Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  Too often in the monologue, all of the technique and most of the content are devoted only to establishing in the reader a different impression of the events of the story from the impression the narrator has of what he's telling. This is not only difficult to do—it puts the narrator and the reader in opposition to one another—but it scarcely seems worth doing, at least not just for its own sake. If carefully done, the resulting work can perhaps be considered something of a tour de force, but a tour de force is anyway only almost by definition just a matter of ability finally overcoming misconception.

  Insofar as what's important ultimately, if it is simply this discrepancy between what the monologist (and/or perhaps the imagined "listener") realizes on the one hand, and what the reader is intended to realize on the other, then the final effect achieved is indeed one of irony—but of a kind of irony established simply for its own sake and no other purpose.

  Irony and Point of View

  Irony is ultimately an aspect of tone, the author's attitude or voice in the story. But in important ways irony is involved in aspects of plot and character, ultimately also no doubt as a result of what the author "feels" about the story, but not seeming to be so—at least, not so directly. The fiction writer, playing God with his characters and their stories, can create tricks of plotting, ironic "turns of event," that resemble the "tricks of Fate" that we speak of as being "ironic" in everyday life.

  Thus, one way the tone of irony is made manifest in fiction is by what it is that is made to happen to the characters. The plot itself achieves the irony, or seems to. And, again, this is akin to irony in life. There is a certain irony, for instance, in the fact that the astronaut John Glenn injured himself by slipping in the bathtub. Why is that? Well, to spell it out, it is because after surviving all the perils of orbiting the earth, he came to grief in the most mundane of ways. Closely akin to this is the idea of "poetic justice": as when a man who makes faulty bathtubs is injured in one himself. His punishment somehow ironically "fits" (is appropriate to) the crime. "Irony of Fate" of this sort comes about through the fact of what happened being either singularly appropriate, as in the case of the bathtub manufacturer, or singularly inappropriate, as in the case of John Glenn. In each case there seems to be an ironic relation between the man and the man's fate, as if there were a mocking attitude behind what has happened, as if someone were laughing somewhere. In both cases, the singularly appropriate and the singularly inappropriate, it seems as if there were some controlling force—Fate, or God, or simply "events"—that somehow arranged things in this mockingly singular way. There is not necessarily an indication that justice has been done; what is involved may be (in fact often is) the very opposite of justice. A mocking attitude is what's common to all forms of irony, whether it be the "tragic" or "dramatic" irony of fate or the facetious ironic tone of satire.

  The mocking effect derives from an element of dissimulation, a pretense of ignorance, which is basic to the techniques of irony. "Socratic irony," for instance, is the method of feigning ignorance so as to confute an opponent in debate. The word "irony" itself comes from the Greek eirōn, a stock character in early Greek comedy who always put down the boastful alazon by using sly understatement and concealing his knowledge.

  Thus irony is often said to be composed of "two separate views, one superimposed on the other." What's meant here is that a naive, uninformed, excluded point of view is contrasted with a point of view that is sophisticated, informed, included. Perhaps it would be simpler to say that differing degrees of knowingness are confronted.

  These two contrasted points of view can be seen, for instance, in ironic speech, which is often close to sarcasm. One man tells a joke and the other man says, "That was really funny." Now if the comment is sincere, it doesn't concern us. If it was sarcastic, both men will know that it wasn't sincere. If the remark was ironic, the man who made it will know it wasn't sincere, but the fellow who told the joke won't know, or at least won't be sure, although others who may be listening to them will. These are the differing degrees of knowingness confronted, and it is how irony is created.

  Irony is a tone. In conversation, it may be a tone of voice. In fiction, it is the tone of the author's voice.

  It's in this way, for instance, that a rather monotonous tone of irony is created in stories told in the monologue form by a self-deceived narrator. The author and the reader supposedly share a knowledge that the monologist doesn't have: reader and author enjoy a superiority at the point-of-view character's expense. But used in more promising forms than the monologue, the techniques of irony are capable of both the most powerful and most subtle effects.

  When irony is achieved through the aspects of plot and character, rather than through the aspects of tone and style and point of view and mood, it is referred to as "dramatic irony." Dramatic irony is situational; it is usually achieved, "set up," in the course of the narrative, then finally resolved. And dramatic irony is used for both comic and tragic effects. Comic dramatic irony is easily demonstrated in stage plays, as when a man boasts how faithful his wife is, and we the audience know that her lover is under the bed. Satiric irony requires our collaboration: we must share the attitude of mockery that the author is presumed to have toward his characters. The author and reader discern that the characters are funny or fatuous or fashionable or futile or whatever. The characters in satire have a different view of their actions, however: to themselves they are serious, sensible, sincere, and so on. When we resist the irony, when we are made to feel by the author a greater compassion for the characters and their situation than the author appears to be showing himself (either in his tone or in his working of the developments of the plot), then this can become tragic irony—at least when it is sublimely and dramatically achieved.

