16
One sign of how terrific Nabokov was as both a teacher and a writer of non-fiction is how he did not introduce an idea until he had carefully laid groundwork for it, allowing the full mental strength and implication to sink in for his students/readers. In this part of the Mansfield Park lecture, Nabokov concludes his discussion of Austen's characterization with the sentence "Characterization in Miss Austen often grades into structure." What does this mean?
In Nabokov's notes for the lecture, editor Fredson Bowers found some comments on literature in general which he slowly introduced through his talk about Austen, then fully delineated in the second lecture on Charles Dickens. But for we lucky readers, these ideas first appear in the footnote to Austen, and I really want to talk about them now.
For Vladimir Nabokov, if asked "What formulates a story?," he would say the answer was the Subject Matter: the why and the how of a story. And Subject Matter was to be found in Structure and Style.
Those two words cannot be emphasized enough.
We have all been trained to think mostly about literature through what Nabokov would call Plot and Theme. Plot is "the supposed story" and Themes are "images or ideas which are repeated here and there in a novel, as a tune reoccurs in a fugue." Plot and Theme are indispensible to all forms of storytelling: books, films, articles, video games. When we tell a story ourselves, we relate a number of events which happened, and then we draw a meaning or overall idea from the events…without that, the story isn't worth telling at all. There are two issues, however, with stopping there. Anyone with half a brain can say "I petted a dog and I liked the fuzzy feeling." There's a plot. There's an image and an idea. Do we call that a story? Even more problematic, if we are going to study literature and extract something essential to the experience of life from it…so many writers can string together hundreds of pages of plot and theme, but this doesn't mean their stories are worth reading. Stephenie Meyer is the most popular novelist in America today. Her books certainly have a LOT of story, and there are themes, albeit ones I strongly disagree with, and people enjoy the experience of following the live girl and the dead vampire and their unshakable love. But VERY FEW PEOPLE would call the Twilight saga great literature. Nabokov certainly wouldn't, and it would have nothing to do with Plot or Theme…he adored gothic tales, Jules Verne's adventures, and the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Vampires and werewolves would not have stirred up negativity. What makes literature great is when a novelist excels at Structure and Style.
Structure is "the composition of a book, a development of events, one event causing another, a transition from one theme to another, the cunning way new characters are brought in, or a new complex of action is started, or the various themes are linked up or used to move the novel forward."
In other words, if anybody can tell a story, then people should make an effort to tell a story in a way which is logical and effective, but also done with creativity.
As an example, I want to use my favorite novel of all time, The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald tells a story with a plot full of action from births to deaths, gives that story a theme about the overwhelming power of love and desire and how humans need to make them part of their lives but never let them gain control, and fills it with an evocative setting and memorable characters. If he had told the story as a straightforward beginning-to-end narrative, it would have been fascinating enough, but then Fitzgerald goes a step further. The events are not presented in chronological order, but in flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks, all from multiple points of view. (Nick lets Jordan and Gatsby narrate some excerpts.) By controlling how the events are presented to the reader, Fitzgerald not only allows the power of each individual event to make itself known, but also creates a sense of delighted wonder by hinting at events, then fully springing them on us to demonstrate the cause-and-effect. For instance, Gatsby's boyhood reading sparks a desire to work hard and improve himself, which leads him to the beach where he meets Dan Cody, which starts him on the dreaming path winding to Louisville and Daisy. The themes merge and diverge just as smoothly…Gatsby's lunch with Wolfsheim leads directly into his asking to see Daisy, the singled-minded obsession with an ultimately fatal desire leading to the sincere love at its core. And Fitzgerald contrasts creation and destruction, faith and infidelity, the artful and the truly artistic, many times throughout the story.
