Living by Fiction Read Free Page B

“stand up to examination.” After all, there is nothing too mysterious about the rightness of an egg’s replacing a bird. The two have met. In other words, the “something right” which “will stand up to examination” is ordinary unity. Notice that Magritte’s surrealism by no means intends to traffic in “accidental” or “arbitrary” images. He uses these words to damn. Must arbitrariness always be damning? Must it forever be out of bounds not as a subject but as a technique? I think so.
    Let me insert here a regret that criticism has no other terms than “device” and “technique” for these deliberate artistic causes which yield deliberate artistic effects. In painting and in music, the word “technique,” at least, has a respectable sound; but in fiction, and especially to laymen, both “device” and “technique” sound sinister, as though writers were cold-blooded manipulators and gadgeteers who for genius substitute a bag of tricks. They are; of course they are. But the trick is the work itself. The trick is intrinsic. One does not produce a work and then give it a twist by inserting devices and techniques here and there like acupuncture needles. The work itself is the device. In traditional fiction the work is device made flesh; in contemporary modernist fiction the workmay be technique itself or device laid bare.
    All this is not to say that the fragmentation of the great world is the only theme of narrative collage: far from it. These techniques—abrupt shifts, disjunctive splicings and enjambments of time, space, and voice—are common coin. Almost all contemporary writers, including writers of traditional fiction, use them toward any number of different ends. For that matter, the historical Modernists themselves used them for various, often traditional ends. In Joyce’s Ulysses , in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , the use of segmented narrative deepens the reader’s sense of the fictional world and its complex characters and scenes. The technique serves the works’ other themes, as it does in Garrett’s Death of the Fox , Ellison’s Invisible Man , Lessing’s The Golden Notebook , and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet . And even when a work’s theme is fragmentation, the work may itself be unified, and the fragmentation may not be bad news; James and many other writers have celebrated the world’s “blooming, buzzing confusion.”
    Note, then, that the fragmentation of narrative line may be, and usually is, as formally controlled as any other aspect of fiction. There is nothing arbitrary whatsoever about fragmentation itself. In fact, as a technique it may elicit more formal control than a leisured narrative technique which imitates the thickened flow of time in orderly progression, if only because it requires the writer clearly to identify the important segments of his work and skip the rest. No charming narrative dalliances prevent our seeing his scenes as parts of a whole; no emotional coziness lulls our minds to sleep.
    The virtues of contemporary modernist fiction are literary, are intellectual and aesthetic. They are the solid excellences of complex, formally ordered pattern. Most contemporary modernist fiction, and the best of it, does not claim these virtues and the incidental virtues of realistic fiction as well. You do not find Calvino promoting “verisimilitude”; you do not read Nabokov as a document of the times. This is as it should be. I bring up the question of integrity here only because it is here that a writer may most readily fool himself—always an attractive possibility. On one hand, sophisticated, hurried readers continue to judge works on the sophistication of their surfaces. On the other hand, our culture continues to pay lip service to the incidental and dull virtues of realism. So a writer may combine the two sets of excellence