How Fiction Works (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

by James Wood

  Even the characters we think of as “solidly realized” in the conventional realist sense are less solid the longer we look at them. I think there is a basic distinction to be made between novelists like Tolstoy or Trollope or Balzac or Dickens, or dramatists like Shakespeare, who are rich in “negative capability,” who seem unself-consciously to create galleries of various people who are nothing like them, and those writers either less interested in, or perhaps less naturally gifted at this faculty, but who nevertheless have a great deal of interest in the self—James, Flaubert, Lawrence, Woolf perhaps, Musil, Bellow, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis. Bellow’s vibrating individuals are Dickensianly vivid, and Bellow himself was aesthetically and philosophically interested in the individual, but no one would call him a great creator of fictional individuals. We don’t go around saying to ourselves, “What would Augie March or Charlie Citrine do?”5 Iris Murdoch is the most poignant member of this second category, precisely because she spent her life trying to get into the first. In her literary and philosophical criticism, she again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of the great novelist; yet her own characters never have this freedom. She knew it, too: “How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one’s failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.”6

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  But Murdoch is too unforgiving of herself. There are scores of novelists whose characters are basically like each other, or rather like the novelist who created them, and yet whose creations stream with a vitality that it would be hard not to call free. Does The Rainbow possess any characters who don’t sound like each other, and ultimately like D. H. Lawrence? Tom Brangwen, Will, Anna, Ursula, even Lydia—they are all variations on a Lawrencian theme, and despite differences in articulacy and education, their inner lives vibrate very similarly. When they speak, which is rarely, they sound the same. Nevertheless, they do possess blazing inner lives, and always one feels how important this inquiry into the state of the soul is for the novelist himself. In some sense, the scenes—the battles of husband and wife, of two opposed and proximate egos—are more individuated than the characters themselves: Will and Anna stacking sheaves of corn in the harvest moonlight; the chapter called “Anna Victrix,” which describes the first, swooning months of the marriage, as Will and Anna discover the sublimity of their sexual union and realize that the world is insignificant to the passion they share; pregnant Anna dancing naked in her bedroom, as David once danced before the Lord, while Will looks on enviously; the chapter devoted to the visit to Lincoln Cathedral; the great flood, which kills Tom Brangwen; Ursula and Skrebensky, kissing under the moon; Ursula at the oppressive school in Ilkeston; Skrebensky and Ursula running away to London and Paris—in a London hotel room she watches him bathing: “He was slender, and, to her, perfect, a clean, straight-cut youth, without a grain of superfluous body.”

  In the same way, it often seems that James’s characters are not especially convincing as independently vivid authorial creations. But what makes them vivid is the force of James’s interest in them, his manner of pressing into their clay with his examining fingers: they are sites of human energy; they vibrate with James’s anxious concern for them. Take The Portrait of a Lady. It is very hard to say what Isabel Archer is like, exactly, and she seems to lack the definition, the depth if you like, of a heroine like Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch.

  I think this was deliberate on James’s part. His novel begins with extraordinary stiffness and self-consciousness: three men, engaged in frivolous badinage, are sitting having tea, waiting for the arrival of the host’s niece. They talk about this lady. Isn’t she due soon? Will she be pretty? Perhaps one of the men will marry her? And then at the very start of the second chapter, she obligingly arrives. Were James being “workshopped” in a creative writing course, he would be censured for this speedy awkwardness; he should surely put a chapter of naturalistic filler between the men at tea and the arrival, make it look a bit less novelistic and convenient. But James’s point is that these men—and by extension we the readers—are waiting for the arrival of a heroine; and, sure enough, here is the author stepping up to provide her. James then proceeds, over the next forty or so pages, to hand us an enormous plate of commentary about Isabel, much of it contradictory. It is presented to us by the author in full exegetical mode. Isabel is brilliant, but perhaps only by the standards of provincial Albany; Isabel wants freedom, but really she is afraid of it; Isabel wants to suffer, but really she doesn’t believe in suffering; she is egotistical, but she likes nothing better than to humble herself; and so on. It is essentially a mess of propositions, and there is very little attempt to present Isabel dramatically. It is an essay, an essay on a character. And it is mostly James telling and not showing.

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  James is really suggesting that he has not yet formed his character, that she is still relatively shapeless, an American emptiness, and that the novel will form her, for good and ill, that Europe will fill in her shape, and that just as these three waiting, watching men will also form her, so will we, as readers. They and we are a kind of Greek chorus, hanging on her every move. Two of the men, Lord Warburton and Ralph Touchett, will devote their lives to watching her. And what, James asks, will be the plot that poor Isabel will have written for herself? How much will she herself write it, and how much will be written for her by others? And in the end, will we really know what Isabel was like, or will we have merely painted a portrait of a lady?

  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 deeply 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. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character “Isabel Archer,” even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remember an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here.

