Understanding fiction

Alice Walker, whose short story "Roselily" appears in this anthology, recounts in an essay the process whereby she absorbed tales from her mother, who in turn had received these stories from earlier ancestors and "anonymous" black women. These stories "came from my mothers lips as naturally as breathing." Their creative spark reflects the vitality of a long oral tradition.

Fiction began as storytelling, perhaps at night around warming campfires or anywhere else that people gathered. In those times the stories were sung or told in verse. Fiction comes directly from ancient oral traditions found in numerous cultures of the world.

Sometimes there were storytelling or story-singing contests, as in the classical age of Greek letters, when poet-playwrights read their works, more in verse than not, to audiences gathered for the festivals of Dionysus, which ran from autumn through spring each year. These early stories usually were about figures or events familiar to particular groups, and such stories often became well known. Eventually, embellishments on the standard tales (as they were then called) were applauded and encouraged. New characters with new characteristics appeared; new conflicts requiring other than the usual solutions were portrayed.

However much adorned, the stories that have lived the longest may symbolize basic human concerns that have remained unchanged. The story of Prometheus is a good example. We know the Prometheus story well as it has come down from the Greeks. Prometheus, pitying human beings, steals fire from the gods and brings it to earth, thus enriching human life with warmth and light. The same basic story is told in many variations all over the world. However, the heroes who steal from the gods or from other powerful beings range from ordinary mortals like King Arthur of England (securing Excalibur) to Rama of India (pulling his bow) to crafty animals (lizards, birds, or insects). At their core, though, such stories are essentially Promethean. However, it is only in die story of Prometheus that the hero is punished by the more powerful beings. In the other stories these beings exact no retribution.

Clearly, a story can have as many variations as it has storytellers, and we all tend to be storytellers, given enough encouragement. Saying "Can you top this?" or telling a fish story is as old as humanity itself. Stories may be viewed as conduits through which are passed history, cultural values, knowledge, and entertainment. Fiction provides us, as Richard Wright acknowledged of his own experience, with "vague glimpses of life's possibilities."

The short story and the novel (which may be considered a longer, more complicated story) are the major forms of fiction used today. The novella, or short novel, is a transitional form between the short story and die novel. The three forms evolved from the earlier tale, fable, legend, and myth.

Fiction, whether short or long, suffers from (or just possibly is enriched by) a preponderance of definitions, many of which are imposed upon the works by persons other than the creators of them. There are times when it is important to let the writers themselves say what fiction is or is not and what it should do or should not do. Nevertheless, if reading a work of fiction makes us believe in its content and its characters, then the work should be considered successful; for fiction is intended first to find believers, and belief must precede any other reaction to the work. A work of fiction usually possesses character, plot, setting, point of view, theme, and, sometimes, symbols. The way language is used to establish each of these elements helps to create within us a reaction to the work.

The choice of language is only one of several ways to tell us what fiction is. Thomas Berger in his novel Killing Time (1972) states, "A work of fiction is a construction of language and otherwise a lie." Constructions of language shape civilization. (Lies are told for no other reason than to be believed.) Next, we confront E. L. Doctorow's assertion, "There is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction." A third perspective comes from Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: "At best, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while." Singer's lies, then, are "white," and his "constructions of language" are illusions.

Explanations of "fiction" abound. Flannery O'Connor holds that the written word has more meaning than the spoken, a fact that gives fiction more importance, perhaps more moral force, than speech. For Herman Melville, fiction offers more reality "than life itself can show.” And for Amy Tan, fiction is predicated on "the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth." In any event, it is clear that fiction is a statement by a writer about a real or imaginary world, past, present, or future; it is a response to the enormous pulsations of the universe by a writer who is part of it. How do we or should we respond to such a statement? Do we feel pleasure? Should fiction make us pause to reflect?

The question of what fiction does or should do, if anything, draws relatively clear opinions from fiction writers. "It has," says Singer, "the magical power of merging causality with

purpose, doubt with faith, the passions of the flesh with the yearnings of the soul.... The zeal for messages has made many writers forget that storytelling is the raison d'etre of artistic prose."

We think this means that good fiction, without having a discernible "message," can fulfill a deep moral need for the reader, just as a writer may feel a moral compulsion to create fiction. Flannery O'Connor seems to support this stance: "It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much else unless it is good in itself." This statement seems to imply that it is possible for fiction not to have any value other than that of being good fiction—possessing an intrinsic worth, with all other factors being extraneous.

Time and again writers stress the need, first of all, to tell a story, a good story. William Faulkner, also a Nobel laureate, said that "the primary job of any writer is to tell you a story, a story out of human experience—I mean by that, universal, mutual experience, the anguishes and troubles and griefs of the human heart, which is universal, without regard to race or time or condition. He wants to tell you something which has seemed to him so true, so moving, either comic or tragic, that it's worth repeating."

Fiction can be a shared experience—a sharing of statements, observations, and moods.

The writer invites you into his or her created, ordered world so you can view your life from a new perspective. As Nobel laureate Toni Morrison observes, fiction can alert readers to "unaccountable beauty... the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer's imagination... the world that the imagination evokes."

Former Esquire and Saturday Evening Post fiction editor Rust Hills believes that contemporary fiction "has much to tell us about how we live, presents a kind of complex truth about ourselves and our society that can be found neither in the analyses and statistics of the psychologists and sociologists nor in the recently popular 'new reportage'... when we try to understand any past civilization we turn first to Art." Fiction may provide us with knowledge where before there was ignorance.

