One Thing After Another

In the May/Summer issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Alice Mattison offers an interesting essay (not available online, but the issue's table of contents is available here) defending the use of coincidence in fiction. Subtitled "An Essay Against Craft," the essay commends the use of coincidence as a way of taking risk, which Mattison feels is discouraged in a literary world dominated by the workshop "rules" implicitly taught in creative writing programs. Writes Mattison: "I don't think directions or rules are available, just terms. . .that undeniably simplify discussions of writing and literature." Such simplification is at times useful, but "the problem arises when we begin to draw conclusions from succesful choices, assuming that what works once will work in every instance."

A few paragraphs after the statements just quoted, Mattison is discussing a Charles Baxter essay in which "Baxter glances at the sort [of stories] that were rejected as old-fashioned by the authors who first made stories turn on insight. He characterizes the stories that Henry James and James Joyce rejected as those with 'plot structures tending to require a set of coincidences or connivances of circumstance.'" Mattison comments: "It hadn't occured to me, before I read Baxter's sentence, that coincidence defines the type of story in which it appears. I hadn't noticed that such stories. . .were helpless without coincidence."

Although Baxter and Mattison don't use the word, what they are both describing is the influence on early novels in English of the "picaresque" narrative. The picaresque story--derived from the term identifying the protagonist of such stories, the "picaro"--was introduced by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is essentially a journey narrative in which the picaro, usually a rogueish character, embarks on a journey in which, literally, one thing happens after another. There's not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or "epiphany." The most famous picaresque novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, in which Cervantes alters the form by making his protagonist a deluded but not antisocial or rascally character.

The early British novelists of the 18th century were greatly influenced by the picaresque narrative, especially such writers as Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Fielding's Tom Jones is probably the most famous of these British picaresque novels. It adopts the journey conceit, the episodic structure, and adds an element of explicit comedy that exceeds even the kind of doleful humor to be found in Don Quixote. (Tom Jones remains a tremendously readable book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what the picaresque form can accomplish.) Charles Dickens was in turn profoundly influenced by Smollett and Fielding, and his novels represent a further fashioning of the picaresque into a narrative technique of great flexibility and latent aesthetic potential.

But this was indeed the "old-fashioned" kind of storytelling that came to be rejected by later writers more concerned about the "craft" of fiction. Perhaps the first writer to really move away from the picaresque was Flaubert, and he may be the writer most responsible for converting fiction into a more gracefully "shaped" kind of storytelling, and therefore a form that could be taken seriously as a mode of literary art. (I greatly admire Flaubert, and nothing I say here is meant to denigrate his achievement in any way.) Mattison identifies James and Joyce as the writers who came to "shape" their stories around the occurence of an "epiphany," but it was really Flaubert who showed James and Joyce that such an aesthetically intricate effect could be brought off in fiction.

Since Flaubert, the notion of "story" in fiction is thus usually associated either specifically with the kind of dramatic narrative leading to revelation or epiphany pioneered by James and Joyce or more generally with the kind of carefully structured narrative encapsulated in "Freytag's triangle": exposition, rising action, climax, denoument, etc. Most genre fiction probably uses the latter, most "literary" fiction the former. Most best-selling potboilers are likely to use the Freytag-derived narrative filtered through Hollywood melodrama. In this context, the picaresque story almost doesn't seem like a story at all, since it doesn't arrange itself in some shaped pattern, but is instead just a series of incidents strung together.

I go over all this not to offer some kind of lesson in literary history but ultimately to suggest, with Mattison but more broadly than her advocacy of "coincidence" goes, that the picaresque ought to remain a viable option and can provide an alternative to the workshop-reinforced domination of the revalatory narrative. To some extent the picaresque style was revived by postwar American writers such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, but in my opinion it still contains much untapped potential. It can free the writer from the tyranny of story--the creation of narrative tension by which too many stories and novels are reductively judged--but at the same time allows for the depiction of external events, provides an aesthetically justified motive for abjuring the directive to probe the psychological depths, and perhaps most of all makes available all kind of other effects--satire, subplots, a larger cast of characters--that the craft-like story discourages. Of course, this is not the 18th century, and writers now would be using the picaresque form in a much more self-conscious way, but that in itself would likely give such fictions a "shape" that would rescue them from mere formlessness. (Although attempting a truly "formless" novel might be an interesting experiment in itself.)

