On Becoming a Novelist

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Book: On Becoming a Novelist Read Free
Author: John Gardner
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term to the breaking point.
    The writer who cares chiefly or exclusively about language is poorly equipped for novel-writing in the usual sense because his character and personality are wrong for writing novels. By “character” I mean here what is sometimes called the individual’s “inscribed” nature, his innate self; by “personality” I mean the sum of his typical and habitual ways of relating to those around him. I mean to distinguish, in other words, between the inner and outer selves. Those who inordinately love words as words are of a character type distinct enough, at least in broad outline, to be recognizable almost at a glance. Words seem inevitably to distance us from the brute existents (real trees, stones, yawling babies) that words symbolize and, in our thought processes, tend to replace. At any rate, so philosophers like Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Heidegger have maintained, and our experience with punsters seems to confirm the opinion. When a man makes a pun in a social situation, no one present can doubt—however we may admire the punster and the pun—that the punster has momentarily drawn back, disengaging himself, making connections he could not think of if he were fully involved in the social moment. For example, if we are admiring the art treasures of a family named Cheuse and the punster remarks, “Beggars can’t be Cheuses!” we know at once that the punster is not peering deeply and admiringly into the Turner landscape at hand. The person profoundly in love with words may make an excellent poet, composer of crossword puzzles, or Scrabble player; he may write novel-like things which a select group admires; but he will probably not in the end prove a first-rate novelist.
    For several reasons (first, because of his personality, which keeps the world of brute existence at arm’s length), he is not likely to feel passionate attachment to the ordinary, mainstream novel. The novel’s unashamed engagement with the world—the myriad details that make character come alive, the sustained fascination with the gossip surrounding the lives of imaginary beings, the naive emphasis on what happened next and what, precisely, the weather was that day—all these are likely to seem, to the word fanatic, silly and tedious; he feels himself buried in litter. And no one is much inclined to spend days, weeks, years, imitating an existence he does not really like in the first place. The word fanatic may love certain very special, highly intellectual novelists (Stendhal, Flaubert, Robbe-Grillet, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake , possibly Nabokov), but he is likely to admire only for their secondary qualities novelists whose chief strength is the hurly-burly of vividly imitated reality (Dickens, Stevenson, Tolstoy, Melville, Bellow). I do not mean that the person primarily interested in linguistic artifice is blocked from all appreciation of good books whose main appeal comes from character and action; nor do I mean that, because by nature he distances himself from actuality, he is too icy of heart to love his wife and children. I mean only that his admiration of the mainstream novel is not likely to be sufficient to drive him to extend the tradition. If he’s lucky enough to live in an aristocratic age, or if he can find the sanctuary of an aesthetic coterie—a walled enclave from which the great, fly-switching herd of humanity is excluded—the artificer may be able to work his quirky wonders. In a democratic age served largely by commercial publishers, only extraordinary ego and stubbornness can keep him going. We may all agree (and then again we may not) that the specialized fiction he writes is worthwhile; but to the extent that he suspects that his time and place are unworthy of his genius, to the extent that he feels detached from the concerns of the herd, or feels that his ideal is either meaningless or invisible to most of humanity, his will is undermined. Not caring much about the kind of novel most

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