrelevant”; they are significantly insignificant. In “The Lady with the Little Dog,” a man and a woman go to bed. After sex, the man calmly eats a melon: “There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.” That is all Chekhov writes. He could have done it like this: “Thirty minutes passed. Outside, a dog started barking, and some children ran down the street. The hotel manager yelled something. A door slammed.” These details would obviously be exchangeable with other, similar details; they are not crucial to anything. They would be there to make us feel that this is lifelike. Their insignificance is precisely their significance. And, as in the Michelet passage of which Barthes is so suspicious, one of the obvious reasons for the rise of this kind of significantly insignificant detail is that it is needed to evoke the passage of time, and fiction has a new and unique project in literature—the management of temporality. In ancient narratives, for instance, like Plutarch’s Lives or the Bible stories, gratuitous detail is very hard to find. Mostly detail is functional or symbolic. Likewise, the ancient storytellers seem to feel no pressure to evoke a lifelike passing of “real time” (Chekhov’s thirty minutes). Time passes jerkily, swiftly: “And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.” Time lapses between the verses, invisibly, inaudibly, but nowhere on the page. Each new “and” or “then” moves forward the action like those old station clocks, whose big hands suddenly slip forward once a minute.

  We have seen that Flaubert’s method of different temporalities requires a combination of details, some of which are relevant, some studiedly irrelevant. “Studiedly irrelevant”—we concede that there really is no such thing as irrelevant detail in fiction, even in realism, which tends to use such detail as a kind of padding, to make verisimilitude seem nice and comfy. You wastefully leave lights on in your home or hotel room when you aren’t there, not to prove that you exist, but because the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive.

  59

  In “The Dead,” Joyce writes that Gabriel was his old aunts’ favorite nephew: “He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks.” This might not look like anything much, at first; perhaps one has to be familiar with a certain kind of petit bourgeois snobbery to appreciate it. But what a lot it tells us about the two sisters, in just a handful of words! It is the kind of detail that speeds on our knowledge of a character: a state of mind, a gesture, a stray word. It pertains to human and moral understanding—detail not as thisness but as knowledge.

  Joyce drops into free indirect style at the very end of the sentence, to inhabit the collective mind of the proper and snobbish old ladies, who are “caught” thinking about their brother-in-law’s status. Imagine if the line went: “He was their favourite nephew, Ellen and Tom’s fine son.” The sentence would tell us nothing about the sisters. Instead, Joyce’s point is that inside their own minds, in their private voices, they still think of their brother-in-law not as “Tom,” but as “T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks.” They are proud of his attainment, of his substance in the world, even a little daunted by it. And that gnomic “of the Port and Docks” functions like the birthday present for Queen Victoria: we don’t know what T. J. Conroy did at the Port and Docks, and it is exquisitely difficult to know how grand a job at the Port and Docks could possibly be. (That is the comedy.) But Joyce—working in a manner exactly opposite to Updike in that passage from Terrorist—knows that to tell us any more about the Port and Docks would ruin the psychological truth: this status means something important to these women. It is enough to know that.

  This sudden capturing of a central human truth, this moment when a single detail has suddenly enabled us to see a character’s thinking (or lack of it), can be a branch of free indirect style, as in the example above. But not necessarily: it may be the novelist’s observation from “outside” the character (though it speeds us inside, of course). There is such a moment in The Radetzky March, when the old captain visits his dying servant, who is in bed, and the servant tries to click his naked heels together under the sheets … or in The Possessed, when the proud, weak governor, von Lembke, loses his control. Shouting at a group of visitors in his drawing room, he marches out, only to trip on the carpet. Standing still, he looks at the carpet and ridiculously yells, “Have it changed!”—and walks out … or when Charles Bovary returns with his wife from the grand ball at La Vaubyessard, which has so enchanted Emma, rubs his hands together, and says: “It’s good to be home” … or in Sentimental Education, when Frédéric takes his rather humble mistress to Fontainebleau. She is bored, but can tell that Frédéric is frustrated with her lack of culture. So in one of the galleries, she looks around at the paintings, and, trying to say something knowing and impressive, merely exclaims: “All this brings back memories!” … or when, after his divorce, Anna Karenina’s husband, the stiff and joyless civil servant, goes around introducing himself with the line: “You are acquainted with my grief?”

