Setting as Character in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

In the first four pages of Conrad’s masterwork the words “gloom” and “brooding” appear six or seven times each in reference to the landscape. As the story advances, the same words and variants appear again and again in reference to the natural environment.  Why, a curious writer might ask, does the physical setting merit such repeated and emotionally slanted attention? 

The answer, I believe, is that the African landscape is one of the novella’s main characters.  It is a character with an arc of its own, one that reflects Marlow’s evolving state of mind and eventually comes alive to play an active role in the story’s plot.

In the early scenes, the wilderness is only a vaguely menacing presence (“the river was there, fascinating—deadly—like a snake . . . almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness”), but soon it begins to have an effect on—or to affect, depending on how you choose to read it—Marlow’s inner state: 

. . . a general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me.  It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints of nightmares.

Gradually, Marlow’s descriptions of the land become even more pointed:

. . . the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth. . .

The landscape is silent with expectation. Marlow’s evolving reaction to it not only furthers the plot—he’s coming to terms with a force that will prove decisive in the story—but builds dramatic tension. 

When Marlow hits upon the idea of getting rivets to fix the steamboat—which will enable him to make the journey up the river in search of the elusive Kurtz—he dances a noisy jig on the hollow metal deck. For the first time, the wilderness speaks back:

A frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin forest on the other side sent it back in a thundering roll . . .

The forest’s echo can be read as a warning. It’s also an important moment for a more practical reason: it lays the groundwork for the wilderness to speak, and even to take action, later in the story. 

As the story develops, we close in on the climactic realization of the true character of the wilderness. The jungle seems to look at Marlow “with a vengeful aspect.”   Unlike shackled nature back in Europe, the wilderness of Africa is malicious and dangerous, “monstrous and free.”

There is a hopeful moment on the upriver journey when Marlow catches a glimpse of something —the fog lifts and he has a clear view of the towering, still, matted jungle with the sun hanging like a ball above it—but then

. . . the white shutter came down again, smoothly, as if sliding in creased grooves.

It proves to be a fleeting vision, a teasing hint of light in an otherwise uninterrupted descent into the Heart of Darkness.  For the reader, the tension is increased because we cling to the hope, however slim, that Marlow’s determinedly pessimistic outlook toward the intentions of the powerful force he is about to confront may prove to be mistaken. 

But no.  As the steamboat nears its destination Marlow begins to get a clearer sense of the true character of the wilderness.  Just below Kurtz’s camp—right before the boat is attacked by flying arrows—he notices a string of sand bars, visible under the water as “a man’s backbone is seen running down the middle of his back under the skin.”  It’s a deathly image, as if a giant has drowned or is waiting underwater to rise up and—and what, exactly?  One is compelled to read on.

In the next few scenes the vision of the menacing living forest comes into focus.  When Kurtz speaks as if he owns the entire African jungle Marlow expects to hear the wilderness “break into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.”   The forest is not only a character that speaks and ridicules; at the climactic moment of the story it also begins to act:

Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying straight into the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment, streams of human beings . .  . with spears in their hands, with bows, with shields, with wild glances and savage movements, were poured into the clearing by the dark-faced and pensive forest.

The wilderness thus plays a key role in the central conflict of the story; in the final encounters with Kurtz it is ever-present, an irresistible, crushing force. 

Conrad’s vision of the wilderness is not mine; I tend to see nature as a redeeming rather than a corrupting force. My overall reaction to Heart of Darkness is probably colored by this fundamental clash of philosophies, but I must say that I found the story rather insistent in its continual return to the landscape as a brooding, menacing presence. It’s almost as if Conrad had discovered a new technique and was afraid to lose sight of it, the way a man might make repeated and needless trips out to the garage to wax and polish a new car.

Nevertheless, Heart of Darkness is notable for its clear and powerful use of setting: to build tension, to reflect the POV character’s evolving emotional state, and indeed to play a major role in the story as a character capable of action in its own right.

***

If you're interested in reading more on the importance of descriptive writing in novels, click here.

Character Sympathy in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India

What struck me most in the initial chapters of A Passage to India, besides the admirable landscape description, is the sympathy of the principal characters.  Forster achieved this in part by offsetting them against the British colonial administrators and their wives, who come off as ignorant and boorish.  But even without this implicit comparison, the main players are interesting and well rounded.  With the character of Mrs. Moore in particular, Forster seems to have made extra efforts to generate sympathy. This is interesting because later in the book Mrs. Moore takes on godlike dimensions, and is a major influence on the arc of the main protagonist, Aziz.

On a superficial level, the old woman plays a bit role in the story, and she dies halfway through the book.  But in a deeper sense she is a pivotal character, in two respects. 

One, she is the force behind Aziz’s eventual salvation.  If Aziz didn’t remember her at key points – if she didn’t continue to “speak” to him even after her death – his tendency to lapse into ethnic/religious partisanship would no doubt have prevailed, cutting him off from a major aspect of his own character: his self-nurturing love of humanity.   Mrs. Moore helps Aziz overcome his demons and the book ends on a surprisingly hopeful note, with Aziz reaching a new level of self-understanding.  It is a crucial point of closure.

