Aspects of the Novel
Grouped roughly by subject matter and only partially cited, the following are quotes or paraphrases from the works below on the art of the novel, followed by 21 lessons I have tried to apply to my own writing:
Poetics, Aristotle translated by S. H. Butcher (A)
Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster (AON)
How Fiction Works, James Wood (HFW).
The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera (MK)
Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov (VN)
Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight V. Swain (DVS)
Story Genius, Lisa Cron (LC)
Story Physics, Larry Brooks (LB)
The Novel
- Final test of novel – Our affection for it (AON).
- The novelist must cling to the idea of expansion, not completion, “not rounding off but opening out.” (A)
- The sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover: an unknown segment of existence – Hermann Boch (MK)
- “The force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.” (VN)
- “We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.” (VN)
- Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.”
- The novel’s spirit is the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to the preceding ones… (MK)
- Kafka – “the radical autonomy of the novel” (the poetry that is the novel—allowed Kafka to say things about the human condition that no social or political thought could ever tell us) (MK)
- The novel: the great prose form in which the author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves, some great themes of existence. (MK)
- Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work. (MK)
- The novel is an imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin. (MK)
- If European culture is under threat… what is most precious about it—its respect for the individual, for his original thought, and for his right to an inviolable private life—that precious essence is being held safe as in a treasure chest, inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel. (MK)
Theme
- An existential inquiry; the abstract thing that gives the novel as a whole an internal coherence, the least visible and most important kind. (MK)
- First, I develop the novel’s story; and over that, I develop the themes. (MK)
- Whenever a novel abandons its themes and settles for just telling the story, it goes flat.
- Distinguish motif – an element of the theme or story that appears several times, always in a different context. (MK)
- Perhaps all novelists ever do is write a kind of theme (the first novel) and variations. (MK)
- Images or an idea repeated in a novel; one theme may parody another (caged birds in Bleak House) (VN)
- Subtextual tool relying on six elements of physics. The relevance of the human experience shown through the dynamics of the story. What the story asks the reader to think about or feel about real life. Best if the reader must see both sides and the story teaches truth through challenge to the characters and consequences of their actions (LB).
Style
- Free indirect style - characters’ own words, free of authorial flagging. Reader sees through a character’s eyes, yet sees more than character can see. Avoid aestheticism (author getting in the way).
- How the structure works: author’s mannerisms, imagery, metaphors, etc. – a magic key to all great masters (VN)
- Languages: 1) author; 2) character; 3) daily speech. Tension when character’s perception combines with physical detail.
- The manner of the author, special intonations, vocabulary (VN)
- Flaubert combined habitual and dynamic detail, from different time signatures (HFW).
Point of View
- Relation in which narrator stands to the story (AON)
1. Describe character from outside, as impartial or partial onlooker
2. Assume omniscience and describe character from inside
3. Assume position of one character w/o knowledge of motives of others
- Three types of author “representatives”:
1. First-person narrator (author, first-person protagonist, invented author, part-time 3d person character)
2. Sifting agent – 3d person; everything seen through these eyes
3. Perry (periscope) – character placed where author wants reader to visit, or who meets people author wants readers to meet (VN)
- Viewpoint may shift (“bounce”) (AON)
- Fanny in Mansfield Park- detached observer and participant – convenient narrator (VN)
- The clearest style uses only current or proper words; at the same time it is mean if diction distorts the meaning of the words. Lofty when it employs unusual words (every word is current, strange, metaphorical, ornamental, newly coined, lengthened, contracted or altered). A certain infusion of elements is necessary to style. Nothing contributes more to produce a cleanness of diction that is remote from commonness than the lengthening, contraction, and alteration of words. Language gains distinction by deviating in exceptional cases from the normal idiom, while partial conformity with usage will give perspicuity. Use of proper words will make it perspicuous. Diction should be elaborated (unusual words) in the pauses of the action, where there is no expression of character or thought. Character and thought are merely obscured by over-brilliant diction.
