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Fiction and the Figures of Life

Summary

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Thoughts

Highlights

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PHILOSOPHY AND THE FORM OF FICTION πŸ”—

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The writer, similarly, thinks through the medium of which he is the master, and when his world arises, novel and complete-sometimes as arbitrary and remote from real things as the best formal game, sometimes as searchingly advanced and sharp to the fact as the gadget of the most inspired tinker-his world displays that form of embodied thought which is imagination. πŸ”—

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Every sentence, in short, takes metaphysical dictation, and it is the sum of these dictations, involving the "Nhole range of the work in which the sentences appear, which accounts for its philosophical quality, and the form of life in the thing that has been made. πŸ”—

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There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions, 7 and the principles which govern these constructions are persistently philosophical. The same, for that matter, is true of narration, dialogue, character, and the rest. Just as the painter's designs help make πŸ”—

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his object, the lines of the novelist offer no alternatives, they are not likely interpretations of anything, but are the thing itself. πŸ”—

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Authors who believe they must, to move their fictions, hunt endlessly through circumstances for plausible causes as they might hunt for them in life, have badly misunderstood the nature of their art-an enterprise where one word and one inferring principle may be enough. πŸ”—

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THE MEDIUM OF FICTION πŸ”—

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However, the moment our writer concentrates on sound, the moment he formalizes his sentences, the moment he puts in a figure of speech or turns a phrase, shifts a tense or alters tone, the moment he carries description, or any account, beyond need, he begins to turn his reader's interest away from the world which lies among his words like a beautiful woman among her slaves, and directs him toward the slaves themselves. This illustrates a basic principle: if I describe my peach too perfectly, it's the poem which will make my mouth water . . . while the real peach spoils. πŸ”—

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Sculptures take up space and gather dust. Concepts do
not. They take up us. They invade us as we read, and they achieve, as our resistance and their forces vary, every conceivable degree of occupation. Imagine a worry or a patn, πŸ”—

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an obsessive thought, a jealousy or hate so strong it renders you insensible to all else. Then while it lasts, you are that fear, that ache, for consciousness is always smaller than its opportunities, and Β· can contract around a kernel like a shell. A piece of music can drive you out and take your place. The purpose of a literary work is the capture of consciousness, and the conοΏ½equent creation, in you, of an imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are that patient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has constructed; and though at first it might seem as if the ric,hness of life had been replaced by something less so-senseless noises, abstract meanings, mere shadows of worldly employment-yet the new self with which fine fiction and good poetry should provide you is as wide as the mind is, and musicked deep with feeling. While listening to such symbols sounding, the blind perceive; thought seems to grow a body; and the will is at rest amid that moving like a gull asleep on the sea. Perhaps we'll be forgiven, then, if we fret about our words and continue country-headed. It is not a refusal to please. There's no willfulness, disdain, exile ... no anger. Because a consciousness electrified by beauty-is that not the aim and emblem and the ending of all finely made love? Are you afraid? πŸ”—

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THE CONCEPT OF CHARACTER IN FICTION πŸ”—

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Even the most careful student will admit that fiction's fruit survives its handling and continues growing off the tree. πŸ”—

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The nature of the novel will not be understood at all until this is: from any given body of fictional text, nothing necessarily follows, and anything plausibly may . Authors are gods-a little tinny sometimes but omnipotent no matter what, and plausible on top of that, if they can manage it. πŸ”—

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Gilbert R yle writes:
Sometimes, when someone mentions a blacksmith's
forge, I find myself instantaneously back in my childhood, visiting ;1 local smithy. I can vividly "see" the glowing red horseshoe on the anvil, fairly vividly "hear" the hammer ringing on the shoe and less vividly "smell" the singed hoof. How should we describe this "smelling in the mind's nose"? πŸ”—

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The imagination has the con1mand over all its ideas and can join and n1ix and vary them in all the \vays possible. It n1ay conceive fictitious objects with all the circun1stances of place and time. It may set them in a n1anner before our eyes, in their true colors, just as they n1ight have existed. But asΒ· it is inlpossible that this faculty of in1agination can ever, of itself,
reach belief, it is evident that belief consists
not in the peculiar nature or order of ideas, but πŸ”—

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in the manner of their conception and in their feeling to the mind. πŸ”—

"Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New
York : Oxford University Press). There is reason to suppose that Burne thinks the imagination plays w'ith ideas only after they have lost all vivifying power. Then, however, their arrangement could satisfy only our conceptions of things, not our perceptions of them."

