The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock (e novels to read online txt) 📕

satisfaction. This was the only difficulty; there was no question of struggling with a subject that he had not entirely mastered, one that broke out with unforeseen demands; Bovary never needed to be held down with one hand while it was written with the other. Many a novelist, making a further and fuller acquaintance with his subject as he proceeds, discovering more in it to reckon with than he had expected, has to meet the double strain, it would seem. But Flaubert kept his book in a marvellous state of quiescence during the writing of it; through all the torment which it cost him there was no hour when it presented a new or uncertain look to him. He might hate his subject, but it never disappointed or disconcerted him.

In Bovary, accordingly, the methods of the art are thrown into clear relief. The story stands obediently before the author, with all its developments and illustrations, the characters defined, the small incidents disposed in order. His sole thought is how to present the story, how to tell it in a way that will give the effect he desires, how to show the little collection of facts so that they may announce the meaning he sees in them. I speak of his "telling" the story, but of course he has no idea of doing that and no more; the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself. To hand over to the reader the facts of the story merely as so much information—this is no more than to state the "argument" of the book, the groundwork upon which the novelist proceeds to create. The book is not a row of facts, it is a single image; the facts have no validity in themselves, they are nothing until they have been used. It is not the simple art of narrative, but the comprehensive art of fiction that I am considering; and in fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself. Narrative—like the tales of Defoe, for example—must look elsewhere for support; Defoe produced it by the assertion of the historic truthfulness of his stories. But in a novel, strictly so called, attestation of this kind is, of course, quite irrelevant; the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement.

And yet the novelist must state, must tell, must narrate—what else can he do? His book is a series of assertions, nothing more. It is so, obviously, and the difference between the art of Defoe and the art of Flaubert is only in their different method of placing their statements. Defoe takes a directer way, Flaubert a more roundabout; but the deviations open to Flaubert are innumerable, and by his method, by his various methods, we mean his manner of choosing his path. Having chosen he follows it, certainly, by means of a plain narrative; he relates a succession of facts, whether he is describing the appearance of Emma, or one of her moods, or something that she did. But this common necessity of statement, at the bottom of it all, is assumed at the beginning; and in criticizing fiction we may proceed as though a novelist could really deal immediately with appearances. We may talk of the picture or the drama that he creates, we may plainly say that he avoids mere statement altogether, because at the level of fiction the whole interest is in another region; we are simply concerned with the method by which he selects the information he offers. A writer like Flaubert—or like any novelist whose work supports criticism at all—is so far from telling a story as it might be told in an official report, that we cease to regard him as reporting in any sense. He is making an effect and an impression, by some more or less skilful method. Contemplating his finished work we can distinguish the method, perhaps define it, notice how it changes from time to time, and account for the novelist's choice of it.

There is plenty of diversity of method in Madame Bovary, though the story is so simple. What does it amount to, that story? Charles Bovary, a simple and slow-witted young country doctor, makes a prudent marriage, and has the fortune to lose his tiresome and elderly wife after no long time. Then he falls in love with the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, a pretty and fanciful young woman, who marries him. She is deeply bored by existence in a small market town, finds a lover, wearies of him and finds another, gets wildly into debt, poisons herself and dies. After her death Bovary discovers the proof of her infidelity, but his slow brain is too much bewildered by sorrow and worry, by life generally, to feel another pang very distinctly. He soon dies himself. That is all the story, given as an "argument," and so summarized it tells us nothing of Flaubert's subject. There might be many subjects in such an anecdote, many different points of view from which the commonplace facts might make a book. The way in which they are presented will entirely depend on the particular subject that Flaubert sees in them; until this is apparent the method cannot be criticized.

