Topical Guide 185
Mark Dorset
Stories: Their Role in Fiction
The stories were there to hold the books together, prop them up, but that function, although useful, perhaps even necessary, wasn’t interesting; it could have been fulfilled by any story, as far as I was concerned, any story at all. The vines that grew on these trellises were much, much more interesting, and part of the interest that I took in them came from the fact that I was partly responsible for making them grow. Certainly the author, Roger Drake, was responsible for planting them and fertilizing the ground they grew in, but it was I who sent tendrils off at unpredictable spots, who sent the vines wandering in several directions, who made them blossom.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Max Unold, one of Proust’s more discerning readers, fastened on the “boredom” … in Proust’s writings and likened it to “pointless stories.”
“Proust managed to make the pointless story interesting. He says: ‘Imagine, dear reader, yesterday I was dunking a cookie in my tea when it occurred to me that as a child I spent some time in the country.’ For this he uses eighty pages, and it is so fascinating that you think you are no longer the listener but the daydreamer himself.”
Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations (translated by Harry Zohn)
Readers: As Participants in Fiction
I didn’t dislike the adventures, of course, but their attraction faded quickly. They were exciting to read the first time, considerably less exciting the second time, and not particularly exciting at all after that. Exactly the reverse was true of what each book told me about Larry, his home and family, his surroundings, and his friend Rocky King. These were matters that on first reading seemed to be only part of the background for the adventures, and a sketchy background at that, but that became more and more interesting as I read and reread.
The reader was not given much direct information about the personal, the private side of Larry’s life. Now and then, a tantalizing piece of information would pop up in the course of an adventure, but more often there were simply gaps in the narrative that invited one to fill them.Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Perhaps the method of rushing at once “in medias res” is, of all the ways of beginning a story, or a separate branch of a story, the least objectionable. The reader is made to think that the gold lies so near the surface that he will be required to take very little trouble in digging for it. And the writer is enabled,—at any rate for a time, and till his neck has become, as it were, warm to the collar,—to throw off from him the difficulties and dangers, the tedium and prolixity, of description. This rushing “in medias res” has doubtless the charm of ease. “Certainly, when I threw her from the garret window to the stony pavement below, I did not anticipate that she would fall so far without injury to life or limb.” When a story has been begun after this fashion, without any prelude, without description of the garret or of the pavement, or of the lady thrown, or of the speaker, a great amount of trouble seems to have been saved. The mind of the reader fills up the blanks,— if erroneously, still satisfactorily. He knows, at least, that the heroine has encountered a terrible danger, and has escaped from it with almost incredible good fortune; that the demon of the piece is a bold demon, not ashamed to speak of his own iniquity, and that the heroine and the demon are so far united that they have been in a garret together. But there is the drawback on the system,—that it is almost impossible to avoid the necessity of doing, sooner or later, that which would naturally be done at first. It answers, perhaps, for half-a-dozen chapters;—and to carry the reader pleasantly for half-a-dozen chapters is a great matter!—but after that a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope the characters and the incidents. “Is all this going on in the country, or is it in town, —or perhaps in the Colonies? How old was she? Was she tall? Is she fair? Is she heroine-like in her form and gait? And, after all, how high was the garret window?” I have always found that the details would insist on being told at last, and that by rushing “in medias res” I was simply presenting the cart before the horse. But as readers like the cart the best, I will do it once again,—trying it only for a branch of my story, —and will endeavour to let as little as possible of the horse be seen afterwards.
I try to bring the essentials to a scene, so the reader, for example, can bring his own sexuality to that scene, which makes it sexier. Your sexuality is mine because it’s yours. All I have to do is give you the lead, you bring your own perception, and you are in it.
Toni Morrison, in an interview with Charles Ruas, in Conversations with American Writers
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