Two, Mrs. Moore (deified as “Esmiss Esmoor”) shoulders much of the novel’s “prophetic” burden, its preoccupation with death and the terrifying yet potentially beautiful expanse of the afterlife.   Her harrowing experience in the caves—when she hears the ancient “boum” echo—resonates throughout the novel, endowing it with unique power. 

We first meet Mrs. Moore in the mosque, when Aziz assumes she hasn’t taken off her shoes like a normal, self-absorbed Englishwoman. He orders her to do so.  But it turns out she already has taken off her shoes, because it “. . . makes no difference.  God is here.” 

Aziz soon learns that Mrs. Moore is not a typical Englishwoman in India.  She has a dry sense of humor, for one thing. When Aziz exclaims “we’re in the same box with a vengeance” because they both have two sons and a daughter, she wonders if their names are also Frank, Ralph, and Stella. She shares Aziz’s distaste for the English government crowd, including her own son. Mrs. Moore, like the reader, easily sees through the posturing of the City Magistrate and other officials, and feels free to speak her mind.  God has put us on earth to be pleasant to each other, she tells her son, who’s come to feel that his job requires him to do otherwise. “God . . . is . . . Love.” 

Mrs. Moore is an interesting and sympathetic character—a desirable dinner companion.  But she’s not perfect, and spirituality, as we’ll later see, is not as unassailable as it appears.  Forster’s sympathetic portrait of Mrs. Moore stands in stark contrast to most of the other English people in the story, which is undoubtedly part of the point.  Mrs. Moore is different. She possesses a certain kind of universal wisdom unique to the aged, a lack of prejudice and an emotional freedom that transcends such meaningless distractions as religion, culture, position, or status.  Mrs. Moore’s wisdom on these matters is what Aziz responds to when they first meet in the mosque. 

But that Mrs. Moore is too perfect to last the entire book.  When she hears the fatal “boum” in the caves, she is shaken to the core, and the event marks the beginning of her fast slide towards death.   She becomes withdrawn, irritable, and unpleasant.  The reader feels let down and disappointed that a brush with mortality (or with the infinite) would cause such a woman to throw away her humane goodness in favor of morbid self-absorption. 

But then, of course, post mortem, she’s resurrected as “Esmiss Esmoor.” Because the reader remembers the noble spirit she originally personified, the deification contains a kind of deep plausibility.

Mrs. Moore continues to play a role after her death. In the final reconciliation between Aziz and Fielding, she seems to speak to Aziz through the medium of her idiot son Ralph.  What she wishes to communicate to Aziz—or what he wishes to hear—is the same brand of wisdom she displayed at the beginning, when they first met in the mosque: Religion doesn’t matter. Forgive your neighbors. God is love. 

The final glimpse we have of Mrs. Moore is when Godbole, in an ecstatic religious trance, ushers her into the afterlife, along with a wasp.  Having done her job, she is now free to move on to a better world.

Slippage, Daydreams: Killer Foreshadowing in a Thomas McGuane Novel

The central conflict running through Thomas McGuane’s entertaining early novel Ninety-two in the Shade is that a man named Nichol Dance has promised to kill the protagonist, Skelton, if the latter follows through on his intent to become a flyfishing guide on Key West. Apparently, it's a pretty competitive business environment.  

The story begins humorously, but not too far into it we get a flashback to the time a few years earlier when — in a bar, after repeated provocation— Nichol Dance shot an “exercise boy.”  The implication is obvious: despite the fact that Dance is a regular guy, he has a murderous streak and is capable of carrying out his threat to kill Skelton. 

Then we have this passage:

On Big Pine key, the first light of day passes through the high breezy forest.  A key-deer buck, the size of a dog, places four perfect scarab hoofs on route A1A and is splattered by a Lincoln Continental four weeks out of the Ford Motor Company, carrying three admirals bound to Miami and a “kick-off breakfast” for a fundraiser.  The taillights elevate abruptly at the Pine Channel Bridge and are gone.  The corporate utopia advances by a figure equal to the weight of the little buck divided by infinity; the Reckoning advances by a figure equal to the buck multiplied by infinity.  A funeral wake of carrion birds, insects, and microorganisms working assiduously between bursts of traffic takes the little deer home a particle at a time.  

The author obviously intended the above paragraph to carry some symbolic weight, as it stands alone surrounded by white space.  But why is it significant? 

It’s an image of death, obviously, a rather serious image despite the whimsical tone, told from a distant, omniscient point of view.  You have the uncaring admirals. You have references to infinity and the ruthless silliness of contemporary society, two of the book’s frequent themes.  But mostly, I think, the passage is there to increase the dramatic tension that's already present in the narrative. 

