We now come to the question of the long narrative, the novel, and how we can approach the writing of one. I must admit that this is the fence I do not want to jump, for although I know there are new novels that succeed, I am at something of a loss to describe, in reasonable critical terms, why they succeed. The novels that have moved me most (Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio, F. M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple) leave me with the impression that a miracle has happened – a ‘How could it be done? Oh! She has done it.’ I am surprised whenever a good novel comes to be written because I understand the odds against which it was written.
If we think of the great nineteenth-century novels, published at a time when the novel as a form was still new, but confident, secure in its legitimacy as a writing form, we know that that kind of novel could not be written today. In narratives as diverse as Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, we are aware, when reading, of a certain inevitability of outcome: the writer has us by the hand – in his or her hand, almost – and we know we will be led, not necessarily to a happy conclusion but that the narrative will be resolved at a place that feels safe and right, that leaves us satisfied. We know we have been reading a novel but nevertheless we can believe that what the author has told us is true. Perhaps not the literal truth (it is unlikely that Jane Eyre, the unloved orphan, should come into a fortune and gain mastery over Rochester who was once her master or that Pip should be ‘raised from his station’ by a mysterious benefactor, who turns out to be Magwitch, the convict he once fed), but what Henry James called ‘the truth of the imagination’.
Dickens’ genius lies in his ability to show, in his novels, the social connections which would otherwise have remained buried. In the lawyer Jaggers’ office, Pip sees the death mask of Estella’s mother, a murderess. He has to recognise that this young woman, his object of adoration, was born to a mother who had been driven to murder. He has to recognise that his own mysteriously found wealth comes from Magwitch, who, after his transportation, made a small fortune in Australia. The respectable rich are compelled to look at the origins of their wealth, and at their own origins, which lie in crime, exploitation – in the unseen, unmentioned parts of Victorian society. Dickens manages to see life steadily and see it whole.
How can that be done now? Remember that Dickens was writing before Freud had begun to uncover the immense complexity of the human personality, before William James’s pioneering work on consciousness, which showed that our conscious mind is not solid but that it runs like a stream, swirling endlessly around symbols, associations from the past; always moving, never at rest. Dickens was writing before Marcel Proust and James Joyce, in their different ways, represented this endless swirling in fiction. Before the First World War, which slaughtered a whole generation of men. Before the Great Depression, which shook so fundamentally any belief in the possibility of continuous economic growth. Before Auschwitz, which shattered any previous, optimistic belief about human nature. After all this, how can the novelist still see life steadily, still see it whole?
For Virginia Woolf, it was the First World War that broke something undefinable, something precious, in social intercourse:
Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves …
Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked – German, English, French – so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember.
A Room of One’s Own
A writer must face the terrifying complexity of contemporary life if his or her fictions or poems are to be relevant to the world today. That means keeping one’s ears and eyes open, it means not looking away but acting as a witness. But how, you may say, does one begin?
Proceed from the bits and pieces
Yeats writes:
I must lie down where all the ladders start:
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
The poet H. D. (Hilda Dolittle) writes:
I go to where I am loved
into the snow
with no thought
of love or duty.
Adrienne Rich writes:
If you can read and understand this poem
send something back: a burning strand of hair
a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood
a shell
thickened from being battered year on year
send something back.
The writer-self tunnels back into the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart, into the lumber room, dark and sometimes frightening, where memory dwells. Memory is not abstract. It is made of bits and pieces, sometimes called junk. These are your materials, the things you begin with. You take them out to another place, into the snow, where the light is winter-bright and you can see very clearly. In this light the junk undergoes a transfiguration. It shines, it becomes something very precious, a gift you touch, caress and give back to your reader: something worth having. Writing is your imagination’s rescue work. Is there anything too vile to bring out into the light? No. When it is aired it looks and feels different. It has a use. Not just for you – because writing is never merely therapeutic, although a healing does occur – but for your readers too.
So, at the start of Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio:
The whistles always woke Mazie. They pierced into her sleep like some gutteral-voiced metal beast, tearing at her; breathing a terror. During the day if the whistle blew, she knew it meant death – somebody’s poppa or brother, perhaps her own – in that fearsome place below the ground, the mine.
‘God damn that blowhorn,’ she heard her father mutter. Creak of him getting out of bed. The door closed, with yellow light from the kerosene lamp making a long crack on the floor. Clatter of dishes. Her mother’s tired, grimy voice.
I don’t know whether Tillie Olsen lived near a mine in her childhood. Perhaps she did or perhaps the mine is a gathering together of memories – of being shut in, starved of air, light, freedom of mind and body. It has a physical reality at the same time as a metaphorical reality. Perhaps she started from the feeling and then found a correspondence for it in the outside world. At all events, it enables her to explore the danger that shoots through many childhoods: the fear of losing a mother or a father, the conflict we often endure as we hear their exasperated voices arguing above our heads or while we are in bed.
Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude also begins with a childhood but it engages with a quite different feeling:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons. ‘Things have a life of their own,’ proclaimed the gypsy with a harsh accent. ‘It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.’
