Free The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner

the arguments raised against conventional fiction by people more interested in metafiction. None of the arguments against conventional fiction will hold, and looking closely at conventional fiction’s defense will help us see clearly what the interest and “truth” in conventional fiction are.Once we have fiction’s nature clear, we can better appreciate the special interest of metafiction, a subject to which we will turn in the next chapter.
    The traditionalist answer to the “innovative fictionist’s” general line of argument might go like this: Innovative fictions of the kind just discussed are not inherently wrong-headed, merely unserious. Whatever interest or value they have they derive from their contrast with “traditional”—that is, “conventional” or “normal”—fiction. So long as conventional fiction remains adequate and worthwhile, innovative fictions are literary stunts. They have a kind of interest, as intellectual toys, but they engage us only for the moment. Though traditional serious fiction may also be play, since it deeply involves us with the troubles of characters who do not in fact exist, the play in serious traditional fiction bears on life, not just art. As we play at compassion, weeping for Little Nell or Ophelia, we exercise faculties we know to be vitally important in real life. If the assembly of made-up materials in a fiction creates a portrait of the artist, the importance of the portrait is not that it tells us what the artist looks like but that it provides us with a focus, an aperture, a medium (as in a séance) for seeing things beyond and more important than the artist. In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world. Granted, no two artists reveal to us exactly the same world, just as no two windows do; and granted, moreover, since artists are human and therefore limited, some dedicated and serious artists may be windows smudged by dirt, others may distort like blistered and warped panes, still others may be stained glass. But the world they frame is the world that is really out there (or in here: Insofar as human nature is everywhere the same, it makes no difference). A powerful part of our interest as we read great literature is our sense that we’re “onto something.” And part of our boredom when we read books in which the vision of life seems paltry-minded is our sense that we are not.
    Aristotle’s idea of the energeic action is not really refuted byPoe’s “Cask of Amontillado” or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” though those works may lead us to understand the theory in a new way, a way Aristotle never thought of, working as he did from the practice of Greek tragedians, but one to which he might without too great an effort adapt himself. Poe and Kafka begin not with exterior situations whose potential is to be actualized in the progress of the work, but with situations that are, in one case literally and in the other expressionistically, interior. Whereas Sophocles’ initial situation in
Oedipus Rex
is a plague in Thebes and the king’s dark history, as yet unknown to the king himself, Poe’s initial situation is almost entirely a psychological state, the central character’s hunger for revenge (whether or not the hunger is even justified the reader cannot tell), and Kafka’s initial situation is a psychological state expressionistically transformed: Where the realist would say, “One day Gregor Samsa woke up to the realization that he was like a cockroach,” the expressionist heightens or intensifies reality by turning the metaphor to fact. In place of the classical writer’s clear distinction between the outside world and the inside world—“situation,” on one hand, “character,” on the other—the two modern writers see outer reality and inner reality as interpenetrating: The world is whatever we feel it to be, so that the situation character must deal with is partly character. Either way, the unfolding of the story