This it accomplishes in an oblique but powerful way, emphasizing the point made in the preceding flashback to Nichol Dance’s murder of the "exercise boy."  Death is near. It happens every day, and it happens to innocent creatures.  Skelton better watch his step, the reader is bound to think. The narrator is serious about this death thing.

A similar sensation is created by the following passage:

Slippage, daydreams: the eye is almost never on the ball.  Skelton could not go to the bathroom.  If you plug up a man’s ass, he thought, you will probably shut off his brain.  He recalled his own figments, Don and Stacy, the People of the Plains.  A knock on the door of their flatlands house.  Stacy calls: “Don?”

 “What?" 

“There is somebody out here with a terrible swift sword.” 

This may be a little more obvious than the key-deer paragraph, but given the context, I found it powerful.  It marks the beginning of the end of the novel, an unmistakable cue that the narrative is now going to accelerate forward to the conclusion.   The reader proceeds with a heightened feeling of foreboding and the near-inevitability of Skelton’s murder.  There's something about Don and Stacy, these two generic innocents confronting doom; this average Midwestern couple coming up against the angel of death.  It’s spooky.

McGuane is good at creating and maintaining narrative tension.  His novels follow a single main story line, usually a self-aware male protagonist plunging himself deeper and deeper into trouble almost—but not quite—against his will.   The books are a pleasure to read because they’re humorous and deadly serious at the same time, whimsical but truthful.   There’s never a trace of sentimentality, yet all the characters, even the antagonists, are highly sympathetic.   

I actually prefer his less flaky later books, but despite its occasional silliness Ninety-two in the Shade is a fictional tour-de-force, blending philosophy, humor, and an irresistibly suspenseful plot. 

Effective and Ineffective Character Description in Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories

Annie Proulx is an acute observer of nature. Her use of the language is rhythmic, truthful, ruggedly energetic, often surprising, and nearly always right on the money.  Her fiction is permeated with a sense of place, and she often uses setting in highly inventive ways to influence the plot and characters. 

Most of the stories in her acclaimed collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories have gravitas; those that don’t are wickedly funny. The characters are original, eccentric and emphatically earthy.  She uses the spectrum of techniques to develop them, but in this post I want to focus on physical description, because it seems to me that the author’s use of it ranges from highly compelling to less than successful.  

At times Proulx seems to suffer from a kind of horror vacui, where every character, major, minor, and incidental must be described in quirky, exhaustive detail.  In a few of the stories, particularly those with multiple lead characters, the descriptions feel front-loaded, an obligatory visual inventory of the entire cast before the story is allowed to begin.  Unfortunately, some of these character descriptions are simply ineffective. This one, for example, from “Job History”:

Leeland’s face shows heavy bone from his mother’s side.  His neck is thick and his red-gold hair plastered down in bangs. 

So far, so good.  If Proulx had stopped here the reader would have had a good initial impression. But then she goes on:

Even as a child his eyes are as pouchy as those of a middle-aged alcoholic, the brows rod-straight above wandering, out-of-line eyes.  His nose lies broad and flat across his face, his mouth seems to have been cut with a single chisel blow into easy flesh.

Perhaps it’s a problem of too many impressions at once. Maybe Proulx is trying to get too specific on facial features that are too common to create a visual image. But for me, the more I read, the less I see.

Much better are descriptions that are either more economical,

Old Red, born in Lusk in 1902, grew up in an orphan home, a cross-grained boy—wrists knobby and prominent, red hair parted in the middle—and walked off when he was fourteen to work in a tie-hack camp.

Aladdin, face like a shield, curly hair springing, tipped his head toward the tablecloth . . .

less visually head on,

They could hear his rapid breathing, like that of a dog, behind them.  If it were a movie his signature music would be a puffed and spitty harmonica.

Mrs. Freeze, a crusty old whipcord who looked like a man, dressed like a man, talked like a man and swore like a man, but carried a bosom shelf, an irritation to her as it got in the way of her roping.

And at those times he stared at her with lustful, white-eyed gaze and talked filth sotto voce.

couched in vignettes, incorporating some telling action and/or possessions,

The mud-daubed son climbed out of the hole, picked up clods, pelted his father until he galloped off, pursued him to the house and continued the attack with stones and sticks of firewood snatched up from the woodpile, hurled the side-cutters he always carried in a back pocket, the pencil behind his ear, the round can filled not with tobacco but with the dark green of homegrown. 

or even “symbolic:” providing a striking image of a character while at the same time foretelling some role the character will play in the story,

…the snuff-dipping, pole-legged, stretched-out foreman, Haul Smith, face decorated with a frothy beard, ringlets the size and color of ginger-ale bubbles.

Close to, he seemed odd, legs tight as though ready to leap, his strange suit made from a coarse fabric, sewed with crooked seams.