I am not suggesting that the picaresque narrative is superior to the more conventionally shaped narrative most novels employ. The possibilities in "shaping" the latter kind of narrative have by no means been exhausted, although most published novels don't seem much interested in exploring these possibilities. A renewed interest in the picaresque might, however, help demonstrate that there is more than one way to tell a story, multiple ways to "shape" a work of fiction, without sacrificing readibility or even fiction's "entertainment" value. (Both Don Quixote and Tom Jones are nothing if not entertaining.) And in the final analyis using such a narrative strategy wouldn't really involve abandoning "craft"; ideally it would further demonstrate that craft is just as much involved in the breaking of convention as in its repetition.

Comments

[Robert Nagle]

First, it's interesting that the picaresque has pretty much disappeared in the contemporary novel, which tends towards the formal, the baroque, the introspective.

The decline of the picaresque form may have something to do with the emphasis on character autonomy and the deemphasis on external forces (fate, the gods) from determining outcome.

On the other hand, perhaps when we say picareque, we are merely referring to more open-ended forms with episodic content. In that case, then we can point to TV shows and sitcoms as continuing the picaresque tradition.

I would group the picaresque/coincidence connection with the problem of the limits of fantasy. How much can a dreamer/fabulist get away with? And if literary coincidences have value in helping the reader/viewer to imagine the improbable or laugh at fate's silliness (see Candide), then they may very well reveal our own sense of helplessness combined with a desire to have our lives arranged as whimsically as certain literary characters. It may also reflect a discomfort with introspection. In this modern age of anomie, the individual reader may be uncomfortable with exploring characterization and emotions simply because solitude is dull and overdone. (I say this as someone who works in complete silence in a cubicle all day; when I come home, I am content with the shallowness of Cheers. It provides company and gets me out of myself).

Kundera has written about the picaresque character at several places (especially in his essay on Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist. Kundera talks about characterizations arising from actions or situations (something Kundera links to erotic adventurism) rather than from internal drives. This parallels (for me at least) people's affection for sitcom characters. The characters of the Friends TV show, for example, never have emotional depth, but the accumulation of backstory creates complex storylines in the 10th year. You can't help it.

One final thought. I am struck by how the recent renaissance of oral storytelling has resulted in looser narratives and an emphasis on natural flow of speech rather than the contemplation of a phrase. Later generations may look at 19th century craftsmen like Flaubert with awe combined with incomprehension.

[Trent Walters]

The picaresque became known as a lesser art form because it fails to resonate. Robert gives the example of Voltaire, a writer whom I love for wit and wisdom. One finds this spirit of picaresque alive and well in modern day genre novel satires through Robert Sheckley and in the more famous, later incarnated mirror image, Douglas Adams. One enjoys the story scene by scene, but the whole does not connect in a greater arc or, if it does, the arc is generally make-shift.

Modern art shapes do include coincidence. Without it, the structure may feel too rigid, but life is connected. It is a piece of a greater whole, which one sees most vibrantly in ecology. I've come to see even politics as a kind of necessary ecology that breaks when one side or the other is too rigidly adhered to. We exist in a delicate balance of creation/destruction, creativity/structure, life/death, and yin/yang that, to tip the scales, ruins whatever process you were seeking to perpetuate.

[Trent Walters]

By the way, I'll trade a dozen average, uninspired, blandly structured novels for one picaresque novel by Voltaire or Sheckley. Sheckley seems at his best in the short form, however, where he takes on a firmer shape. So I'm not dissing the picaresque or Sheckley, but it is because of the way art resonates that Sheckley will be better known for his short fiction.

