THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE
We have now considered the subject-matter of fiction and also
the contrasted attitudes of mind of the two great schools of
fiction-writers toward setting forth that subject-matter. We must
next turn our attention to the technical methods of presenting the
materials of fiction, and notice in detail the most important devices
employed by all fiction-writers in order to fulfil the purpose of
their art.
Rhetoricians, as everybody knows, arbitrarily but conveniently
distinguish four forms, or moods, or methods, of discourse: namely,
narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. It may be
stated without fear of well-founded contradiction that the natural
mood, or method, of fiction is the first of these,--narration.
Argumentation, for its own sake, has no place in a work of fiction.
There is, to be sure, a type of novel, which is generally called in
English "the novel with a purpose," the aim of which is to persuade
the reader to accept some special thesis that the author holds
concerning politics, religion, social ethics, or some other of the
phases of life that are readily open to discussion. But such a novel
usually fails of its purpose if it attempts to accomplish it by
employing the technical devices of argument. It can best fulfil its
purpose by exhibiting indisputable truths of life, without persuasive
comment, _ex cathedra_, on the part of the novelist. In vain he
argues, denounces, or defends, appeals to us or coaxes us, unless his
story in the first place convinces by its very truthfulness. If his
thesis be as incontestable as the author thinks it is, it can prove
itself by narrative alone.
Exposition, for its own sake, is also out of place in fiction. The
aim of exposition is to explain,--an aim necessarily abstract; but
the purpose of fiction is to represent life,--a purpose necessarily
concrete. To discourse of life in abstract terms is to subvert the
natural mood of art; and the novelist may make his meaning just as
clear by representing life concretely, without a running commentary of
analysis and explanation. Life truly represented will explain itself.
There are, to be sure, a number of great novelists, of whom George
Eliot may be taken as the type, who frequently halt their story
to write an essay about it. These essays are often instructive in
themselves, but they are not fiction, because they do not embody their
truths in imagined facts of human life. George Eliot is at one moment
properly a novelist, and at the next moment a discursive expositor.
She would be still greater as a novelist, and a novelist merely, if
she could make her meaning clear without digressing to another art.
Description also, in the most artistic fiction, is used only
as subsidiary and contributive to narration. The aim of
description--which is to suggest the look of things at a certain
characteristic moment--is an aim necessarily static. But life--which
the novelist purposes to represent--is not static but dynamic. The aim
of description is pictorial: but life does not hold its pictures;
it melts and merges them one into another with headlong hurrying
progression. A novelist who devotes two successive pages to the
description of a landscape or a person, necessarily makes his story
stand still while he is doing it, and thereby belies an obvious law
of life. Therefore, as writers of fiction have progressed in art, they
have more and more eliminated description for its own sake.
Since, then, the natural mood, or method, of fiction is narration,
it is necessary that we should devote especial study to the nature
of narrative. And in a study frankly technical we may be aided at the
outset by a definition, which may subsequently be explained in all its
bearings.
A narrative is a representation of a series of events. This is a
very simple definition; and only two words of it can possibly demand
elucidation. These words are _series_ and _event_. The word _event_
will be explained fully in a later section of this chapter: meanwhile
it may be understood loosely as synonymous with _happening_. Let us
first examine the exact meaning of the word _series_.