- Novelist: write your own personal dictionary… your key words, your problem words, the words you love… (MK)
- Homer, admirable in all respects, has the special merit of being the only poet who rightly appreciates the part he should take himself. The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person. (A)
- The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work. (MK)
- Author can intervene directly but tone is crucial: must be playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or inquiring. (MK)
- It is futile to try to make a novel “difficult” through stylistic affectation; any novel worth the name, however limpid it may be, is difficult enough be reason of its consubstantial irony.
- Three elementary possibilities for the novelist: he tells a story (Fielding); he describes a story (Flaubert); he thinks a story (Musil) (MK)
- Austen’s methods of characterization: 1) direct description; 2) directly quoted speech; 3) reported speech; 4) imitation of character’s speech when speaking of him. Also reminiscence – unconscious imitation of an earlier author. (VN).
- Madame Bovary - The subject may be crude and repulsive while its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books. (VN)
- Flaubert had a special device: the counterpoint method: parallel interlinings and interruptions of two or more conversations or trains of thought. (VN)
- Flaubert – semicolon-and introduces a culminating image, vivid detail, descriptive, poetic, melancholy or amusing. (VN)
- Clichés – “bits of dead prose and of rotting poetry” (VN)
Form
- Structure (development of a story; choice of characters and how they are used, interplay of themes) = the planned pattern of the artwork + style (VN)
Characters
- Author’s function is to reveal hidden life.
- Flat – single essential attribute (HFW). Not changed by circumstances, and so comforting in retrospect (AON). Can convey human depth (Dickens)
- Round – surprise with each appearance; combine well with others; draw each other out without seeming to do so (HFW). Capable of surprising in convincing way (AON)
- Fit to perform tragically for any time and move us to feelings other than humor or appropriateness. (Austen’s characters are round or capable of rotundity) (AON)
- Real: when author knows everything about the character, explicable though not necessarily explained (AON); harmony and dissonance between registers (high v low; grand v vernacular) makes character real (HFW); should run smoothly, while plot should cause surprise.
- Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches that do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything, are not expressive of character. Aim at: 1) any speech or action that manifests moral purpose of any kind will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is good; 2) propriety; 3) character must be true to life; 4) consistency (A)
- Inviolable standard of psychological realism: character must have complete independence; author must disappear so as not to disturb the reader, who wants to give over to illusion and take fiction for reality. (MK)
- Even if author is speaking, his reflections are connected to a character: must think his attitudes, his way of seeing things, in his stead and more deeply than he could do it himself.” (MK)
- In Dickens, every character has a specific attribute that reappears (VN)
- Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the characters in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories. (VN)
- Joyce: breaks character into fragments scattered through book; reader gradually puts together/ Proust shows character through notions of other characters. (VN)
- Stream of consciousness – better say the “stepping stones of consciousness” - exaggerates the verbal side of thought; drawback of recording thought is the blurring of the time element and too great a reliance on topography. (VN)
- Ulysses – man in brown Macintosh = Joyce (as Stephen notes Shakespeare is the ghost in Hamlet). Ulysses Part Two, Chapter 6 – “more amusing for a writer to write than for a reader to read, and so its details need not be examined.” (VN)
- Introduce characters in action, after preparation for entrance and not in a group. (DWS)
- Focus on empathy. Character’s journey is stage upon which layers of emerging arc are displayed. Basic facets: backstory, inner conflict vs exterior conflict, fears, feelings, judgments, character arc within the context of the quest. How does character feel about and respond to the quest? Best if reader feels what hero feels and steps into hero’s role as reader hopes he would, with something interesting to do and something to be. (LB)
Metaphor
- Must be poetic but emanate from character. Leap toward the counterintuitive, comparing to the opposite (see Russian formalists – ostranenie (defamiliarization)); estrange and then connect – surprise image followed by recognition of inevitability. (HFW)
Story
- Narrative of events in time sequence. Reader wants to know what happens next. Asks to be read out loud (transforms reader into listener). Suspense – “the only literary tool that has any effect on tyrants and savages” (AOL). War & Peace – great chords begin to sound, extended over space as well as time
- Must add values. Why does protagonist care – the “third rail”? Protagonist on the threshold:
1. Protagonist’s “Want”: What deep-seated desire has he had for a long time? (must be concrete, although not necessarily possible). What specifically must happen? Why does he want it?