[TEV]

I suspect the notion of a "formless" novel is going to mean different things to different people, but you might want to thumb through a copy of John Banville's first novel Nightspawn. The book doesn't ultimately work but it's an interesting attempt at what Banville described as "a betrayal of the reader's good faith in the writer's good faith." He goes on to describe it "as near to silence as I can get" but most interesting, he says this:

"I set out to subject as much pressure as I could bring to bear on [traditional nineteenth century concepts], while remaining within the rules. I made a wildly implausible plot. I brought in stock characters. I brought in a political theme ... precisely in order to make nothing of it. There are many reasons for proceeding this way but one of the principal ones was that I was interested to test, to bend close to breaking, the very curious relationship which exists between reader and author."

Not especially germane to picaresques, but an interesting meta-attempt at a formless novel.

[Simon]

This explanation would have more weight if it had treated the influence of Aristotle's Poetics on narrative fiction. Aristotle slammed the _deus ex machina_ ceceit, which is analogous to the idea of 'coincidence' in prose. Where does that fit in to the notion that the picaresque came first?

The development of drama was taking place before the prose story-tellers could even write, and it is surely reasonable to think that the early writers of prose placed themselves in the dramatic tradition, especially when you think of someone like Aphra Behn, who was a master playwright before she turned to writing prose.

[Amardeep Singh]

I think Simon's point about deus ex machina is quite right (though surely it would have had a Greek name... do we know what word Aristotle used?). Perhaps it's sensible to think of external/coincidence plots and internal/epiphany plots as dancing around each other in time.

In contemporary fiction, I think both devices are available, sometimes even in the course of a single story (The Sweet Hereafter).

Anyway, thanks for a great post on the picaresque. I learned a thing or two.

[Dan Green]

No more than I'm saying that the picaresque is inherently superior am I saying that it was somehow "first." Of course there were other approaches to storytelling, but the picaresque was the one that helped to get the novel going.

[Alan]

The greatest picaresque in 20th c. American literature is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Simply peerless. Soldier in the Mist is also a fine picaresque by him.

This little book review is interesting in that it covers "metahistorical romance", which definitely incorporates the picaresque.

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?command=view_essay&essay_id=douglasce

[R. A. Rubin]

I guess then in the last century, Kerouac stands alone. I prefer coincidence. It makes for healthier art. Our audience prefers it. Iowa doesn't care about an audience. They have tenure.

[carter]

The author Jonathan Raban has some interesting points regarding coincidences in novels, as mentioned in this blog: "More interestingly, Raban returned to one of my favourite conceits of his: the novel-sized city...Noting how people sometimes poke fun at the ridiculous coincidences Dickens relied on when writing about mid-19thC London i.e. key protagonists accidently bumping into other key protagonists in the busy streets, thereby sprouting unlikely plotlines, Raban notes that the population of London at that time was 1.7m people. Seatlle now is 1.7m people. Raban's not totally serious point is that there may be an optimum size of city to generate the coincidences required to write a certain kind of novel"

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2003/08/jonathan_raban.html

[Ray]

But Flaubert, James, and Joyce *do* employ outrageous coincidence. It's just that the coincidences tend to be more fine-grained and thickly spread than in "Tom Jones" or "Oliver Twist", and to be harder for the protagonists to recognize and for the plot summaries to retell. The beauties of free indirect discourse rely on characters thinking and perceiving exactly the right things in exactly the right way to support the fiction's structure: ideally, there's a coincidence per phrase! In "Ulysses", Joyce carried the technique to such self-conscious extremes that it became the major source of comedy in itself, with the overt "plot" coincidences of the story dwarfed by comparison. Beckett's "stink of artifice" merely did Joyce shorter, and it seems to me that the acclaimed mainstream post-modernists have ever since comfortably dawdled in the cleared frontier.

[Dan Green]

Ray: I agree with you. "Coincidence" is just another way of saying "artifice," and ultimately all fiction is artifice.

[arthur]

I was struck by a similarity of description in your praise of the potential of the picaresque and Coetzee's near-dismissal of Augie March. Isn't Augie a picaresque?

[Daniel Green]

Yes, Augie March is a picaresque, but a very badly done one.