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We do visualize, I suppose. Where did I leave my gloves?
And then I ransack a room in my mind until I find them. But the room I ransack is abstract-a simple schema. I leave out the drapes and the carpet, and I think of the room as a set of likely glove locations. The proportion of words which we can visualize is small, but quite apart from that, another barrier to the belief that vivid imagining is the secret of a character's power is the fact that when we watch the pictures which a writer's words have directed us to make, \'e miss their meaning, for the point is never the picture. It also takes concentration, visualization does-takes slowing down; and this alone is enough to rule it out of novels, which are never waiting, always flowing on. πŸ”—

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our imaginings are mostly imprecise. They are vague and general. Even when colored, they're gray.
A hare vaguely perceived is nevertheless a specific hare. But a hare which is the object of a vague image is a vague hare. πŸ”—

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Enter Mr. Cashmore, who is a character in The Awkward Age.
l\1r. Cashn1ore, who would have been very redheaded if he had not been very bald, showed a single eyeglass and a long upper lip ; he was large and jaunty, \Vith little petulant n1ovements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type. πŸ”—

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We can imagine any number of other sentences about Mr. Cashmore added to this one. Now the question is : what is Mr. Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr. Cashmore is ( 1) a noise, ( 2 ) a proper name, ( 3 ) a complex system of ideas, ( 4) a controlling conception, ( 5) an instrument of verbal organization, ( 6) a pretended mode of referring, and ( 7) a source of verbal energy. 8 But Mr. Cashmore is not a person. He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him. There is no path from idea to sense (this is Descartes' argument in reverse), and no amount of careful elaboration of Mr. Cashmore's single eyeglass, his upper lip or jauntiness is going to enable us to see him. πŸ”—

(1) He is always a "mister," and his name functions musically
much of the time. "He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and the air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which sometimes lent a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely mentionable, was on occasion balanced or matched by his playful application of extravagant terms to matters of much less moment." What a large mouthful, that sentence. His name ( 2) locates him, but since he exists nowhere but on the page (6) , it simply serves to draw other words toward him ( 3 ), or actualize others, as in conversation ( 7), when they seem to proceed from him, or remind us of all that he is an emblem of (4), and richly interact with other, similarly formed and similarly functioning verbal centers (5 ).

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Characters in fiction are mostly empty canvas. I have
known many who have passed through their stories without noses, or heads to hold them; others have lacked bodies altogether, exercised no natural functions, possessed some thoughts, a few emotions, but no psychologies, and apparently made love without the necessary organs. The true principle is direct enough: Mr. Cashmore has what he's been given; he also has what he hasn't, just as strongly. Mr. Cashmore, in fact, has been cruelly scalped. πŸ”—

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As a set of sensations Mr. Cashmore is simply impossible; as an idea he is admirably pungent and precise. πŸ”—

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So sometimes, then, we are required to take away what
we've been given, as in the case of Mr. Cashmore's red hair; sometimes it's important to hold fast to what we've got and resist any inclination we may have to elaborate, as in the case of Mr. Mulholland, who I said had thumbs; and sometimes we must put our minds to the stretch, bridging the distances between concepts with other concepts, as in the two examples which follow; or we may be called upon to do all these things at once, as in what I promise will be my final misuse of poor Mulholland. πŸ”—

  1. Well, I finally met Mr. Mulholland. Oh, what's he like? He has large thumbs.

  2. Well, I finally met Mr. Mulholland. Oh, what's he like? A silver thimble.

  3. I saw Mr. Mulholland today . Oh, what was he doing? Walking his thumbs.
    Mr. Mulholland's face had a watchful look. Although its features had not yet arrived, they were rnomentarily expected.

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To summarize, so far: 1.
Only a few of the words which a writer normally uses
to create a character can be "imaged" in any sense. z.
To the extent these images are faded sensations which
we've once had, they fill in, particularize, and falsify the author's account.
3Β· To the degree these images are as vivid and lively as
reality is, they will very often be unpleasant, and certainly can't be "feigned." Then words would act like a mindexpanding drug. 4Β· To the degree these images are general schema, indistinct and vague, the great reality characters are supposed to have becomes less plausible, and precise writing (so often admired) will interfere with their formation. 5. Constructing images of any kind takes time, slows the
flow of the work; nor can imagining keep up, in complexity, with the incredibly intricate conceptual systems which may be spun like a spiderweb in a single sentence. 6. We tend to pay attention to our pictures, and lose sight
of the meaning. The novelist's words are not notes which he is begging the reader to play, as if his novel needed sonlething more done to it in order to leap into existence. πŸ”—

Love this: "The novelist's words are not notes which he is begging the reader to play, as if his novel needed something more done to it in order to leap into existence."

