About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
to Forster’s golfer), I see no particular reason why all writing, even if it begins by appropriating the name “novel,” “story,” or, indeed, “poem” or the name of any other genre, needs to be immediately recognizable as belonging to the genre label it carries. I have gotten great pleasure from “short stories” that were nothing but sequences of numbers, random words, or abstract pictures, not to mention comic books—a medium I love. I’ve gotten pleasure from J. G. Ballard’s “condensed novels,” which are collections of impressionistic fragments running only seven or eight pages each (see The Atrocity Exhibition, 1967). I have gotten pleasure from poems where the words were chosen by any number of games or operationalized systems or semantic or aesthetic tasks or within any of a variety of constraints. But all this will be discussed in its place. Genres are ways of reading, ways of understanding, complex moods, modes, and chains of expectations—discourses, if you will—and as such there is as much aesthetic pleasure (and use!) to be found in opposing those expectations as in acquiescing to them.
Sixty years ago, that witty and sensible critic Leonard Knights (“How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth,” 1948) noted: “Only as precipitates from memory are plot and character tangible; yet only in solution has either any emotive valency.” This is what Forster’s dull, ugly worm is all about. Plot, character, and the structure that constrains and embodies them are the solutes that effloresce into emotive force within the solution of those “finer growths.” Those “finer growths” through which the plot and characters achieve their emotive fullness are, themselves, controlled by structure. Most of the interminable discussions of plot in writing texts are useless because finally plot has no existence by itself; it is only a single aspect of a more complex process (which I call structure); and if the writer tries to deal with only the plot by itself, he or she ends up twisting at that dried-up little worm, which, when it effloresces, may or may not swell to proper shape and effect, depending entirely on the solute—the finer growths—it arrives in.
This book teases apart how writing works: what the process of its making consists of; and how its making is made by and remakes the world.
These are huge topics.
As the reader can see, this is not a large book.
My comments about them are suggestive rather than definitive. Still, with what notions we can harvest here—the ones we can speak of intelligibly—I hope my readers can begin to figure out how to do what they want on their own.
VIII
What sorts of stories do I enjoy?
What do I read for?
I read for information. Clearly, forcefully, and economically given, information constitutes my greatest reading pleasure. I cotton to Ezra Pound’s oft-quoted dictum, “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” (Raymond Carver quotes it in his fine essay “On Writing.”) Notice, however, Pound says “morality,” not value. The first information I read for, at least in fiction, is usually visual and generally sensual. I want to know where I am, and in particular what that place looks like, smells like, sounds like, and feels like. If the writer can make me sensorily aware of his or her setting—trick me into seeing/hearing/smelling it vividly (again, vivid description is a trick, and a more complex trick than simply laying out what’s there), so much the better. Throughout my fictions I want Stein’s one-third “description simple concentrated description not of what happened nor what is thought or what is dreamed but what exists and so makes the life the island life the daily island life”—or, if not, then something that I will find equally interesting.
The next kind of information I read for is any tone of voice in the writing that is informative itself about the story, about how the story is getting told. Just who is the narrator? Should I trust that narrator? Should the narrator awake my suspicions? Should I like the narrator or not like the narrator? Should I look up to the narrator? Or should I assume the narrator is my equal? What is the narrator’s attitude toward the characters who occupy the foreground of the fictive field? And toward those in the background? And to the other characters? And the situation and the setting itself? If the writer keeps giving me those shots of vocal and sensory information, forcefully and with skill, I can be happy with any one of the narrative stances above, because I am disposed to trust the writer creating that voice and painting the pictures—whether I “like” a character or not. Even if the narrator gives me mostly vocally modulated analysis (Proust, James, Musil …), I can be happy with the tale—though probably a reader other than I will have to discover that book and alert me to its excellences before I read it. (Proust, James, and Musil are not writers I’d have been likely to pick up on my own and stick to without some critical preparation. Joyce or Nabokov I might well have.) Those fictive works that make their initial appeal through tone of voice—often a tone solidly bourgeois, educated, ironic—can take on more complex concepts and explore them through a level of formal recomplication that is often richer than the relatively direct fiction writer can achieve. But the greatest failures in this mode occur when the voice runs on and on without ever managing to erect the narrative structures that create beauty, resonance, and finally meaning itself. These failures usually hinge on a misunderstanding we have already seen: the confusion of “the literary effect” with an effect of tone rather than an effect of form that can even contour the tone (a confusion I would say my very smart twenty-six-year-old male creative writing student had fallen into).
Writers working in this mode, however, should avoid creative writing workshops. Little or nothing in such works can be criticized on the workshop level. Often the resonating structures take 60, 130, 300 pages to construct. By the same token the most successful works in this mode (Proust, late James, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein of The Making of Americans and Lucy Church Amiably, Marguerite Young’s Miss McIntosh, My Darling, James McElroy’s Plus and Men and Women, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions …) do not find their audience quickly. (In his Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell tried to have it both ways and was, I feel, remarkably successful—though the reader has to commit himself to the whole thing. Moreover, most of Durrell’s theoretical folderol about axes and so forth is simply distracting nonsense.) Those structures have to be built just as clearly—in their own larger, more generous terms—and the writing must eventually seem just as economical, if such works are to garner a readership.
When I read, I am also aware of tone (apart from tone of voice) and mood, and often a quality that can only be called beauty. Still, a writer who tries to go for them directly without giving me a hefty handful of writerly stuff on the way is usually not going to make it.
He walked into the room and saw Karola sitting there. She was beautiful. He thought of flowers. He thought of butterflies. He thought of water running in the forest.
The writer who begins a story with these sentences is probably very aware of tone—but is not really giving me, as a reader, much else. (I would be getting even less, if it were in the present tense—“He walks into the room and sees Karola sitting there. She is beautiful. He thinks of flowers. He thinks of butterflies. He thinks of water running in the forest”—more “tone” and even less voice.) It is much easier for me to be interested in a story that begins:
He walked into the little room with the white plaster ceiling and the wooden two-by-fours making rough lintels above its three windows. Karola sat at a small table, her forearm in the sunlight. When he looked at her ear, he remembered the pink and white flowers in his aunt’s kitchen garden back in New Zealand. By her tanned cheek, some of her white-blond hair lifted and shook in the breeze, and he remembered the flaxen butterflies flicking in and out of the sunlight and shadow of the big Catalpa outside in the green and gray Bordeaux landscape they’d been staying in three summer months now. Just standing there, just looking at her, he felt the same surge of pleasure he’d felt, a year before, when he’d come around the rocks in the twelve acres of forest his aunt had purchased for the farm in that last, sweltering New Zealand winter, and he’d seen the falling water for the first time, how high it was, how it filled his head with the sound of itself, how cool it looked in the winter heat. Karola did that to him.
Although I can’t know or even be sure, I suspect the first writer wanted to describe