The Art of Fiction

"Beauty is truth," said Keats. "Beauty is information," says the great Russian semiotician, Juri Lotman, a formula more in tune with the modern mind.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn, said Ernest Hemingway - an overstatement, but an illuminating one.

Magic realism,when marvelous events occur in ...a realistic narrative,is an effect especially associated with contemporary Latin-American fiction,but it is also encountered in novels from other continents,as those of Gunter Grass,Rushdie and Milan Kundera.All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions ...,which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism.

Nabokov's virtuosity in a language that was not his mother-tongue never ceases to amaze; but perhaps it was this very fact that allowed him to discover the full resources of English prose, and to use them with uninhibited delight.

DEFAMILIARIZATION is the usual English translation of ostranenie (literally, "making strange"), another of those invaluable critical terms coined by the Russian Formalists. In a famous essay first published in 1917, Victor Shklovsky argued that the essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways...

There is always a trade-off in the writing of fiction between the achievement of structure,pattern and closure on one hand,and the imitation of life randomness, consequentiality and openness on other. Coincidence,which surprises us in real life with symmetries we don't expect to find there,is too obviously a structural device in fiction,and excessive reliance on it can jeopardize the verisimilitude of a narrative.

...the novel is supreme among the forms of narrative literature in rendering subjectivity.The earliest English novel,Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,Richardson's Pamela,used journals and letters to portray the inner thoughts of their characters with unprecedented realism;and the subsequent development of genre,at least up to Joyce and Proust,can be seen in terms of progressively deeper and subtler exploration of consciousness...

Sterne anticipated Joyce and Virginia Woolf in letting the vagaries of the human mind determine the shape and direction of the narrative. And one of the slogans of modernist poetics is "Spatial Form", which means giving unity to a literary work by a pattern of interconnected motifs that can only be perceived by "reading over" (i.e. re-reading) the text in the manner recommended by Tristram.

In epiphanies, prose fiction comes closest to the verbal intensity of lyric poetry (most modern lyrics are in fact nothing but epiphanies)

...fictional prose is wonderfully omnivorous, capable of assimilating all kinds of nonfictional discourse - letters, diaries, depositions, even lists — and adapting them to its own purposes.