A Manual of the Art of Fiction

by Clayton Meeker Hamilton

At this point the main outline was completed. It then became necessary for Poe to plan the two divisions of the story in detail. In the first part, no action was necessary, and very little attention had to be paid to setting. It was essential that all of the writer’s stress should be laid on the element of character; for the sole purpose of this initial division of the story must be to produce upon the reader an extremely emphatic impression of the extraordinary 198 personality of Ligeia. As soon as the reader could be sufficiently impressed with the force of her character, she must be made to die; and the first part of the story would be finished. But at this point Poe was obliged to choose between the direct and the indirect means of delineating character. Should Ligeia be depicted directly by her husband, or indirectly, through her own speech? In other words, should this first half of the story be a description or a conversation? The matter was easy to decide. The method of conversation was unavailable; because a dialogue between Ligeia and her husband would keep the attention of the reader hovering from one to the other, whereas it was necessary for the purpose of the tale to focus all of the attention on Ligeia. She must, therefore, be depicted directly by her husband. Having concluded that he must devote the entire first half of his story to this description, Poe employed all his powers to make it adequate and emphatic. The description must, of course, be largely subjective and suggestive, and must be pervaded with a sense of something unfathomable about the person described. In order that (reverting to the language of Poe’s own critical dictum) “his very initial sentence” might “tend to the outbringing of this effect,” the author wrote, “I cannot for my soul remember how, when, or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the Lady Ligeia”; and the story was begun.

It was more difficult to handle the second division of the tale, which was to deal with the period between Ligeia’s death and her resurrection. The main stress of the story now ceased to be laid on the element of character. The element of action, furthermore, was subsidiary in the second part of the tale, as it had been already in the first. All that had to happen was the resurrection of Ligeia; and this the reader had been forced by the very 199 theme of the story to foresee. The chief interest in the second part must therefore lie in determining where and when and how this resurrection was accomplished. A worthy setting must be found for the culminating event. Poe could lose no time in preparing a place for his climax; and therefore he was obliged, as soon as he had laid Ligeia in the grave, to begin an elaborate description of the stage settings of his final scene. The place must be wild and weird and arabesque. It must be worthy to receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpses of the moon. The place was found, the time––midnight––decided upon: but the question remained,––how should Ligeia be resurrected?

And here arose almost an insuperable difficulty. Ligeia had been buried (must have been buried, as we have seen), and her body had been given to the worms. Yet now she must be revived. And it would not be sufficient to let her merely walk bodily into the fantastic apartment where her husband, dream-haunted, was waiting to receive her; for the point to be emphasized was not so much the mere fact of her being once more alive, as the fact that she had won her way back to life by the exertion of her own extraordinary will. The reader must be shown not only the result of her triumph over death, but the very process of the struggle through which by sheer volition she forced her soul back into the bodily life. If only her body were present, so that the reader could be shown its gradual obsession by her soul, all would be easily accomplished; but, by the conditions of the story, her body could not be present: and the difficulty of the problem was extreme.

But here Poe hit upon a solution of the difficulty. Would not another dead body do as well? Surely Ligeia could breathe her life into any discarded female form. Therefore, of course, her husband must marry again, 200 solely in order that his second wife should die. The Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine is, therefore, as I have already hinted, not really a character, but only a necessary adjunct to the final scene, an indispensable piece of stage property. In order to indicate this fact, Poe was obliged to abstain carefully from describing her in detail, and to seek in every possible way to prevent the reader’s attention from dwelling long upon her. Hence, although, in writing the first part of the story, he devoted several pages to the description of the heroine, he dismissed the Lady Rowena, in the second part, with only two descriptive epithets,––“fair-haired and blue-eyed,” to distinguish her briefly from the dark-eyed and raven-haired Ligeia.

With the help of this convenient body, it was easy for Poe to develop his final scene. The intense struggle of Ligeia’s soul to win its way back to the world could be worked up with enthralling suspense: and when at last the climax was reached and the husband realized that his lost love stood living before him, the purpose of the story would be accomplished, Ligeia’s will would have done its work, and there would be nothing more to tell. Poe wrote, “These are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes––of my lost love––of the Lady––of the Lady Ligeia”: and the story was ended.

For it must be absolutely understood that with whatever may have happened after that moment of entire recognition this particular story does not, and cannot, concern itself. Whether in the next moment Ligeia dies again irrevocably, or whether she lives an ordinary lifetime and then ultimately dies forever, or whether she remains alive eternally as a result of the triumph of her will, are questions entirely beyond the scope of the story and have nothing to do with the single narrative effect which Poe, from the very outset, was planning to produce. 201 At no other point does he more clearly display his mastery than in his choice of the perfect moment at which to end his story.

It would, of course, be idle to assert that Poe disposed of all the narrative problems which confronted him while constructing this story precisely in the order I have indicated. Unfortunately, he never explained in print the genesis of any of his stories, and we can only imagine the process of his plans with the aid of his careful analysis of the development of “The Raven.” But I think it has been clearly shown that the structure of “Ligeia” is at all points inevitably conditioned by its theme, and that no detail of the structure could be altered without injuring the effect of the story; and I am confident that some intellectual process similar to that which has been outlined must be followed by every author who seeks to construct stories as perfect in form as Poe’s.

