The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth

In an effort to read criticism and apply it to writing, I read this essay. I haven't been able to apply it to reading, that comes later, because it took me a long time to digest it all. So this is an outline of my understanding, for me, to use in reference to the next set of reading that I do.

Booth's primary argument is that while many critics call for the absence of authorial commentary in the novel, that authorial presence is essential and that all authorial devices, as well as attitude and values are in fact authorial influence. This should be welcomed when done effectively. Objectivity is impossible because the basic framework of a novel is a communication between author and reader.

The Authors Many Voices

• Commentary
  
• Character statements
  
• Reliable narrators
  
• Metaphor
  
• Placement and sequence of telling
  

All Authors Should be Objective

Neutrality and the Author's Second Self

• Sartre "art must be like science" but what's objective and by whose scale?
  
• Everyone is against everyone else's prejudices and in favor of his own commitment to the truth
  
• The argument in favor of neutrality is thus useful in so far as it warns the novelist that he can seldom afford to pour his untransformed biases into his work.
  
• Author creates implied version of self
  
• Some authors seem to be discovering or creating themselves as they wrote
  
• Intricate relationship of real author with his various official versions of himself; different works as reflection of the different "author self"
  
• Three terms used to name core of norms and choices: style, tone and technique these are all examples of authorial presence
  
• Author must be in harmony with choices he makes for narrative character; not necessarily be in harmony with the character himself
  
• Shakespeare does not plague us with his undigested personal problems
  

Emotions, Beliefs and the Reader's Objectivity

• Art cannot be reality else it is destroyed
  
• Distance is key; under distanced doesn't attract and over distanced is too personal
  
• If emotional effect is decreased something else in the novel must increase (social judgment for example)
  
• Authorial presence that can be purged: unrealistic author voice; unrealistic human emotion; moral judgment
  

Types of Literary Interest (and Distance)

• Curiosity about the facts; what's going to happen?
  
• Completion of pattern or form; crime and punishment; cause and effect or genre expectations (a sonnet must begin and end as a sonnet)
  
• Human attachment (desire to see the protagonist succeed or fail)
  
• 1 without 3 = detective novel
  
• Technique alone will not hold interest
  
• We will accept destruction of character we love if destruction is necessary to satisfy other interests
  
• But in great work we surrender our emotions for reasons that leave us with no regrets, no inclination to retract, after the immediate spell is past. They are, in fact, reasons which we should be ashamed not to respond to.
  
• Joyce values truth and beauty and Stephen will do anything conventionally amoral and reader will accept
  

Combinations and Conflicts of Interests

• Narrow setting does not equal narrow interests (Austen)
  
• Dostoevsky: curious about religious and political battle between nihilism and relativism, and we want to know if Pophyry will catch his mouse
  

  
   

Role of Belief

• Unless reader adopts attitude or belief it will be difficult for reader to endure
  
• Shakespeare: evil is bad and part of life; universal experience
  
• Woolf: sensibility is good; insensitivity is bad if reader doesn't agree then won't have reaction
  

The Morality of Impersonal Narration

The Morality of Elitism

• To believe that that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality." (Woolf)
  
• One possible reaction (of the artist) to a fragmented society may be to retreat to a private world of values, but another might well be to build works of art that themselves help to mold a new consensus.
  
• Writer must transform ideals so that they don't appear in the story as the writer's ideals but shared with the reader
  
• Reader needs help viewing the author's world
  
• Book as communication between the author and reader (and all that in between)
  
• Cannot divorce human action from human meaning (attitude, moral judgment)
  
• Author is rewarded by the peers he creates in his readers
  

 

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Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi

Written in first person present tense, it is the inner monologue of a man who is on his last night in his home with his family. Unbeknownst to them, he is leaving in the morning. The opening line tells the whole story, "It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back." Why, we immediately want to know and that puts the reader right at the highest dramatic point.

How does he tell the story? The reader is with Jay over the course of the evening. The story moves through about six hours as he bathes his boys, puts them to bed, eats with his wife, tries to pack, goes to bed, masturbates in bathroom, is interrupted by son, puts him back to bed, leaves the house. Threaded throughout that is back story that tells us why Jay is leaving and what he thinks about it.