  In old-fashioned fiction, it was relatively easy to detect the author's tone; often in the omniscient-author point-of-view method he would obtrude his presence and make his comments on the action directly. The commentary might be ironic in tone, but more likely it was sentimental or didactic. In contemporary fiction, the author is often conspicuously absent—especially in the first-person and central-intelligence point-of-view methods. It is often now far more difficult to decide just what an author feels about his characters and their goings-on.

  Thus the older-fashioned methods tended toward clarity and sympathy—a kind of subjectivity on the author's part that made for a feeling of involvement. The newer-fashioned methods tend toward ambiguity and irony—a kind of objectivity on the author's part that makes for a feeling of detachment.

  Setting

  Setting is often described as "the element of place or location in fiction"— locale was the old-fashioned word for it. But setting implies location in time, time of day as well as historic time, and such matters as the weather out of doors or the temperature in the room where it all happens—all of these factors are customarily included in the term "setting." It may seem of small consequence, and in stories where the setting doesn't matter, it is of small consequence. But in successful stories, where everything works together, it's useful to see what choice of setting contributes. With a writer like Hemingway, for instance, who seemed to have a choice of milieu for his stories—Spain, Africa, upstate Michigan, and so on—one could easily think through why each story is set wherever it is. Putting aside biographical considerations, one sees that it is the perfect setting chosen, and that it contributes to the whole successful unity of the story.

  As with all other aspects of a successful story, the setting may be basic to the original conception or may be the result of conscious and deliberate choice in the course of composition. If it is a question of choice, then the first decision about setting for any author—especially the author of a short story, where economy is always at such a premium—is the selection of the place itself, for here he can make use of certain attributes of his setting that already exist either actually in the place itself, or can be presumed to exist in the reader's conception of the place, without havin
g to create these connotations himself.

  One notices this best if he has the occasion to consider a number of stories by different authors all about the same place—as, for instance, in preparing an anthology of stories about New York City. Virtually every American writer has written a New York City story—Melville, Crane, James, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Wolfe, and Malamud, Cheever, and James Baldwin, and so on—and it is fascinating to see how the single similar element, setting, functions in each in a different successful way. You could do the same with a group of stories about "the sea" or "Paris" or "farm life" or "the South" or "suburbia" or whatever. I put each of these locales in quotation marks, for it is their connotations as much as their actuality that is put to work in fiction.

  In the case of New York City, for instance, it is clearly a place about which certain generalizations can be made — whether they are inaccurate clichés or even contradictory is not important—and this makes the city useful and effective as a setting for an apparently limitless variety of situations and themes. In terms of plot and character, there is so much mobility in the city, both upward and downward, that it is an appropriate setting for any character's quick rise or fall. Because the city has more people of all social classes in close-crowded conjunction, it is an appropriate setting for any odd encounter—as between an actress and a bum, between a playboy and a secretary — with corresponding opportunities for depicting the injustices of social distinction and the extremes of poverty and wealth. New York City is between America and Europe and hence is a likely scene for conflict between the two. There are, in fact, so many comings and goings of all sorts in New York that an author can make virtually any plot or characterization plausible.

  Many of the traditional themes of fiction—the corrupting powers of ambition, the nature of one's responsibility to self and to others, the tragedy of loneliness, the paradoxes and ambiguities of compromise—all seem congenial to the city's qualities—its crowded loneliness, its veneration for the new, its bustling immorality, its commercialism, its sense of busy pointlessness. The city is available as a symbol of opportunity and freedom and success, and of the empty underside of these qualities. Useful as these connotations of New York have been to many writers, however, it would be absurd to set a story there, rather than some place that is better known to the author, if that place would function as well in his story.

  Conrad used the sea, Faulkner used the South, Cheever used suburbia, and in so doing, these authors managed to create, from story to story and from novel to novel, a world with connotations not just of the place itself, but from their own individual perception and creation of it. Setting can work this way: there can be a valuable reinforcement back from the depicted "world." Hardy's "Wessex" takes on connotations from book to book that the actual Dorset or West Country never suggest in themselves, and the same is of course true of Cheever's "Shady Hill" and Faulkner's "Yoknapatawpha." The beginning writer, however, experimenting, ought not to expect any virtue as such from what's disparagingly called "regionalism." What he should concern himself with is how the setting of each story enhances it, or can be made to do so.

  This is as likely to be achieved by description of place as it is by choice of place. "Description" has been given a bad reputation by bad writers. Reading Sir Walter Scott, you'd skip the "description"—he'd imprison a heroine and then describe the castle for two pages, how and when and whyfore it was built, and what of, stone by boring stone. It was description for description's sake, or for "verisimilitude" or "historical accuracy" or something. It had no integral part, no function in the narrative, and one was right to skip it. This is not true of a passage of description in Thomas Hardy or any other good writer, where the description contributes to the whole work symbolically or emotionally—enhancing in a variety of ways that can be demonstrated.

