Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  Conventional methods or "principles" of the craft of fiction are presented here—or, I suppose, for that matter, anywhere—only as possible helps to the author, never as handicaps. They are based, first, on the way things have been done previously by successful writers of fiction; and second (but to a much lesser extent) on theoretical analyses of the ways in which various aspects of a successful work of fiction interact.

  The "Question" of Point of View

  Two of the very best books about fiction are E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, and they differ completely on the subject of point of view. Percy Lubbock states flatly: "The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of point of view—the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story." E. M. Forster quotes this, says facetiously, "Those who follow him will lay a sure foundation for the aesthetics of fiction," then goes on to say that for him on the contrary, "the 'whole intricate question of method' resolves itself not into formulae but into the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says."

  It may at first seem that in this argument Lubbock is making a general point about the rhetoric of fiction—that the relation in which the narrator stands to the story is important—and that Forster is rather unfairly construing this as a specific statement: that narration of a story must be strictly confined to one character's viewpoint. But Forster has got Lubbock right: that is pretty much what he's saying in The Craft of Fiction. Most of what Lubbock says about method in fiction derives from the methods Henry James used in his novels; and the cornerstone of James's method is the strict maintenance of point of view.

  The novels of Henry James have the complex unity and close relation between part and whole that we've seen is usually more characteristic of a short story. In the world of his novels, everything "works" together beautifully, every aspect of his technique is thoroughly appropriate to every other aspect. Lubbock felt, and perhaps James did too, that a good deal of this unity was created by the effective control of point of view. The point of view used determined not only the character of the narrator, but the whole character of the work. James's point-of-view characters are always men or women of intelligence and sensitivity, conscious of fine moral distinctions, with an almost aesthetic feeling for proper behavior—James himself called them his "super-subtle fry."

  The characterization of the point-of-view figure thus always determined (or "suited"—for there is a chicken-or-egg "which-came-first?" problem here) the famous and familiar Jamesian style, a distinct and original language, full of "difficult" words and long, intricate, complex sentence constructions, interrupted constantly by parenthetical qualifications and modifications, capable of great nuance. The point-of-view characterization also determined (or suited) the plot, which often turned on a matter of propriety or involved a fine moral distinction. And in many of his novels and stories, effects of suspense and surprise and irony are achieved by the very limitations imposed by maintaining point of view as strictly as he did. His choice of point of view determined (or suited) too the whole milieu or setting of his work—the social or artistic concerns of the well-off and the well-born in Europe and the older cities of America. Point of view, then, had an effective controlling relationship to character, to plot, to setting, to theme—to, in fact, the whole "world" of James's fiction.

  Choice of point of view can be shown to have a similar determining relation to the whole of other modern authors' work, but the effect is most obvious and most fully realized in James. It is no wonder that Lubbock—with James in his mind as the master craftsman of the novel—stressed point of view as central to "the whole intricate question of method in fiction."

  In refutation of Lubbock's emphasis on point of view, Forster cites various examples—Dickens in Bleak House and Tolstoi in War and Peace are two—of authors suecessfully using a mixed-up point of view. He describes how Bleak House begins with the omniscient point-of-view method, drops that, "inhabits" a young lady to give us her thoughts, switches and skips from one character to another. "Logically," says Forster, "Bleak House is all to pieces, but Dickens bounces us, so that we do not mind the shiftings of the view point."

  There is no arguing with success, and Forster is not alone in feeling that novelists before James were more successful than novelists since James have been in writing "big" novels with "big" characters that "bounce" readers into accepting the life within as somehow convincing. Every reader willingly goes off "into" those big Victorian novels, engrossed until the last page is turned. Contemporary fiction provides only slick and sleazy versions of this experience. To "lose" himself in a contemporary novel, the casual reader must turn to one of those "big" best sellers, which nowadays usually means a vulgar novel, steamily exposing sexuality in Washington, Hollywood, or a small New England village. Turning the last page of one of those novels, a reader has the sickening feeling of having done something awful. The reasons for this separation in contemporary fiction between what is "popular" and what is "good" are many, but the idea being advanced here is that there was substantially more "bounce" in the older-fashioned sort of fiction, before all the nonsense about "craft" in fiction came in with Henry James and all those others.

  Often in those good old novels there was an omniscient author available as companion, offering to take the gentle reader by the hand and conduct him freely from place to place, from character to character, wherever the action was, explaining what each character was up to, who was good and who was bad and who was in-between and why, neglecting nothing to get the reader interested and involved in what was happening, explaining and interpreting it all, and generally making everything clear.

