Elements of Fiction

(Adapted from Worksheets by Nina Baym)

 

1.     Matter (subject matter), scale and scope of the novel. What specific aspects of the real world does the novel treat? How big a chunk of reality does the novel take on? What degree of detail is used in representing the portion of reality that the novel represents?

2.     Plot: A story is an account of change. Such an account requires one to identify an initial state and a final state and to explain how and why the change occurs, including the initial state and how it is disturbed, identification of the protagonist, and his/her goals, relation of the antagonist to the initial state or its disturbance; obstacles; outcomes.

3.     Plot: The chronological arrangement and selection of key incidents; emphasis and pacing, the crisis (or climax) and how it embodies (incorporates) the various strands of action.

4.     Characters: Classification according to their relation to the protagonist or advancement and revelation of the plot: protagonist-helpers; antagonist-helpers; surrogate, functional, and decorative (textural) characters.

5.     Characters: Chief means of delineating characters, differences among delineations of different characters, means of delineation absent from the novel (or portraying or particular characters): author commentary, narrator’s commentary, other characters’ commentary, character’s own words about him/herself, character’s words about others, character’s actions, “tags” (dress, mannerisms, symbols, recurrent associations).

6.     Setting: Role in the action, role with regard to verisimilitude, how embedded in the narrative; decorative or functional (integral).

7.     Point of view: How it reveals and conceals knowledge, controls the reader’s distance from the action, and dictates emotional and intellectual accessibility of the work. The point of view is the window on the action, necessary since the novel is a narrated rather than a dramatic form. The chief continua along which point of view may be described are: (a) the degree of the narrator’s knowledge; (b) the degree of the narrator’s understanding; and (c) the degree of the narrator’s participation.

8.     Author-narrator in relation to the story. [Author as control on access to the story, source of knowledge, narrator, commentator.]

9.     Author-narrator in relation to the reader. [Place allotted to the reader; reader-author relationship.]

10. Character of the author-narrator. [The character of the author as evidenced in attitudes, tone, idiosyncrasies of style.]

11. Author-narrator in relation to the book he/she is writing or the tale as a narrative structure; both explicit and implicit evidence. [Author as artist, book-writer, or tale-teller (the author as author).]

[NOTE: Items 8-11 require somewhat different treatment when the author-narrator is a character, a first-person narrator, or when the narrator is distinguished from the author, as with Huck Finn. Also, we may ultimately decide to combine these items: The character of the author-narrator as revealed in style, degree, and nature of embellishment, characteristic devices, tone, attitudes toward the reader, direct or oblique references to the act of writing (or telling) the story.]

12. “Literary” characteristics such as chapter titles, epigraphs, typographical eccentricities or signals, etc.

The Novel

(Definition by Nina Baym)

 

The novel is a long (75,000+ words) written fiction dealing with human beings or their surrogates or delegates. Its length is necessary to develop complexity, which is also characteristic of novels, as distinct from shorter stories. It is not dramatic representation; it poses a voice between the reader and the fiction; to some extent, of course, the voice is part of the fiction.

 

A fiction is an invented story. A story is an account of change. Such an account requires one to identify an initial state and a final state and to explain how and why B came after A. Theorists use the concept “fable” to distinguish the idea of a pre-existing story from the particular version of it in a specific work. Many “stories” can be made from one “fable.” However, this distinction turns out to be of only limited analytic usefulness. More significant are the concepts of subject matter and genre, or subgenre. Subject matter is of the work’s relation to the real world; genre is of its relation to literature. Some relationship may exist between subject matter and genre, but it is not a necessary, obligatory one.

 

Common critical parlance identifies subject matter with theme. For example, when we speak of the “international theme” in Henry James, we really mean the international subject matter. Subject matter is the area of the real world that the author has marked out for fictional treatment in the novel. Most of our criticism and teaching is directed to finding out what, through this treatment, the author is “saying” about the subject matter. Subjects also impose their own demands concerning scale, scope, and decorum; it is assumed by cultural conventions that there are appropriate ways of treating various subject matters.

 

Genre is one way that a reader knows what is going on in the work. Different subject matters are associated with correlated types of novels—for example, Western, whodunit, hardboiled detective fiction, sci-fi, historical romance, novel of manners. These types, or genres, are usually evident in popular novels, but all novels manifest membership in genre to some degree.

 

Structure, or form of the novel, is commonly approached in two segments, according to whether the story or its written/told nature is stressed; the latter is called “discourse.” Since a novel consists of words alone, and all these words proceed from a hypothetical teller or writer, it is extremely difficult to discern in some approaches what might not be discourse. But if the novel were all discourse, the distinction would be useless. Careful attention to the text reveals where the writer is more concerned with the story and where he/she is more concerned with the telling of the story. We use “discourse” thus in a more restricted way to refer to those places in a given text where the focus is on the novel as a written artifact or as a communication between a writer and reader. (Every novel has running discourse.)

 

Story is broken down into four elements: plot, character, setting, and point of view.

 

Plot is the giving shape to the story on both a large and small scale. Story is invariably translated into plot by identifying an agent, an aim. The “final state” is related to the “initial state” through a human/humanoid actor with goals and desires that are accomplished or not. All plots consist of the efforts of the agent to achieve a goal, and the reader is engaged by the question of the agent’s success. The plot involves a progressive complication (entangling, knotting) of agent and impediment to a point of greatest intensity (often called the climax or crisis), and then a disentangling toward a final unknotting (denouement), sometimes by way of a catastrophe.

