I’ve read only two novels by Austen, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abby. I have Pride and Prejudice on my TBR pile. Dr. Mullan’s book is one of many scholarly works on Austen’s fiction; this one told in an easy style that lets us be impressed by Austen’s invention and perfection of so many literary techniques. This is especially impressive, as we learn that, unlike other well-known female novelists of her time, Austen never met any contemporary literary lights. Apart from her own extensive reading, she did this all on her own. Throughout the book, reference is made to Austen’s letters to various family members and friends, giving us a window into experiences that inspired some of her literary inventions. Austen lived much of the culture she wrote about.
Only the last two chapters directly address technique apart from the author’s subjects and stories: When does Jane Austen Speak Directly to the Reader, and How Experimental a Novelist is Jane Austen? All the other chapters address Austen through her novel’s content. Marriage, money, literature (in the novels), dialogue among and between both primary and secondary characters, weather, names, illness, death, and sex. There is a chapter dedicated to Austen’s use of the blush—male characters “color”; they never blush. In young women, a blush can, but does not always, signal awakening to her own sexual allure. There is more besides. In Austen’s novels, apart from very few (except in Northanger Abby) “authorial interventions,” we see the whole of the story from the viewpoint of her characters. Sometimes the reader knows more than the characters, but often we are left to discover their misunderstandings as they discover them.
All the Austen novels are used in every chapter, but in rough order of which are cited most often—this is my impression. I did not keep a formal tally—they are Emma, followed closely by Persuasion and Mansfield Park, then Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abby. Sanditon, an incomplete novel (completed by her brother after Jane’s death), is also cited frequently. Despite my lack of Austen scholarship, I found Mullan’s book easy to read and impressively informative. Highly recommended to Austen fans.
Lolita came first and has a moral arc like almost every example in the literary canon. Pale Fire does not have any moral arc that I can find, and it seems to me to exist solely to illustrate Nabokov’s prose mastery and organizational brilliance. It certainly does that. As to its physical organization, we must remember that in 1959 there were no personal computers with word processors. Nabokov’s ability to cross-reference everything in a moderately lengthy novel of four sections using only—I presume—a typewriter and whatever notes he kept is extraordinary!
The novel is usually divided into three sections, but I count four. They are:
A Forward
Pale Fire, a 999-line poem in “four cantos.”
Commentary on the poem—the bulk of the novel.
Alongglossary/index—not usually considered as a part of the novel, but perhaps it should be. It constitutes almost ten percent of the text. There is considerable background here given after the story, and it further illustrates Nabokov’s organizational skills.
The Foreword tells of the arrival of Charles Kinbote, an assistant professor of literature at a small college (Wordsmith) in the fictional town of New Wye somewhere in America’s Appalachia. Charles has come to New Wye from Zembla, an island country somewhere in the Baltic Sea. He chose this obscure place to hide, evading pursuers. By happy coincidence, he discovers that the big drafty house he rents is next door to his favorite poet, John Shade, who, like Kinbote, teaches at the college. We learn how he and the poet become friends, and how the poem and commentary came to be published. We also learn, soon enough, that the poet has been killed, collateral damage, the assassin’s target being Kinbote, who is not who he claims to be.
The poem follows in four parts. It is about life, death—the Shade’s daughter perishes in an accident at only twenty years old—marriage, the afterlife, and of what sort, and so on. The poem is no masterpiece (deliberately so), but it is competent in its phrasing and structure, which the narrator uses to inspire his commentary.
Following the poem is Kinbote’s commentary, structured by reference to the poem’s lines. The lines are addressed sequentially, but there are many gaps. There can be a short paragraph commenting on line 100 while the next comment might be two or three pages inspired by line 150, and so on. But while Kinbote ultimately likes the poem, it is not, as he had hoped, about Zembla and the tales he told to Shade before the poet begins the poem. The commentary, then, uses lines from the poem to frame parts of Kinbote’s story of the last king of Zembla (Charles IV, AKA Kinbote): his upbringing, his overthrow in a revolution (with a hint of Soviet sponsorship), and his escape from Zembla.
Kinbote contrives to meet his idol, the poet, early in 1959 and, over the following months—all of this is revealed to us, the reader, only in the commentary written after Shade is dead—tells his story without revealing that he is the king. The poem is written between July 1 and July 21st, finished on the very day the poet is murdered. Nabokov speaks in the first person when discussing himself as Kinbote, but switches to the third person when recounting the king’s history. Also in third person is his account of Gradus, the assassin sent by the Zemblan revolutionaries to find and kill King Charles. Salted throughout the commentary, we learn of Gradus’ election to assassin and his travels from Zembla to Paris, Geneva, and Niece, where he learns of the king’s hiding place in obscure New Wye. How does the narrator know all of this? The answer waits for us until the story time moves to the period following Shade’s death.