For the rest of Nabokov's definition…think about the chapter where Nick attends Gatsby's party, is surrounded by an atmosphere the likes of which he has never known before, and at the end finds the stranger he has been talking to is Gatsby…and Gatsby wants to ask him a favor which will propel the plot to its end. To have Gatsby emerge from a background figure, one more playboy in the Jazz Age Circus, to actually being the fabled personage everyone has been talking about since the novel began is great Structuring. To have Nick slowly become acclimated to West Egg, be thrust into its apotheosis, and from there start all systems going on the plot movement…that's great Structure. And the themes of The Great Gatsby are brilliantly interwoven, as Gatsby's passionate, self-destructive pursuit of Daisy correlates with Nick's dispassionate affairs with "the girl from home" and Jordan—but Gatsby also awakens an idealistic vision of WANTING something more in Nick which will drive him from the East and which he will never lose…this is a point I think has never been fully explored and which I intend to elaborate on following my exploration of these Lectures. I digress…
Style is "the manner of the author, his special intonations, his vocabulary, and that something which when confronted with a passage makes a reader cry out that's by Austen, not by Dickens."
So one part of what makes a book extraordinary is technical creativity…what is said and the methodology by which it is said. But imagine if F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote like Stephenie Meyer. For all its fantastic Structure, would The Great Gatsby still be Required Reading for not just high school students but everyone who cares about literature?
The beautiful creativity unique to each of us is equally needed. Style is HOW WE and WE ALONE tell this story. Only an unimaginative writer would dryly narrate a tale (though in some cases, as with Hemingway in part, this is Style in extremis)—the great stories are embellished with a special, carefully arrived at word choice, with similes and metaphors and other devices which awaken additional meaning in readers, with images and descriptions of people and places, and with a certain undefinable trait which comes from our own personal experience, with listening to the voices of so many others and blending them together with our own beliefs and opinions to create OUR voice. Therefore, a writer who wants to create something of lasting value cannot be predictable or clichéd or draw too heavily upon the stories and techniques of others, be they cool and sparse or melodramatically flourished (NOW I'm looking at you, Miss Stephenie.)
Fitzgerald had a style, one shaped by the verve and flair of the Twenties and the mannerisms of the rich and the expatriates and the dreamers who wanted to be rich and tried to copy them both. Anthony Trollope, my literary hero (who will one day become a great dominating presence here) also had a style. Unlike Fitzgerald, his stories were in conventional beginning-middle-end structure, but his observations of life in England as a civil servant who worked with all classes gave him both a factual eye used to great effect in describing anyone and anything, and an understanding of human natures and passions in a climate which was not exactly open to free expression which infuses his dialogue with layers of meaning: his characters are often dry of voice but conceal hidden urges, loves, and hates, which make their raptures and sadness and anguishes that much more striking and effective when the major events and crises happen.
Now let us, like Nabokov, take one logical step further. If the major theory behind literature is the rhetorical perspective, then Structure and Style are the VITAL KEYS to understanding this strange, splendid, beautiful world. Think about our president. Barack Obama won over the country, practically won over the world, by being able to not just tell a story, but to structure his stories in ways which made the personal become the universal and vice-versa (the Philadelphia speech was an autobiography and an anecdotal epilogue where the point was that all the citizens of earth are too interconnected and need each other too much to let race matter) and then use words and descriptions to create images people could relate to and support. The word "change" for instance carried MEGATONS of weight after the presidency of George W. Bush.
So if we can learn how Structure and Style CREATE a story through studying how writers use them to create an effect on us, then look at how the works of these writers affected their world and the worlds which came after them, then one day we will be listening to the news or reading a magazine and suddenly find ourselves picking out the technique, how Structure and Style are working together to create an effect in us…and from there, decide if we want to go along with that effect.
For Adolf Hitler had a story to tell and a style all his own every bit as much as Barack Obama.
Tomorrow, I'll get back to actually talking about Mansfield Park. But Structure and Style…without them, nothing about this blog or the country I'll be getting my passport to at Hyde Park in September really means a damn.
No comments:
Post a Comment