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Words in daily life are signposts, handles, keys. πŸ”—

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Ortega y Gasset asks us to imagine we are looking through a window at a garden.
The clearer the glass is, the less (of the glass ) \Ve will see. But then making an effort we may withdraw attention from the garden; and by retracting the ocular ray, we may fixate it upon the glass. Then the garden will disappear in our eyes and we will see instead only some confused masses of color which seem to stick to the glass. Consequently to see the garden and to see the glass in the \Vindowpane are two incompatible operations .. .. Likewise he who in the work of art aims to be moved by the fate of John and Mary, or of Tristan and Iseult, and readjusts to them his spiritual perception will not be able to see the work of art .... Now the majority of people are unable to adjust their attention to the glass and the transparency which is the work of art ; instead they penetrate through it to pass ionately wallow in the human reality which the work of art refers to. If they are invited to let loose their prey and fix their attention upon the work of art itself, they will say they see nothing in it, because, indeed, they see no human realities there, but only artistic transparencies, pure essences. πŸ”—

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of spring, earth, and roses. Or Uncle Harry, Africa, the tsetse fly, and lovesick elephants. πŸ”—

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On the other side of a novel lies the void. Think, for instance, of a striding statue; imagine the purposeful inclination of the torso, the alert and penetrating gaze of the head and its eyes, the outstretched arm and pointing finger; everything would appear to direct us toward some goal in front of it. Yet our eye travels only to the finger's end, and not beyond. Though pointing, the finger bids us stay instead, and we journey slowly back along the tension of the arm. In our hearts we know what actually surrounds the statue. The same surrounds every other work of art: empty space and silence. πŸ”—

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A character, first of all, is the noise of his name, and all
the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him. We pass most things in novels as we pass things on a train. The words flow by like the scenery. All is change. πŸ”—

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Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. πŸ”—

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Mountains are characters in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, so is a ravine, a movie, mescal, or a boxing poster. A symbol like the cross can be a character. An idea or a situation (the anarchist in The Secret Agent, bomb ready in his pocket ), or a particular event, an obsessive thought, a decision (Zeno's, for instance, to quit smoking), a passion, a me.mory, the weather, Gogol's overcoat-anything, indeed, \vhich serves as a fixed point, like a stone in a stream or that soap in Bloom's pocket, functions as a character. πŸ”—

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Normally, characters are fictional human beings, and thus are given proper names. In such cases, to create a character is to give meaning to an unknown X; it is absolutely to define; and since nothing in life corresponds to these Xs, their reality is borne by their name. They are, where it is. πŸ”—

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If one examines the texture of a fiction carefully, one will
soon see that son1e \Vords appear to gravitate toward their subject like flies settle on sugar, while others seem to emerge from it. In many works this logical movement is easily discernible and very strong. When a character speaks, the words seem to issue from him and to be acts of his. Description first forms a nature, then allows that nature to perfonn. πŸ”—

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Mr. Cashmore may never have had a model, and may never have been imagined either, but may have come to be in order to serve some high conception (a Mr. Moneybags ) and represent a type, not just himself, in which case he is not a reality rendered, but a universal embodied. πŸ”—

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In well-regulated fictions, most things are overdetermined. πŸ”—

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Any painter knows that a contour may only more or less enclose his model, while a free line simply and completely is. Many of the model's contours may be esthetically irrelevant, so it would be unwise to follow them. The free line is subject to no such temptations. Its relevance can be total. As Valery wrote: There are no details in execution. πŸ”—

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But the writer must not let the reader out; the sculptor must not let the eye fall from the end of his statue's finger; the musician must not let the listener dream. Of course, he will; but let the blame be on himself. High tricks are possible: to run the eye rapidly along that outstretched arm to the fingertip, only to draw it up before it falls away in space ; to carry the reader to the very edge of every \vord so that it seems he must be compelled to react as though to truth as told in life, and then to return him, like a philosopher liberated from the cave, to the clear and brilliant world of concept, to the realn1 of order, proportion, and dazzling construction ... to fiction, where characters, unlike ourselves, freed fron1 existence, can shine like essence, and purely Be. πŸ”—