Kinbote (Charles) is disappointed that the poem has nothing to do with the tales of Zembla and the king told to Shade in the months preceding the poem’s composition. Kinbote makes use of the poem’s lines (many, but by no means all) as launching points for the different elements of the story/commentary. The commentary is cross-referenced—often multiple times on each page—into itself; the narrator is constantly asking us to “see the comment to line so-and-so.” In the Kindle version of the book, these references are links, which is helpful, except that following them all (there are many dozens) and returning to the story thread is time-consuming and unnecessary for grasping the whole.
On July 21, Shade proclaims the poem finished and gives the “fair copy” and some notes on possible substitutions to Kinbote. It is then that they run into the incompetent assassin who shoots but misses the king and hits Shade instead. At that moment, a gardener, linked to Kinbote’s rented property, hits the assassin from behind with a hoe. The police arrive, and Gradus is taken alive. Shade is dead, and his wife mistakenly believes that he, Shade, was the real target and thanks Kinbote for trying to shield him. This elevates Kinbote to hero status in the wife’s eyes and allows him to persuade her to give him the poem he has not, at that point, read, for publication—with all royalties accruing to her under their contractual arrangement.
There is a small plot-hole here. In the Foreword, the narrator notes that two “trustees of the school” and its President know Kinbote’s real identity. These three (whom we never hear from) would know that Shade was not the assassin’s real target, but no mention is made of this.
Charles flees to another hiding place somewhere in Wyoming—he believes there will be others sent to kill him—where he begins to write his commentary telling us he managed to interview the imprisoned Gradus “once or twice” before the would-be assassin commits suicide. It is in these interviews that Charles, presumably, learns the details of Gradus’ travels and how he located the exiled king. I leave out a lot of character and story details throughout this review.
No part of the story is continued in Nabokov’s glossary-index, so I suppose this is not a true part IV, but it creates a structure parallel to the four quartos of the poem (Nabokov gets a lot of commentary mileage out of the poem’s structural elements) and gives us more detail—backstories–about all the novel’s characters. I assume Nabokov intended it to have some significance because there is a lot of authorial work in it.
What is the upshot of all of this? Lolita carried a heavy moral. Pale Fire, the title of the poem, seems to carry no moral weight. It is merely a story. The poem does not justify the story, but the story—told in the Foreword and the Commentary—is the vast bulk of the novel. I ended up reading each canto of the poem separately and then the commentary covering the lines of that canto. Since the commentary had little to no narrative relationship to the poem, this mattered little. What Nabokov produced was a novel that gave generations of literature students material for their theses. In the end, it was a delightfully entertaining, if silly, story that illustrated Nabokov’s linguistic brilliance throughout.
In 1740 Samuel Richardson wrote a novel called Pamela. It was about an exceptionally chaste, modest, and stunning young woman of fifteen, and a man, her pursuer, rich, handsome, persistent, and ten years older, the squire Mr. B____. It is what you think, but it doesn’t exactly end the way a modern reader would expect. I’ve reviewed it here, but what happened after Pamela is my subject today.
About a year after Pamela was published, Henry Fielding published his first novel (really a novella, only 55 pages long). Called Shamela, it is a very crude parody of Pamela, and Richardson was not amused. It is also reviewed via the link above.
The next year, 1742, Fielding published his first full-length novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Fans of Pamela would have immediately recognized that Joseph and Pamela happen to share the same surname! We learn early on in the novel that Joseph and Pamela are indeed sister and brother (Richardson never mentions a brother). Since born to low family (though when Joseph Andrews takes place Pamela is married to the squire), as Pamela was originally servant to the squire’s mother, Joseph is servant to the sister, who is the squire’s aunt. Welcome to the Booby family. Richardson never alludes to the squire as other than Mr. B____, and he never mentions a brother of his now-bride Pamela, nor an aunt. Fielding makes use of a family invented by Richardson in which to plant his characters. He first calls Mr. B____ Booby in Shamela and brazenly uses it in this novel.
Now, Lady Booby, the aunt employing Joseph, is but recently a widow, said to be a remarkably good-looking woman, about forty. Joseph, at this point, is just over twenty, and Lady Booby has the hots for him, as does Mrs. Slipslop (Fielding’s names can be pretty crude), another of the servants. Joseph is a very handsome and virile-looking young man! If Joseph had been Tom Jones, he might have acceded to both women, but Joseph is as chaste as his sister and rejects them both. They are furious, and the lady fires him, much regretting it throughout the novel.