The word _series_ implies much more than the word _succession_: it
implies a relation not merely chronological but also logical; and
the logical relation it implies is that of cause and effect. In any
section of actual life which we examine, the events are likely to
appear merely in succession and not in series. One event follows
another immediately in time, but does not seem linked to it
immediately by the law of causation. What you do this morning does not
often necessitate as a logical consequence what you do this afternoon;
and what you do this evening is not often a logical result of what you
have done during the day. Any transcript from actual life that is not
deliberately arranged and logically patterned is therefore likely not
to be a narrative. A passage from a diary, for instance, which states
events in the order of their happening but makes no attempt to present
them as links in a chain of causation, is not, technically speaking,
narrative in method. To illustrate this point, let us open at random
the diary of Samuel Pepys. Here is his entry for April 29, 1666:--
"To Church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy sermon upon the Devil's having no
right to anything in this world. To Mr. Evelyn's, where I walked
in his garden till he come from Church, with great pleasure reading
Ridley's discourse, all my way going and coming, upon the Civil and
Ecclesiastical Law. He being come home, he and I walked together in
the garden with mighty pleasure, he being a very ingenious man; and,
the more I know him, the more I love him. Weary to bed, after having
my hair of my head cut shorter, even close to my skull, for coolness,
it being mighty hot weather."
There is no logical continuity in the worthy diarist's faithful
chronicle of actuality. What occasioned the weariness with which he
went to bed? It could not have been the company of Mr. Evelyn, whom
he loved; it could hardly have been the volume on the civil and
ecclesiastical law, though its title does suggest the soporific. Was
his strength, like Samson's, shorn away with the hair of his head;
or can it be that that lazy sermon of Mr. Mills' got in its deadening
effects at bed-time? We notice, at any rate, that the diarist's
remarks need considerable re-arrangement to make them really
narrative.
Yet it is just in this way that commonly event succeeds event in the
daily life of every one. It is only in the great passionate crises of
existence that event treads upon event in uninterrupted sequence of
causation. And here is the main formal difference between life as
it actually happens and life as it is artistically represented in
history, biography, and fiction. In every art there are two steps:
first, the selection of essentials, and secondly, the arrangement
of these essentials according to a pattern. In the art of narration,
events are first selected because they suggest an essential logical
relation to each other; and they are then arranged along the lines of
a pattern of causation. Let us compare with the haphazard passage from
Pepys a bit of narrative that is artistically patterned. Here is the
conclusion to Stevenson's story of "Markheim." The hero, having slain
a dealer in his shop on Christmas day, spends a long time alone,
ransacking the dealer's effects and listening to the voice of
conscience. He is interrupted by a ringing of the door-bell. The
dealer's maid has returned from holidaying.--
"He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to
himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was,
ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as a chance-medley--a scene
of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on
the further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in
the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned
by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer
swarmed into his mind as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more
broke out into impatient clamor.
"He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a
smile.
"'You had better go for the police,' said he: 'I have killed your
master.'"
The last sentence of this passage is an effect which is logically
led up to by many causes that are rapidly reviewed in the preceding
sentences. Stevenson has here patterned a passage of life along lines
of causation; he has employed the logical method of narration: but
Pepys, in the selection quoted, looked upon events with no narrative
sense whatever.
The narrative sense is, primarily, an ability to trace an event back
to its logical causes and to look forward to its logical effects.
It is the sense through which we realize, for instance, that what
happened at two o'clock to-day, although it may not have resulted
necessarily from what happened an hour before, was the logical outcome
of something else that happened at noon on the preceding Thursday, let
us say, and that this in turn was the result of causes stretching back
through many months. A well-developed narrative sense in looking on at
life is very rare. Every one, of course, is able to refer the headache
of the morning after to the hilarity of the night before; and even,
after some experience, to foresee the headache at the time of the
hilarity: but life, to the casual eye of the average man, hides in
the main the secrets of its series, and betrays only an illogical
succession of events. Minds cruder than the average see only a jumble
of happenings in the life they look upon, and group them, if at all,
by propinquity in time, rather than by any deeper law of relation.
Such a mind had Dame Quickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare's
"Henry IV." Consider the famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff
of breach of promise to marry her:--
"Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in
my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon
Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking
his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then,
as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife.
Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come
in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of
vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst
desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green
wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to
be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long
they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch
thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath: deny it, if
thou canst."
