Who’s Got the Moves: John Gardner & Technique (Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
John Gardner
Last Wednesday I brought up the dicey subject of style -- that aspect of writing that many believe cannot be taught. Even while writing the post, I wondered what John Gardner would say on the subject, so I jumped to Vol. 2 of the Paris Review Interviews where his can be found. Gardner was measured on the subject, although very clear about the relationship between style and the world view of the author, much like Capote:
One of the first things you have to understand when you are writing fiction -- or teaching writing -- is that there are different ways of doing things, and each one has a slightly different effect. A misunderstanding of this leads you to the Bill Gass position: that fiction can't tell the truth, because every way you say the thing changes it. I don't think that's to the point. I think that what fiction does is sneak up on the truth by telling it six different ways and finally releasing it. That's what Dante said, that you can't really get at the poetic, inexpressible truths, that the way things are leaps up like steam between them. So you have to determine very accurately the potential of a particular writer's style and help that potential develop at the same time, ignoring what you think of his moral stands.
He also discussed style in the now more conventional sense of how an author approaches prose, demonstrating briefly how he might approach that prose in turn. What I enjoy about this quote is an awareness of that effect mentioned above -- an awareness that an author might handle an aspect of craft so effectively that it changes another person's attitude about something hitherto fundamental to his own understanding of writing:
I used to think that words and style should be transparent, that no word should call attention to itself in any way, that you could say the plainest thing possible to get the dream going. After I read some early Gass -- "The Pedersen Kid," I think -- I realized that you don't really interfere with the dream by saying things in an interesting way. Performance is an important part of the show. But I don't like Gass, think language is of value when it's opaque, more decorative than communicative.
I was interested to know what Gardner thought about style since he is well known for believing without doubt than technique can be taught. "Certainly it can be taught," he says in the interview, then cautioning:
But a teacher has to know technique to teach it.... Most of the writers I know in the world don't know how they do what they do. Most of them feel it out. Bernard Malamud and I had a conversation one time in which he said that he doesn't know how he does those magnificent things he sometimes does. He just keeps writing until it comes out right. If that's the way a writer works, then that's the way he had to work, and that's fine. But I like to be in control as much of the time as possible.
Thus Gardner's interest in craft and in its teaching.
Best known as the author of The Resurrection (1966), The Wrecking of Agathon (1970), Grendel (1971), and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Gardner found pride of place on my bookshelves as the author of The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (1983). I have read this book so many times it's falling apart. Gardner has strong views about what makes good writing, and I understand why a writer would bristle at some of his statements. (Here's a quote from the interview sure to bother some: "I'm bored by plots that depend on the psychological or sociological quirks of the main characters -- mere melodramas of healthy against sick -- stories that, subtly or otherwise, merely preach.") But given Gardner's belief in the redemptive power of art, it's also understandable why he challenges writers to construct the best (as he understands it) story and prose possible. Writing deserves no less.
Personally, I find it hard not to run after a writer who claims -- as Gardner does in this interview: "I really do believe that a novel has to be a feast of the senses, a delightful thing."
That's one to write on a post-it and stick to your computer screen.
Here's another: "Ideally the reader should never catch you shaking a symbol at him. Intellect is the chief distractor of the mind."
I recommend The Art of Fiction to every writer I know. Gardner's novels sit definitively on the shelf marked "literature," but I find his advice on craft useful for constructing all kinds of stories, including genre fiction. If I have a "style" as an editor, it's certainly been honed under Gardner. For example, I seem to believe (despite all those years seeking out the post-psychological novel while studying poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and identity theory) that authors should love their characters. Or, put another way, that the author shouldn't despise or be cold to their characters. That's straight out of The Art of Fiction. If an author doesn't love his or her character, why should a reader care? How commonplace -- how not elite -- is that?
It's not surprising, then, to find a quote in the interview that foregrounds Gardner's awareness of the general reader. It also underscores another aspect of craft that Gardner taught me: that all aspects of craft work in tandem. A weakness in one craft technique can create problems in other aspects of craft. Alternatively -- as in this example -- developing a technique like setting could be just what's needed for solving problems in characterization, theme, and symbol:
Setting is one of the most powerful symbols you have, but mainly it serves characterization. The first thing that makes a reader read a book is the characters. Say you're standing in a train station, or an airport, and you're leafing through books; what you're hoping for is a book where you'll like the characters, where the characters are interesting. To establish powerful characters, a writer needs a landscape to help define them, so setting becomes important. Setting is also a powerful vehicle of thematic concerns; in fact, it's one of the most powerful. If you're going to talk about the decline of Western civilization or at least the posibility of that decline, you take an old place that's sort of worn out and run-down. For instance, Batavia, New York, where the Holland Land Office was ... the beginning of a civilization ... selling the land in this country. It was, in the beginning, a wonderful, beautiful place with the smartest Indians around. No wit's this old, run-down town that has been urban-renewalized just about out of existence. The factories have stopped and the people are poor and sometimes crabby; the elm trees are all dead, and so are the oaks and maples. So it's a good symbol.
Gardner's interview in the Paris Review contains numerous moments like that one -- moments in which Gardner, the teacher of technique speaks about a range of craft issues. The interview even can feel like an abridged, conversational version of The Art of Fiction. Some of his discussions offer very specific advice, such as about how to teach (or to learn) plot:
When you teach creative writing, you teach people, among other things, how to plot. You explain the principles, how it is that fiction thinks. And to give the kids a sense of how a plot works, you just spin out plot after plot after plot. In an hour session, you may sin out forty possible plots, one adhering to the real laws of energeia, each one a balance of the particular and the general -- and not one of them a story that you'd really want to write. Then one time, you hit one that catches you for some reason -- you hit on the story that expresses your unrest.
Other discussions are more abstract, such as how realism commits a writer to employing techniques that make the fiction absolutely credible to the reader, techniques that may not even interest the writer:
I've never been terribly fond of realism because of certain things that realism seems to commit me to. With realism you have to spend two hundred pages proving that somebody lives in Detroit so that something can happen and be absolutely convincing. But the value systems of the people involved is the important thing, not the fact that they live on Nine Mile Road. In my earlier fiction I went as far as I could from realism because the easy way to get to the heart of what you want to say is to take somebody else's story, particularly a nonrealistic story. When you tell the story of Grendel, or Jason and Medeia, you've got to end it the way the story ends -- traditionally, but you can get to do it in your own way. The result is that the writer comes to understand things about the modern world in light of the history of human consciousness; he understands it a little more deeply and has a lot more fun writing it.
Consistently, they are to the point:
It has always seemed to be that the main thing you ought to be doing when you write a story is, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, to set a "dream" going in the reader's mind ... so that he opens the page, reads about three words, and drops into a sort of trance. He's seeing Russia instead of his living room. Not that he's passive. The reader hopes and judges.
and:
I try to be as overt as possible. Plot, character, and action first. I try to say everything with absolute directness so that the reader sees the characters moving around, sees the house they're moving through, the landscape, the weather, and so on. I try to be absolutely direct about moral values and dilemmas. Read it to the charwoman, Richardson said. I say, make it plain to her dog. But when you write fiction such as mine, fantastic or quasi-realistic fiction, it happens inevitably that as you're going over it, thinking about it, you recognize unconscious symbols bubbling up to the surface, and you begin to revise to give them room, sort of nudge them into sight.
These are just a few reasons why I feel Gardner's got all the moves.
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