  60

  These details help us to “know” Karenin or Bovary or Frédéric’s mistress, but they also present a mystery. Years ago, my wife and I were at a concert given by the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. At a quiet, difficult passage of bowing, she frowned. Not the usual ecstatic moue of the virtuoso, it expressed sudden irritation. At the same moment, we invented entirely different readings. Claire later said to me: �
�She was frowning because she wasn’t playing that bit well enough.” I replied: “I think she was frowning because the audience was so noisy.” A good novelist would have let that frown alone, and would have let our revealing comments alone, too: no need to smother this little scene in explanation.

  Detail like this—that enters a character but refuses to explain that character—makes us the writer as well as the reader; we seem like co-creators of the character’s existence. We have an idea of what is going through von Lembke’s mind when he shouts, “Have it changed!” but there are several possible readings; we have an idea of Rosanette’s awkwardness, but we can’t know what exactly she means when she says, “All this brings back memories!” These characters are somehow very private, even as they artlessly expose themselves.15

  “The Lady with the Little Dog” is almost entirely composed of details that refuse to explain themselves, and this suits the story because it is about a love affair that brings a great happiness somewhat inexplicable to the lovers. A married man—and expert seducer—meets a married woman in Yalta; they go to bed. Why do at least thirty minutes go by in silence as Gurov eats his melon? Several reasons come to mind: and we fill that silence with our reasons. Later in the story, the confident seducer decides, in ways he cannot fully express, that this ordinary-looking woman from a small town means more to him than anyone he has ever loved. He journeys from Moscow to the woman’s provincial town, and they meet at the local theater. The orchestra, writes Chekhov, takes a long time to tune. (Again, no commentary is offered: we are free to assume that provincial orchestras are inexpert.) The lovers snatch a moment outside the auditorium, on the stairs. Above, two schoolboys watch them, smoking. Do the boys know what drama is happening beneath them? Are they indifferent? Are the lovers troubled by the surveillance of the schoolboys? Chekhov does not say.

  The perfection of the detail has to do with symmetry: two malefactors have encountered two other malefactors, and each couple has nothing to do with the other.

  Character

  The punchline of the story relates to an American academic saying of Beckett, “He doesn’t give a fuck about people. He’s an artist.” At this point Beckett raised his voice above the clatter of afternoon tea and shouted, “But I do give a fuck about people! I do give a fuck!”1

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  There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: “My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that gray velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood.” The unpracticed novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilized in a scene that is hard. When I encounter a prolonged ekphrasis like the parody above, I worry, suspecting that the novelist is clinging to a handrail and is afraid to push out.

  62

  But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running—what he calls “getting a character in.” He says that Conrad himself “was never really satisfied that he had really and sufficiently got his characters in; he was never convinced that he had convinced the reader; this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books.” I like this idea, that some of Conrad’s novels are long because he couldn’t stop fiddling, page after page, with the verisimilitude of his characters—it raises the specter of an infinite novel. At least the apprentice writer, with his bundle of nerves, is in good company, then. Ford and Conrad loved a sentence from a Maupassant story, “La Reine Hortense”: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” Ford comments: “That gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”

  Ford is right. Very few brushstrokes are needed to get a portrait walking, as it were; and—a corollary of this—that the reader can get as much from small, short-lived, even rather flat characters as from large, round, towering heroes and heroines. To my mind, Gurov, the adulterer in “The Lady with the Little Dog,” is as vivid, as rich, and as sustaining as Gatsby or Dreiser’s Hurstwood, or even Jane Eyre.

