THE ART OF CREATING FICTION

Also by Zulfikar Ghose

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It Also published by Palgrave Macmillan

The Art of Creating Fiction Zulfikar Ghose

Professor of English University of Texas at Austin

palgrave

* © Zulfikar Ghose 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991978-0-333-53678-0

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, Ah, well, you must do it as you canl'

Henry James, The Art of Fiction

Contents

Acknowledgements viii Preface xi

PART I THEORY 1

1 The Inescapable Lesson of the Master 3

2 Things That Appear 20

3 A Special Language 33

4 The Human Experience 50

PARTn &: PRACTICE 63

5 Towards Perfection 65 6 Imperfection 89

7 Perfection 126

PART III CODA 143

8 Answers to your Questions 145

Index 157

vii

Acknowledgements The short stories discussed at length in this book were chosen from anthologies in general use to facilitate the student's ref-erence to the complete texts. For permission to use copyright material, the author and the publishers wish to make the following acknowledgements:

For 'Bam Burning': Copyright 1939 and renewed 1967 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers. Reprinted from Collected Stories of William Faulkner by permission of Random House, Inc.

For 'Faulkner at West Point': From Faulkner at West Point, by Joseph L. Fant III, and Robert Ashley. Copyright (c) 1964 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from Flaubert's letters reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857 and The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1857-1880, selected, edited, and trans-lated by Francis Steegmuller, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1982 by Francis Steegmuller.

Excerpts from 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber' and 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' by Ernest Hemingway reprinted with permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright 1936 by Ernest Hemingway; renewal copyright (c) 1964 by Mary Hemingway.

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Selected Prose trans. Mary Hottinger, Tania and James Stem, BoUingen Series XXXIII, 1. Copyright 1952 by Princeton University Press. (c) renewed 1980 by Princeton University Press.

'The Odour of Chrysanthemums' and 'The Blind Man' by D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1922 by Thomas Seltzer, copyright renewed 1950 by Freida Lawrence. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

Excerpts from 'Our Friend Judith' from A Man and Two Women by Doris Lessing Copyright (c) 1958, 1962, 1963 by Doris Lessing. Reprinted by permission of Simon &: Schuster, Inc.

From Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright (c) 1967 by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

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Acknowledgements ix

From Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov, copy-right (c) 1980 by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc . . Excerpts from Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940-1977 by

Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, copyright (c) 1989 by the Article 3 b Trust Under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Excerpts from Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor. Copyright (c) 1957, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1%9 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O'Connor. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

From Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. three; The Captive, The Fugitive, & Time Regained, by Marcel Proust, translated by c.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; and by Andreas Mayor. Translation Copyright (c) 1981 by Random House, Inc. and Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of Random House.

'The Chrysanthemums' by John Steinbeck, copyright 1938, 1965 by John Steinbeck. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

From Tolstoy's Letters edited by R.F. Christian. Selection, English translation and editorial matter copyright (c) R.F. Christian 1978. Reprinted with permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company.

Excerpts from 'Kew Gardens' in A Haunted House and Other Stories by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1944 and renewed 1972 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Excerpts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925-1936, by Virginia Woolf, Preface and Notes copyright (c) 1980 by Anne Olivier Bell, Diary copyright (c) 1980 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

The author further acknowledges that his other sources have been the Library of America two-volume edition of the literary criticism of Henry James, Letters of Anton Chekhov, tr. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Harper & Row, 1973); Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (Viking, 1975); the collected edition of Paul V a1~ry' s works in the Bollingen series published by Pantheon Books (New York) and Routledge & Kegan

x Acknowledgements

Paul (London); The Letters of Erza Pound 1907-1941, ed. by D.O. Paige, (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950); Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New Directions, 1968); Mario Vargas Losla's The Perpetual Orgy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986). The quotation from Stanley Kunitz is from an interview in The Craft of Poetry, ed. Wllliam Packard (Doubleday, 1974), an excellent collection of in-terviews first published inThe New York Quarterly.

The quotations from Thomas Berger are from 'Observations from a Correspondence: Letters from Thomas Berger', published in the Spring 1983 edition of Studies in American Humour, and appear by permission of Thomas Berger.

Chapter 2, 'Things That Appear', was first published in a slightly different form in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer 1989) and the author gratefully acknowledges his debt to its editor, John O'Brien, whose invitation to write an essay led to the creation of this book.

Excerpts from 'Bam Burning' reprinted from Collected Stories of William Faulkner are also by kind permission of Chatto & Wind us Ltd.

Preface

A person wishing to become a surgeon specialising in heart operations seeks to enter a medical school with an established reputation in that field and expects especially to study under the guidance of a practising surgeon who has a proven notable skill and would consider it a joke if he were told that he could learn equally well were he to apprentice himself instead to the butcher at the supermarket who is highly admired for his skill in cutting up carcasses.

The best advice to writers was given by Ezra Pound when he said, 'Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work'. This might appear to be advice that is difficult to follow. It is in the nature of an art that the producers of genuinely notable work are few, the mediocrities are legion, and its teaching is often entrusted to people who have produced no work at all. Unlike the medical student, the student of creative writing rarely is able to choose the equivalent of a specialist surgeon as his teacher.