• What he anticipates the future to hold. "Eight years ago, my friend Victor left his wife. Since then he has had only unsatisfactory loves, including the Chinese prostitute who played the piano naked and brought all her belongings to their assignations." (p.362)
  
• His reflection on sex despite his active sexual longings, and finally affair with a young girl. "After a certain age, sex is no longer casual. To lay your hand on another's body, or to put your mouth against another's –what a commitment that is! Your whole life uncovered." (p.363)
  
• His marriage: "It wasn't Susan's wit or beauty that attracted me. There was never great passion—perhaps that was the point." (p.365)
  
• His insecurity: "Fear is something I recognize. My childhood still tastes of fear. Fear of parents, aunts, and uncles, of vicars, police, and teachers, and of being kicked, abused, and insulted by other children. The fear of getting into trouble, of being discovered, castigated, smacked, ignored, locked in, locked out. There is, too, the fear of your own anger, of retaliation and of annihilation, as well as the fear of who you might become. It isn't surprising that you become accustomed to doing what you are told while making a safe place inside yourself and living a secret life." (p.366)
  
• His friend Asif's perspective on marriage, followed by what Jay sees as his failures.
  
  

  "But marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in Hell, and a reason for living. You need to be equipped in all areas, not just the sexual.'
  

  'Yes,' I said, dully, 'I know.'
  

  Oh to be equipped in all areas." (p. 368)
  

• His struggle with the question of being true to his own self and his (self-centered) desire for freedom and possibility.
  
• "What did father's life show me? That life is a struggle, and that struggle gets you nowhere. That there is little pleasure in marriage; that it is like doing a job one hates. You can't leave and you can't enjoy it. Both he and Mother were frustrated, neither being able to find a way to get what they wanted. Nevertheless, they were loyal and faithful to each other. Disloyal and unfaithful to themselves. Or do I misunderstand?" (p. 369)
  
• His role in his marriage. "Its been weeks since we fucked. I've stopped approaching Susan in that way, to see if she desires me. I have waited for a flicker of interest. I am a dog under the table waiting for a biscuit."
  
• His hope for redemption. "If she wakes up, puts out her arms, and says she loves me, I will sink back into the pillow and never leave. But she has never done such a thing." (p.370)
  
• The tragedy of his situation. "I glance into the mirror and see a gray-haired, grimacing, mad-eyed monkey with a fist in front of him (his other hand placed delicately on his side because his back hurts from lifting the children). I suddenly feel I am more likely to weep than ejaculate." (p.371)
  
• The sadness of leaving his children. "I wonder when I will sleep beside him again. He has a vicious kick and a tendency, at unexpected moments, to vomit in my hair. But he can pat and stroke my face like a lover. His affectionate words and little voice are God's breath to me." (p.372)
  

All this serves to make Jay a fully dimensional character as an emotionally limited man. Because despite all this insight and sensitivity, there is really never a question about him leaving. He is flirting with it throughout but he is unable to be serious. His character perfectly summed up by his friend Asif. "You remind me of someone who reads only the first chapter of a book. You never discover what happens next." (p.367) Jay is perpetually stuck in his adolescent approach to the shiny and new.

I read somewhere that this story became a novella. I find that interesting since the whole story is perfectly encapsulated in these eleven pages. And while Jay is sympathetic in this short form and the portrait of this marriage poignant, I am not interested enough in him to read a longer work.

Aren’t You Happy for Me by Richard Bausch

This is third person and primarily dialog, a phone call between the father and daughter. The reader discovers the daughter's predicament (pregnant, getting married to a 63 year old who was her professor) with the father. This in contrast to his own marriage which is in trouble.

What the story achieves with this style is the building sense of dismay (particularly if you are the parent of a girl) as the daughter relays the trifecta of bad news. The reader feels empathy for Ballinger as he takes this information in. What the story didn't achieve (for me) was clarity, it skims the surface. Ballinger turns mean on the phone with his daughter and then her fiancé. That leads me to wonder "Is this why he and Mary are separating? Because he's a jerk?". Bausch doesn't give away much from Ballinger's emotional point of view, except at the end where he lapses into a reverie in which he mourns his early marriage.