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IN TERMS OF THE TOENAIL : FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE πŸ”—

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Lowry is constructing a place, not describing one; he is making a Mexico for the mind \Vhere, strictly speaking, there are no menacing volcanoes, only menacing phrases, where complex chains of concepts traverse our consciousness, and where, unlike history, events take place in the moment that we read them-over and over as it may be, irregularly even, at widely separated timeswhenever we restore these notes to music. πŸ”—

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In this conceptual country there are no mere details, nothing is a simple happenstance, everything has meaning, is part of a net of essential relations. Sheer coincidence is impossible, and those critics who have complained of this quality in Lowry1 have misunderstood the nature of the novel. 'They would not complain of the refrain of a song that its constant reappearance was coincidence. So the Ferris wheel of the festival-for this is the Day of the Dead, after all-will turn in our eyes as it turns in the Consul's, the burning wheel of Buddhist law, "its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the trees," appearing just as often as design demands. πŸ”—

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But certainly not the things so important to us despised sober people, on \'hich the balance of any human situation depends. It's precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlo\'e, your Faust n1an, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That's like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail. πŸ”—

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Fiction is life in terms of the toenail, or in terms of the Ferris wheel, in terms of tequila ; it is incurably figurative, and the world the novelist makes is always a metaphorical model of our own. πŸ”—

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Perhaps one can say that the scientist works always through a quantitatively abstract system, and that his purpose seems to be to find \vays to represent the vague and informal qualitative content of experience within a rationally well-ordered formal scheme. But Hamlet's and Horatio's words rely in no obvious way upon the math em at ical or scientific, and we are forced, in what is really a very complicated and very peculiar manner, to infer the same phenomenon we reached from ten degrees and force five from logical absurdities, strange con1parisons, and silly riddles. πŸ”—

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Shakespeare has introduced an altogether novel set of concepts; novel, that is, with respect to the idea of weather as such; and it is through these concepts that we understand the kind of wind and cold we're in, just as, through the mathematical, the scientist tries to understand the experienced weather too. πŸ”—

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the technique of the artist is like that of the scientist. He invariably views the transactions of life through a lens of concept: through the shrew, the wife; through the wife, the dog; and through the dog, the cold and persistent wind. πŸ”—

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Metaphor is a manner of inferring; a manner of setting down as directly and briefly and simply as possible whatever is necessary for the inference desired, although the conclusion may require premises that are neither brief nor plain and do not seem direct, since direction, in both art and metaphor, is often indirection elsewhere; for it is as much a matter of concern there to seek the severe straight way as it is in science and mathematics to seek the same. But metaphor is more than a process of inference; it is also a form of presentation or display. πŸ”—

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Metaphors argue. They endeavor also to produce acquaintance: the frog who jun1ps, the Count who is tall. "It is a nipping and an eager air" has qualities of both proof and n1eeting. It describes one very strange thing jn order that we may infer and in son1e equally strange way feel another. It seems to πŸ”—

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present us with the cold rather than name it, and it seems to argue the cold rather than be it. πŸ”—

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The scientist, after a time, finds himself with a store of observations of the natural world on the one hand, and a system of pure mathematical connections on the other. Within the mathematical system he can make inferences with great speed and accuracy. Unfortunately the system is empty; it has no content; it tells him nothing about the world. His observations tell him nothing either, for logical connections cannot be perceived; his data ren1ain disorganized; there are no paths through it for the mind. But if he decides to represent a body by a point and motion by a line, then the system becomes concrete, at once trapping a vast number of physical things in a web of logical relations. In this way the scientist makes his model. πŸ”—

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Metaphors rarely have a thoroughly formal and abstract
lens, but when they do the resemblance to the scientific case is striking. If one lover says sadly to the other: "We shall always be as far apart as we are now; we meet only in illusion," the figure is drawn from geometry and the rule is: let lives travel in straight lines; while the conclusion is: since our lives are parallel, we shall never meet. And it is a commonplace that such lines seem to converge at the horizon. πŸ”—