But the method can be watched; and immediately it is to be noted that Flaubert handles his material quite differently from point to point. Sometimes he seems to be describing what he has seen himself, places and people he has known, conversations he may have overheard; I do not mean that he is literally retailing an experience of his own, but that he writes as though he were. His description, in that case, touches only such matters as you or I might have perceived for ourselves, if we had happened to be on the spot at the moment. His object is to place the scene before us, so that we may take it in like a picture gradually unrolled or a drama enacted. But then again the method presently changes. There comes a juncture at which, for some reason, it is necessary for us to know more than we could have made out by simply looking and listening. Flaubert, the author of the story, must intervene with his superior knowledge. Perhaps it is something in the past of the people who have been moving and talking on the scene; you cannot rightly understand this incident or this talk, the author implies, unless you know—what I now proceed to tell you. And so, for a new light on the drama, the author recalls certain circumstances that we should otherwise have missed. Or it may be that he—who naturally knows everything, even the inmost, unexpressed thought of the characters—wishes us to share the mind of Bovary or of Emma, not to wait only on their words or actions; and so he goes below the surface, enters their consciousness, and describes the train of sentiment that passes there.

These are the familiar resources of a story-teller, which everybody uses as a matter of course. It is so natural to take advantage of them that unless we purposely keep an eye upon the writer's devices, marking them off as he turns from one to another, we hardly notice the change. He is telling a story in the ordinary way, the obvious and unconstrained. But in fact these variations represent differences of method that are fundamental. If the story is to be shown to us, the question of our relation to the story, how we are placed with regard to it, arises with the first word. Are we placed before a particular scene, an occasion, at a certain selected hour in the lives of these people whose fortunes are to be followed? Or are we surveying their lives from a height, participating in the privilege of the novelist—sweeping their history with a wide range of vision and absorbing a general effect? Here at once is a necessary alternative. Flaubert, as a matter of fact, gives us first a scene—the scene of Bovary's arrival at school, as a small boy; the incident of the particular morning is rendered; and then he leaves that incident, summarizes the background of the boy's life, describes his parents, the conditions of his home, his later career as a student. It is the way in which nine novels out of ten begin—an opening scene, a retrospect, and a summary. And the spectator, the reader, is so well used to it that he is conscious of no violent change in the point of view; though what has happened is that from one moment to another he has been caught up from a position straight in front of the action to a higher and a more commanding level, from which a stretch of time is to be seen outspread. This, then, is one distinction of method; and it is a tell-tale fact that even in this elementary matter our nomenclature is uncertain and ambiguous. How do we habitually discriminate between these absolutely diverse manners of presenting the facts of a story? I scarcely know—it is as though we had no received expressions to mark the difference between blue and red. But let us assume, at any rate, that a "scenic" and a "panoramic" presentation of a story expresses an intelligible antithesis, strictly and technically.

There is our relation, again—ours, the reader's—with regard to the author. Flaubert is generally considered to be a very "impersonal" writer, one who keeps in the background and desires us to remain unaware of his presence; he places the story before us and suppresses any comment of his own. But this point has been over-laboured, I should say; it only means that Flaubert does not announce his opinion in so many words, and thence it has been argued that the opinions of a really artistic writer ought not to appear in his story at all. But of course with every touch that he lays on his subject he must show what he thinks of it; his subject, indeed, the book which he finds in his selected fragment of life, is purely the representation of his view, his judgement, his opinion of it. The famous "impersonality" of Flaubert and his kind lies only in the greater tact with which they express their feelings—dramatizing them, embodying them in living form, instead of stating them directly. It is not to this matter, Flaubert's opinion of Emma Bovary and her history—which indeed is unmistakable—that I refer in speaking of our relation to the writer of the book.

It is a matter of method. Sometimes the author is talking with his own voice, sometimes he is talking through one of the people in the book—in this book for the most part Emma herself. Thus he describes a landscape, the trim country-side in which Emma's lot is cast, or the appearance and manners of her neighbours, or her own behaviour; and in so doing he is using his own language and his own standards of appreciation; he is facing the reader in person, however careful he may be to say nothing to deflect our attention from the thing described. He is making a reproduction of something that is in his own mind. And then later on he is using the eyes and the mind and the standards of another; the landscape has now the colour that it wears in Emma's view, the incident is caught in the aspect which it happens to turn towards her imagination. Flaubert himself has retreated, and it is Emma with whom we immediately deal. Take, for example, the two figures of her lovers, Rodolphe and Léon, the florid country-gentleman and the aspiring student; if Flaubert were to describe these men as he sees