About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
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of Ode to a Grecian Urn’s previous 48 lines, his observation can take the top of your head off. Keats is, after all, the master of accuracy and implication among the English romantic poets, working toward vivid immediacy. Indeed, like Joyce’s story “The Dead” and Lawrence’s tale “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” Keats’s poem is one of the gentlest, one of the most powerful retellings of the tale of the Edenic expulsion implicit in the gaining of any and all knowledge (in Keats’s case, it is the particular knowledge called happiness implicit in domestic social beauty).
Again, not everyone is affected by these texts in this way; nor is each reader affected by them in the same way every time she or he reads them. But enough readers find that they work enough of the time to preserve specific description and withheld implication as valued techniques of the literary, both in prose and poetry. Writings that employ those techniques generously often seem more immediate, more protean, and more vibrant over the long run than works that eschew them for a safer rhetoric and more distanced affect.
I think of myself as a reader with broad, if not actually catholic, tastes. When I have tallied it up, I find that I spend as much on reading matter weekly as I do on food—now that my daughter is grown—for a family of two. That includes a fair amount of eating out. As much as I love to read, however, I enjoy reading far fewer than one out of twenty fiction writers. (That’s currently living and publishing fiction writers.) Certainly I read more books than I actually like. Telling you a bit more about the kind of reader I am will, then, suggest something about the strengths—and the limitations—of the book to come.
VII
My approach to story is conservative—all but identical to the one E. M. Forster (1879–1970) put forward in his 1927 meditation, Aspects of the Novel. (I said we’d return to it.) Because Forster says it well and succinctly, I quote rather than paraphrase. Only then will I point out the few ways in which Forster and I differ.
If you ask one type of man, “What does a novel do?” he will reply placidly: “Well—I don’t know—it seems a funny sort of question to ask—a novel’s a novel—well, I don’t know—I suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak.” He is quite good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor bus at the same time and paying no more attention to literature than it merits. Another man, whom I visualize as on a golf-course, will be aggressive and brisk. He will reply: “What does a novel do? Why, it tells a story of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same way.” And a third man he says in a sort of drooping regretful voice, “Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story.” I respect and admire the first speaker. I detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story … The more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growth it supports, the less we shall find to admire. It runs like a backbone—or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary … It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence—dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience wonder what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story … When we isolate the story like this and hold it out on the forceps—wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time—it presents an aspect both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it. (25–28)
And we have much to learn from Forster’s description of it, as well. Paradoxically, story itself does not have a beginning, middle, and end (though any particular story must have these in order to be satisfying): story itself, however, is “interminable” and (incidentally) chronological, “the naked worm of time.” The famous “beginning” and “end” (of the “beginning,” “middle,” and “end” triad) are simply narrative strategies for mounting the endless train of narrative and strategies for dismounting. When writers try structurally to harmonize the beginning and ending strategies with what is going on in the mid-game, we approach the problems grouped under the rubric “narrative art.”
Within his ellipses (the parts I have elided with the traditional three dots), Forster talked about the age, strength, and power of story, for which he had much respect. So do I. (She-herazade of The Thousand Nights and a Night is the heroine of the passages I’ve omitted. Look them up.) But in terms of the problems before us, that is not to the point. Indeed, what is to the point is that, in most of the narratives we are presented with today, be they sitcoms, TV miniseries, movies, or even news accounts, the stories we get are mostly bad. With some extraordinary exceptions throughout the history of all these fields, most comic books, TV series, and action movies don’t have good stories. Neither do most published novels, and for the same reason: the logic that must hold them together and produce the readerly curiosity about what will happen is replaced by “interesting situations” (or an “interesting character”), which don’t relate logically or developmentally to what comes before or after. That is to say, they are wildly illogical. We cannot follow their development, even—or especially—if we try. If we look at them closely, they don’t make much sense. The general population, day in and day out, is not used to getting good stories. This has two social results.
First (on the downside), it probably accounts for why there is so little political sophistication among the general populace. Political awareness requires that people become used to getting rich, full, complex, logical, and causative accounts of what is going on in the world and, when they don’t, regularly demanding them. But with television and most films and books, they get little chance.
Second (on the upside), it produces a relatively small but growing audience interested in and hungry for experimental work. Paradoxically, most experimental work is simpler than the traditional “good story.” As far back as 1935, in his introduction to his selected poems, Robinson Jeffers called the techniques of modernism “originality by amputation.” Formally, it’s still a pretty good characterization—which is probably why normative fiction (and figurative painting) persists. What it leaves out, however, is that the nature of the experiment is rarely a negative one. It’s a positive one. E. E. Cummings (1894–1963) began his lines with lower-case letters throughout his career—as has Lucille Clifton (b. 1936) throughout hers. But the experiment is only secondarily about not beginning your lines with upper-case letters. It’s about the effect gained by beginning your lines with lower-case letters. It is a matter of exercising the attention to focus on smaller elements that, in a “good story,” would only be perceived in concert with many others. The long-term effect of experimental work is the heightening of the microcritical abilities among readers, so that, among other things, we get better at criticizing those “good stories” that turn out to be, in reality, not so good after all.
I do not believe the only purpose of the contemporary, the experimental, or the avant-garde is to increase our appreciation of the traditional. Both have rich and distinct effects, pleasures, and areas of meaning. But as the legacy of high modernism (through which most of us come to the contemporary and the avant-garde) makes clear, the normative and the experimental relate; they nourish each other.
What distinguishes story from a random chain of chronological events that all happen to the same character, or group of characters, is causal and developmental logic. This logic alone is what makes one want to find out what happens next. Most beginning writers are, however, unaware of how fragile the desire to know what comes next actually is—or how easily it’s subverted.
Turning readers’ attention from the future to the past with a flashback will almost always slay that desire, unless that flashback answers a clear question set up in the previous scene—and answers it clearly and quickly.
In my creative writing classes today rarely do I get a short story of more than six, eight, fifteen pages that doesn’t have at least one flashback in it. Rarely does it work. Understand, I have no problem with realistic flashbacks—but in life, flashbacks are just that: flashes. They last between half a second and three seconds, ten at the