Each of the parts of Bausch's story; marriage and family starting; marriage ending are well constructed. But I didn't feel that Ballinger did anything but react predictably to the situation. I also didn't think that the brief allusions to their own ending marriage built any complexity. It just heightened the bittersweet situation that Melanie is in. You can predict her marriage will end badly (widow; supporting an elderly husband and young child, divorce) and despite Ballinger's relatively normal pathway through a long marriage (twenty two years at least) it's ending so that all feels as Ballinger's reaction.

What does Bausch actually tell us about Ballinger's marriage in a ten page story?

"The truth was that he had news of his own to tell. Almost a week ago he and Mary had agreed on a separation. Some time for both of them to sort things out." (p. 86)

"Outside the window, his wife, with no notion of what she was about to be hit with, looked through the patterns of shade in the blinds and, seeing him, waved. It was friendly, and even so, all their difficulty was in it." (p.87)

"Everything they had been through during the course of deciding about each other seemed concentrated now." (p. 94)

"Of course there are things to work on. Every marriage—"His voice had caught. He took a breath. "In every marriage there are things to work on." (p. 94)

"Who knows," Ballinger's wife said. "Maybe they'll be happy for a time." He'd heard the note of sorrow in her voice, and thought he knew what she was thinking; then he was certain that he knew. He sat there remembering, like Mary, their early happiness, that ease and simplicity, and briefly he was in another house, other rooms, and he saw the toddler than Melanie had been, trailing through slanting light in a brown hallway, draped in gowns she had fashioned from her mother's clothes."

These five short lines are really the story. Melanie's impending marriage is actually a backdrop against which Bausch builds a picture of an unhappy marriage that hasn't always been unhappy.

Is there a possibility for redemption of their marriage? Sitting on the bed sharing a common memory (Ballinger believes) would be the place where the author could have made another choice. Bausch could have chosen reconciliation for these two. It would have been sweet. But happy endings aren't possible for this couple, and one speculates for Melanie. So having this couple come together would have been forced. The authentic part about this depiction of divorce is its non-eventfulness.

"He did not know why that particular image should have come to him out of the flow of years, but for a fierce minute it was uncannily near him in the breathing silence; it went over him like a palpable something on his skin, then was gone. The ache which remained stopped him for a moment. He looked at his wife, but she had averted her eyes, her hands running absently over the faded denim cloth of her lap. Finally she stood. "Well," she sighed, going away. "Work to do." (p. 95)

 

All Around Atlantis by Deborah Eisenberg

This story really caught my writer's attention. Eisenberg uses first person addressing another character in the story. The conversation is imagined, so works as memory but is conversational in style. I have often used first person conversation with the reader, but this style really spoke to me. The intimacy that the point of view creates draws the reader right in, and the conversation style allows Eisenberg to use asides and humor. But the other component of it that serves to strengthen the story is that it's a conversation between two people who "know" so the protagonist isn't explaining everything to a new person. Plus, her use of the fact that the two haven't interacted in thirty years gives Eisenberg the license to inform Peter (and us) about the other characters in the story.

'Your own, much more modest, catastrophe was quite a different thing. Now, there was a disaster one could speak of; the sort of disaster that might be experienced by human beings like ourselves; victims we could all—including Mr. and Mrs. Chandler—endorse! I must have been right, Paige told me excitedly, only a few days after her Doubts, you probably escaped—there'd been Communists swarming all over Budapest!

How gratified you would have been to her Paige's conjectural account of your escape, lined as it was the monuments to you—You Scrambling Over Tanks in the Streets. You Dodging Bullets, You in Hand-to Hand Combat with Soldiers…

"Peter?" was what I said. "I'll bet Peter was hiding under the bed."'

Eisenberg gives us Anna's opinion of Peter (one of them since their relationship was complex), gives Peter her young opinion of him, and tells a story. She also alludes to his young haughty self, and how—had he known—he would have been bolstered by Paige's tales of his escape. Paige's wildly overdone version, romanticized to fit her image of him, is heightened by Anna's humor, and the use of headline punctuation to give the sensation of reading a paper. This, of course, being Paige's only exposure to the conflict in Europe, her parent's The Chandlers. Anna's exposure being her mother's numbers tattooed on her arm and her alarming disappearances into her bedroom.

