The Art of Fiction: Parts 41 - 50

 

41 Duration

Come Back, Dr Caligari by Donald Barthelme (1964)

David Lodge tells us about these "stories that continually tested the limits of fictional form". In this extract the author in "Will You Tell Me" stupidly (in my opinion) glances through the years in only a few words. Not clever.

42 Implication

Scenes from a Provincial Life by William Cooper (1950)

Here the writer "goes to the very edge of explicitness, something that would never have been allowed in previous decades. "Teasing the reader into the inferential construction of a scene that is both witty and erotic" when so much is implied.

43 The Title

New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

(So many of these nineteenth century authors of whom I had never heard). In this extract, Reardon had finished writing his novel but without a title, could not think of one, so he just used the name of the main character (as so many did in those days). Some interesting  notes from Lodge such as Martin Amis calling his second novel Dead Babies (1975), but the publishers changed it to Dark Secrets.

44 Ideas

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

"A novel in which ideas seem to be the source of the work's energy, originating and shaping and maintaining it's narrative momentum". So here it is the idea of the hooligans using their own version of slang. This short extract includes "droogs", "sherries", "yahzic", "grahzny", "vonay" etc. (Reading this brings back memories of the film).

45 The Non-Fiction Novel

The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle (1837)

Could we not have had a more modern novel to demonstrate this? Why not instead Truman Capote's In Cold Blood etc which Lodge describes at the start of this piece. Or Schindler's Ark that was classed as non fiction in America but won the Booker Prize for fiction.

46 Metafiction

Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth (1968)

"Metafiction is fiction about fiction - novels and stories that call attention to their fictional status". The Granddaddy of them all is ..... yes: "echoes of Tristram Shandy". Why is Lodge so obsessed with this book? However, English novelists tend to use this device as an aside. Now that's good.  

47 The Uncanny

William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe (1839)

So I consulted my 1963 edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination (new when I bought it when I was eighteen) and there was the above story first of the forty six. It starts "Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson". Typical of the author, this is a "Doppelganger" story. A depraved narrator tormented by this "rival". "Plunging deeper and deeper into dissipation". Lodge also talks about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Hammer Films plundered Poe's short stories. 

48 Narrative Structure

I Would Have Saved Them If I Could by Leonard Michaels (1975)

Here are three extremely short pieces, not even paragraphs. THE HAND is five lines, ALL RIGHT is eight and MA just makes two. I think that Lodge must be running out of headings to make up the fifty.

49 Aporia

The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett (1959)

I didn't know that this Greek word means difficulty or being at a loss, literally "a pathless path, a track that gives out". The excerpt sounds just like something out of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. "What am I to do. What should I do. In my situation, how to proceed?" Lodge gives us a few more examples such as Shakespeare's "to be or not to be". 

50 Ending

Of course it had to be that. 

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1818)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

Lodge discusses the difference between "the end of the novel's story" and "the last page or two of text". I would have been interested to hear the difference but he spends more time on his own novel Changing Places.