The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (23 page)

An even less grand point of view is third person
objective
, identical to third person subjective except that the narrator not only never comments himself but also refrains from entering any character’s mind. The result is an ice-cold camera’s-eye recording. We see events, hear dialogue, observe the setting, and make guesses about what the characters are thinking. This point of view can work brilliantly in fairly short fiction. Its limits are obvious.

The noblest writers, like Isak Dinesen and Leo Tolstoy, rise above the pettiness and unseemly familiarity of third person subjective, and avoid the savage sparsity of third person objective, by means of the authorial-omniscient point of view. In the authorial omniscient, the writer speaks as, in effect, God. He sees into all his characters’ hearts and minds, presents all positions with justice and detachment, occasionally dips into the third person subjective to give the reader an immediate sense of why the character feels as he does, but reserves to himself the right to judge (a right he uses sparingly). Usually he judges events, touching on morality only by implication. When he intrudes with moral heavy-handedness, as Tolstoy does in
Resurrection
, the effect is likely to be disaster. In the authorial-omniscient point of view the reader escapes the claustrophobia he may feel when boxed into a limited opinion; he sees and celebrates, shrugs off, or deplores a variety of opinions; and he sails along securely, confident that he will not be tricked or betrayed by the wise and thoughtful narrator. The cards are on the table.

What for a time demoted the authorial-omniscient point of view—ruler of the field for centuries—was widespread doubt, at
least among intellectuals, about the existence of God, and increasing fascination with Pilate’s tiresome question “What is Truth?” Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and many others invented valuable alternatives to the omniscient voice—among others, the story told through various points of view, filtered through perhaps unreliable narrators like Conrad’s Marlow, or reported by some poetic or real voice, even the imagined voice of the community. Now that nervous theological and metaphysical questions have lost their wide appeal, writers like Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Oates, or William Gass feel free to use the omniscient point of view whenever they like, untroubled by God’s existence or nonexistence and its fur-thermores. The authorial-omniscient narrator is, for them, as much a fiction (or a literary tradition without desperate implications) as anything else they may use in their writing, such as the old palomino horse with spavins, or the wired-up chair in some kitchen. Cutting through the muck, they simply say—in the traditional voice of the omniscient narrator—what is fictionally true. They play God as they might play King Claudius, by putting on a cape.

One of the problems the beginner may encounter in using the authorial-omniscient point of view is that of establishing it in the first place and, throughout his story, moving smoothly into the minds of his characters. To establish this point of view when his narrative opens, the writer must dip fairly soon into various minds, setting up the rules; that is, establishing the expectation that, when he likes, he will move from consciousness to consciousness. The shift to third person subjective requires a skillful handling of psychic distance. (On psychic distance, see p. III.)

Another available point of view is the so-called “essayist omniscient.” The easiest way to describe it is by contrast with the authorial omniscient. The language of the authorial-omniscient voice is traditional and neutral: The author speaks with dignity and proper grammar, saying what any calm, dignified,
and reasonable person would say. “Happy families are all alike.” Or: “During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the Devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.” Every authorial-omniscient voice sounds much like every other. The essayist-omniscient voice, though it has nearly the same divine authority, is more personal. Though we do not know the name and occupation of the speaker, we sense at once that the voice is old or young, male or female, black (as in Charles Johnson’s
Faith and the Good Thing
) or white. Whereas the writer who has chosen the authorial-omniscient technique needs only to imitate, say, Tolstoy, the writer using the essayist-omniscient voice must first invent a character with particular habits of thought and particular speech patterns. Except by their concerns and subject matter, one cannot tell Tolstoy from Dinesen. Neither is free to be sly or bitchy; the voice simply states facts and makes seemingly impartial judgments. Jane Austen, on the other hand, can say anything she pleases, as long as it’s interesting and suitable to the personal voice established. Until recently most writers who used the essayist voice developed some one distinctive voice and used it book after book (Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner). Contemporary writers tend to play more with ventriloquism, so that sometimes one book by a given writer sounds very little like another by the same writer.

All good fiction contains suspense, different kinds of suspense in different kinds of fiction. Take the simplest kind first.

Anyone can write “A shot rang out” or “There lay the body of Mrs. Uldridge.” What is harder to write is the moment leading up to such a climax. When the writing is successful, the reader senses that the climax is coming and feels a strong urge to
skip to it directly, but cannot quite tear himself from the paragraph he’s on. Ideally, every element in the lead-in passage should be a relevant distraction that heightens the reader’s anticipation and at the same time holds, itself, such interest—through richness of literal or metaphoric language, through startling accuracy of perception, or through the deepening thematic and emotional effect of significant earlier moments recalled—that the reader is reluctant to dash on.

Even in the work of some of our better pop novelists, too easy solutions to this problem are common. One is the author’s first- or third-person entry into the suspense-filled thoughts of a character, in the hope that the character’s suspense will rub off on the reader. Another, more general, is irrelevant distraction: “As I walked toward the Parker place, there was a mockingbird singing. Upstairs, it sounded like—somewhere behind the shutters—though I knew there couldn’t be a mockingbird inside. I remembered—moving without a sound toward the gate—how Old Bass used to tell me about mockingbirds. ’Samuel,’ he’d say …” Irrelevant distraction, even if it works, in a feeble way, makes the reader feel manipulated. True, texture can help disguise the fault (the name Old Bass here, the mockingbird); and true, the line between irrelevant distraction and relevant distraction may be a fine one. The distracting detail of thought about the mockingbird, in the lines above, is not irrelevant if it recalls earlier passages in the fiction, associations that enrich the suspenseful moment. Old Bass may have died mysteriously, or may have believed that the song of a mockingbird presages dark events.

