The writing of fiction

by Edith Wharton

IV

The predicament—the situation—must still be borne in mind if the novelist approaches his task in another way, and sees his tale as situation illustrating character instead of the reverse.

Even the novel of character and manners can never be without situation, that is, without some sort of climax caused by the contending forces engaged. The conflict, the shock of forces, is latent in every attempt to detach a fragment of human experience and transpose it in terms of art, that is, of completion.

The seeming alternative is to fall back on the “stream of consciousness”—which is simply the “slice-of-life” of the ’eighties renamed—but that method, as has already been pointed out, contains its own condemnation, since every attempt to employ it of necessity involves selection, and selection in the long run must eventually lead to the transposition, the “stylization,” of the subject.

Let it be assumed, then, that a predicament there must be, whether worked out in one soul, or created by the shock of opposing purposes. The larger the canvas of the novel—supposing the novelist’s powers to be in scale with his theme—the larger will be the scale of the predicament. In the great novel of manners in which Balzac, Thackeray and Tolstoy were preeminent, the conflict engages not only individuals but social groups, and the individual plight is usually the product—one of the many products—of the social conflict. There is a sense in which situation is the core of every tale, and as truly present in the quiet pages of “Eugénie Grandet” or “Le Lys dans la Vallée” as in the tense tragedy of “The Return of the Native,” the epic clash of “War and Peace” or the dense social turmoil of “Vanity Fair.”

But the main advantage of the novelist to whom his subject first presents itself in terms of character, either individual or social, is that he can quietly watch his people or his group going about their business, and let the form of his tale grow out of what they are, out of their idiosyncrasies, their humours and their prejudices, instead of fitting a situation onto them before he really knows them, either personally or collectively.

It is manifest that every method of fiction has its dangers, and that the study of character pursued to excess may tend to submerge the action necessary to illustrate that character. In the inevitable reaction against the arbitrary “plot” many novelists have gone too far in the other direction, either swamping themselves in the tedious “stream of consciousness,” or else—another frequent error—giving an exaggerated importance to trivial incidents when the tale is concerned with trivial lives. There is a sense in which nothing which receives the touch of art is trivial; but to rise to this height the incident, insignificant in itself, must illustrate some general law, and turn on some deep movement of the soul. If the novelist wants to hang his drama on a button, let it at least be one of Lear’s.

All things hold together in the practice of any art, and character and manners, and the climaxes springing out of them, cannot, in the art of fiction, be dealt with separately without diminution to the subject. It is a matter for the novelist’s genius to combine all these ingredients in their due proportion; and then we shall have “Emma” or “The Egoist” if character is to be given the first place, “Le Père Goriot” or “Madame Bovary” if drama is to be blent with it, and “War and Peace,” “Vanity Fair,” “L’Education Sentimentale” if all the points of view and all the methods are to be harmonized in the achievement of a great picture wherein the individual, the group and their social background have each a perfectly apportioned share in the composition.

“Four great walls in the New Jerusalem

Meted on each side by the angel’s reed—”

Yes; but to cover such spaces adequately happens even to the greatest artists only once or twice in their career.

V
MARCEL PROUST

V
MARCEL PROUST