There are, of course, many deficiencies in Dame Quickly's mental
make-up; but the one for us to notice here is her utter lack of the
narrative sense. She would never be able to tell a story: because, in
the first place, she could not select from a muddle of events those
which bore an intelligible relation to one another, and in the
second place, she could not arrange them logically instead of
chronologically. She has no sense of series. And although Dame
Quickly's mind is an exaggeration of the type it represents, the type,
in less exaggerated form, is very common; and everybody will agree
that the average man, who has never taken pains to train himself in
narrative, is not able in his ordinary conversation to tell with ease
a logically connected story.
The better sort of narrative sense is not merely an abstract
intellectual understanding of the relation of cause and effect
subsisting between events often disparate in time; it is, rather, a
concrete feeling of the relation. It is an intuitive feeling; and,
being such, it is possessed instinctively by certain minds. There are
people in the world who are natural born story-tellers; all of us
have met with them in actual life: and to this class belong the
story-telling giants, like Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Dumas pere,
Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling. Narrative is natural to their minds. They
sense events in series; and a series once started in their imagination
propels itself with hurrying progression. Some novelists, like Wilkie
Collins, have nothing else to recommend them but this native sense of
narrative; but it is a gift that is not to be despised. Authors with
something important to say about life have need of it, in order that
the process of reading their fiction may be, in Stevenson's phrase,
"absorbing and voluptuous." In the great story-tellers, there is a
sort of self-enjoyment in the exercise of the sense of narrative;
and this, by sheer contagion, communicates enjoyment to the reader.
Perhaps it may be called (by analogy with the familiar phrase, "the
joy of living") the joy of telling tales. The joy of telling tales
which shines through "Treasure Island" is perhaps the main reason for
the continued popularity of the story. The author is having such a
good time in telling his tale that he gives us necessarily a good time
in reading it.
But many of the novelists who have had great things to say about human
life have been singularly deficient in this native sense of narrative.
George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, for example, almost never evidence
the joy of telling tales. George Eliot's natural habit of mind was
abstract rather than concrete; she was born an essayist. But, largely
through the influence of George Henry Lewes, she deliberately
decided that fiction was the most effective medium for expressing her
philosophy of life. Thereafter she strove earnestly to develop that
sense of narrative which, at the outset, was largely lacking in
her mind. To many readers who are not without appreciation of the
importance and profundity of her understanding of human nature, her
stories are wearisome and unalluring, because she told them with
labor, not with ease. She does not seem to have had a good time with
them, as Stevenson had with "Treasure Island," a story in other ways
of comparative unimportance. And surely it is not frivolous to state
that the most profound and serious of thoughts are communicated best
when they are communicated with the greatest interest.
It could hardly be hoped that a person entirely devoid of the
narrative sense should acquire it by any amount of labor; but nearly
every one possesses it in at least a rudimentary degree, and any
one possessing it at all may develop it by exercise. A simple and
common-sensible exercise is to seize hold of some event that happens
in our daily lives, and then think back over all the antecedent events
we can remember, until we discern which ones among them stand in a
causal relation to the event we are considering. Next, if will be well
to look forward and imagine the sort of events which will logically
carry on the series. The great generals of history have won their most
signal victories by an exercise of the narrative sense. Holding at the
moment of planning a campaign the past and present terms of a logical
series of events, they have imagined forward and foreseen the probable
progression of the series. This may perhaps explain why the great
commanders, like Caesar and Grant, have written such able narrative
when they have turned to literature.
The young author who is trying to develop his narrative sense may find
unending exercise in the endeavor to ferret out the various series of
events which lie entangled in the confused and apparently unrelated
successions of incidents which pass before his observation. When he
sees something happen in the street, he will not be satisfied, like
the casual looker-on, merely with that solitary happening; he will try
to find out what other happenings led up to it, and again what other
happenings must logically follow from it. When he sees an interesting
person in a street-car, he will wonder where that person has come from
and whither he is going, what he has just done and what he is about
to do; he will look before and after, and pine for what is not. This
exercise is in itself interesting; and if the result of it be written
down, the young author will gain experience in expression at the same
time that he is developing his sense of narrative.