A good deal of the story is the journey of Joseph and a mentor, Parson Adams, the curate of Joseph’s home parish, from Lady Booby’s summer place to their home parish, along the way meeting up with the one woman Joseph has or will ever love, Fanny, another resident of the parish with whom Joseph grew up. It is also the home parish of Lady Booby (what else could it be?).
Compared to the later Tom Jones (1744), Joseph Andrews is very linear. Things happen along the journey, but each is resolved in turn. There is a big twist near the end, and Lady Booby can taste her conquest of Joseph, who, being brother to Pamela—the squire’s wife—is now an in-law! But the twist untwists through very clever—I can’t believe Fielding came up with all this stuff—manipulation of all the characters, including a pair who otherwise appear only in Richardson’s original novel! In its rather rushed ending, everyone gets what they want, and love triumphs! Even Lady Booby flees to London and meets a dashing officer who makes her forget Joseph—we can only imagine how.
Google tells me that Richardson was “deeply offended” by both Shamela—understandably—and Joseph Andrews—less understandably, writing that it was a “wretched performance,” and that it was only fit “to entertain none but Porters or Watermen.” I’m sure revealing the family name to be Booby was a great part of Richardson’s ire, but come on… Mr. B___? Richardson set himself up for that one! In my view, Joseph Andrews is a very clever take-off from, and not parody of, Pamela. Unlike Shamela, it is not crude (ok, except the name Booby), but clever and very funny.
Not a novel, but a long essay about women authors, notably novelists, and their historical restrictions. The bottom line is straightforward. Writing takes time. It requires some place, some space, to write in (Jane Austin having the exceptional ability to write in a room often crowded with activity), and also the means (money from one source or another) to sustain oneself while engaged in the process. Historically, Woolf notes, women have had none of these things.
Woolf begins by illustrating the restrictions placed on women’s time and space. While visiting Oxford, she was not allowed into the libraries without a male escort or a letter of recommendation. Late in her essay, she mentions Sappho (a Roman erotic poetess of Lesbos whose work is known today only in fragments) and Shikibu Murasaki, a member of the Japanese Royal Court credited with the world’s first “true novel” (Tale of Genji) in 1050 C.E. We don’t know much about Sappho, but Murasaki’s royal status allowed her the time and space to write an absurdly long novel. But Woolf begins by exploring a few examples of 18th-century female poetry suffused with bitterness about women’s place in the world.
Moving up, Woolf notes that the 19th century’s four great female novelists, Austin, Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, were all childless. Child-rearing, especially when one has more than a couple of them, takes a lot of time unless there is wealth to afford nannies; even then, household management is left mostly to the woman. Why, Woolf asks, did women writers gravitate to novels? Novels were, she surmises, the new form, drama and poetry—including epic poetry—having been worked over by men for a few thousand years, while nonfiction demanded scholarship from which most women were excluded (as in Woolf’s chapter one Oxford story).
Lastly, already in the 20th century’s first quarter, women wrote everything: fiction, nonfiction, stories, drama, and poetry, made possible by fairer property laws, the right to vote, and the ability to work in traditionally male occupations. She wonders whether these changes, while lifting women from the status of chattel, wouldn’t end up thrusting her into a pitiless competition with men across all professional and social spheres? Much of her speculation has come to pass, but Woolf would at least applaud what women writers have achieved. At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in each year, there are more published female than male novelists!
A long and delightful literary essay (would Woolf write anything less?) whose lesson can be summarized in two sentences: Writing takes time and requires some space in which to focus. Not until the 20th century did women, beyond a rare few, gain that time and space.
One of my favorite books on the subject of fiction (a few others are listed at the end). Not how to write a novel, but more focused on how to read them. He doesn’t say much about plot because whatever it is, the magic in fiction is how a good author embeds us in the story. This book is about the linguistic tricks (if you will) that form the technical structure of that embedding.
For example, in his chapter on character, we learn that Wood is not so enamored of distinctions like “round” and “flat” characters. Both can be important to the story, and importantly, some of the flat ones turn out to be highly memorable, while character rounding, as it has evolved from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, has changed markedly. A modern author writing like Balzac or Eliot sounds hackneyed, imitative, “overdone.” But the modern has the advantage that, once the long form of character has been articulated and the technique becomes well known, the modern author can use evolved and much shorter techniques to invoke a fully rounded character (or environment); or as Thomas Hardy wrote (Tess of the d’Ubervilles 1891) “…we wander the long paths many times to discover the short ones” (my paraphrase)
This works for other aspects of what is called “realism” as well. All of modern genre fiction, from romance to action-adventure, mystery, and so on, is made possible by reference to this history. Wood points this out in his last chapter. Is realism in literature real? Not in the sense that it encompasses all of reality. Yet there is truth in it. The art (and this is true of all fine art) is arranged so that what it reveals of reality enhances whatever truth—insight—the artist wants to convey.