It would be inadvisable to draw hard and fast “lessons” or “rules” from any of these subjective impressions, so let me just sum it up by noting the following.  In Proulx’s stories, the least effective descriptions are those where specific facial or bodily detail is excessively piled on, or where a large cast is sketched in a rote and dutiful manner. More effective character descriptions are economical—floating along like colorful lobster buoys in the current of the story.  Descriptions using vignettes, actions, objects, non-visual cues, or descriptions at once accurate and symbolic are also effective.  

And, of course, what characters say and do prove to be of much more consequence than what they look like.   

Character Portrayals in Catcher in the Rye

The first third of The Catcher in the Rye includes an interesting character portrayal of Stradlater, Holden Caulfield’s Pencey roomate. Stradlater is first mentioned in connection to Ackley, the mossy-mouthed sociopath down the hall, who, we’re told, hates Stradlater’s guts because he once told Ackley to brush his teeth. It’s our first clue about Stradlater: he’s an insensitive guy. Soon afterwards, though, Holden defends Stradlater to Ackley:

“Look.  Suppose, for instance, Stradlater was wearing a tie or something that you liked.  Say he had a tie on that you liked a helluva lot—I’m just giving you an example, now.  You know what he’d do?  He’d probably take it off and give it to you.  He really would.  Or—you know what he’d do?  He’d leave it on your bed or something.  But he’d give you the goddam tie.”

The above is an important bit of shading, because it endows the character of Stradlater with a certain amount of sympathy—he’s got an endearing generous streak—and, as we’ll see, it does the same for Holden.  But from this point on it’s mostly downhill for Stradlater.  He’s self-important:

All of a sudden the door opened, and old Stradlater barged in, in a big hurry. He was always in a big hurry.  Everything was a very big deal. 

He’s always asking for favors:

“Yeah. Listen.  If you’re not going out anyplace special, how about lending me your hound’s-tooth jacket?”

He’s kind of a philistine:

He had one of those very piercing whistles that are practically never in tune, and he always picked out some song that’s hard to whistle even if you’re a good whistler, like “Song of India” or “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.”  He could really mess a song up.

He’s a public dandy but a secret slob:

He always looked alright, Stradlater, but for instance, you should’ve seen the razor he shaved himself with.  It was always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap.  He never cleaned it or anything.  He always looked good when he was finished fixing himself up, but he was a secret slob anyway, if you knew him the way I did. 

In the course of the few minutes Stradlater is in the room, variations of each of these traits are presented several more times, either in the form of Holden’s pronouncements or dialog, until they’re clearly fixed in the reader’s mind.  They make more and sense to the reader because they all turn out to flow out of one overarching character flaw.

He was always asking you to do him a big favor.  You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he’s a real hot-shot, and they’re always asking you to do them a big favor.  Just because they’re crazy about themselves, they think you’re crazy about them, too, and that you’re just dying to do them a favor. 

He always shaved himself twice, to look gorgeous.  With his crumby old razor.  

That’s something else that gives me a royal pain.  I mean if you’re good at writing compositions and somebody starts talking about commas.  Stradlater was always doing that.  He wanted you to think the only reason he was lousy at writing compositions was because he stuck all the commas in the wrong place. 

The character flaw, of course, is vanity—or self-absorption—which leads to all the other annoying traits.  Stradlater’s character rings true with the reader because it makes sense. It’s logical that a vain person would take others for granted; that he would be a secret slob; that he would be insensitive about other people and about art and music; and even that he would be generous. As Holden points out, you don’t have to explain every little thing to Stradlater as you do to Ackley, because he simply doesn’t care about anything but his appearance and projected persona.  Sure, take the tie. 

           

Stradlater’s character traits are rolled out gradually, like clues, and then presented again several times so that they’re fixed in the reader’s mind.  At a certain point it occurs to the reader that all of the traits flow from one overarching flaw, vanity, and there is a nice moment when everything about Stradlater clicks into place.  We get him.

But why does Salinger dedicate so much space to him? Stradlater’s self-absorbed pursuit of one of Holden’s girlfriends provides the impetus for them to fight, and for Holden to leave Pencey, but once Holden does leave, Stradlater only comes up in passing two or three more times.  The main conflict in the story revolves around what’s going to happen to Holden after he leaves Pencey.  (Where’s he going to end up?  Not somewhere good, we suspect.) The main development in the story is the gradual revelation of Holden’s character, not anyone else’s.  So the question is, how does the character of Stradlater advance the story?

The answer, I think, is that Stradlater advances the story insofar as he sheds light on Holden’s character, and makes him sympathetic.  Don’t forget that Holden is interpreting the people he meets for us throughout the entire book. It’s through his eyes that we’re able to experience that “Aha!” regarding Stradlater’s character.  We can share Holden’s somewhat smug outlook: Oh yes, I know the type, Holden. Thank God we’re not like that. 

Holden Caulfield is a sympathetic narrator partially because he’s such a lucid observer of the human race.  And despite his tendency to fixate on what he sees as phoniness in people, he does make a sincere effort to see the good in them, even in odious characters like Ackley and Stradlater.