Analysis of “The Prodigal Son.”––The student of short-story structure is therefore advised to submit several other masterpieces of the form to a process of intellectual analysis similar to that which we have just pursued. By so doing he will become impressed with the inevitability of every structural expedient that is employed in the best examples of the type. For a further illustration of this inevitability of structure, let us look for a moment at the parable of “The Prodigal Son” (Luke xv., beginning with the eleventh verse), which, although it was written down many centuries ago, fulfills the modern critical concept of the short-story, in that it produces a single narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. For the purposes of this study, let us set aside the religious implications of the parable, and consider it as an ordinary work of fiction. The story should more properly be called “The Forgiving Father,” rather than “The 202 Prodigal Son”; because the single narrative effect to be wrought out is the extent of a father’s forgiveness toward his erring children. Two characters are obviously needed for the tale,––first, a father to exercise forgiveness, and second, a child to be forgiven. Whether this child were a son or a daughter would, of course, have no effect on the mere structure of the story. In the narrative as we know it, the erring child is a son. In pursuance of the greatest economy of means, the story might be told with these two characters only, because the effect to be wrought out is based on the personal relation between them,––a relation involving no one else. But fatherly forbearance exercised toward an only child might seem a trait of human weakness instead of patriarchal strength; and the father’s forgiveness will be greatly accentuated if, beside the prodigal, he has other children less liable to error. Therefore, in pursuance of the utmost emphasis, it is necessary to add a third character,––another son who is not allured into the way of the transgressor. The story must necessarily be narrated by an external omniscient personality: it must be seen and told from a point of view aloof and god-like. The father could not tell it, because the theme of the tale is the beauty of his own character; and neither of the two sons is in a position to see the story whole and to narrate it without prejudice. The story opens perfectly, with the very simple sentence, “A certain man had two sons.” Already the reader knows that he is to be told a story of character (rather than of action or of setting) concerning three people, the most important of whom is the certain man who has been mentioned first. Consider, in passing, how faulty would have been such another opening as this, for instance,––“Not long ago, in a city of Judea”.... Such an initial sentence would have suggested setting, instead of suggesting character, as the leading element 203 in the story. Very properly, the first of the two sons to be singled out specifically is the more important of the two, the prodigal: “And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.’” Thus, in only two sentences, the reader is given the entire basis of the story. The swift and simple narrative that follows is masterly in absolute conciseness. The younger son takes his journey into a far country, wastes his substance in riotous living, begins to be in want, suffers and repents, and returns to seek the forgiveness of his father. Wonderfully, beautifully, his father loves and pities and forgives him: “For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” At this point the story would end, if it were told with only two characters instead of three. But emphasis demands that the elder son should now make an entirely reasonable objection to the reception of the prodigal; because the great love which is the essence of the father’s character will shine forth much more brightly when he overrules the objection. He does so in the same words he had used in the first moment of emotion: “For this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.” These beautiful words, which now receive the emphasis of iteration as well as the emphasis of terminal position, sum up and complete the entire preëstablished design.

This story, which contains only five hundred words, is a little masterpiece of structure. It embodies a narrative theme of profound human import; it exhibits three characters so clearly and completely drawn that the reader knows them better than he knows many a hero of a lengthy novel; and it displays an absolute adjustment between economy and emphasis in its succinct yet touching train of incidents. Furthermore, it is also, in the English version of the King James translators, a little masterpiece of style. The words are simple, homely, and 204 direct. Most of them are of Saxon origin, and the majority are monosyllabic. Less than half a dozen words in the entire narrative contain more than two syllables. And yet they are set so delicately together that they fall into rhythms potent with emotional effect. How much the story gains from this mastery of prose may be felt at once by comparing with the King James version parallel passages from the standard French Bible. The English monosyllabic refrain, with its touching balance of rhythm, loses nearly all of its esthetic effect in the French translation: “Car mon fils, que voici, était mort, mais il est ressuscité; il était perdu, mais il est retrouvé.” And that very moving sentence about the elder son, “And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out and entreated him,” becomes in the French Bible, “Mais il se mit en colère, et ne voulut point entrer; et son père étant sorti, le priait d’entrer.” No especial nicety of ear is necessary to notice that the first is greatly written, and the second is not.

Style Essential to the Short-Story.––And this leads us to the general consideration that even a perfectly constructed story will fail of the uttermost effect unless it be at all points adequately written. After Poe had, with his intellect, outlined step by step the structure of “Ligeia,” he was obliged to confront a further problem,––the problem of writing the story with the thrilling and enthralling harmony of that low, musical language which haunts us like the echo of a dream. It is one thing to build a story; it is quite another thing to write it: and in Poe’s case it is evident that an appreciable interval of time must have elapsed between his accomplishment of the first, and his undertaking of the second, effort. He built his stories intellectually, in cold blood; he wrote them emotionally, in esthetic exaltation: and the two moods are so distinct and mutually exclusive that they 205 must have been successive instead of coexistent. Some authors build better than they write; others write better than they build. Seldom, very seldom, is a man equipped, as Poe was, with an equal mastery of structure and of style. Yet though unity of form may be attained through structure alone, unity of mood is dependent mainly upon style. The language should be pitched throughout in tune with the emotional significance of the narrative effect to be produced. Any sentence which is tuned out of harmony will jangle and disrupt the unity of mood, which is as necessary to a great short-story as it is to a great lyric poem. Hawthorne, though his structure was frequently at fault, proved the greatness of his art by maintaining, through sheer mastery of style, an absolute unity of mood in every story that he undertook. Mr. Kipling has not always done so, because he has frequently used language more with manner than with style; but in his best stories, like “The Brushwood Boy” and “They,” there is a unity of tone throughout the writing that sets them on the plane of highest art.