Telling a good story is considered by many to be a primary function of fiction, but telling a truthful story seems to be equally important. According to Joseph Conrad, all art "may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing light to the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect...." Conrad's opinion raises a problem. Is the writer's truth more truthful than anyone else's? Or might his truth merge with that of the reader? Truth is joined, made "manifold and one," and that characteristic, along with others, makes for good fiction. Perhaps this is what Grace Paley means when she states that fiction writing bears with it certain moral responsibilities, saying, "Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life." We are once again faced with the fact that good fiction may awake in readers a sense of moral thought and action and that the action considered often is that of creating a story. Yet we must be careful about the "truth" of a writer's vision. For example, the African writer Chinua Achebe, whose story "Civil Peace" appears in this anthology, has taken issue with the "truth" of Conrad's "classic" Heart of Darkness, finding in it the "depersonalization of a portion of the human race."

Most people feel that there is a story or novel within them waiting for an opportunity to get out, and perhaps that is as it should be. Flannery O'Connor, a fine guide to the materials of fiction, declares, "The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust...." No one has ever been able to say for sure where even the "humblest" materials come from, how they are gathered and fashioned into the shape of a story or novel. We simply do not know. Yet we do recognize, in one way or another, the ability of a good writer of fiction to take the most ordinary materials and render them into extraordinary works.

Edgar Allan Poe writes, "Either history affords [the writer] a thesis—or one is suggested by an incident of the day—or at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative—designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue or authorial command, whatever crevices of fact or action may, from page to page, render themselves apparent." Somewhere in the creative process, Poe is saying, is an experience the writer has had which he or she desires to share with others. This view is shared by Leo Tolstoy: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them...."

James Baldwin articulates a similar perspective: "One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."

Often the writer tries to share uncommon experience in order to extend our knowledge. Certainly Ernest Hemingway was such a writer. Hemingway, indeed, implies that Dostoevsky's greatness was a result of extreme hardship: "Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia." It was also Hemingway's opinion, shared by a number of writers, including James Joyce and Richard Wright, that writers "are forged in injustice as a sword is forged."

The idea that fiction is based on personal experience, which then seeks universal acceptance, refers, of course, to only one method by which fiction is created. The most widely held opinion is mat fiction is created from a mixture of fact and fancy. We sense this admixture of fact and fancy in a writer like Jorge Luis Borges, who is so intrigued by the labryinth in his fiction that he terms this structure "a symbol of bewilderment, a symbol of being lost in life."

Although fiction comes in several forms, our basic concern in this text is with die short story, which was created and defined in die United States early in die nineteenth century. While the short prose narrative—the tale—goes back to die eighth century B.C., Edgar Allan Poe is said to have first recognized the genre of die short story in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales in 1842. The term "story," as opposed to "tale," is believed to have originated in die Henry James collection Daisy Miller: A Study; and Other Stories, which was published in 1883.

Of Hawthorne's short stories Poe wrote that the form belonged "to die loftiest region of art." As to the mechanics of creating die story, Poe added that "having conceived with deliberate care a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he [the writer] then invents such incidents—he combines such events as may best aid him in establishing his preconceived effects." Furthermore, "if his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, men he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which die tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design."

Poe's rules influenced die rise both of die short story and of poetic forms in the United States and abroad. How do these rules stand up after 150 years? Isaac Bashevis Singer states: "Unlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy discussions, flashbacks, and loose construction, the short story must aim directly at its climax. It must possess uninterrupted tension and suspense. Also, brevity is its very essence. The short story must have a definite plan...." Both Poe and Singer eschew didactic elements in the short story, but it often happens that such elements find their way into a work even in the conceptual stage. Given many writers' concern for truth and justice, didactic sections may perhaps be excused. One definition of "didactic," it is worth noting, is "morally instructive."

Short story writers now are legion, and they have, like the form, contributed much to literature from the early stages of the industrial revolution to today's age of supertechnology. It is often said, and it is probably true, that most people in most modern societies find themselves with diminishing time to read. Novels are longer and demand more time and thought from us; short stories may demand more consideration for shorter periods of time and perhaps have not quite so much labyrinthian plot. The short story may be perfect for our age—and even perfect for certain writers. As Alice Munro admits, she started writing short stories because she didn't have time to write anything else!

As an integral part of literature, the short story, like the novel, must first of all tell us a story. The various interpretations of the story, the question of which philosophy it might propound, and whether the author succeeded—all such considerations come long after the facts of creation and publication. It may happen that as literature becomes more and more just another product of the entertainment factory, the labels attached to literature may come to bear more weight than the works themselves. We, of course, hope this will not happen.

By whatever means a story is created and however it is structured, whether it imitates life, expresses it, affects it, or projects it, language ultimately makes the story work. Language is the final mold of all the other elements of fiction—language shows what it is and what it does, reveals how it was created, and gives it the ultimate form it demands. A contemporary novelist and poet, Judith Ortiz Cofer, who grew up in the United States initially speaking Spanish, describes her acquisition of a second language—English—as an emergence from the bottom of a swimming pool: "I managed to surface and breathe the air of the real world... for I needed to communicate almost as much as I needed to breathe." Language creates character, action, mood, tone, symbols, and so on. Concepts do not. Everything in the world, as a highly fluent chimpanzee in Bernard Malamud's novel God's Grace (1982) declares, might very well be the genesis of a story, but it takes language for the telling. In good fiction, in all great literature, it is language that we see, feel, and hear. Language is both the wrapper on the package and one of the gifts inside it.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16