First Person Retrospective: Point of View in Larry Watson's Montana 1948

The third person point of view is a reliable lens through which to see a story: transparent, non-distorting, a flexible optical instrument with which to zoom in and out on characters, scenes, and descriptions with minimal distraction to the reader.  And that is the point, isn’t it?  The “vivid, continuous dream” of fiction? 

I sometimes get annoyed with writing that is too focused on “voice.” Such stories can come off more as acts of ventriloquism than acts of narrative, more about demonstrating the writer’s personal virtuosity than about tapping into deep mythological resonance present in the best storytelling. 

As everyone knows, objectivity is impossible for humans to achieve.  At some level, all first person stories must address this issue. Is the narrator reliable?  What stake does the narrator have in the story? Unless it’s handled carefully, the author runs the risk of alienating, confusing, or distracting the reader.  On top of all this, in first person POV the narrative voice and the character’s spoken dialog (if any) must be consistent, or at least related.

The point I’m making is that the first person POV is fraught with danger.

An added danger of a first person retrospective story is that, by definition, it is a memory reported by a participant.  All of us experience this kind of reporting, as listeners, almost every day of the week.  In our minds we have a template; we have an intuitive sense for the limitations of memory, and we know it’s not exact. We know it can only encompass a certain level of detail.  Memory is vague. It tends to round things off. It doesn’t necessarily pay attention to the niceties of scene and dialog; it rarely follows a chronology for very long; and the clarity of its images is often sporadic and fleeting. 

In Montana 1948, the narrator’s father recounts a story about himself and his brother and the Highdogs, which is basically a memory within a memory, or, if you prefer, one first person retrospective story within another. The story is told in general terms, sticking to the facts, and the details are fuzzy:

Cordell and I were on our way somewhere, or back from somewhere, and we cut through the slough.  I guess things were dried out just enough or matted down from a few freezes, but we started finding golf balls in the brush, dozens of them.

The verisimilitude of this memory, at least for this reader, calls into question that of the larger memory embodied by the entire novel. Reading Montana 1948, I was often struck by a disjunction between the narrator’s purported perspective—that of an adult telling a story of his boyhood—and the level of detail he is able to produce. The narrator’s ability to recall the smallest details does not sit well with his frequent disclaimers about his limited perspective, for this reader anyway.  The degree of recall implied by the narrative is an observational power that borders on omniscience.

I suppose this kind of thing is a built-in problem for the first person retrospective POV, and I don’t see any easy solutions.  However, I agree with what E.M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel (to paraphrase), that anything goes in fiction, as long as you can “bounce” it.   And despite the above problems, I believe Watson does succeed in bouncing it in Montana 1948.   But he runs a risk in doing so, and I think it’s fair to generalize that a first person retrospective POV requires more indulgence on the part of a reader than does a third person past tense POV.   In a third person narrative, there’s no room for confusion: This isn’t memory, this is story.

Given all this, why would you ever use the first person retrospective?  Are there specific problems it resolves?  The answer, I think, is that the first person retrospective allows the narrator latitude to take a step back, and to judge events from the perspective of a different point in time.  Presumedly, the intervening years have allowed the narrator to develop some kind of wisdom about the events, which heightens our understanding in crucial ways. 

Thus, in Montana 1948, the narrator can write,

Had I any sensitivity at all I might have recognized that all this talk about wind and dirt and mountains and childhood was my mother’s way of saying she wanted a few moments of purity, a temporary escape from the sordid drama that was playing itself out in her own house.  But I was on the trail of something that would lead me out of childhood.

Is this passage (and others like it) important to the overall goals of the novel?  Absolutely.  Could a third-person narrator get away with this kind of diagnostic judgement of his characters?  Probably not.  What the first person retrospective POV does, in effect, is create a kind of omniscience for the narrator without sacrificing the verisimilitude upon which the story depends. 

In other words, if this novel wants the reader to believe he’s reading a “real” story—a kind of personal memoir, which I believe it does—then “regular” omniscience simply wouldn’t fly.  In this sense, the first person retrospective POV is modern realism’s answer to the omniscience of Tolstoy or Melville. 

Why Humanity Needs Fiction

Humans evolved as a species sitting around campfires in a lethal wilderness. Unlike other animals, we had no special evolutionary tools to protect us, no armor or great speed or built-in camouflage. But we did have remarkably large and adaptable brains. It's not a great stretch, in my opinion, to speculate that at a certain point storytelling became one of our most important tools for survival. 

Imagine a big game hunt:

So there was this big mammoth, right? We were chasing it over the glacier, Argh and me, but we couldn’t seem to catch up with it. Suddenly I had this idea. “Argh,” I said, “why don’t you go around to the other side of that frozen lake with your spear, and I’ll chase the mammoth over in your direction. Then you can hit it with your spear from the front, and I’ll hit it with mine from the back.”