  63

  Let us think about this for a moment. A stranger enters a room. How do we immediately begin to take his measure? We look at his face, his clothing, for sure. This man, let us say, is middle-aged, still handsome, but going bald—he has a smooth space on the top of his head, fringed with flattened hair, which looks like a pale crop circle. Something about his carriage suggests a man who expects to be noticed; on the other hand, he smooths his hand over his head so often in the first few minutes that one suspects him of being a little uneasy about having lost that hair.

  This man, let us say, is curious, because the top half of him is expensively turned out—a fine, pressed shirt, a good jacket—while the bottom half is slovenly: stained, creased trousers, old unpolished shoes. Does he expect, then, that people will only notice the top of him? Might this suggest a certain faith in his own theatrical ability to hold people’s attention? (Keep them looking at your face.) Or perhaps his own life is similarly bifurcated? Perhaps he is ordered in some ways, disordered in others.

  64

  In Antonioni’s film L’Eclisse, the luminous Monica Vitti visits the Rome stock exchange, where her fiancé, played by Alain Delon, works. Delon points out a fat man who has just lost 50 million lire. Intrigued, she follows the man. He orders a drink at a bar, barely touches it, then goes to a café, where he orders an acqua minerale, which he again barely touches. He is writing something on a piece of paper, and leaves it on the table. We imagine that it must be a set of furious, melancholy figures. Vitti approaches the table, and sees that it is a drawing of a flower …

  Who would not love this little scene? It is so delicate, so tender, so sidelong and lightly humorous, and the joke is so nicely on us. We had a stock idea of how the financial victim responds to catastrophe—collapse, despair, self-defenestration—and Antonioni confounded our expectations. The character slips through our changing perceptions, like a boat moving through canal locks. We begin in misplaced certainty and end in placeless mystery.

  The scene raises the question of what really constitutes a character. We know nothing more about this investor than this scene tells us; he has no continuing role in the film. Is he really a “character” at all? Yet no one would dispute that Antonioni has revealed something sharp and deep about this man’s temperament, and by extension about a certain human insouciance under pressure—or possibly, about a certain defensive will to insouciance under pressure. Something alive, human has been disclosed. So this scene demonstrates that narrative can and often does give us a vivid sense of a character without giving us a vivid sense of an individual. We don’t know this particular man; but we know his particular behavior at this moment.

  65

  A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters 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.

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  On the other side, among those with too little belief in character, we hear that characters do not exist at all. The brilliant novelist and critic William Gass comments on the following passage from Henry James’s The Awkward Age: “Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-haired if he h
ad not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type.” Of this, Gass says:

  We can imagine any number of other sentences about Mr. Cashmore added to this one. Now the question is: what is Mr. Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr. Cashmore is (1) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling perception, (5) an instrument of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy. He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him.2

  Like much formalist criticism, this is both obviously right and obviously wrong. Of course characters are assemblages of words, for literature is such an assemblage of words: this is like informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined “world,” because it is just a bound codex of paper pages. Surely Mr. Cashmore, introduced thus by James, has instantly become, in practice, “an object of perception”—precisely because we are looking at a description of him. Gass claims, “Nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him,” but that is exactly what James has just done: he has said of him things that are usually said of a real person. He has told us that Mr. Cashmore looked bald and red, and that his “petulant movements” seemed out of keeping with his large jauntiness (“were not in the line of his type”). At present, of course, in James’s preliminary dabs, Mr. Cashmore has just been created, and he hardly exists; Gass confuses the character’s Edenic virginity with his later, fallen essence. That’s to say, Mr. Cashmore at this moment is like the frame of one of those buildings we look at from the street, and which so often seem like stage sets. Of course “any number of other sentences about Mr. Cashmore” could be added to the ones we have: that is because so few sentences have so far been said by James about him. The more paint that James applies, the less provisional will the character seem. “There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions,” Gass argues in the same book. But why one or the other? To my mind, to deny character with such extremity is essentially to deny the novel.