Screeds
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Auctorial Shortcomings
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec warned his devotees not to form their estimates of him from his paintings. "One should never meet an artist whose work one admires," he said. "The work is always so much more than the man." In his own case, that might have been true, but I contend that, if an artist is not a "hack" who toils solely for monetary gain, he cannot help but reveal himself through his art. This is more true of writers of fiction than of any other category of artist.
There are two edges on that sword, of course. If a writer is a genuine, and genuinely fine, human being, the reader will know him as such, but if he has significant weaknesses or ineptitudes, those will come through just as clearly. His personailty, quite as much as his skills, will reveal itself through his treatment of his fictional characters and of the situations to which he consigns them.
This is part of the barrier to the production of good fiction. The writer can't help but be aware that he's disclosing himself, putting what matters most to him out where everyone can see it. Self-disclosure of that level is hard, and often painful. Additionally, good fiction must involve significant dilemmas for its protagonists, dilemmas that have moral dimensions -- and for maximum drama, their early choices must be bad ones.
No one likes to dwell on his mistakes, and no one likes to prattle about them to others. Yet the fiction writer, in his search for compelling material, must do exactly that.
Sometimes it doesn't work out. The writer can get wrapped around his anxieties, frustrations, or regrets so tightly that he can't allow his protagonists to escape them: he puts them into the situations that challenged him beyond his strength, and then makes them fail exactly as he did. Or he might yoke his protagonists to his wish-fulfillment fantasies, making them behave as no real person would behave, to serve his own need for a hero to admire.
There's a fine line between a larger-than-life but still plausible character and a superhero fit only for a preadolescent's fantasies.
The violation of plausibility is sometimes subtle. For example, consider Stephen King's admirable fantasy The Green Mile. Few recent books approach the grace and power of this remarkable novel. Its effect on the typical reader is long-lasting and profound. Yet to make the story possible at all, King had to wedge four characters who exhibited sensitivity and compassion well beyond the human norm into the roles of Death Row prison guards. Just how likely is it that such men would find their way into that trade, or remain long in it?
Willing suspension of disbelief can bridge a chasm of implausibility such as that, sometimes, if the writer is truly gifted, or if the story has enough force to keep the reader moving forward too quickly to look down into the gulf. But there are few writers that gifted, and few stories with the necessary thrust.
Lesser auctorial weaknesses are easier to bear, especially if the writer respects the reader as co-creator of the story. This concept isn't widely understood. The writer must leave the reader's imagination space in which to roam, and trail suggestive threads into that space for the reader to follow. He must refrain from over-specifying what the reader should expect to see there, and must take care about suggesting details, particularly details of setting or backstory, that would conflict with the reader's imaginative constructions.
The original Star Wars movie provides a good example of how this is done. In Luke Skywalker's first scene with Obi-Wan Kenobe, the old Jedi gives a very sparse description of the role of the Jedi Knights in the days of the Republic. He makes a fleeting reference to the Clone Wars, but provides no details. That opens a space for the viewer's imagination, in which he can construct his own vision of the backstory, thereby investing himself in the narrative.
With regard to evocation of the reader's imagination about setting, the necessary discipline is to under-describe. Long passages of description leave the reader's imaginative eye unemployed. Worse, they invariably have a static character, freezing the characters in place while the narrator sets forth all the details of the setting. The effect is dreary and stultifying. Elmore Leonard, the famed suspense writer, had this in mind when a fan asked him why he wrote so little description into his novels. Leonard's reply: "I try not to write the parts that people skip."
This underscores the maxim that veteran writers have been giving neophytes for centuries: cultivate an eye for the telling detail. A "telling detail" is evocative. It spurs the imagination forward, rather than commanding it to stand still while a ream of static factual detail is heaped upon it. It suggests the sort of setting in which it would most likely be found, but preserves the reader's degrees of freedom. And it can be related quickly, in a sentence or two rather than in a three-hundred-word paragraph.
I'm in the process of completing a novel that's faced me with many challenges. The ones discussed above are uppermost in my mind at present. They have me wondering: Will whoever deigns to read this book learn more about me than I want him to know? If so, how am I giving myself away? Should I be less self-revealing, or should I fix my own flaws of personality and self-discipline before I proceed?
Decisions, decisions...
| <<- Asymmetries | Battle Lines ->> |
