The Power of Persuasion
Dear Friend,
You’re right. My first few letters, with their vague hypothesizing on the literary vocation and the origin of novelists’ themes, not to mention their zoological allegories—the tapeworm, the catoblepas—were overly abstract, their suppositions sadly unverifiable. Which means that the moment has come for us to move on to less subjective matters, ones more specifically rooted in literary practice.
Let us speak, then, of form, which, paradoxical as it may seem, is the novel’s most concrete attribute, since it is form that gives novels their shape and substance. But before we set sail on waters so alluring for those who, like you and me, love and practice the narrative craft, it’s worth establishing what you already know very well, though it is not so clear to most readers of novels: the separation of form and content (or theme and style and narrative structure) is artificial, admissible only when we are explaining or analyzing them; it never occurs in reality, since the story a novel tells is inseparable from the way it is told. This way is what determines whether the tale is believable or not, moving or ridiculous, comic or dramatic. It is of course possible to say that Moby-Dick is the story of a sea captain obsessed with a white whale that he pursues across all the world’s oceans and that Don Quixote tells of the adventures and misadventures of a half-mad knight who tries to reproduce on the plains of La Mancha the deeds of the heroes of chivalric literature. But would anyone who has read those novels recognize in such plot descriptions the infinitely rich and subtle universes of Melville and Cervantes? To explain the mechanisms that bring a tale to life, it is permissible to separate content from form only on the condition that it is made clear that such a division never occurs naturally, at least not in good novels. It does occur, on the other hand, in bad ones, and that is why they’re bad, but in good novels what is told and the way it is told are inextricably bound up together. They are good because thanks to the effectiveness of their form they are endowed with an irresistible power of persuasion.
If before reading The Metamorphosis you had been told that it was about the transformation of a meek little office worker into a repulsive cockroach, you probably would have yawned and said to yourself there was no reason to read such a ridiculous tale. However, since you’ve read the story as Kafka magically tells it, you “believe” wholeheartedly in the terrible plight of Gregor Samsa: you identify with him, you suffer with him, and you feel choked by the same despair that destroys the poor character, until with his death the ordinariness of life as it was (before his unhappy adventure disturbed it) is restored. And you believe the story of Gregor Samsa because Kafka was capable of finding a way to tell it—in words, silences, revelations, details, organization of information and narrative flow—that overwhelms the reader’s defenses, surmounting all the mental reservations he or she might harbor when faced with such a tale.
To equip a novel with power of persuasion, it is necessary to tell your story in such a way that it makes the most of every personal experience implicit in its plot and characters; at the same time, it must transmit to the reader an illusion of autonomy from the real world he inhabits. The more independent and self-contained a novel seems to us, and the more everything happening in it gives us the impression of occurring as a result of the story’s internal mechanisms and not as a result of the arbitrary imposition of an outside will, the greater the novel’s power of persuasion. When a novel gives us the impression of self-sufficiency, of being freed from real life, of containing in itself everything it requires to exist, it has reached its maximum capacity for persuasion, successfully seducing its readers and making them believe what it tells them. Good novels—great ones—never actually seem to tell us anything; rather, they make us live it and share in it by virtue of their persuasive powers.
You’re undoubtedly familiar with Bertolt Brecht’s famous theory of the alienation effect. He believed that to succeed in writing the kind of epic and didactic theater he proposed, it was essential to develop a way of staging plays—reflected in the movement or speech of the actors and even the construction of the sets—that would gradually destroy the “illusion” and remind the audience that what they were seeing was not real life but theater, a fabrication, a performance, from which, nevertheless, conclusions should be drawn and lessons learned promoting action and reform. I don’t know what you think of Brecht. I believe he was a great writer, and that, although he was often hampered by his propagandistic and ideological aims, his plays are excellent and, thankfully, much more persuasive than his theorizing.
In its persuasive efforts, the novel aims for exactly the opposite effect: to reduce the distance that separates fiction from reality and, once that boundary is elided, to make the reader live the lie of fiction as if it were the most eternal truth, its illusions the most consistent and convincing depictions of reality. That is the trick great novels play: they convince us that the world is the way they describe it, as if fiction were not what it is, the picture of a world dismantled and rebuilt to satisfy the deicidal urge to remake reality, the urge that fuels the novelist’s vocation whether he knows it or not. Only bad novels foster the alienation Brecht wanted his spectators to experience in order to learn the political lessons he meant to impart along with his plays. Bad novels lacking in the power of persuasion, or possessing only a weak strain of it, don’t convince us that the lie they’re telling is true; the “lie” appears to us as what it is: a construction, an arbitrary, lifeless invention that moves ploddingly and clumsily, like the puppets of a mediocre puppet master whose threads, manipulated by their creator, are in full sight, exposing them as caricatures of living beings. The deeds or sufferings of these caricatures will scarcely be able to move us: do they, after all, experience anything themselves? They are no more than captive shades, borrowed lives dependent on an omnipotent master.
Naturally, the autonomy of fiction is not a truth—it is a fiction, too. That is to say, fiction is autonomous only in a figurative sense, and that’s why I’ve been very careful when referring to it to speak of an “illusion of autonomy,” “the impression of self-sufficiency, of being freed from real life.” Someone is writing these novels. That fact, that they are not the product of spontaneous generation, makes them dependent, connects each of them by an umbilical cord to the rest of the world. But it’s not just having an author that links novels to real life; if the storytelling inventions of novels did not reflect on the world as it is lived by their readers, the novel would be something remote and mute, an artifice that shuts us out: it would never possess any power of persuasion, it could never cast a spell, seduce readers, convince them of its truth, and make them live what it relates as if they were experiencing it themselves.
This is the curious ambiguity of fiction: it must aspire to independence knowing that its slavery to reality is inevitable, and it must suggest through sophisticated techniques an autonomy and self-sufficiency as deceptive as the melodies of an opera divorced from the instruments or the throats that voice them.
Form works these miracles—when it works. It is in practical terms an indivisible entity, made up of two equally important components that, though they are always intertwined, may be isolated for purposes of analysis and explication: style and order. Style refers, of course, to words, to the way a story is written; order to the organization of the story’s elements. To simplify greatly, order concerns the great axes of all novelistic construction: narrative space and time.
So as not to make this letter too long, I’ll leave for next time some thoughts on style, the language of fiction, and the workings of that power of persuasion on which the life (or death) of all novels depends.