We are all familiar with those obligatory moments in suspenseful movies when the lady is about to open the dangerous door. She stops to listen, eyebrows lifted, and if the movie’s a good one the sound that has troubled her is one we’ve heard before (though she, perhaps, has not), a sound we too were troubled by at first, until we learned that it was only the tin cup hanging on the pump-spout, banging in the wind. Or the distracting
sound may recall a scene that contrasts with this one; for example, a scene in which little Leander, now ominously vanished, played happily with the hired man’s cat, offering it a drink. The lady moves forward again, her fear allayed, and reaches cautiously toward the door we don’t want her to open. Another sound! She pauses, her expression partly fear, partly irritation—irritation at her own timidity, perhaps, but the expression is one into which we’re free to project our own irritation. (Suspenseful delay is enjoyable, but even when distractions enrich the meaning of the climax about to come, we are not such fools as to miss the fact that we’re being led, a little like donkeys. If the reader is not to waken from the fictional dream, it can be useful to anticipate the reader’s feeling and channel it back into the story.)

Another kind of delay may be achieved by stylistic juxtaposition. Early in “Views of My Father Weeping,” Donald Barthelme introduces surrealist elements—in this case images from outside the flow of time—into a narrative that has so far been profluent, or forward-moving. We are puzzled for a moment, wondering whence came the strange image of the dead father weeping on the bed, then the image of his throwing the ball of yarn, then that of his mashing the cupcakes. Before we can figure out the answer, we are thrown back into profluence, only to be brought up short again, a page or two later, by more surrealism. The effect, though more subtle and intellectual, is a little like that in a thriller novel when the author leaves one character and sequence of events for another not immediately relevant to the first but sure to intersect with it eventually. So, for instance, the writer may begin with a likable American family of tourists arriving in Hong Kong, then switch to a group of dangerous international plotters. Mentally casting forward, the reader expects trouble for the tourists and feels the beginning twinges of suspense. Here, as in Barthelme, the suspense comes partly from our not knowing for sure where we are or how to anticipate the future.

In serious fiction, the highest kind of suspense involves the Sartrian anguish of choice; that is, our suspenseful concern is not just with what will happen but with the moral implications of action. Given two possible choices, each based on some approvable goal, we worry, as we read, over which choice the character will make and, given the nature of reality, what the results will be.

In some recent fiction, notably that of Samuel Beckett and, often, Donald Barthelme, the writer makes ironic use of the fictional convention of delay, encouraging the reader to cast forward to some possible outcome and then refusing to make any progress toward that end. In
Waiting for Godot
we are told that the two tramps have come to this barren place to wait for Godot, whoever that may be. The tramps talk and go through circular motions—routines leading nowhere—and time passes, in the sense that things happen (though not sequentially): The one remaining leaf falls from its branch on the nearly barren tree; but Godot does not arrive. Our conventional expectation helps Beckett make his point on stasis. In Beckett’s play
Happy Days
we get much the same thing. The pile of refuse in which one of the two characters is buried gets deeper act by act—by the third it is up to her neck; but despite this proof that time is passing, the characters learn nothing, make no progress. In Barthelme, the end may be achieved but, if so, proves to be some idiotic joke, as at the end of “The Glass Mountain” or
The Dead Father
—a joke that makes nonsense of the quest. In these works delay becomes an end in itself—the value, if any, is in the journey, not the arrival—and the anguish of choice proves a fool’s delusion, since no choice brings satisfaction. The art of such fiction lies in keeping the reader going, though the writer knows from the beginning that there’s no place to go. The moral value of such writing is obviously dubious, though it can be argued—by emphasizing the moral seriousness of the writer as he presents his suspect opinions; by pointing out, if possible, the measure of authentic compassion we can feel for the characters
(not just pity or ironic detachment); or by maintaining that, in laughing, we at once accept and reject the conceit. We accept, much as we do when we hear sick jokes, in that we see how the writer might say such an outrageous thing; we reject in that, in the act of laughing, we deny that human beings are the helpless clown-creatures the author has represented, and we suspect, rightly or wrongly, that the author secretly agrees with us—otherwise why make the characters so clownlike? The fact that Samuel Beckett is in earnest, or says he is, may surprise us but does not change our response. To the writer who wishes to emulate Beckett or Barthelme, the only possible advice is this: Make sure your routines are as interesting as your model’s.

About style, the less said the better. Nothing leads to fraudulence more swiftly than the conscious pursuit of stylistic uniqueness. But on the other hand nothing is more natural to the young and ambitious writer than that he try to find a voice and territory of his own, proving himself different from all other writers. Such a young writer is likely to take advice from no one, and though that fact may exasperate his writing teacher, the wise teacher knows it’s an excellent sign, and gives the young writer his head, objecting to and criticizing stylistic absurdities only enough to keep the student honest.

A few observations may be made to the young stylist that may prove useful. First, most fictional styles are traditional—think, for example, of the customary style of the tale, the yarn, the third-person-omniscient realistic piece of fiction. Many writers simply master one such style and make use of it all their lives, counting on their own unique experience and personality to make the style individual. They are right to do so, though their choice is not the only one available. Each writer’s interests and personality must inevitably modify the style. Someone who writes brilliantly, with closely observed detail, about professional
dishwashing or clerking in a grocery store, presenting his material in the normal style of third-person-subjective realistic fiction, must inevitably sound different from another writer who, working in the same basic style, writes of circus work or the life of professional torturers. Style often takes care of itself.

The same is true of the writer who masters not one conventional style but many, either writing each story in a style different from the style he used last time or mixing styles within a given story in a way that seems to him intuitively satisfying and somehow justifiable in terms of the story as a whole.