2. Protagonist’s “Misbelief”: What defining misbelief stands in the way (fear) holding him back from achieving that desire? What holds him back, based on specific backstory? It felt right at the time. (LC)
- Why study literature? Because I like stories. (VN)
- Story: about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result (LC)
- Story Question:
1. statement – establishes character, situation, objective;
2. question – establishes opponent and disaster. (DWS)
Plot
- Narrative of events emphasizing causality (why? instead of what next?).
- The supposed story (VN)
- Triple process: complication, crisis, solution (A)
- Demands reader intelligence and memory.
- The plot is the first principle, and the soul of a tragedy; character holds the second place.
- A certain length is necessary, a length which can be easily embraced by the memory.
- The plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.
- The unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the deus ex machina.
- As to that poetic imitation which is narrative in form and employs a single meter, the plot manifestly ought, as in a tragedy, to be constructed on dramatic principles. It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or many, little connected together as the events may be. (A)
- Character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.
- A complex action is one in which the change is accompanied by reversal, or recognition:
1. Reversal is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to the rule of probability or necessity. (The messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but by revealing who he is, produces the opposite effect.)
2. Recognition is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal.
3. The Scene of Suffering - a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds. (A)
- Consider what the poet should aim at, and what he should avoid, in constructing plots: The poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts. Everything irrational should, if possible, be excluded; or, at all events, it should lie outside the action of the play. (A)
- Once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity. (A)
- It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen - what is possible according to the laws of probability or necessity. (A)
- A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, but rather the realm of human possibilities. (MK)
- Plot, with its whole machinery of unforeseen and exaggerated coincidences: There is nothing so dubious in a novel—so ridiculous, so passé, so much in bad taste. (MK)
- Critical objections are drawn because plot is: impossible, irrational, morally hurtful, contradictory, or contrary to artistic correctness. (A)
- Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
- Tragedy must have six parts (which determine its quality): Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. (Every play contains the Spectacular). Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. A man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. (A)
- Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is better, and indicates a superior poet. (A)
- The poet should look for tragic incident to occur between those who are near or dear to one another. (A)
- Tragedy falls into two parts: Complication and Unraveling or Denouement. Incidents. Extraneous to the action are frequently combined with a portion of the action proper, to form the Complication; the rest is the Unraveling.
- Complication: all that extends from the beginning of the action to the turning-point to good or bad fortune. - The Unraveling: extends from the beginning of the change to the end
- Most important is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.