It remains for us now to consider philosophically the significance of
the word _event_. Every event has three elements: the thing that is
done, the agents that do it, and the circumstances of time and place
under which it is done; or, to say the matter in three words,--action,
actors, and setting. Only when all three elements conspire can
something happen. Life suggests to the mind of a contemplative
observer many possible events which remain unrealized because only one
or two of the necessary three elements are present,--events that are
waiting, like unborn children on the other side of Lethe, until the
necessary conditions shall call them into being. We observe a man who
could do a great thing of a certain sort if only that sort of thing
were demanded to be done at the time and in the place in which he
loiters wasted. We grow aware of a great thing longing to be done,
when there is no one present who is capable of doing it. We behold
conditions of place and time entirely fitted for a certain sort of
happening; but nothing happens, because the necessary people are away.
"Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!" sang
Robert Browning; and then he dreamed upon an event which was waiting
to be born,--waiting for the imagined meeting and marriage of its
elements.
It is the function of the master of creative narrative to call events
into being. He does this by assembling and marrying the elements
without which events cannot occur. Granted the conception of a
character who is capable of doing certain things, he finds things of
that sort for the character to do; granted a sense of certain things
longing to be done, he finds people who will do them; or granted the
time and the place that seem expectant of a certain sort of happening,
he finds the agents proper to the setting. There is a conversation
of Stevenson's, covering this point, which has been often quoted. His
biographer, Mr. Graham Balfour, tells us: "Either on that day or about
that time I remember very distinctly his saying to me: 'There are, so
far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story.
You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a
character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or
lastly--you must bear with me while I try to make this clear'--(here
he made a gesture with his hand as if he were trying to shape
something and give it outline and form)--'you may take a certain
atmosphere and get action and persons to express it and realize it.
I'll give you an example--"The Merry Men." There I began with the
feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I
gradually developed the story to express the sentiment with which the
coast affected me.'"
In other words, starting with any one of the three elements--action,
actors, or setting--the writer of narrative may create events by
imagining the other two. Comparatively speaking, there have been very
few stories, like "The Merry Men," in which the author has started
out from a sense of setting; and nearly all of them have been written
recently. The feeling for setting as the initial element in narrative
hardly dates back further than the nineteenth century. We may
therefore best consider it in a later and more special chapter, and
devote our attention for the present to the two methods of creating
narrative that have been most often used--that in which the author has
started with the element of action, and that in which he has started
with the element of character.
Very few of the great masters of narrative have, like Honore de
Balzac, employed both one and the other method with equal success:
nearly all of them have shown an habitual mental predilection for the
one or for the other. The elder Dumas, for example, habitually devised
a scheme of action and then selected characters to fit into his plot;
and Mr. George Meredith has habitually created characters and then
devised the elements of action necessary to exhibit and develop them.
Readers, like the novelists themselves, usually feel a predilection
for one method rather than the other; but surely each method is
natural and reasonable, and it would be unjudicious for the critic to
exalt either of them at the expense of the other. There is plenty of
material in life to allure a mind of either habit. Certain things
that are done are in themselves so interesting that it matters
comparatively little who is doing them; and certain characters are in
themselves so interesting that it matters comparatively little what
they do. To conceive a potent train of action and thereby foreordain
the nature of such characters as will accomplish it, or to conceive
characters pregnant with potentiality for certain sorts of deeds and
thereby foreordain a train of action,--either is a legitimate method
for planning out a narrative. That method is best for any author which
is most natural for him; he will succeed best working in his own way;
and that critic is not catholic who states that either the narrative
of action or the narrative of character is a better type of work than
the other. The truth of human life may be told equally well by those
who sense primarily its element of action and by those who sense
primarily its element of character; for both elements must finally
appear commingled in any story that is real.