The student who would be a writer, however, is, among the inquirers after truth, the most fortunate. In creative writing, teachers of the highest eminence are to be found not among the living but among the dead and they are freely available to every student whose ambition it is to achieve greatness. The critical essays of Henry James; the letters of Gustave Flaubert; the diaries of Virginia Woolf; the lectures of Vladimir Nabokov; the journals of Andre Gide; the writings of Miguel de Unamuno: in these, and in many other works, novelists of undeniable eminence are there to teach us by revealing the theoretical preoccupations latent in their notable work. Some of the greatest practitioners of the art of fiction have recorded their theories, perceptions and working habits in considerable detail. Marcel Proust has indeed made his aesthetic speculations a motif in his novel, so that he reveals to the reader the art of creating fiction while engaging the reader's imagination with the fiction itself.

The ideas concerning the art of writing fiction offered in this book are an amalgam of the thinking of these writers without

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xii Preface

whose way of seeing and doing you and I are no more than rudimentary sentient beings who have yet to discover the faculty of sight.

This book, therefore, will engage you with ideas concerning the creation of fiction that engaged the great writers without whose work we would not have the conception of fiction that we do. That you should be familiar with that work, be steeped in the tradition, goes without saying - though, unfortunately, too few students know enough of the past and devote a disproportionate attention to their contemporaries, the majority of whom, however significant they might appear for a time, are inevitably worthless. The acquiring of the tradition by patient labour is entirely your affair; what this book offers you is the central way of seeing common to the great writers, and if you, too, acquire their per-ception you will find your own writing immensely encouraged, if not inspired, and you will be less likely to faIl into the error of thinking that all that's necessary in order to be proficient in your art is to learn the use of a few tools. It is a sad and pathetic spectacle, but there are people in this world who have not yet recognised the absurdity of trying to play tennis with a squash racket.

You should learn to use those tools, of course, and there are manuals that will teach you to do so, and if writing were merely a craft you would need to look no farther; but as an art it is concerned also with a dimension of learning that cannot be taught but can only be intuited or learned in the instincts, which is to say, experienced as a liberating moment of enlightenment. Which is why what the great writers have said in their essays, letters and journals will always remain the most important source of learning for the new writer, for without having received that enlightenment all his other learning will avail him nothing. This book, then, complements your manuals, your handbooks and what else the classroom makes available - though, if the truth were to be told, no textbook or professor of creative writing will teach you as much as you will learn from one essay by Henry James or one short story by William Faulkner or even one letter written to his mistress by Gustave Flaubert: in the art of creation, the breath of the creator is inevitably more inspiring than all the windy talk of the professors.

The first rule to understand about any art is that no art observes any rules. Ways of doing become established, a tradition becomes

Preface xiii

established. But neither the ways of doing nor the principal elements of the tradition are fixed entities; if they were, civilisation would consist of lumps of petrified matter scattered across a desert. Every new writer, even if he is not a James Joyce, is a radical and a subversive, and if he succeeds and wins greatness for himself it is because he is perceived to be different from all else that has gone before him, but once his worth is accepted then he, too, becomes a monument and the tradition that he began by challenging he ends by altering and then becoming a part of it until succeeding generations cannot conceive of a tradition of which he is not an important element. Originality, which sometimes appears to discredit and reject what is established, is no more than a complex variation of what already exists.

I emphasise the point that an art observes no rules because it is an important qualification that needs to be stated in advance. In one's attempt to teach the art of creating fiction it is inevitable that one appears to be offering rules; a textbook, with its neat chapter headings - 'Character', 'Plot', 'Dialogue' - will also reinforce the impression that what the student is learning is rules; and in a book such as this one there will be occasions when, for example, a synthesis of ideas taken from Tolstoy and Flaubert will lead to a generalisation which will have the appearance of a rule. No, there are no rules; and if you come across a generalisation that has the appearance of a rule then please remember that it is absolutely without authority, that it is only a way of looking at a question - of form, perhaps, or of style - and that it is subject to a thousand qualifications and variations of approach, which luxury of alternatives is what makes art so unpredictable and eternally fascinating.

This book has not yet begun and the word art has already been used ten thousand times. While art itself is an exceptional thing, we need not be overwhelmed by the poor little word. The scientist works at his science; we work at our art - there's nothing grand about it. What is important is that we should be serious about our art. I see no purpose in wanting to be a writer unless one has the burning ambition to be a very great one; we may fail in the end, but success and failure are considerations that do not concern the serious artist - neither being on the best-seller list nor being critically acclaimed, though each a perfectly natural wish, is a guarantee of success, and never to be published, though a fate to be lamented, does not necessarily imply failure; the only

xiv Preface

consideration that drives an artist obsessively to his work is a desire for a perfection of form that, taking its myriad facets from the great tradition, represents his image of reality. And if you are driven with this ambition, then the sweetest applause you will hear will not be from your contemporaries but it will be an applause heard by you alone, for it will be audible only within your heart, and its sound will be that of an approving murmur coming from behind your shoulder from where Dickens or Melville is expressing his delight in your sentences.