JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #33
December 31, 2020
We tell each other stories all the time. Sometimes when a friend tells us that they’re about to embark on some endeavor, even a banal one, we react by compulsively telling a story of our own experience with a similar situation. This can range from giving directions to talking about the experience of starting a job. I might tell my friend, "I’m going to that new bank tomorrow," and he might helpfully reply that "When I went in there the other day they didn’t have any pens at the counter," certainly a sad tale of woe that I dutifully take to heart and for which I offer my condolences. But importantly, through his story I learn that I might want to bring my own pen to the new bank or plan some other workaround.
In these ordinary, sympathetic stories, the search for our interlocutor’s intentional meaning, the purpose of their story, feels natural. Hence we take license to find meaning in every story we read. Why is Hemingway telling us the story of Robert Jordan’s experience in the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls. What does he mean to tell us? Is he sharing some hard-won insight? What is his message? This is, I think, unfortunate, and it undermines the most important feature of fictional storytelling.
Fiction and story find their life in specific and concrete detail, while communicated messages are always generalizations. In order to evoke the experience of a story, an author compounds details that create vivid and memorable characters and settings, build up the decisions and actions that compel their plots, and overall paint a picture of the story that we can form in our minds. In order to find a message among those details, we have to abstract them away from the story, to generalize their import and salience. This process will always degrade the fictional experience. Details are carved away to reveal a supposed message that is applicable beyond the story.
Fictional themes in a story arise out concrete details--it is by experiencing the depictions, the events that comprise the narrative, that we can explore a theme. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, we witness the way characters confront and contemplate their own mortality, and we may thereby be led to think about death ourselves. This is not the "meaning" of the story--this is not a "message" that Hemingway embedded within the story. This is simply what the story is about. The details allow us to experience the confrontations and contemplations that the characters undergo, to empathetically live their lives for a few pages. Fiction does not deliver to us a message or meaning, but the experience of other lives, other specific and concrete lives and the concerns and exigencies of those lives. If a story has a message or meaning, it is encompassed in its entirety and not something that can be generalized or abstracted away.
If we want to write stories that are important, we must not think about them as if they are a puzzle to be decoded for our true intentions or hidden messages. Stories of import are stories that give us a glimpse of important issues, a perspective on things we would not get otherwise, through the concrete and specific details that help us see through the eyes of human beings that are different from us, that offer alternate points of view by which to understand the world. The best fiction allows us to live alternate lives by allowing us to enter fully into the dream-state that fiction can awaken for us. Our job as writers is to create that dream-state as fully as possible.