The critic may, however, make a philosophical distinction between the
two methods, in order to lead to a better understanding of them both.
The writers who sense life primarily as action may be said to work
from the outside in; and those who sense it primarily as character
may be said to work from the inside out. The first method requires the
more objective, and the second the more subjective, consciousness
of life. Of the two, the objective consciousness of life is (at its
weakest) more elementary and (at its strongest) more elemental than
the subjective.
Stevenson, in his "Gossip on Romance," has eloquently voiced the
potency of an objective sense of action as the initial factor in the
development of a narrative. He is speaking of the spell cast over him
by certain books he read in boyhood. "For my part," he says, "I liked
a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, 'towards the close of
the year 17--,' several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing
bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with
a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean
proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate.
This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel,
and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I
affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite
would do, but the highwayman was my favorite dish. I can still hear
that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the
coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of John
Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words 'post-chaise,' the 'great north
road,' 'ostler,' and 'nag' still sound in my ears like poetry. One and
all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books
in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some
quality of the brute incident."--For the writer who works from the
outside in, it is entirely possible to develop from "some quality of
the brute incident" a narrative that shall be not only stirring in
its propulsion of events but also profound in its significance of
elemental truth.
The method of working from the inside out--of using a subjective
sense of character as the initial factor in the development of a
narrative--is wonderfully exemplified in the work of Ivan Turgenieff;
and the method is very clearly explained in Mr. Henry James' intimate
essay on the great Russian master. Mr. James remarks: "The germ of a
story, with him, was never an affair of plot--that was the last thing
he thought of: it was the representation of certain persons. The
first form in which a tale appeared to him was as the figure of an
individual, or a combination of individuals, whom he wished to see in
action, being sure that such people must do something very special and
interesting. They stood before him definite, vivid, and he wished
to know, and to show, as much as possible of their nature. The first
thing was to make clear to himself what he did know, to begin with;
and to this end he wrote out a sort of biography of each of his
characters, and everything that they had done and that had happened
to them up to the opening of the story. He had their _dossier_, as
the French say, and as the police has of that of every conspicuous
criminal. With this material in his hand he was able to proceed; the
story all lay in the question, What shall I make them do? He always
made them do things that showed them completely; but, as he said, the
defect of his manner and the reproach that was made him was his want
of 'architecture'--in other words, of composition. The great thing,
of course, is to have architecture as well as precious material, as
Walter Scott had them, as Balzac had them. If one reads Turgenieff's
stories with the knowledge that they were composed--or rather that
they came into being--in this way, one can trace the process in
every line. Story, in the conventional sense of the word--a fable
constructed, like Wordsworth's phantom, 'to startle and waylay'--there
is as little as possible. The thing consists of the motions of a group
of selected creatures, which are not the result of a preconceived
action, but a consequence of the qualities of the actors."--And yet,
for the writer who, like Turgenieff, works from the inside out, it
is entirely possible to develop from "the qualities of the actors" a
train of action that shall be as stirring as it is significant.
The main principle of narrative to bear in mind is that action alone,
or character alone, is not its proper subject-matter. The purpose of
narrative is to represent events; and an event occurs only when both
character and action, with contributory setting, are assembled and
commingled. Indeed, in the greatest and most significant events, it
is impossible to decide whether the actor or the action has the upper
hand; it is impossible, in regarding such events, for the imagination
to conceive what is done and who is doing it as elements divorced.
A novelist who has started out with either element and has afterward
evoked the other may arrive by imagination at this final complete
sense of an event. The best narratives of action and of character are
indistinguishable, one from another, in their ultimate result: they
differ only in their origin: and the author who aspires to a mastery
of narrative should remember that, in narrative at its best, character
and action and even setting are one and inseparable.
For the conveniences of study, however, it is well to examine the
elements of narrative one by one; and we shall therefore devote
three separate chapters to a technical consideration of plot, and
characters, and setting.