By Way of a P.S.
Dear Friend,
Just a few lines as a kind of farewell, to reiterate something I’ve already expressed many times in the course of our correspondence as, spurred on by your stimulating missives, I’ve tried to describe some of the tools that good novelists use to cast the kind of spell that keeps readers in thrall. And that is that technique, form, discourse, text, or whatever you want to call it (pedants have come up with many names for something that any reader could identify with ease) is a seamless whole. To isolate theme, style, order, points of view, et cetera, in other words, to perform a vivisection, is always, even in the best of cases, a form of murder. And a corpse is a pallid and misleading stand-in for a living, breathing, thinking entity not in the grip of rigor mortis or helpless against the onset of decay.
What do I mean by this? Not, of course, that criticism is useless and unnecessary. On the contrary, criticism can be a very valuable guide to the world and ways of an author, and sometimes a critical essay is itself a creative work, no less than a great novel or poem. (Off the top of my head, here are a few examples: Studies and Essays on Góngora by Dámaso Alonso, To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson, Port Royal by Sainte-Beuve, and The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes: four very different kinds of critical works, but all of them equally valuable, illuminating, and original.) At the same time, it seems to me of the utmost importance to make it clear that criticism in and of itself, even when it is most rigorous and inspired, is unable to entirely account for the phenomenon of creation, to explain it in its totality. A successful fiction or poem will always contain an element or a dimension that rational critical analysis isn’t quite able to encompass. This is because criticism is a labor of reason and intelligence, and in literary creation other factors, sometimes crucial to the work—intuition, sensitivity, divination, and even chance—intervene and escape the very finest nets of literary criticism. That is why no one can teach anyone else to create; at most, we may be taught to read and write. The rest we must teach ourselves, stumbling, falling, and picking ourselves up over and over again.
My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you’ve read in my letters about the structure of the novel, and just sit down and write.