The Power of Literary Form

(1) The Idea: The Power of Fictional Forms - Slowing Time

One of the titles that I particularly enjoyed was James Wood’s How Fiction Works. It restored my love for realist fiction, ironed out some of my misunderstandings of the fictional form and it gave me the pleasure of reading some of the sharpest literary criticism I’ve ever read.

Take this passage for example when Wood commented on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

This, from Madame Bovary - Charles is stupidly pround that he has got Emma pregnant: ‘L’idée d’avoir engendré le délectait.’ So compact, so precise, so rhythmic. Literally, this is ‘The idea of having engendered delighted him.’

… This is good, but pity the poor translator. For the English is a wan cousin of the French. Say the French our aloud, as Flaubert would have done, and you encounter four ‘ay’ sounds in three of the words: ‘I’idée, engendré, délectait.’ And English translation that tried to mimic the untranslatable music of the French would sound like bad hip-hop: ‘The notion of procreation was a delecation.’

Brilliant, right? Sometimes the book gives the impression of listening to a jolly old guy giggling as he flicks through his literary tomes while licking his index finger.

But my love for Wood’s witty style aside, the book is packed full of heavier and more substantial arguments. One of them directly addressed this concern that I have about life flying by me all too fast.

In one of my favourite chapters on literary form, Wood, evoking Walter Benjamin, articulated the unique power of fiction:

“So fiction… ideally offers us a power we tend to lack in our own lives: to reflect on the form and direction of our existence; to see the birth, development and end of a completed life.”

This point, while subtle, deserves a lot of unpacking.

The way I see it, we all start off by imposing our youthful stories onto the potential of life because we don’t have the privilege of hindsight. One day I will become x and after that y will be wonderful. One day I will meet a and our lives will look like b. The future carries that sweet allure in the realm of fantasy because we don’t know any better. This is one of the last instances when life has a semblance of chapters/form.

But then, reality comes along and disrupts our beautiful stories. Becoming x just means doing all the work to keep up with it, and y turned out to be just another meeting we had to take on a Wednesday morning.

I felt this when I was in London meeting with the senior publishers at Bloomsbury. What used to be a picturesque scene of a young writer in a shabby jacket, dreaming of getting a book published all landed in a restaurant with a table scattered full of publishing notes while deadlines loomed.

This is the tragedy of reality: things remain mundane no matter how much fantasy we try to impose onto them. And when we have enough of these mundane moments, time speeds up because our brains are incredibly efficient at tuning our repetition. In a sense, life will continue to degenerate into narrative-less happenings UNLESS we take special care to remember and narrate it.

This is why I get a special pleasure from reading biographies as well as fiction: they give me a temporary sense of narrative to my own life. But just like a broker who forgot to count his blessings in favour for more, I sometimes forget to take stock just to put my head down into more work. As a consequence,

Life… strikes us as essentially formles… It’s protean. It’s about the process of endlessly becoming, proud of its built-in obsolescence (Wood, p. 144).

In our efforts to endlessly become someone or achieve something, we’re putting endless commas behind each milestone, muttering to ourselves: there will be more, just wait.

This becomes a neverending battle as we turn ourselves into unfinished projects. We become run-on sentences with no full stops.

But fiction and literary form remain one of the few resources that offer us this full-stop we desperately need. In Wood’s words, it offers us a certain negative power because it shows us “where things stop”.

It places an almost sacred border around the artwork and says, ‘This is not identical with the claims of the world. This is a space that demands a certain degree of strangeness, apartness, submission, significance.’ Form absorbs but can finally resist the world, is superbly autonomous (Wood p. 145)

When we actively engage with these hard borders and narrative checks, it anchors our lives in a narrative and offers us one of two things: perspective and contemplation. Perspective for zooming out of our busy lives and contemplation for limiting endless options down to actions that align with our inner principles.

And this is one of the reasons why reading fiction with concentrated effort is not only a great use of our time but also an essential device for stabilising temporality. So, in a world where we’re at risk of becoming formless through the desire to endlessly become,

Literature [acts] as a site of concentration, critique, surplus [and as] the stillness at the eye of the storm, a kind of prayerful attention. (Wood, p. 144)

In other words, reading isn’t merely some pleasant pastime, but a spiritual practice that gives our lives the gravity of narration.

(2) The Prompts:

1: Who did I want myself to be when I was young and what was the narrative I had for myself? As we’ve discussed, as we get older, it’s easy to forget that our lives did have narrative integrity at some point. Though those stories might be wildly different now compared to the first drafts of our youth, try your best to bring them back.

2: How can I retrieve a sense of narration from my life? Try to figure out ways to gain perspective and contemplation so that life stops devolving into a list of happenings. Do you want to read a biography? Write a story about your day. Or call up an old friend so that you can recall who you were before time slipped away from you.