Tillie Olsen’s novel begins with the whistle breaking into Mazie’s sleep and Márquez’s with the firing-squad, ice and magnets. It is as if each writer had taken the memory of some powerful event (the terrible shock of being woken by a piercing noise; discovering the ‘magical’ properties of magnets) and daydreamed in such a concentrated way about it that a group of people, a situation, a story began to emerge. The story may, when it is ‘out’, bear only a passing resemblance to the writer’s own life (although Márquez, at least, has admitted that his novel is firmly grounded in memories of his own childhood) because of the transforming power of the daydream. But it is the memory that sits like a kernel at the heart of it all.
In A Hundred Years of Solitude we even sense that the writer wants to take us back into childhood, into the time when ‘the world was … recent’. The world is recent at the dawn of human history and also at the start of a child’s life because at both times it is perceived by new eyes. At both times things lack names and it is necessary to point. At both times we see the world with a clarity that we later lose. By conflating childhood with mythic time – and does not the world possess mythic proportions when we are small? Are not adults figures of great power, who can help us grow or else destroy us? Are they not gods, to the child? – the writer enables the reader to go back, to see again what we once saw, but this time with the eyes of an adult, the adult who regards the child in him/herself.
Daydreams and their purposes
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud had this to say about daydreams:
Like dreams, they are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are based to a great extent on impressions of infantile experiences; like dreams, they benefit by a certain degree of relaxation of censorship. If we examine their structure, we shall perceive the way in which the wishful purpose that is at work has mixed up the material of which they are built, has rearranged it and formed it into a new whole. They stand in much the same relation to the childhood memories from which they are derived as do some of the Baroque palaces of Rome to the ancient ruins whose pavements and columns have provided the material for more recent structures.
(my italics)
I cannot emphasise enough the importance of daydreams for the writer in you. They occupy the time that seems vacant, as if you were just hanging around doing nothing – but where in reality the well is filling up, where you are gathering together the material that will make up your narrative; rearranging it, transforming it. What Freud called the wishful purpose could also be called the structuring principle. It is able to build a palace out of a ruin; it is the shaping spirit of your narrative.
In this chapter we’ve been looking at two novels which, although they both contain their own particular stylistic innovations, nevertheless stick to the recognised, traditional shape of the novel. They look like any other novel if you just flick over the pages and they are divided into chapters. But what if your wishful purpose is not taking you in this direction? Well, fortunately, new ground has been broken by some of our novelists, ground which can be husbanded by new writers. Publishers now accept novels which are composed of a series of short, interlinked stories, novels where prose narrative alternates with poems and – perhaps most interestingly – the epistolary novel has been resurrected, along with the novel of fragments, where every page contains a separate ‘statement’ that is linked to every other statement through place, character and feeling. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is an example of the first and Monique Witting’s The Lesbian Body of the second.
You are standing on the edge now. You know what can be done in a novel. You have examined the work of other authors, which I called to your attention only to indicate the avenues that are open to us, not to say. ‘This is great writing: emulate it.’ I don’t know what great writing is. I only know what moves me. You now know, to some degree, what moves you and gives you pleasure. You have found things from your past that you can use. You know the power of the daydream to transform the lumber room’s contents into precious jewels. Lie down. Roll your eyes back to slow your mind down.
Open the door of the lumber room. The air is thick with dust, accumulated over years of not-remembering, years of not wanting to know. You can hardly breathe at first. You are afraid and full of excitement at thoughts of what you might find. You feel around in the dark. There is only a tiny crack of light under the door. Not enough to see by. You stumble. Your foot has encountered something hard/something soft/something wet/something dry. You reach down, feel it, lift it up gently. You do not know what it is. All you know is that you want it. It is the fragment that will lie at the heart of your novel. You carry it out into the white, shimmering light. You look at it, wonderingly.
What is it? What, or whom, does it call to mind? Whom does it summon forth? They are coming, all of them. There is a company of characters drawn to the object. Who are they? What is their connection to one another? They are talking. What do they say? The object somehow binds them all together. It possesses a history, a knowledge. What is this knowledge? Their eyes are wide open as they pass the object round. It means something different to each of them and they are all astonished. Why? What is the drama? When did it happen? What started it, or who?
You are utterly prepared for this and utterly ignorant. The writing work you’ve done as you followed the course of this book has laid the foundations for the palace you’re about to build. You opened the door of memory early on, engaged with your early fears, your early triumphs. You learned the potency of place, the joy of movement, the way each sense participates in the pleasure of writing. You taught your people to speak, you learned about the shape of stories. You learned to keep the feeling high, to communicate with the energy of your reader. All this will help you.
But there is a sense in which it won’t. This, this novel, this place you are going to inhabit, is unknown, uncharted, to anyone except you. And you have forgotten the way. You are sure you knew it once but now it is so hazy. Will you lose yourself? What will you discover? You need a map.
Make a map. Draw the shape of your novel. Name your people and make clear to yourself how they are connected. Draw in the events, make a chart of how they build to the climax. Name to yourself the climax, so you know what you are writing towards. The map may prove to be inadequate. You may find a stream, a cave, a factory, a prison you did not know was there but which insists upon itself as a landmark. No matter. You need a map to start with, if only for security, like a childhood blanket or toy weapon. Make a map. Now discover the name of the country. Where is this novel happening?
Now you are beginning your novel.