  "Passages" of description, as such, seldom appear in today's fiction, at least not long ones. But whatever description is provided can be analyzed, can be shown to be "loaded" or "slanted" or "colored" in such a way as to achieve an effect. The language can be effectively freighted (with adjectives or adverbs that are dolorous or cheerful or whatever); details of the place described can be selected or omitted depending on the sort of effect desired; or the point-of-view character can be made to view the setting with an attitude which suitably colors the description of it. There are these and all sorts of other ways in which an author can render the setting so as to create a desired effect.

  In fact, it is an instructive exercise for a beginning writer to put himself to: to describe the exact same place—a room or a garden or a city street—in two ways, first as forbidding, say, then as attractive, without changing many of the actual details.

  But that is, of course, simply an exercise. What matters is to render the setting of a specific story exactly so it perfectly enhances all the other aspects of that story. A passage of description should foreshadow action for the reader, whether symbolically or otherwise; the perception of the setting should help delineate character, whether of the point-of-view character or otherwise. Henry James, speaking of the artificiality of separating "parts" of fiction, said he could not "conceive a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative, nor a passage of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive." Thus the setting must contribute to the other aspects of the story, as well as to the whole.

  Style

  There is a way of thinking about fiction that maintains that "style" could be at the heart of the whole matter, just as there's the simpler-minded thought that plot is the whole thing, or character. We've quoted Lubbock as saying that it was point of view that "governed" method in the craft of fiction. It could equally be said that the all-important thing is theme, or tone, or virtually any other aspect of the techniques of fiction.

  It is the inseparability of part from part, and part from whole, in a successful work of fiction that makes this shift in emphasis not just possible but plausible. You can look at a successful short story from any angle, come in on it in one direction, and maintain that it was that facet that made the whole thing shine so. To maintain that style rules all, however, is to make the word stand for more than it normally needs to.

  Theme usually refers to the element of meaning in a work of fiction: what the story "says," insofar as it is paraphrasable. Tone is the customary word for the element of the author's presence in the work: his attitude toward it, say, insofar as that is detectable. And style usually is confined to mean the element of language: words, syntax, punctuation, and so on—everything from the simple mechanics to the rhetoric that may reflect a given author's originality of utterance. To some extent, obviously, theme and tone and style—as well as "voice" and "vision" and "world view" and so on—all overlap one another so much in meaning that they can be thought of as all meaning pretty much the same thing. It's a short step from that realization to taking one word of your own choice or devising and just saying that it does represent the whole thing.

  But even if "style" is limited strictly to elements of the author's language it is still a most significant aspect of fiction technique. There are many, many things involved. Word usage itself is just the first: style will differ if long, "difficult," scholarly or elegant words and terms are used, instead of short, colloquial, "ordinary" words of everyday speech. Similarly, the lengths and constructions of sentences will have an effect: one thinks of the effective difference between, say, the long, convoluted, intricate, complex, tortuous sentences of Henry James that seem to hang forever before banging-in at the end, and the curt sentences of Hemingway. It's not just a question of an older style of writing; Hemingway's contemporary, Faulkner, constantly uses those paragraph-long sentences, full of negative-dependent qualifying clauses—"not because" this and "not because of' that—evoking as he pretends to put aside. Certainly it would be possible both to underestimate and to overestimate the importance of sentence construction to the very different worlds that Hemingway and James are creating in their fiction. What should not b
e overlooked is how exactly appropriate is the style to the whole in the case of each of them, and in fact in the case of any successful writer.

  Nor is it of course simply sentence structure that achieves this appropriateness of style. There's the matter of verb tenses: the use of conditional forms, and the use of past and present tense. The effect of various grammatical mechanics will contribute: as, for instance, differences in punctuation, such as setting off parenthetical matter in dashes, or commas, or whatever. Paragraphing and italics and exclamation points must matter; essayists use the semicolon all the time, yet it virtually never appears in fiction; there must be a reason. And there is the whole business of dialogue—not just how much it is used, but the cadences of it. For surely a great part of what is called a writer's "vision" comes from how he listens.

  A writer's style reflects the world he perceives and helps to create the world he depicts. The Jamesian world is more elegant, elaborate, intricate, and complex than the Hemingway world, and the Jamesian language reflects and depicts it as such. But "style," as we have used the word, is only one aspect of fiction technique; it contributes only as it works with the other aspects of fiction.

  The interconnections are throughout, as always. The aspect of point of view will have a determining effect on style, and be determined by it: whoever is seeing or telling the story must see and talk in a way that works with all the rest. This, of course, brings us to the aspect of characterization: the sorts of characters the author creates will speak the language of his world. What "happens" to them, the plots of his stories, will be the sorts of things that happen to those sorts of characters in that sort of place—wherever it is or whatever it's like there—for the setting, too, will be determined by its relation to all the other aspects of the author's world.