Telling stories about the hunt packaged important information, and allowed the hunters and their listeners to place themselves in the scene. Re-imagining it, they could adapt their behavior. They could tell the story again to refine and perfect the practice of securing food. Similar narratives could have been used to discover and disseminate methods to escape or avoid predators, to spread the word about new territories and resources, or to plan the defeat of rival tribes. Those that could tell a clear and resonant story would always be welcome around the campfire. 

Like any other special adaptation, this aspect of our brains was probably refined and elaborated over thousands of generations of natural selection. We became capable of creating stories of great scope and beauty, the evolutionary equivalent of a peacock’s tail or a meadow-lark’s song. Those who could wield this special human power (says the lecherous writer, coughing into his sleeve), could secure the most desirable, um, mates. 

Whether or not you subscribe to this kind of evolutionary theorizing, there can be no doubt that the ability to produce compelling narrative is ingrained in our consciousness. And what about today? Is storytelling still important? Obviously, given the focus of this blog, I think it is. 

For one thing, storytelling helps us make sense of a universe that is teeming with random information. We live in a time where more knowledge is available to us than ever before. Narrative, in effect, is the molding of information into a shape that makes sense. Connecting the dots. Identifying cause and effect. 

Economics 101: When things are plentiful, they’re cheap. When things are scarce, they command a higher price. These days, which is more scarce, information or narrative? 

I mentioned before that narrative is a basic human need. Conspiracy theories boil and fester because of our deep unmet longing for narrative. Narrative is also, again, the human way of ordering information into something powerful and useful for humans. And by useful, I don’t mean that it’s a way to make money or gain political power -- although it is frequently used that way.

Think about a political election. The winner is often (not always) the politician who’s waged the most effective campaign. And what is an effective campaign, but an effort to tell the most striking, internally consistent, emotionally appealing “story” about the candidate? Elections rarely turn on policy, for heaven's sake -- which may be one reason that we too often elect candidates who are owned by corrupt interests, and whose policies work against our own self-interests.

Words activate the imagination in a way pictures cannot. Viewing a film or a photograph is a relatively passive activity; reading is not. Reading, on a deep level, is sharing. It is communion. Stories are a way of imagining our way home. Of identifying with a greater human community. They allow us to envision new possibilities, and to create our lives the way we choose to create them. 

There's a saying I love: Books are our grandfathers. They equip us to live independent, conscious, intentional, rich lives.  And, as the great Ursula K. Leguin once wrote: 

“We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” 

This is the essential importance of storytelling. 

The Art of the Double-Entendre: Ian McEwan's Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a short and unabashedly plot-driven novel, and there’s a lot to like about it.  McEwan’s sentences are straightforward, literate, and acutely insightful, sweeping the reader down the current of the darkly comic story.  The descriptions are sharp, the characters interesting, and there’s a wry elegaic aspect: the two protagonists mourn their lost youth in the ebbing twentieth century.  McEwan is especially good at portraying his protagonists’ jobs: one is a composer and the other a newspaperman, and we get detailed insight into the workaday doings of each in long passages that are mysteriously appealing; perhaps there is a universal curiosity about work, a desire to vicariously experience another human being’s field of expertise. 

But really, the rocket fuel that powers this exquisite little page-turner is that much sought-after quantity for narrative artists: dramatic tension. 

The opening scene takes place at a funeral for Molly Lane, a friend and lover of Clive and Vernon, the dual (and eventually dueling) protagonists.  During this scene we get insight into the way their minds work, their back-stories, etc.—but the main thing that keeps us reading is a series of little hints that are dropped casually, mostly in the form of double-entendres, that foreshadow the terrible events to come.  For context, it’s important to know that Molly has died of a terrible neurological disease, one that began with a slight tingling in her arm and quickly spiraled down into memory loss, madness, and pain. 

The funeral takes place on a cold day, so perhaps it’s not unusual that Clive is “losing the sensation in his feet.”   This first double entendre may slide by without much notice, no more than a slightly disorienting jolt, but when Clive notices “so many faces [he’d] never seen by daylight, and looking terrible, like cadavers jerked upright to welcome the newly dead,” we really begin to suspect that something is awry. 

McEwan relies on a cumulative effect to be sure that there is no misunderstanding:

[Clive] heard a woman call out merrily, “I can’t feel my hands or my feet and I’m going.” 

These brief and seemingly casual snippets work on a subconscious level, pricking our awareness to keep us alert to the main thrust of the story.  In effect, the reader is spooked into paying attention.  The masterful way McEwan has Clive filtering the busy conversation at the funeral—the lines the composer’s subconscious mind elects to overhear—together with the protagonist’s exaggeratedly morbid observations, sets the perfect tone for this novelistic black comedy.

We find some less subtle foreshadowing also, as when Clive tells Vernon,

“You know, I should have married her.  When she started to go under, I would have killed her with a pillow or something and saved her from everyone’s pity.”

By the end of the first scene, the reader has received the first major dosage of dramatic tension—which is, not coincidentally, directly tied to the central plot conflict: Clive and Vernon’s twilight struggle with mortality, and their eventual reciprocal murder.