 

On a small scale the plot is broken down or built up by individual events (or their representation) that are ordered and emphasized. The events are designed to advance the plot, and their basic relation to each other is loosely causal: each event makes the next one happen and follows from the one before. The plot necessarily takes place in time, but a mere temporal sequence is not sufficient to connect events in a plot. In this way, all novels are episodic (when they become too loosely connected, the novel is called “episodic” to distinguish it from more tightly plotted works); but the episodes contribute to building and overcoming impediments.

 

Ordering refers to the sequencing of events in a narrative when compared to a “natural” (chronological) sequence and also when compared to a purely ideal, logical internal order. Deviation from both these orders is carried out as a means of making the plot interesting to the reader. Interest involves both presenting and suppressing information (even deceiving); concealment and revelation are equally important to plot. Ordering thus implies a reader and reminds us forcefully that no narrative is natural event, but is only made to seem so.

 

Emphasis involves the weighting of events to make some more prominent that others. Emphasis is achieved by positioning, by repetition, and by amplitude (duration—that is, the stretching out established in a given narrative).

 

Plots may be unitary or episodic (telling one story or many stories in a sequence), but in a novel the episodes when they exist tend to cohere within a larger unitary plot. Similarly, plots may be single or multiple (one line of action or many recounted at the same time); but in the typical novel that has multiple plots, these relate to one another in a structure of doubling/repetition or contrast (reverse repetition).

 

The agent in a novel, as well as the impediments, takes human form. The characters in a novel are functions of the action in relation to the agent (protagonist). They may be classified thus:

·       Protagonist

·       Protagonist’s aides or surrogates

·       Antagonist(s)

·       Antagonist’s aides or surrogates

·       Characters who advance the action

·       Characters who reveal the action to the reader

·       Characters who “decorate” the action, including characters who interpret or comment on it, who are typical, symbolic, or who are proliferated for purposes of verisimilitude

 

All narrative requires characters in the sense of agents or actors; novels usually have characters who are “characterized,” that is, given traits, personalities, and other psychological apparatuses which function in the action. Necessarily, traits are drawn from the author’s cultural repertory.

 

The basic traits of a character are those required by his/her function in the plot.

 

Character achieves additional complexity and (in our culture) verisimilitude by the accumulation of traits, and especially by traits that are in some tension so that character itself may become the occasion for plot.

 

Characters proliferate from the protagonist by principles of contrast, doubling, and variation.

 

Character, like plot, is emphasized by positioning, repetition, and amplitude. Not all characters in a novel will be “characterized” with equal richness, therefore, or by the same means. There are a number of means of delineating characters, and the greater the number used, the more “three-dimensional” the character will seem to be. The chief means are:

• Naming
• Phyical appearance
• Tags (a piece of repeated “business,” such as Gatsby’s “old sport” and wearing white)
• Talk about by others
• Direct or indirect analysis by author
• Talk, including (a) as rhetoric (the character’s own individual “language” as a means of self-definition), and (b) as action (what the character says and in what circumstances equals a performance)
• Behavior, or actions, dramatized or described
• Representation of thoughts, or description of thoughts

 

The point of view is the window on the action, necessary since the novel is a narrated rather than a dramatic form. There are many continua along which a point of view may be described, but the chief are:

1)     the degree of the narrator’s knowledge

2)     the degree of the narrator’s understanding

3)     the degree of the narrator’s participation.

 

Novels purport to “occur” in real places at designated historical times, and setting is essential for the creation of this illusion. A setting may also function in the plot or in character. Setting may be general or highly particularized. Setting may be presented in one set piece at specific times in the discourse or be presented more or less continuously.

 

Components of discourse include:

1)     Definition of the author who is neither the real-life writer nor necessarily the point of view (never, in cases of limited point of view). The style, pace, tone, degree of description versus dramatization, commentary, digression, use of symbols, attachments of morals and meanings, playfulness or seriousness, sparseness or richness of ornament and decoration are all part of the definition of the author and thus of the discourse.

2)     Definition of the reader/implied reader (the human presence created within the text as the author’s implied ideal “receiver” for the narrative).

3)     Definition of a relation between author and reader, whereby the story becomes part of a communication between them. The relation may be defined along many continua, but the degree of formality versus intimacy and of cooperation versus antagonism are two of significance.

4)     Definition of the story as a told or written event, an artifice, a message calling attention to its status as language rather than reality; talk about the story.

5)     Typographical presentation of the work: titles, chapters, epigraphs, tables of contents, color, illustrations, materials of production (cover, paper, binding).

 

Experimental novels may be directed “outward” toward the subject matter or “inward” toward the discourse. An outward-directed experimental novel is one that attempts to encompass new subject matter in the novel form, and to make such innovations in the story or discourse as seem necessitated by the new subject matter. Inward-directed experimental novels posit a disjunction between the discourse and the story and emphasize the discourse and artificial nature of the story, hence calling the reader’s attention to the acts of writing and reading as experiences in their own right. Inevitably, experimental novels must disappoint or offend the reader’s expectations, and consequently the experimental novel is associated with a kind of deliberate antagonism on the writer’s part toward the reader although the antagonism is supposed to be for the reader’s eventual benefit.

 

All novels, clearly, are experimental to some degree—at least all novels that we take seriously—in one of these two ways.