This choice in point of view makes the story both a good example of craft, and an enjoyable story. I've found the two don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. I liked this format so much that I hijacked it for a story I had been writing in third person. I had been struggling with the fact that I wanted the story to be about a relationship, but from the point of view of the woman only. The story felt flat and the emotional component was hard to build in that voice. After I read this story, I went back and applied this voice/pov to my story and it immediately reached the level of intimacy that I was seeking. I think it made it a much better story.

Point of View: One or Many

I've been wrangling with the idea of point of view and whether than more is better than one. I keep asking myself this question around the latest reading I have done: Runaway (Munro), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (Harrison), A frivolous woman (Gordimer) and The Winter Father (Dubus). And mostly I struggle with the unanswerable question: what if the author made a different choice would the story have been better? Unless I can afford to commission any of them (still living) to rewrite their story at my whim I'm out of luck. And maybe that isn't the question, maybe the question is: what did the decision the author made do to the story?

• Munro's choice made the surrender of Carla to her life with Clark more sinister. If he hadn't had another point of view than Carla's, he couldn't have told the reader that the goat had disappeared at Clark's hand. In effect, to tell this story, Munro had no choice other than to provide us with another point of view.
  
• Harrison only uses point of view shift briefly and it doesn't materially impact the story. If we hadn't drifted into Roth's seat for a moment the story wouldn't have changed. In this instance it seems almost accidental rather than intentional.
  
• Gordimer uses one point of view to influence the reader. Since it is told from the son's point of view and he is deeply attached to his mother in complicated ways, you absorb and then, subsequently, are distanced from his perspective of her. This choice allows the author the freedom to portray Grete's persona (which was essential to her) without having to examine her inner workings. You sit in the story like a guest at any one of her frivolous parties.
  
• Dubus uses one point of view to bring us closer to Peter, to feel his parental anxiety. He also makes this choice because Peter is somewhat of a narcissist and so being closeted on within his head, seeing the world his way enhances his character.
  

Of all the above stories, Munro's really has the most plot and action, action that changes the dimension of the story. The other three, while having action in them, are about the character and the character's state of mind. Where that character may be (in a cornfield or driving kids to and fro) serves only to deepen the readers understanding of the character. If Dubus had started the divorce in summer, you wouldn't have felt the relief of that season. In Maine we have the most incredible summers only because we suffer through difficult winters, in California you lose the dimension of weather because the days are (relatively) the same.

So then the question becomes what decision did I make in Sandia Peak and what did it do for me? I use only one point of view. I did so because the story is about Gina. It's her awakening, but also her taking action and asserting herself when her life has been a series of events she did not initiate. That she has been "victim" to them, passive, is part of the reason that I chose to write it from her viewpoint. It is intended to be an internal journey as opposed to a series of events. Telling Gina's story, or part of it, from another perspective feels like it would break the framework of the story I am trying to create. I guess I could commission myself to write another version (I work cheap).

A frivolous woman by Nadine Gordimer

This story is absent of dialog and the climax is difficult to pinpoint. And yet, it is a compelling and beautiful story. It's told from 3^rd person with some omniscience, some fusing of author and son from whose perspective the story is told. It reads like memory, like a memoir in some instances. It feels like stream of conscious thought, and Gordimer's elaborate sentence structure enhances that effect. Her writing reminds me a bit of Virginia Woolf. This passage describing Arnulf's fear about being able to rescue his wayward mother from the Senegalese concentration camp is an example those sentences. They take the reader through the labyrinth of thought and memory by virtue of their structure.

"How could bureaucratic processes—only ones available, badgering the Red Cross, importuning the aghast Swedes who hastily had been made the representatives of people detained in makeshift camps God knows how where by the chaos of war—reach the void, silence; worse, a gust of images tossing up thirst, hunger, parched desert, tropical deluge." (p.36)

What does no dialog do to this story? It makes it move quickly, the reader doesn't pause and sink down into the workings of Grete's life or her interaction with her son very deeply. This serves to preserve not only the son's perspective on his mother, fond and exasperated, but also understand her true feelings about her life. She is a woman who has survived horrible events; Nazi Germany, Concentration Camp in Senegal, the suicide of a husband and yet she continues to hold parties and live exuberantly. The limited viewpoint enhances her own projected persona of frivolity by not showing (what you can only imagine to be) her darkest thoughts.