In Chapter Two, Clive’s struggle with mortality surges forth into his conscious mind:

Anxieties about work transmuted into the baser metal of simple night fear: illness and death, abstractions that soon found their focus in the sensation he still felt in his left hand.

He manages to convince himself he’s just being paranoid, and represses his fear by taking sleeping pills.  For awhile everything seems okay—he consoles himself by deciding to take a trip to the Lake District, a landscape he’s always found soothing—but he can’t expunge the fear entirely.  As he drifts off to sleep his subconscious returns to the morbid double-entendre mode of the funeral scene:

He had swallowed his hemlock, and there’d be no more tormenting fantasies now.  This thought too was comfort, so that long before the chemicals had reached his brain, he had drawn his knees toward his chest and was released.  Hardknott, Ill Bell, Cold Pike, Poor Crag, Poor Molly . . .

McEwan’s second protagonist, Vernon, undergoes a similar process, though he copes with it differently.  Chapter Three begins, “The thought recurred to Vernon Halliday during an uncharacteristic lull in his morning that he might not exist.” 

This has the ring of a classic short-story “hook,” something out of Kafka, but of course it too is subtly tied to the central theme of mortality.  Vernon suppresses his fear by exercising authority—by losing himself in his work as Editor of the newspaper – but he is constantly aware of a recurring “sense of absence”:

Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.

He’s also touching his head a lot, although he doesn’t take note of it himself until page 33:

There was now a physical symptom.  It involved the whole right side of his head, both skull and brain somehow, a sensation for which there was simply no word.

Both protagonists become increasingly obsessed with their own mortality.  The main plot dynamo is fully wound up. Much of the rest of the book involves Clive and Vernon fruitlessly seeking a deeper refuge in their work—each of which comes with a nifty internal plot dynamo of its own.  Everything fits together like clockwork, propelling us to the final symmetrical resolution. 

Inspiration vs Cold-Eyed Calculation: Hemingway Revisited

My post earlier this year on Hemingway’s descriptive writing has been subjected to a great many hits and retweets, but some readers have been skeptical about my point regarding the repetition of words. The effects of the repeated words may well be similar to those I identified, they argue, but there’s no way Hemingway could have written his limpid, stream-of-consciousness-echoing prose with such cold-eyed intentionality.

This brings up an interesting subject. To what degree is literature the result of an author’s rational intention: the analytical processes of composition and revision? Looked at from another angle, doesn’t literature spring from deep, semi-mystical wells of the collective unconscious, or even from divine inspiration?

There’s no pat answer to this conundrum (thank the gods), but I do have my opinions. Personally, I think most good writing does spring from mystical sources related to the collective unconscious. This is why it’s so important to banish one’s internal editor while producing first-draft material. 

But good writing is also, typically, the result of many hours of sustained, coldly calculating, and very unglamorous analytical work. This is why it’s often advisable to begin with an outline, and why exacting revision and rewriting take up the lion’s share of most writers’ time.

As a result of some research I’ve been doing to get ready for an upcoming writer’s program in Cuba (there may still be openings if you're interested), I recently re-read Hemingway’s short story “One Trip Across,” which I came across in my copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition.  

“One Trip Across” is a great adventure tale, though modern readers will no doubt find its protagonist, Harry Morgan, quite controversial in terms of his racial attitudes and his dubious moral code. The story is set in the waters between Cuba and Key West, and it was the germ for Hemingway’s novel, To Have and Have Not, later made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

The story provides what I believe is as close as we’ll ever get to conclusive evidence that Hemingway did view the use of repeating words with cold-eyed intentionality. [Warning: spoilers to come: you may want to spend a half hour or so reading the story before reading on.]

Hemingway begins by setting a desperate and tense tone with an episode of political violence in Havana. We learn about the increasingly desperate situation faced by Harry Morgan, a rough, working class Key West fishing guide finishing up a two week marlin-fishing trip to Cuba. Harry’s client stiffs him, leaving him penniless and stuck. A Chinese coyote approaches him, asking him to smuggle and ultimately kill a dozen Chinese refugees.

The huge sum of money offered by the Chinese coyote has the potential to solve all Harry’s problems. After a bit of agonizing, the fishing guide violates his own deeply-held principles and accepts. He ends up killing the coyote and saving the lives of the refugees, which is somewhat ennobling, but only partially redeems Harry in the reader’s eyes. Harry gets away with the money and his boat, and the story has a happy ending.

On the whole, "One Trip Across" is written in a noirish first-person voice that plays into the widespread perception of Hemingway’s prose as limited to clipped, hyper-macho diction. But consider the final paragraph of descriptive prose:

Then we came to the edge of the stream and the water quit being blue and was light and greenish and inside I could see the stakes on the Long Reef and on the Western Dry Rocks and the wireless masts at Key West and the La Concha hotel up high out of all the low houses and plenty smoke from out where they’re burning garbage. Sand Key light was plenty close now and you could see the boathouse and the little dock alongside the light and I knew we were only forty minutes away now and I felt good to be getting back and I had a good stake now for the summertime.

