Free On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner Page B

daughter is simply a victim in this story, since she doesn’t know the facts by means of which she could make significant choices—namely, struggle with her feelings and come to some decision, accepting her role as daughter or else, conceivably, choosing to violate the incest taboo. When the central character is a victim, not someone who does but someone who’s done to, there can be no real suspense. Admittedly it is not always easy to see, in great fiction, the central character’s agency. The governess in James’s The Turn of the Screw would hotly deny that she herself is acting in complicity with the forces of evil, but gradually, to our horror, we realize that she is; and some stories—for instance those of Kafka—adapt to the purposes of “serious” fiction the central device of a certain kind of comic fiction, the clown-hero knocked around by the universe, a character we laugh at because his misapplied strategies and beliefs parody our own. (It is not that Kafka’s heroes—or Beckett’s—do not try to do things; it is only that the things they try don’t work.) In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.
    The wiser or more experienced writer gives the reader the information he needs to understand the story moment by moment, with the result that instead of asking, as he reads, “What’s going to happen to the characters next?” the reader asks, “What will Frank do next? What would Wanda say if Frank were to …” and so on. Involving himself in the story in this way, the reader feels true suspense, which is to say, true concern for the characters. He takes an active part, however secondary, in the story’s growth and development: he speculates, anticipates; and because he has been provided with relevant information, he is in a position to catch the mistake if the writer draws false or unconvincing conclusions, forcing the action in a direction it would not naturally go, or making the characters feel things no human being would really feel in the situation.
    If Frank is clearly drawn and interesting, a lifelike human being, the reader worries about him, understands him, cares about the choices he makes. Thus if Frank at some point, out of cowardice or indecisiveness, makes a choice any decent human being would recognize as wrong, the reader will feel vicarious embarrassment and shame, as he would feel if some loved one, or the reader himself, were to make such a choice. If Frank sooner or later acts bravely, or at least honestly, selflessly, the reader will feel a thrill of pride as if he himself or some loved one had behaved well—a pride that, ultimately, expresses pleasure in what is best not just in the made-up character but in all humankind. If Frank finally behaves well, and Wanda shows unexpected (but not arbitrary or writermanipulated) nobility, the reader will feel even better. This is the morality of fiction. The morality of the story of Frank and Wanda does not reside in their choosing not to commit incest or in their deciding they will commit incest. Good fiction does not deal in codes of conduct—at least not directly; it affirms responsible humanness.
    The young writer who understands why it is wisest to tell the Frank and Wanda story as one of dilemma, suffering, and choice is in a position to understand good fiction’s generosity in the broadest sense of the word. The wise writer counts on the characters and plot for his story’s power, not on tricks of withheld information, including withheld information at the end—will they commit incest or won’t they, now that they know? In other words, the writer lays himself wide open, dancing on a high wire without a net. The writer is generous, too, in that, for all his mastery of technique, he introduces only those techniques useful to the story: he is the story’s