“As the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel… it is not, any more than a painting, expected to apologize.”
“Beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”
– Henry James 1884
There are many essays and books with this title, and normally they are meant to teach you how to write or take yourself seriously. Ayn Rand, who authored a book called The Art of Fiction, talks about the need to know the language well, about using the words clearly, about theme, about plot, but what about the basic question – what is that makes poems and prose different from day to day life and stories?
Many Israeli books are freely based upon reality. Whenever editing other writers’ fiction, I try to dig deeper or to understand why this or that line was written in this sort of manner and not another. I usually come to the conclusion that it must have happened in real life. But literature isn’t real life, it condenses, it enlarges, normally I say that it takes three real people in order to create a fictional character. That is to say that the writer has to take the qualities of at least three different individuals to form one single character. It’s sort of like a 1:100′000 map, it’s only a representation of real life and if we would construct a city identical to the map, we would fail miserably. There is one literal historic epic that tries to do just that – À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust that is known to the English reader as In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past. He attempt to write down decades of his own life. This work of art ended only with the author’s death and one can say that this is also a failure to grasp and describe real life.
One can ask, ‘What is the importance of real life?’ and ‘Isn’t literature more important?’ Shakespeare wrote in the 18th Sonnet to his lover that “So long as man can breathe or I can see. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” and in a way this shows us how literature can be almost like a time machine. Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, a Hebrew essayist and thinker made a mockery out of Jewish researchers who tried to determine whether Moses was a real person or not. In one of his essays he claims that the importance of Moses as a literal character who affected so many people along the ages is far more important from the question if he is a truly historical figure, so this brings me to the question, ‘What is important in the art of fiction?’
I believe that in order to create something meaningful one must strike a nerve, a fundamental truth in his writings and that is something we are going to talk about next week.