The first important point to make about this paragraph is that the diction is different from the rest of the story. The voice is no longer clipped and noirish; the sentences run on, similar to the "boiling over" paragraph style I pointed out in this Cormac McCarthy post.

The intentionality here is obvious: Harry Morgan has succeeded, the story is going to have a happy ending, and the diction must therefore capture Harry’s joyous emotions upon the realization of this fact. Straightforward enough, right? And in itself, this a great thing for a writer to notice. It’s a reminder to use your sentences to echo the emotion your protagonist is experiencing.

But it’s the repetition of the words “stakes,” “good,” and “plenty,” that struck me. Given what has happened in the story – Harry has plenty of money now; plenty to stake him through the summertime – do you have any doubt that Hemingway went about revising this paragraph with intentionality regarding repeating words?

I’d love to hear your thoughts if you have them.

Drama in Storytelling: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men

I recently went to see a production of Steinbeck’s great play-novelette, Of Mice and Men. The fact that a friend was playing George was a big part of the draw, but I generally do like to go see plays now and then -- for enjoyment, edification, and to remind myself of the essential kinship that exists between theatrical productions and fictional prose narratives.

During the play’s intermission, I was talking to a friend and it flashed into my mind that Of Mice and Men would be a perfect work to study with regard to the centrality of drama in storytelling. Far too much of the fiction I'm reading these days is flaccid and uninspiring, a condition for which more drama is the most important antidote. If your fiction is getting tepid reactions from readers, drama is almost certainly the missing ingredient. Drama is what allows a story to grab readers by the throat and never let them go.

There’s a good deal more to it, of course, than just putting in more arguments and swashbuckling fight scenes. “Quiet” narratives can and should have as much or more drama than action-packed stories. So, where does drama come from, and why do I think Of Mice and Men offers such an instructive example?

Before I jump in to the story, I should probably define terms. I don’t know or care what the official jargon is, but for the purposes of this post I’m defining storytelling “drama” as consisting of two main elements: tension and conflict. Tension is the knowledge or expectation that something bad is going to happen. Conflict is when something bad actually happens, often manifested as a clash between opposing characters.

There isn’t a single moment in Of Mice and Men that doesn’t bristle with drama. I remember picking up the novelette a few years ago and scarcely being able to breathe until I’d reached the final line. Moreover, Steinbeck’s drama is completely “honest,” in that it emerges directly from the characters’ basic makeup: their proclivities, flaws, and deeply held desires. As I see it, here are the main sources of drama in Of Mice and Men:

• Lennie’s overwhelming and thoughtless strength, and his disquieting tendency to love small furry creatures to death. 

• Curley’s Napoleon complex, as manifested in his antipathy toward Lennie. 

• Curley’s wife’s flirtatiousness, and the trouble it portends with regard to Curley’s extreme jealousy and proclivity to violence. 

• George and Lennie’s need to “make a stake” in order to survive and free themselves of the cycle of poverty and hard labor. (Note: this is the story’s central “dramatic need” – it propels the story’s main actions in addition to serving as a source of tension in its own right: will they succeed or won’t they?) 

• George and Lennie’s yearning (later shared by Candy and Crooks) for their own farmstead with chickens, a garden, and Lennie’s long-haired rabbits. This note of yearning is closely related to the “dramatic need” mentioned above, and is one of the things that gives the story its deep resonance.

Together, all these point-sources of simmering drama create an overwhelming sense of impending disaster. This is the definition of suspense. Of Mice and Men has it in spades, which is why it's so consistently arresting. Things are inevitably going to go wrong. The characters' dramatic needs will either be met or thwarted, and their intrinsically oppositional natures are bound to express themselves in a final conflagration. Here's another point where I believe many stories fail. Dramatic tension is worth nothing if it's never consummated in dramatic conflict. But Steinbeck, of course, delivers. 

*

To sum up, there’s not one simple, easy-to-articulate source of drama in Of Mice and Men. Rather, there are a whole slew of sources, many of them intertwined, that are developed and unfolded in the course of a simple, linear, and emphatically causal chain of events. The resolution is quite satisfying, because all the drama is resolved in a single, climactic scene.

The main lesson I take out of this? Don’t stint when it comes drama. It is much more likely that your story has too little of it than too much. In fact, there can’t be too much of it, as long as it’s “honest”  – that is, character-driven.

I think a lot of contemporary writers forget this. It’s not so much that nothing happens – although that too is a problem in a lot of apprentice fiction. It’s that what does happen isn’t “honest” enough. It isn’t sufficiently rooted in the desires and flaws and intrinsic natures of the story’s characters.

Steinbeck is a great American master. His fiction is as urgent and resonant now as the day it was written. If it’s been awhile since you’ve read Of Mice and Men, the few thrilling hours it takes to immerse yourself in it will be an eminently worthwhile investment.