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  In Aspects of the Novel, Forster used the now-famous term “flat” to describe the kind of character who is awarded a single, essential attribute, which is repeated without change as the person appears and reappears in a novel. Often, such characters have a catchphrase or tagline or keyword, as Mrs. Micawber, in David Copperfield, likes to repeat, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” She says she will not, and she does not. Forster is genially snobbish about flat characters, and wants to demote them, reserving the highest category for rounder, or fuller, characters. Flat characters cannot be tragic, he asserts; they need to be comic. Round characters “surprise” us each time they reappear; they are not flimsily theatrical; they combine well with other characters in conversation, “and draw one another out without seeming to do so.” Flat ones can’t surprise us, and are generally monochromatically histrionic. Forster mentions a popular novel by a contemporary novelist whose main character, a flat one, is a farmer who is always saying, “I’ll plough up that bit of gorse.” But, says Forster, we are so bored by the farmer’s consistency that we do not care whether he does or doesn’t. Mrs. Micawber, he suggests, has a saving comic lightness, which allows her to be similarly consistent but not similarly dull.

  But is this right? Of course, we know a caricature when we see one, and caricature is generally uninteresting. (Though sometimes it might just be a novelist’s way of sticking to the point…) But if by flatness we mean a character, often but not always a minor one, often but not always comic, who serves to illuminate an essential human truth or characteristic, then many of the most interesting characters are flat. I would be quite happy to abolish the very idea of “roundness” in characterization, because it tyrannizes
us—readers, novelists, critics—with an impossible ideal. “Roundness” is impossible in fiction, because fictional characters, while very alive in their way, are not the same as real people (though, of course, there are many real people, in real life, who are quite flat and don’t seem very round—which I will come to). It is subtlety that matters—subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure—and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do. Forster’s division grandly privileges novels over short stories, since characters in stories rarely have the space to become “round.” But I learn more about the consciousness of the soldier in Chekhov’s “The Kiss” than I do about the consciousness of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, because Chekhov’s inquiry into how his soldier’s mind works is more acute than Thackeray’s serial vividness.7

  In the second place, many of the most vivid characters in fiction are monomaniacs. There is Hardy’s Michael Henchard, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, who burns with his one secret, or Gould in Nostromo, who can think only of his mine. Casaubon, too, fixated on his infinite book. Aren’t such people essentially flat? They may surprise us at first, but they soon stop surprising us, as their central need occupies them. Yet they are no less vivid, interesting, or true as creations, for being flat. They are certainly not cartoons, which is implicit in Forster’s discussion. (They are not cartoons because their monomania is not inherently cartoonish but inherently interesting—consistently surprising, one might say.)

  Forster struggles to explain how we feel that most of Dickens’s characters are flat and yet at the same time that these cameos obscurely move us—he claims that Dickens’s own vitality makes them “vibrate” a bit on the page. But this vibrating flatness is true not only of Dickens, but also of Proust, who also likes to tag many of his characters with favorite sayings and catchphrases, of Tolstoy to some extent, of Hardy’s minor characters, of Mann’s minor characters (he, like Proust and Tolstoy, uses a method of mnemonic leitmotif—a repeated attribute or characteristic—to secure the vitality of his characters), and supremely of Jane Austen.

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  Forster mysteriously claims Austen for the round character camp, but in doing so he just shows that he needs to expand his definition of flatness. For what is striking about Austen is precisely that only her heroines are really capable of development and surprise: they are the only characters who possess consciousness, the only characters who are seen thinking in any depth, and they are heroic, in part, because they possess the secret of consciousness. The minor characters around them, by contrast, are pretty obviously flat. They are seen externally, they reveal themselves only in speech, and little is demanded of them: Mr. Collins, Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, and so on. The minor characters belong to a certain stage of theatrical satire; the heroines belong to the newly emergent, newly complex form of the novel.

  Take Shakespeare’s Henry V as an example. If you asked most people to separate King Harry and the Welsh captain Fluellen into Forsterian camps, they would award Harry roundness and Fluellen flatness. The king is a large part, Fluellen a minor one. Harry talks and reflects a lot, he soliloquizes, he is noble, canny, magniloquent, and surprising: he goes among his soldiers in disguise, to talk freely with them. He complains of the burden of kingship. Fluellen, by contrast, is a comic Welshman, a pedant of the kind Fielding or Cervantes would nimbly satirize, always banging on about military history, and Alexander the Great, and leeks, and Monmouth. Harry rarely makes us laugh, Fluellen always does. Harry is round, Fluellen flat. Which actor, at audition, would choose Fluellen over the part of the king? (“I’m sorry sir, Mr. Branagh has already reserved that part for himself.”)