There are chapters on narration, detail, form (organization), language, character development, dialogue, and consciousness in literature—the invention and evolution of “free indirect discourse” being, in Wood’s opinion, the keystone in the development of the modern novel. Many, many authors are referenced, some of whom I’ve read, a few I’ve never heard of. There are two chapters focused on Flaubert (1821-1880), the lynchpin of “realism”, with supporting reference to Austin, Eliot, and Balzac, and more. How these nineteenth-century developments transform in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels—with examples—is also addressed
How Fiction Works is a well-crafted examination of how to read a novel and appreciate the literary mechanisms behind the magic. I first read this book six or seven years ago, having never read (other than Shakespeare) any of the canonical authors mentioned. This review is based on a re-read after having read at least one novel from many of them.
Here are a few other books on structure in fiction:
How to Read Novels like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2008)
How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2005). This one is mostly about symbolism.
Woolf is mentioned in so many books on writing fiction that I thought I’d better have a look at her. To the Lighthouse is, I am told, one of her “more approachable” novels.
So what have we got here? Take any group of ordinary people, a few adults, and children of varying ages. Throw them together in an ordinary scene, say a small neighborhood barbecue on a summer evening. Every one of those people, adults and children, has an “inner life,” observations, thoughts, emotions, sometimes vocalized to others in the group, sometimes only thought. You could write a novel exposing these inner lives over the course of a few hours. James Joyce (Ulysses) does this over the course of a day for one character and then, famously, for his wife at the end of the novel.
In Woolf’s case, the people are the Ramsays: husband, wife, and eight children who own a summer home on the Isle of Wight and, along with a handful of guests (helping to afford the food and a couple of servants), occupy the house summer after summer. The first [almost] two-thirds of the novel takes place over one day, from early afternoon to night. Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life is given the most attention—she is the masterful lynchpin of the whole family—but the mental gyrations of Mr. Ramsay and some of the children and guests, in particular Lily, a wannabe painter, are also explored as they reflect on their own thoughts and interactions with others.
The only “story” here is a planned sail (the Ramsays own a small sailboat) to a lighthouse on a rocky island some distance from their home on the bay. The youngest child, five-year-old James, is very excited about the trip but is traumatized by his father, who cancels it due to an oncoming storm that will make the next day’s sail impossible. They all finally go to sleep.
Turn the page, and ten years have passed. Mrs. Ramsay had died. Presumably natural causes. She was only in her fifties. World War I has come and gone. Andrew, the oldest son, was killed. Rue, the oldest daughter, married and then died in childbirth. The house has been unoccupied for some years.
But people are returning. The first mind Woolf relates is one of the servants charged with cleaning the place up, getting it ready. Mr. Ramsay, his six living children (James is now fifteen), Lily, and Mr. Carmichael, another guest from the old days, and two others arrive. In the novel’s last third, Lily, now in her mid-forties and never married, is the mind most often explored. Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam (a daughter), along with two other semi-characters—we never know their real names, only James’ mental meanderings about them—end up sailing to the lighthouse—they make it safely. The mental narratives switch back and forth between Lily on shore trying to paint while watching the boat make its way across the bay, and James and Cam on the sailboat. The boat disappears from Lily’s view, safely reaching the lighthouse island. Lily thinks they must be there by now. Mr. Carmichael vocalizes the same thought. Lily makes one last brushstroke on her painting. The novel ends.
Call me crazy, but aside from Woolf’s masterful word-craft, the novel’s rhythm, her representation of thought’s flow, and the novel’s “realism,” the story is trivial—a “shaggy dog” story. I know, I know. The story is deliberately trivial. The novel is about the characters’ minds and how their occasionally expressed thoughts affect one another. Mrs. Ramsay’s death greatly affects Lily, and likewise—we perceive through Lily—Andrew’s death saddens Mr. Charmichael. But all the “action” is ordinary, lacking in any drama. Except for Mr. Ramsay—who occasionally shows a temper—the conflicts and contradictions experienced remain locked in mind.
For my part, reading to experience Woolf’s word-craft—do I dare tackle Ulysses?—is the interesting thing about the novel. It all feels like an exercise. “Class… Write me a sixty-thousand-word study of a handful of characters’ mental ruminations while interacting over ordinary matters that can be anything so long as there is no serious drama acted out between them.” OK, it’s more than a mere exercise. But what is the upshot of it all: people have mental lives that are often full of conflict and emotion, even if what happens between them—behavior—is of little consequence. OK. I concur. Real people are like this. Woolf paints minds with words. In the end, I can appreciate that even if the “story” leaves me flat.
Ruminations 