  Even careful readers find that there is a good deal of ambiguity—much of it surely not intentional—in the work of James and of those who follow his point-of-view method. There are famously two entirely different "ways" of reading James's Turn of the Screw, for instance: the governess's point of view is maintained so strictly that a case can be made that the specters in the story are not real, but imagined, products of her sexual fantasies. In fact, there is much legitimate confusion as to just how the events of much modern fiction should be understood by the reader—confusion that would vanish instantly if the author were there to step forward and explain the truth of the situation and say a word or two about what we're supposed to think of it.

  Henry James himself spoke of English fiction as "a paradise of loose ends," referring not to ambiguity but to all the easiness and pleasure and leisureliness and clarity of the old hit-or-miss methods of narration that have now been swept away—so the argument goes—by enthusiasm for the newer-fangled "tight" kind of fiction, where excellence seems to depend on craft, not content.

  The question of point of view is central to this continuing discussion about the effect of craft in fiction. Of shiftings in point of view, Forster says further that "critics are more apt to object than readers" and that "since the problem of a point of view certainly is peculiar to the novel" (drama doesn't have it) the critics have "rather over-stressed it" in an attempt to establish fiction as a separate art form.

  And it is true that Lubbock's book is called The Craft of Fiction and that the collection R. P. Blackmur made of James's prefaces to his novels is called The Art of the Novel. Clearly both James and Lubbock do assume that the effects of fiction (including, presumably, the effect of "bouncing" the reader into believing the story) are achieved by "craft" or "art"—at any rate, by method. They do assume that fiction is an art form, that it will have its own techniques, problems, and methods, and that as point of view is in fact unique to fiction it may very well be at the center of "the whole intricate question of method in the craft of fiction."

  Point of View and "Involvement"

  Perhaps it would be well to state the obvious here: It is by method that effects are achieved. Not, perhaps, methodically calculated methods; not even, perhaps, methods which an author may be t
otally aware of using; but methods that are demonstrable in the work.

  How, anyway, is a reader "bounced" into accepting what the author says? How is this involvement of the reader achieved? A lot of modern writers don't even want this effect, and a short story will always provide a good deal less of it than will a novel.

  But if a writer does want the reader "in," wants him to "enter" the world of his fiction, there are certainly ways of getting him there. One is the system of promises of action to come that we discussed in terms of foreshadowing and suspense. Another will always be the basic character-plot interaction: having characters do things that are on the one hand surprising and interesting, and on the other hand convincing and credible. But the most important aspect of the sensation of involvement, considered just as an effect, is the reader's loss of sense of self. The way a reader "loses himself" in a book is by shutting off his regular world and entering the world of the book. It is more a question of "enclosure" than it is of "bounce."

  We must imagine a reader with no distractions; or, if that is unimaginable in this day and age, a reader in a chair with a book or magazine, with nothing much bothering him for the space of time it will take to read what we have in mind for him. He will, of course, have some distractions; everyone does. Minor worries: errands unrun, work postponed, things to do, perhaps even the feeling that there's something else he ought to be reading. Never mind, he starts with us.

  But how will we begin with him? We know that the first paragraph, the very first sentence, must do special work. He has not yet begun to concentrate and read carefully, and good writing may be wasted here; but it is especially needed here. He will not be concentrated here, perhaps, but he will not be involved yet either. He will be critical; we must be careful. No belief or faith is yet established. You need some confidence in a person before you go on a journey with him. Once he starts with us, he will be in motion and we can keep him in motion more easily.

  As he reads on, one by one little pieces of his consciousness of self drop from him, a worry there, a distraction there, a sense that the chair's uncomfortable there; a memory of how he must stop reading in time to phone Miranda about dinner is replaced by a memory of what E. M. Forster elsewhere calls "a half-explained gesture" made by one of our characters. His memory fills gradually with our mysteries, our tensions take the place of his anxieties, our conflicts replace his worries, our point of view replaces his consciousness, our narrator's voice is the only sound he hears, what our narrator shows him is all he sees. He is absorbed, involved, enclosed in the world of the book.

  Again: this is not necessarily a good thing. Modern fiction especially wants considerably more distance from the reader than this. But we have seen that point of view is the most important way of establishing closeness and distance; and if what one wants is the effect of enclosure, the method of presenting the narrative to the reader has got to be the most determining thing.

  Forster says that "bouncing" the reader is more important in fiction than point of view. But even if one agrees about the importance of "bounce," the question is, how to do it? Bounce and point of view are not comparable. The first is an end, the second is a means; the first is an effect, the second is a method.