Structure
- Composition of a book; development of events; transition between themes; introduction of characters. (VN)
- Synchronization – a device used by Joyce rather than a theme; characters or things whose changing places mark flow of time. (VN)
- Used to create dramatic tension, pace, character arc (thus empathy). Unfold story in sequence that deepens the stakes and presents twists. Best if it surprises and intrigues and then rewards reader on both emotional and intellectual levels. Only minimally flexible. Story comprises four sequential parts of approximately the same length. Surprises intrigue the reader and then reward on both emotional and intellectual levels (LB)
- Scene Execution: give equal weight to character and dramatic tension. Cut quickly to mission while setting up subsequent deepening of stakes, urgency, character arc, including foreshadowing and subtext (but more latitude in Part I for setup):
1. Each scene should accomplish specific narrative mission: a twist, a layer, a piece of business, a foreshadowing;
2. Something should happen in each scene, connected to what happened before and what will happen next;
3. Story Beat (a moment of transition and illumination): aim to include in every scene: something changes: could be a reaction, moment of reflection, flashback. Start with one word or a short phrase;
4. Timing: enter scene at last possible moment (avoid setup or too much description). Deliver any big reveal at last possible moment (“cut & thrust”);
5. Show, don’t tell – to extent possible;
6. Give reader credit for ability to make leaps;
7. Best: ask and to some extent answer a thematic question in each scene;
8. Character reaction must be significant, pertinent, motive, characteristic, reasonable, in form of:
a. Feeling
b. Action
c. Speech (DWS)
- Motivation-reaction unit:
1. Sentence w/o character
2. Sentence about character (DWS)
Mystery
- Mystery is essential
- Create strategic opacity by omitting a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation or ethical principle for action
Beauty
- “At which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it.” (AON)
- The earliest novelists discovered adventure. Thanks to them we find adventure itself beautiful. (MK)
- Human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man, and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old, they may be, will never cease to astonish us. (MK)
- The beauty of a phrase depends on alliteration and assonance. (VN)
Truth
- Begins only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, and encloses them in the necessary rings of his style, e.g., comparing two sensations, making their essential nature stand out by joining them in a metaphor – to remove them from the contingencies of time, linking them together by means of timeless words.
Fantasy
- Implies the supernatural, but need not express it. Intermittent Realism pervades all the greater works of Melville, Dostoyevsky, DH Lawrence and Emily Bronte.
Prophecy
- A tone of voice, demands in reader humility and suspension of sense of humor.
Pattern
- Appeals to our aesthetic sense, though we do not see the pattern (e.g., hourglass structure of The Ambassadors). Rigid pattern may externalize the atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the door and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing-room.
Rhythm
- Not all the time (like pattern) “but by its lovely waxing and waning fills us with surprise and freshness and hope.” (AON)
- Song holds the chief place among the embellishments. (A)
- Tempo is determined by the relation between the length of a part and the “real” time of the event it describes. (MK)
- The writer’s subtlest craft: to compose a novel by setting different emotional spaces side by side. (MK)
_________________________________________________
21 Lessons I tried to incorporate in Backstory and Pandion:
1. The sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover an unknown segment of existence.
2. First, develop the story; and over that develop the themes.
3. Assume position of one character at a time w/o knowledge of motives of others, each a sifting agent--everything seen through his/her eyes, but viewpoint may shift (“bounce”).
4. Free indirect style--characters’ own words, free of authorial flagging. Reader sees through character’s eyes, yet sees more than character can see.
5. Watch for tension when character’s perception combines with physical detail.
6. Flaubert--combine habitual and dynamic detail, from different time signatures.
7. Diction should be elaborated (unusual words) in the pauses in the action, where there is no expression of character or thought.
8. Flaubert counterpoint: parallel interlinings and interruptions of two or more conversations or trains of thought.
9. Joyce synchronization: characters or things whose changing places mark the flow of time.
10. Round characters--capable of surprising in a convincing way; made real by harmony and dissonance between registers (high vs low; grand vs vernacular).
11. Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what a character chooses or avoids.
12. Every Dickens character has a specific attribute that reappears. One personality trait must stand dominant in each character.
13. Metaphor must be poetic but emanate from character. Leap toward the counterintuitive, comparing to the opposite – surprise image followed by recognition of inevitability.
14. Story = What Next? Plot = Why?
15. Plot - complication, crisis, solution; must imitate one whole action.
16. In a complex action, change is accompanied by reversal or recognition.
17. Fear and pity best result from inner structure of the piece.
18. Tragedy = complication and unraveling, and must include events inspiring fear or pity: best when events come on by surprise, and follow as cause and effect.
19. Mystery created by strategic opacity: omitting a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation or ethical principle for action.
20. The beauty of a phrase depends on alliteration and assonance.
21. Truth begins when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, and encloses them in his/her style.