Be Kind to Your Fictional Beings

So, I know I wrote empty promises last week about my triumphant return to reading fiction, but then I didn't read any fiction except for Kafka, which is glum and written in enormous oppressive paragraphs (he has the world's most annoying refusal, which is a double one: he refuses to make his characters speak distinctly, and then refuses to give each line of their dialogue a new paragraph). Now, please don't get me wrong, I love Kafka; but given that the flavor of fiction I was lamenting last week was Kingsley Amis, you can see how he wouldn't really address my needs. But the other thing I've been doing that may be some sort of fiction sop, is writing fiction. This is a little like knitting someone else a sweater because you're cold, but whatever. It is what I did.

And doing it, I have noticed one of the Worst Things in the World of Fiction, which is a particular problem of voice. I know it is the worst, because I do it all the time when I try to write fiction, and Young Fat Schratz did it ALL THE TIME even when he was writing nonfiction, and now there are certain sentences that I created that haunt me like Erinyes, reminding me not just that I used to be dumb but that I used to, in my dumbness, imagine myself clever. Anyway, the problem is something like "representing thoughts that no one would ever consciously form, as conscious thoughts". I went looking around for examples, and found a quite good one and a quite bad one, in the same chapter of Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

As for robbing the caisse, in which Bond himself was not personally concerned, but only interested, he reflected that it would take ten good men, that they would certainly kill two or three employees, and that anyway you probably couldn't find ten non-squeal killers in France, or in any other country for the matter of that.

Great reflecting, Bond! Here we have Bond thinking about something he actually would think about (logistics) and that revealing facts about the mission (it's complicated and dangerous), cheery Francophobia (no non-squeal killers in France) and an even cheerier weltschmerz (it's a world problem, not just a France problem). You can imagine how, say, the penultimate attribute could've been gone into badly, if it hadn't had the concept of men who can reliably kill as a lead-in: "Bond checked into the caisse. France, he thought, how pathetically devoid of non-squeal killers!" Or something like that.

Or something like this, again from Casino Royale:

Some of this background...passed through Bond's mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little.

Gah! Who would think such a thing? Away from his therapist? This is the problem, of course, with free indirect discourse especially and with the head-on obligation to represent another human being that every fiction writer (most fiction writers) takes on: to say things that someone else would say, while knowing all that you, the writer, know about her. Ian Fleming is even more psychologically astute than James Bond, so he is in a position to talk about feather-bedding. I am fairly positive that I, as a thinking thing, have never had the sensation "I rather like this" pass through my mind about anything except food, and even then not often. It's an autodiagnosis that no one makes, but it's exactly the kind of diagnosis that smart writers find easiest to make on fictional beings, including their own. And it drives me nuts, both when I see it and when I do it. So please, fiction writers. Be kind to your fictional beings. Do not force them to say impossible things. They and I will appreciate it.

Life Sentences

The other day a friend of mine called me and told me that she had a list of fifteen great opening sentences from novels, and then she named them, and I correctly identified the books that twelve of them opened. I don't think that this speaks to my outstanding knowledge of things, so much as the general fame of first sentences, last sentences, and cool sentences in general. I seem to recall reading somewhere lately that the sentence is the basic unit of any kind of meaning. This is given a relatively loose reading of the sentence (a sample of this kind of "sentence" was a weather report claiming that Tuesday's High would be 34 degrees Fahrenheit and Low 36 degrees Fahrenheit), but I think it makes sense. The reason for that is because there are dozens and dozens of sentences with which I am infatuated, and a negligent number of phrases about which I feel the same way. Even the ones that do -- James's "a second and even a more extravagant umbrella", Shakespeare's "so musical a discord" -- I actually like synecdochally, as parts representing their sentence wholes which I like even more.

I was given the task in school of writing a perfect sentence, in accordance with Donald Barthelme's perfect writing assignment that he used to give his students. The perfect sentence is one that is i) surprising, ii) in some sense true, iii) beautiful, and iv) possessed of a metaphysical dimension. His example of a sentence fulfilling only condition i, and of a sentence fulfilling only conditions one and two, are both fantastic: the former is "It has always been my desire to sleep with -- that is, to have sexual intercourse with -- the New York Review of Books." and the latter is "The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.". His example of a perfect sentence, one that meets all four criteria, is from Kafka and goes like this: "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand, and becomes part of the ceremony.". That is a great Kafka sentence, to be sure. Our professor in this class provided us with a selection of sentences that he had culled for their perfection, and a lot of them were good, but none of them were as good as that Kafka sentence, and I think the reason why is that the sentences culled from their homes are, while indeed building blocks of meaning, building blocks more like Legos than anything else.

When I was young, it bothered me that if I built a wall out of Legos, the top level of the wall still had rising out of it the studs that all of the blocks making up the lower strata of the wall had as well. Each block in the lower strata called out for a capping level of blocks, and each was satisfied; but those on the top level were not. It should come as no surprise that I spent a huge amount of my childhood by myself, with childish things and a furrowed brow. It should come as no further surprise that I spend a huge amount of my time currently by myself with a furrowed brow, although now I do it surrounded by words instead of Legos. Sentences, however gorgeous, if yanked from their places of residence, seem yanked: they want to be prepared for, and to work at preparing for something else (hence the mania, I suppose, for first and last sentences, which are half saturated). And so I wonder what it would be like to make a craft of just sentences. One such is Kafka's sentence-story about the leopards and the chalices, which is not yanked from anywhere, but designed simply to stand as a magnificent sentence. That sentence seems less to me like a Lego, and more like an ice cube: complete, glistening, inscrutable (ice cubes are inscrutable, right?) Somewhere, there is a sentence-smith waiting to just churn out little igloos of perfect sentences, and I cannot wait.

By the dubs, I had to actually write two sentences that attempted to meet Barthelme's criteria, and I am going to post them in the comments -- where you should too!