  Thus the real question is: what methods can the author best use to create illusion, or enclosure, or bounce, or reader involvement, or whatever one calls it? One of the most effective methods of bringing a story alive, and together, and to the point, is to get the point of view right. Correct use of point of view may not be all it takes to bounce a reader into believing a story, but it won't bounce him out either.

  Even Forster doesn't say that Dickens in Bleak House and Tolstoi in War and Peace are successful because point of view in these novels is "all to pieces." "Dickens bounces us," he says, "so that we do not mind the shiftings of the view point." And in logic it must be true that either the author gained something by violating point of view or shifting it, or the book would have been better if he hadn't. In David Copperfield and Great Expectations Dickens holds point of view fairly firmly (they are first-person point of view), and they are certainly just as bouncy books as Bleak House —infinitely more bouncy, most people feel. In War and Peace Tolstoi does shift point of view from chapter to chapter, but in each chapter he is focusing on a different character, or different set of characters. The structure of War and Peace is altogether different from that of a Henry James novel—it has many plots, not just one, and many characters, and Tolstoi shifts so as to focus the unifying power of point of view on each in turn. Shifting point of view as the action shifts from one character to another is a necessary practice in novels where many characters are involved, and such shiftings prove the effectiveness and usefulness of point of view, not the opposite.

  When Forster scoffs at those who follow Lubbock in attempting to "lay a sure foundation for the aesthetics of fiction," he is undoubtedly correct in mocking what could only be a foolish project. No theory of fiction could embrace all the various sorts of method used in all the successful stories and novels that have been written, much less in all those original works that will be written in years to come. But this is not to say that intensive internal analysis of some of the methods successfully used by writers in the past to bounce or involve or amuse their readers hasn't a great value both to current readers and future writers. The almost mathematical precision with which Percy Lubbock discusses the question of point of view in The Craft of Fiction is one of the best examples we have of this sort of analysis in action; and James's prefaces themselves are also very precise and informative about the effects of technique.

  But Henry James discusses technique as he used it to solve particular problems in his own novels and stories; and Lubbock's theories about method are based, as we said, primarily on the methods James used. Most of what is said about the effects of method or the usefulness of technique is not as abstract as it sounds. Theories about method derive for the most part from specific examples of their successful use by specific authors in specific novels or stories. The more they are generalized to cover a variety of instances of successful use, the less accurate they are likely to be as to specific effect. The beginning writer must realize that although a successful author, or even a succession of successful authors, may have repeatedly used a given method to solve a given problem, he can't count on it working for himself. Problems always tend to look more alike than solutions. Successful solutions are usually unique—both individual and original.

  Once again: no "rule" of writing exists. Not a single one. Nor should suggestions about the general or specific effectiveness of any given method in any hypothetical case ever be construed as advising a beginning author away from a full exploitation of everything that's been done in fiction before, much less from the myriad original methods and manners of writing fiction that will be found in the future. One original method and manner of the fiction of the future may be characteristically his own.

  The "Moved" Character and Point of View

  The decision about which character will "get" the point of view in a story is usually part of the author's original conception, seldom a matter of conscious choice. Nevertheless, several considerations pertain. One central one is whether the point-of-view character, as created or chosen, is compatible with the author's own "vision" and "voice," enough like him to make for easy narration. Another consideration, this time from the plotting, is whether the character can logically be in all the necessary places at the right time so as to be able to recount what's needed. These are only considerations, of course, among many; and there seems to be nothing that actually controls the choice.

  For instance, considerations from characterization might suggest that an adult, perceptive, fine-conscience consciousness might be the best way to present the story and its implications, and indeed this works splendidly for writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton. But writers like Anderson, Twain, Faulkner, and Hemingway show how perception and narration by a naive and eloquently inarticulate character—per
haps, for instance, a youth—can far better achieve their story's intention, can in fact become the very point of their story through the irony achieved by some discrepancy of realization.

  Thus, where point of view falls in successful fiction seems felicitously random, a little like where God chooses to bestow miraculous perception in life—whether on a shepherdess or a king, a scholar or a fool.

  There is, however, one consideration about where point of view shall fall that seems to me to devolve so inexorably from the dynamics of fiction that even the best authors get into trouble when they fail to take it into account and much fiction by lesser writers fails to succeed just because of neglecting it.

  The essential dynamic of fiction, we have said, is that character is moved by action. We have called the character to whom the events of the narrative have consequence the "moved" character. It is my belief that the moved character and the point-of-view character, in successful fiction, will prove to be one and the same.