So where is the climax in this story? We start with cleaning out her stash of fancy dress. She is dead. Is it the point at which she returns to Germany, unbeknownst to her son, and may not escape a second time? Is it where we learn that the son had joined the army and fought the Nazis for four years? It is difficult to understand at what point this story turns. I believe it is here at the end, where the reader's relationship with Grete changes. The closing passages shame any reader who has adopted the son's opinion of his mother as "frivolous" when clearly she has exhibited more courage than any of us might need to in our lifetime.

"Her serious son, himself, had spent four years in the Allied army settling their scores for the Nazis.

A grandmother who'd never grown up.

Life: a stack of fancy dress costumes in a pirate chest. No number tattoed on an arm; no. No last journey in a cattle truck.

Who among the responsible adults, grown up at a distance, had found a lover-cum-husband sitting in his consulting room with a revolver bullet in his brain that finally outlawed the doctor-for-Jews-only. Who had put up an umbrella against the Camp de Concentration de Sebikholane as if to shelter from a passing shower.

So what's significant about that?

The past is a foreign country.

 

No entry." (p.41)

What this story shows me as a writer is that climax in a story doesn't necessarily equate to action. In my writing I feel the need to have "an event" that serves as the turning point. Grete's events have all happened in the past and she is dead. So the climax for the story itself (not her life which was full of them) lies in the shift in the reader not the characters. I think this is an interesting and subtle aspect of storytelling I need to consider more as I read and write.

The Winter Father by Andre Dubus

The Winter Father is told in the third person using only Peter Jackman's point of view. In my continued examination of stories that limit point of view to one character, this serves as a good example. I've read it a few times and the relationship of Peter with the children, the tension and love and that become exaggerated in divorce continue to stay with me.

When I first read The Winter Father, I thought it was the story of a divorced man trying to maintain a relationship with his children. But on a second closer reading, I realized that the story is really about Peter's relationship with himself as a father. Dubus writes this entirely in Peter's head. There is very little dialog, just sprinkles between lengthy passages spent with Peter. Because of this choice in narration, the story moves quickly over time. Also because of this the reader's view of the divorce, of the children, of Peter's new lover, of his ex-wife are limited to Peter's view of them. You are also limited to Peter's view of himself. So in this story, Dubus has created the claustrophobia of being an individual in a complex situation.

Is that good? Not sure. It serves to magnify his concern about his relationship with the kids, it makes that the focus. The divorce, the adultery, the fighting, his new relationship are all backdrop to his anxiety about being a divorced father.

"Not for Peter; the sky was grey, the time was grey, dark was coming, and all at once he felt utterly without will; all the strength he had drawn on to be with his children left him like one long spurt of arterial blood: all his time with his children was grey, with night coming; it would always be; nothing would change: like three people cursed in an old myth they would forever be thirty-three and eight and six, in this car on slick or salted roads, going from one place to another. He disapproved of but understood those divorced fathers who fled to live in a different pain far away. Beneath his despair, he saw himself and his children sledding under a lovely blue sky, heard them laughing in movies, watching in awe like love a circling blue shark in the aquarium's tank; but these seemed beyond recapture."

This passage is a good sample of the writing. Dubus uses long rambling sentences, broken up by semicolons, colons and commas to create the sensation of constant thought. This passage moves across thought quickly and without depth, but manages to give the reader a very vivid sense of Peter. And The Winter Father runs throughout in this. So from a close third person use where the author is constructing the inner world of the character this really works. And that is something that I'm striving for. But I'm not sure what the "story" of the Winter Father is, other than that account. Is Peter redeemed from his adulterous acts that resulted in the divorce? Not sure. Is his relationship with his children better than it was because they have more time together to "do" things? Not sure. No insight into the fullness of the story for me as reader means exactly that. No insight. Would it be a better story with that insight? Not sure. But the story does leave me, as reader, with those questions.

The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison

This story uses place almost as a character. Similar to my story, Harrison puts Clare in a physically limiting place and then tells her story through multiple levels of flashback. Yet the story moves forward. The other component of this story to consider is the "why here, why now" question? Which is unclear to me.

Harrison uses a labyrinth of scenes, varied in their chronology, associatively linked to give you the feeling of being in the mind and enhanced by omniscient drift. He uses multiple devices to tell Clare's story, including conversations with her daughter (imagined but believable) and memories.