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the form and method of
metaphor are very much like the form and method of the novel. If metaphor is a sign of genius, as Aristotle argued, it is because, by means of metaphor, the artist is able to organize whole areas of human thought and feeling, and to organize them concretely, giving to his model the quality of sensuous display. πŸ”—

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imagine the Oriental deviousness, the rich rearrangements, the endless complications of the novel conceived as I suggest it should be, as a monumental metaphor, a metaphor πŸ”—

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we move at length through, the construction of a mountain with its view, a different, figured history to stretch beside our own, a brand..:new ordering both of the world and our understanding; for most of us do live under our lives like creatures covered by a sea or shadowed by a mountain, a volcano, its edges deepeqed further by ravines. πŸ”—

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even the apparently literal language of the novel πŸ”—

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has a figurative function πŸ”—

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when the Consul falls over in the road, the concreteness of the scene presented should keep us to the concreteness of our own, each immediate and personal yet as shared as breathing, so \Ve don't dare make a mean abstraction of it, crying out as though we were critics : ah, look, the fall of man! oh, feel again the foolish frailties of flesh ! or, dear me, how hard life is to mount, how slow to summit! (all such shouts are vulgar and may rouse the Consul from his swoon before the proper words do); rather we see our own life in the same fashion Lowry has envisioned Firn1in's; what we take a way and keep is the novel's figurative form; we reconceive our own acts in his manner; hear, in our own ears, similar symbolic tones; and finally everything becomes clear-clear, that is, in terms of one quite bent and dirty toenail, since on another toe there n1ight not be Carthaginians in combat, but Buicks broken down, or disgraced angels falling into Indiana. The object of that mousy metaphor was Clifford; the object of every novel is its reader. And when the metaphor is meant, we look for Clifford's tail; and when the metaphor is apt, we find it. The novel does the same thing to uοΏ½; there is no point it does not touch. Certainly details - are different. Clifford hasn't a real tail either. Nor does Hamlet's wind bark. What would make the metaphor if they \Vere just the same? πŸ”—

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The novel does not say, it shows; it shows Il}e my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes. I live in a suburb of Cincinnati, yet the Consul's bottled Mexican journey is so skillfully constructed that its image fits me-not just a piece of it with which I may identify, such sympathies rend the fabric, but the whole fantastic dangerous country, the tale in its totality. πŸ”—

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But you remember how Kant ingeniously solved his problem. Our own minds and our sensory equipment organize our world ; it is we who establish these a priori connections \vhich we later discover and son1etimes describe, n1istakenly, as natural laws. We are inveterate model makers, imposing on the pure data of sense a rigorously abstract system. The novelist makes a system for us too, although his is composed of a host of particulars, arranged to comply with esthetic conditions, and it both flatters and dismays us when we look at our own life through it because our life appears holy and beautiful always, even when tragic and ruthlessly fated. Still for us it is only "as if." Small comfort for Clifford, the n1etaphorical mouse. πŸ”—

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The novelist may fling his language from him as that
First Bang blew the stars, pretend to a distance and blacken each relation; he may claim no acquaintance with garbage cans, say he has never ridden a bicycle, assert he's not once crawled through mud, companion to a gunnysack, and not once waited with a cardboard tree and empty road πŸ”—

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for anyone, let alone Go dot (we should accede to this; he may be honest) ; yet we can be confident that sometime it has been "as if" ; that he has placed himself only at a metaphorical distance from his creation, has hidden his face while exposing his privates. πŸ”—

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Models, however, aren't real. And metaphorical models
arc even less so. Light does not travel in straight lines, we only represent it that way. Nor arc all the features of our mathematics features of our data. Twice 2
s is so, but so
Fahrenheit is not twice warmer than its half. With metaphorical models the discrepancies arc even greater. Although the scientific model yields testable results ( triangulation docs give us the height of the steeple), our fictional conclusions, the inferences we draw there, remain forever in the expanding spaces of the novel. πŸ”—

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In a metaphor that's meant, the descent to the literal can never be made. And as I've
pointed out, when the terms interact, we should begin to see Clifford-like qualities among our friends who are mice. πŸ”—

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No wonder the novel is long. No wonder, either, that at the edge of the Volcano, the danger is real though its source is a fiction, an image perceived on a drunkard's toenail, for such a book says to each of its readers more than that two mountain chains traverse the republic; it says what Rilke wrote of another work of art, the torso of an archaic Apollo:
There is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. πŸ”—