  But the categories could easily go the other way. The King Harry of this play, unlike the Harry of the two Henry IV plays, is merely kingly, in rather a dull fashion. He is very eloquent, but it seems like Shakespeare’s eloquence, not his own (it’s formal, patriotic, august). His complaints about the burdens of kingship are a bit formulaic and self-pitying, and tell us little about his actual self (except, in a generic way, that he is self-pitying). He is an utterly public figure. Fluellen, by contrast, is a little terrier of vividness. His speech, despite the “Welshisms” that Shakespeare puts in—“look you,” and so on—is idiosyncratically his own. He is a pedant, but an interesting one. In Fielding, a pedantic doctor or lawyer speaks like a pedantic doctor or lawyer: his pedantry is professionally bound up with his occupation. But Fluellen’s pedantry has a limitless and slightly desperate quality about it: Why does he know so much about the classics, about Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon? Why has he appointed himself the army’s military historian? He surprises us, too: at first we think his windiness will substitute for valor on the field, as Falstaff’s did, because we think we recognize a type—the man who speaks about military action rather than performing it. But he turns out to possess a touching valor and loyalty; and his rectitude—another inversion of type—is not merely hypocritical. (That is, he does not just talk about rectitude, even though he does indeed talk a lot about it.) And there is something piquant about a man who is at once an omnivorous roamer of the world’s knowledge and literatures, and at the same time a little Welsh provincial. His monologue on how Monmouth resembles the classical city of Macedon is both funny and moving:

  I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the worlds I warrant you shall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth.

  I still meet people like Fluellen; and when a garrulous guy on a train starts talking up his hometown, and says something like “we’ve got one of those”—shopping mall, opera house, violent bar—“in my town, too, you know,” you are apt to feel, as toward Fluellen, both mirth and an obscure kind of sympathy, since this kind of importuning provincialism is always paradoxical: the provincial simultaneously wants and does not want to communicate with you, simultaneously wants to remain a provincial and abolish his provincialism by linking himself with you. Almost four hundred years later, in a story called “The Wheelbarrow,” V. S. Pritchett revisits Fluellen. A Welsh taxi driver, Evans, is helping a lady clear out a house. He finds an old volume of verse in a box, and suddenly bursts out, scornfully: “Everyone knows that the Welsh are the founders of all the poetry in Europe.”

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  In fact, the ubiquitous flat character of the English novel, from Mr. Collins to Charles Ryder’s father, tells us something deep about the dialectic of British reticence and sociability, and something, too, about British theatricality. It is hardly surprising that the self should be so often theatrical in English fiction, when its great progenitor is Shakespeare. But of course many of Shakespeare’s characters are not just theatrical; they are self-theatricalzing. They carry within them fantastic, often illusory, notions of their own prowess and reputation. This is true of Lear, of Antony, of Cleopatra, of Richard II, of Falstaff, of Othello (who, as he is dying, is still instructing his audience to make a record of his demise: “Set you down this, / And say besides that in Aleppo once, / … I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him thus”). And it is true, too, of the minor characters like Launce and Bottom and Mistress Quickly, who so easily flame up into histrionic comic irrelevance.

  From Shakespeare descends a self-theatricalizing, somewhat solipsistic, flamboyant, but also perhaps essentially shy type who can be found in Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray, Meredith, Wells, Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, V. S. Pritchett, Muriel Spark, Angus Wilson, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, and on into the superb pantomimic embarrassments of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais’s David Brent. He is typified by Mr. Omer, in David Copperfield, the tailor whom David visits to get his funeral suit. (David is en route to his mother’s funeral.) Mr. Omer is an English soliloquist, and prattles on without embarrassment as he blunders his way all over David’s grief: “showing me a roll of cloth which he said was extra super, and too good mourning for anything short of parents,
” and saying, “‘But fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why, or how; and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how. Everything is like life, in my opinion, if you look at it in that point of view.’”

  Something true is revealed here about the self and its irrepressibility or irresponsibility—the little riot of freedom in otherwise orderly souls, the self’s chink of freedom, its gratuity or surplus, its tip to itself. Mr. Omer is determined to be himself, even if that means likening fashions in clothes to patterns of morbidity. Yet no one would call Mr. Omer a “round” character. He exists for a bare minute. But contra Forster, the flat character like Mr. Omer is indeed capable of “surprising us”—the point is, he only needs to surprise us once, and can then disappear off the stage.

  Mrs. Micawber’s catchphrase, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber,” tells us something true about how she keeps up appearances, how she maintains a theatrical public fiction, and so it tells us something true about her; but the farmer who says, “I’ll plough up that bit of gorse” is not maintaining any similarly interesting fiction about himself—he is just being stoical or habitual—and so we know nothing about his true self behind the catchphrase. He is simply stating his agronomic intentions. That is why he is boring; “consistency” has nothing to do with it. And we all know people in real life who, like Mrs. Micawber, do indeed use a series of jingles and tags and repetitive gestures to maintain a certain kind of performance.

  A Brief History of Consciousness

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  One reason that Cervantes needs to have Don Quixote accompanied by Sancho Panza on his travels is that the knight must have someone to talk to. When Don Quixote sends Sancho off to search for Dulcinea, and is alone for the first extended period in the novel, he does not think, as we would now understand the term. He speaks out aloud, he soliloquizes.