“And Then What Happened?”

why does anyone write fiction? Why does anyone read it? So many spiders spinning! So many flies eager for the web! Where did it all begin? Surely with the telling of a story. The imagination easily supplies the vision of a shaggy group huddled in a cave, listening. The firelight is in our faces, the night around us, and the stars above the night. Who knows what simple or oracular account possesses us? But we can guess it is a story.

Perhaps most contemporary fiction is stale and inadequate because it has got too far away from storytelling. Certainly Lolita and those long, rueful pieces in the New Yorker have come a great distance from the fire in the cavern. “True” storytelling moves forward as if prompted by impatient children chorusing: “And then what happened?” Few of our best writers, since the earlier Evelyn Waugh, have possessed the narrator’s art that makes us greedy for the next event. We may be eager for the next page (“readability”), but such eagerness does not necessarily mean an interest in the sequence of happenings (“plot”). The result is a fiction that is personal to the point of confession, fragmented, meditative, as carelessly patterned as “life,” as random as memory. And, as in life, “characters” and descriptions and subjective poetry abound. In improper hands, this mélange of the humdrum and of private reactions can be deadly dull.

CM

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C. Robert Morse

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why does anyone write fiction? Why does anyone read it? So many spiders spinning! So many flies eager for the web! Where did it all begin? Surely with the telling of a story. The imagination easily supplies the vision of a shaggy group huddled in a cave, listening. The firelight is in our faces, the night around us, and the stars above the night. Who knows what simple or oracular account possesses us? But we can guess it is a story.

Perhaps most contemporary fiction is stale and inadequate because it has got too far away from storytelling. Certainly Lolita and those long, rueful pieces in the New Yorker have come a great distance from the fire in the cavern. “True” storytelling moves forward as if prompted by impatient children chorusing: “And then what happened?” Few of our best writers, since the earlier Evelyn Waugh, have possessed the narrator’s art that makes us greedy for the next event. We may be eager for the next page (“readability”), but such eagerness does not necessarily mean an interest in the sequence of happenings (“plot”). The result is a fiction that is personal to the point of confession, fragmented, meditative, as carelessly patterned as “life,” as random as memory. And, as in life, “characters” and descriptions and subjective poetry abound. In improper hands, this mélange of the humdrum and of private reactions can be deadly dull.