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

against the sky and compared to a single, equally isolated tree in the foreground, the one remote, unchanging, and divine in connotation, the other accessible, ever-changing, and humanized. We find this juxtaposition of elements expressed in its classical form in Titian, Poussin, and other masters; in several of the late works of Cézanne—the Mont-Sainte-Victoire paintings of 1902–1906—we find the traditional juxtaposition ingeniously varied, the tree mysteriously dominating the mountain and treated in such a way (swirling brushstrokes, vague outlines) that it seems at least as mystical as the mountain; or the tree and the mountain so identified, by color and frantic brushstrokes, that the accessible and the remote, or human emotion and the ideal, seem to merge; and so forth.
    Though no one can say what the number is, the number of fictional elements that exist is finite, like the number of words in the English language. Like the tree and the mountain in our example from painting, or like words in the English language,the elements of fiction may mean one thing in one place, another in another; they slip and slide and occasionally overlap; but they have meaning—or, at any rate, meaning domains—and so do their standard, increasingly complex juxtapositions. Good writers use them as skillfully and comfortably, and sometimes as unconsciously, as plumbers and roofers use language. No new elements are likely to be discovered; this is what we mean, or ought to mean, when we say that “literature is exhausted.” What writers do discover is new combinations. The search for new combinations is both guided by and one with the fictional process.
    Perhaps the logical first step in the fictional process is the writer’s conscious or intuitive recognition of the nature of narrative, and his acceptance of the shackles imposed by his decision to tell a story (instead of, say, to write a philosophy book or paint a picture). By definition—and of aesthetic necessity—a story contains profluence, a requirement best satisfied by a sequence of causally related events, a sequence that can end in only one of two ways: in resolution, when no further event can take place (the murderer has been caught and hanged, the diamond has been found and restored to its owner, the elusive lady has been captured and married), or in logical exhaustion, our recognition that we’ve reached the stage of infinite repetition; more events might follow, perhaps from now till Kingdom Come, but they will all express the same thing—for example, the character’s entrapment in empty ritual or some consistently wrong response to the pressures of his environment. Resolution is of course the classical and usually more satisfying conclusion; logical exhaustion satisfies us intellectually but often not emotionally, since it’s more pleasing to see things definitely achieved or thwarted than to be shown why they can never be either achieved or thwarted. Both achievement and failure give importance to the thing sought; we can feel about it as we feel about values. Logical exhaustion usually reveals that the character’s supposed exercise of free will was illusory.
    It might be objected here that no law requires art to be “pleasing.” A story that raises expectations, then shows why they can neither be satisfied nor denied, can be as illuminating, and as interesting moment by moment, as any other kind of story, though the ending may annoy us. The trouble, from the traditionalist point of view, is this. First, the revelation that the character’s exercise of free will was illusory raises suspicions, which may or may not be justified, about the author’s honesty and artistic responsibility. It may be that the writer was as surprised and disappointed by the inescapable conclusion to his fictional argument as we have been; yet we cannot help wondering how much real interest he felt from the beginning in his characters and events: The conclusion suggests that he has