The ordinary novelist does not argue he hopes to show, to disclose. How can the plot seem disappointing when it is a lovely argument spread out? It is because fiction is stone-deaf to argument. In the place of climax, we can deliver a judgment. We, the crusader-novelist, having started with our generality, must end with a generality they had better be the same. Observation and the inner truth of that observation as he perceives it, the two being tested one against the other to him this is what the writing of a novel is. Literally it may correspond to a high degree or to none at all emotionally it corresponds as closely as he can make it. Taking a particular situation existing in his world, and what he feels about it in his own breast and what he can make of it in his own head, he constructs on paper, little by little, an equivalent of it. This discovery is the best hope of the ordinary novelist, and to make it he begins not with the generality but with the particular in front of his eyes, which he is able to examine. They are fatal to tenderness and are in themselves nonconductors of any real, however modest, discover of the writer’s own heart. They make too much noise for us to hear what people might be trying to say. On fiction’s pages, generalities clank when wielded, and hit with equal force at the little and the big, at the merely suspect and the really dangerous. Next, we as the crusader-novelist shall find awkward to use the very weapon we count on most: the generality. When we think of Ibsen, we see that causes themselves may in time be forgotten, their championship no longer needed it is Ibsen’s passion that keeps the plays alive. Suppose John Steinbeck had only now finished The Grapes of Wrath? The ordinary novelist has only one message: “I submit that this is one way we are.” This can wait. The crusader’s message is prompted by crisis it has to be delivered on time. What will our problems be?īefore anything else, speed. Nevertheless, let us suppose that we feel we might help if we were to write a crusading novel. How unfair it is that when a novel is to be written, it is never enough to have our hearts in the right place! But goodwill all by itself can no more get a good novel written than it can paint in watercolor or sing Mozart. Large helpings of naïveté and self-esteem, which serve to refresh the crusader, only encumber the novelist.
The exception occurs when it can rise to the intensity of satire, where it finds a better home in the poem or the drama. Are fiction writers on call to be crusaders? For us in the South who are fiction writers, is writing a novel something we can do about it?Īnd yet, the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good. “All right, Eudora Welty, what are you going to do about it? Sit down there with your mouth shut?”, asked a stranger over long distance in one of the midnight calls that I suppose have waked most writers in the South from time to time. What distinguishes it above all from the raw material, and what distinguishes it from journalism, is that inherent in the novel is the possibility of a shared act of the imagination between its writer and its reader. For the mind of one person, its writer, is in it too. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material: it is not even of the same family of things. The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader.
And here, it seems to me, the heart of fiction’s real reliability has been struck at-and not for the first time by the noble hand of the crusader. I think they come of an honest and understandable zeal to allot every writer his chance to better the world or go to his grave reproached for the mess it is in. But I feel in these words and other like them the agonizing of our times. Or there may have been an instinct to smash the superior, the good, that is endurable enough to go on offering itself. Remembering how Faulkner for most of his life wrote in all but isolation from critical understanding, ignored impartially by North and South, with only a handful of critics in forty years who were able to “assess” him, we might smile at this journalist as at a boy let out of school. Not too long ago I read in some respectable press that Faulkner would have to be reassessed because he was “after all, only a white Mississippian.” For this reason, it was felt, readers could no longer rely on him for knowing what he was writing about in his life’s work of novels and stories, laid in what he called “my country.”