At times Harrison's narrative voice can be confused with Clare's thoughts.

"Normally she stood aside and lived on her comments to herself on what was happening to her, but when the pain moved to the left, she moved inside herself, and this had the virtue of being novel within the framework of suffering." It is difficult to tell if this is the narrators commentary on Clare's handling of the suffering, or Clare's own observation of self. It seems to make little difference which it is, as Clare is as much an observer of her own life as the reader herself. Examination of the next five passages demonstrates how easily Harrison shifts up and down the story.

Clare fall to her knees in the cornfield and tries to pray, coming up empty. This leads us into a series of memories of Dr. Roth, their relationship and truths about Clare's life.

"One late afternoon over drinks he said something that disturbed Clare, to the effect that they shared an economic condition that was out of sync, and definitely out of sympathy with ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the rest of the world, and they had to walk an extremely narrow line not to die from being rich freaks. He asked how Clare and Donald got their home and she said it had been a wedding gift from her mother. Dr. Roth said his own home had come from his father-in-law on the same occasion, and when had either of them given more than a nominal consideration to the purchase of anything—food, clothing, wine, books, cars, vacations? He said he would have gone mad years long ago without the single day a week he spent as a volunteer at Detroit Receiving, a hospital that serviced the black ghetto and the poorest whites. Then he noticed a hurt look quickly pass across her face before she could conceal it.

"What about me?" she said.

"Oh, your reading in unpleasant areas and your migraines keep the tips of your toes in the real world."

"That's not very much is it?"

"It's usually enough. Our sort doesn't need a great deal of consciousness to get by. Most often sending a check will do."

"I'm not leaving this shit heel fern bar on that sour note." She signaled the waiter for another glass of wine. Clare swore on the order of once a year. "This can't be another monkey occasion." She was referring to a benefit ball they had attended, the purpose of which was to raise money for new accommodations for the chimpanzees at the Detroit Zoo. Donald was in Atlanta for a few days and Dr. Roth's wife had entered a manic shopping phase that could best be resolved in New York City. Zilpha had only recently died and Dr. Roth thought it important for Clare to get out of the house."

Let's look at what moves Harrison makes: Harrison moves from Clare's memory, shifts for one sentence into Roth's point of view, then moves into dialog. He then cycles further back in time (only hours) to narrate the event that just recently preceded the conversation. The story then returns to the shit heel fern bar for another revelation about Clare's "piths and gists", her record of cherished passages she's kept since university. Again, Harrison takes us into Roth's point of view regarding his discomfort with her Yeats "notion to the effect that life a was a long preparation for something that never occurred."

"My piths and gists don't work since Zilpha and Sammy died." We return to Clare contributing to the answer to "why here, why now?" Harrison keeps us at the fern bar for one more commentary regarding Clare's situation and timing; that she is passive and Roth bringing that to her attention makes her nervous. Her discomfort with her life is driving towards action.

"I know you have an aversion to anything Oriental as being too passive, even though you are utterly passive yourself."

"Can I make a donation?" Clare had become nervous.

"Not at the moment. Perhaps later when a donation doesn't mean you're delaying doing something about yourself.

'When you say 'doing something about yourself' it sounds like psychobabble. You know the big section in Borders Bookstore that covers self-improvement.'

'Pathology can only be imaginative up to a certain point. If you like, I'll work on the sentence.

*

"Clare found herself nearly at the end of a row…"

Harrison brings us right back to Clare "doing something about herself." I admit, I continue to ask the question why here, why now? Once Harrison gets me to the cornfield, I completely engaged in the story. But I found I was still asking the practical question about why she would just walk off. She's had money, independence and travel. She could have left her husband at any time, called him from a foreign country with Zilpha, gone to her daughters. I'm not sure Harrison has convinced me that this moment makes sense.

Craft-wise I think the story achieves amazing things with its complexity. Harrison continually cycles away and back throughout the length of the novella, layering in back story in small pieces and weaving them in and then returning to her present state. This is an elegant series of steps that feel seamless. The reader moves with the story in and out of heads, through time without getting lost. The multiple levels enrich the story and move away from formulaic present, backstory, present pattern that I have applied in my current work.