About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
who don’t contribute very much (except by their all-important negative examples), and the exceptions are precisely those glorious ones that prove, in the sense of test, the rules and principles on which my overarching aesthetic rests.
The less interested either we or our characters are in their jobs, incomes, families, social class, landlords, friends, neighbors, and landscapes (i.e., how they are connected to the material world around them), the less we have to write about. This may be why the highly individualistic but highly isolated heroes of genre fiction—from Conan the Conqueror to James Bond—often seem so thin in relation to those of literary fiction. This is why the strength of such stories that feature them tends to be on an allegorical—i.e., poetic—level, rather than on the level of psychological (not to mention sociological) veracity.
IX
I’ve already suggested that the desire to hear our stories in chronological order may begin with the desire to have our fictions take on the image of history. Eighteenth-century novels such as Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) were often called histories (the novel’s full title is Tom Jones, the History of a Foundling). Readers of the twenty-four-years-earlier Robinson Crusoe (1726) initially flocked to the book because they thought they were getting the thinly fictionalized “history” of the actual adventures of a sailor named Alexander Selkirk, who had famously spent time on a desert island, as had Crusoe; Defoe even encouraged the rumor that he had interviewed Selkirk in order to write his book, though almost certainly that was untrue and just a publicity move.
Supporting him through fourteen meaty novels, Dickens’s great discovery in the nineteenth century was that what happens to us as children directly influences the adults we turn out to be, both in terms of our strengths and in terms of the shortcomings we must overcome. Thus plot in the novel in particular—and in fiction in general—became, for Dickens, part of a structure of incidents that not only tell the story but also move us among the kinds of incidents that explain what happens in terms of certain kinds of causes as well as the given moments of history needed to understand them: in Dickens’s case, particular childhood incidents and (later in his novels) the adult happenings particularly affected by them.
The fictive discovery of the eighteenth century was that the forces of history were themselves large determinants of our interests, wants, and desires. Nor is that lesson forgotten during the nineteenth. In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), Julien Sorel’s life is entirely determined through having to live in the social retrenchments following the expansions of the Napoleonic wars. In Les Misérables of 1862, Victor Hugo shows how the social advancement of working-class criminal Jean Valjean is as dependent on the turmoil accompanying the early years of the age of republican revolutions in Europe in general and France in particular as that advancement is dependent on Valjean’s own character—while seven years later, in 1869, almost as if it were posed as a counterargument by Flaubert, Sentimental Education details how its middle-class hero, Frédéric Moreau, misses out on opportunity after opportunity to behave as a moral hero over the period that includes the revolution of 1848, through his own romantic daydreaming coupled with his personal inhibitions.
The nineteenth century’s particular addition to the novel might be seen as a realization that the conflicts between social classes and the desires that cross class lines—along with the aforementioned Dickensian discovery of family and childhood as a complex force in the creation of character—propel the machinery of the world.
Beyond the one-third that is “description of the daily island life,” the glory of the nineteenth-century novel was its ability to present dramatically, in logical if not chronological order, the complex of reasons that cause things to work out as they do: What elements in his own miserly character interact with his disappointments in the world to make Ralph Nickleby hang himself? Bitter and rigid police inspector Javert is obsessed with his belief in Jean Valjean’s subhumanity and fundamental evil. How and why, then, after Valjean saves Javert’s life, once they meet just outside the Paris sewers during the Revolution of 1832 does Javert subsequently go to pieces, finally allowing himself to fall from a bridge into the Seine and drown? How does the brilliant provincial inventor David Séchard end up a happy man, even though most of the profits from his discovery of the way to make paper from artichoke fiber have been stolen from him? How does David’s childhood friend, the aspiring poet Lucien Chardon, end up a miserable suicide in a Paris jail cell, where he has been imprisoned for murder?
The dramatic richness and resonance with which these questions are answered contribute to making Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), Les Misérables (1862), and Lost Illusions (1834) great novels.
Drama suggests that if we simply hear what Ralph, Javert, David, and Lucien say to other people and watch what they do, we shall understand their fates. The novel adds: For full understanding, we must also know how they think and feel, as well as how they are enmeshed in “the daily island life.” In short, it adds the most productive parts of psychoanalysis and Marxism to the historical mix.
The twentieth century’s particular refinement on these exploratory and explanatory novelistic structures, from Proust and James to Joyce and Woolf, was that, in the lives of real people, all these elements were now further granulated across the individual play of swirling subjectivity, either dramatically though artfully rendered stream of consciousness techniques (as in Woolf and Joyce), or through precise analysis (as in James and even more so in Proust), on an even more nuanced, more complex level. By adding the focus on the subjective, however, such writers do not forget the social.
If one or more (or indeed all) of the characters in a story are unaware of the sociohistorical levels that contour where they are and the choices they have open to them in the world, it doesn’t particularly matter. But, as the writer is less and less aware of these sociohistorical levels in the course of structuring her or his tale (that is, when the structure of the story does not carry us through a set of incidents, places, and descriptions that, apart from or in conjunction with the “plot,” help explain those positions and those choices), the tale seems thinner and thinner, regardless of its subjective density.
To generalize all this and say that fiction that is unaware of the historical dimensions, both of the genre and of the aspects of life it chooses to portray, tends to be thin and relatively uninteresting sounds hopelessly high-falutin’, even arrogant. But there it is. Certainly this is the failing of the “sin and sex in the suburbs” genre, which over the sixties, seventies, and eighties produced such a memorable amount of unmemorable writing. Its plots so rarely moved the characters through any situations that allowed the characters (or the readers) to see what had stalled these characters in that landscape, or what was preventing them from leaving it, or why they could not transform it into something more humanly satisfactory. Similarly it is the major failing of the genre that has come largely to replace it through the culture of university creative writing and MFA programs: “sin and sex in graduate school,” where, in story after story, the characters never consider the absurdly low exploitative salaries they are actually teaching for, how they supplement those salaries into the possibility of living, what they hope to achieve through the sacrifice, and what in all likelihood the overwhelming majority will actually achieve—and the discrepancies between vision and actuality.
The non-high-falutin’ way to say it is to point out that from the beginning of fiction as we know it, the basic way to produce a richly interesting fictive situation is to take a person from one social stratum and carefully observe him or her having to learn to deal with folks from another, either up or down the social ladder: the bourgeois young man who must learn how to live and work among sailors (Kipling’s Captains Courageous, 1887) or the poor working-class fellow who must learn to negotiate society (Jack London’s Martin Eden, 1913); Becky Thatcher’s social rise from impoverished poor relation to society’s heights in Vanity Fair (1848) or Odette de Crécy’s rise from demi-mondaine, through a stint as the cultured Swann’s mistress, till finally she becomes the Duchesse de Guermantes, which provides the running story thread through the grand tapestry of Remembrance of Things Past* (1913–27). Fiction feels most like fiction when it cleaves most closely to such situations—and, as its stories stray further and further from such interclass encounters, it feels thinner and thinner.
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