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Rating: Borrowing a successful analogy by Vitaliano Trevisan, according to which writers are like farmers, we can say that agriculture is like literature. And vice versa. A subject where much theorizing takes place, with many experts or those who adopt such attitudes, yet where practice remains something powerfully distant, irregular, and subjective.
Each place has its own cultures, its own methods, and not everything blooms in the same areas. You work in one way, your neighbor in another, and so on.
Then come the experts: but how, you don't do it like that, look, they've recently discovered. Well, we understand each other.
Orienting oneself is difficult, and it's always better not to be too swayed by new trends.
In a landscape as I've described it, books like "How Fiction Works" (James Wood, Mondadori 2010) are a real satisfaction.
Wood's book is not for miracle seekers hoping to become Joyce or King with volumes like "How to Write" or "Writer's ABC".
It's not even an overly theoretical book on criticism and narratology.
It's a work that aims to "pose theoretical questions but offer practical answers or, in other words, ask questions as a critic but provide answers as a writer."
With a style that is brilliant and colloquial, Wood connects to the English critical tradition (Edward Morgan Forster, Henry James) which is quite different from the currents of Russian Formalism and French Structuralism, making it more appreciable.
Personally, I found it more immediate than books like "The Story Workshop" by Angelo Marchese, although the latter is much more exhaustive. The difference lies in the author's intentions: Marchese aims to synthesize the history of theories on narrativity, and provide adequate and complex investigative tools, while Wood shows us the analysis already beautifully done.
The book progressively describes the evolution of the concept of the "Modern Novel" from what he recognizes as the forerunner: Flaubert, highlighting and acknowledging its characteristics and qualities.
He exemplifies the differences between past and more recent works (using numerous citations: Austen, Wallace, Joyce; up to Svevo and Pavese) describing, for example, the birth of consciousness in literary works. Have you ever noticed? The characters in parables, Jewish stories, the Bible, never think. We observe with God's eyes, but we don't know their thoughts, we only see the individual actions. Even time flows differently: in regular leaps; without slowdowns or rapid progressions.
In modern novels, but already in Shakespeare's works, as Wood points out, all this changes. There is an evolution. Think of the characters’ loud reflections (Soliloquy), up to streams of consciousness.
One of the characteristics analyzed by Wood, and which has gained value with the Modern Novel, is the meticulous care for detail. The importance of knowing how to select details to include in the narrative. The particular: which reveals craftsmanship wisdom but often spills over into arid aestheticism. But we must distinguish: this does not mean that Flaubert invented the care for detail. Flaubert was the first to institutionalize the concept regarding the importance of detail. But he invented nothing.
Previously, before the 19th century, an imitation of the classics was favored, and the writer was not required to be also a good observer. Despite this, there are numerous, interesting precedents. Take for instance Henry Fielding, who in his "Joseph Andrews" narrates, describing a brawl if I remember correctly, engravings of war scenes on the protagonist's stick. A detail indeed, so eccentric and real at the same time, capable of striking our imagination: what does it mean? Is it large? Is it intricately carved? Was the craftsman very skilled? All this isn't revealed, but it makes the detail so strong that over time we might forget entire chapters (it happened to me like that), but not these particulars, which Wood, using a definition of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus adapted by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, calls "Haecceity."
"Haecceity" are those particulars inserted by the author to give the narrative a concrete element. That makes the abstract tangible*.
As Wood explains to us, haecceity can also be an anecdote, something bizarre and curious at the same time. Take for example the hyperbolic lies boasted by Khlestakov, the protagonist of "The Inspector General", when he says he gets the soup sent all the way from Paris. Comic and absurd together, this line lives longer in our memory compared to maybe the names of co-protagonists or many other things we forget. Here’s another case of haecceity.
On the other hand, however, this search for details and their presence on the page (from Balzac and, as mentioned above, rationalized by Flaubert) sometimes ends up becoming oppressive, overwhelming, tedious, and thus useless. Just think of the highly detailed descriptions, typically nineteenth-century, and deplored by the modernists. Another example: despite Zola praising them, we find the excess of details spiky and rigid in the novels of the Goncourt Brothers, who slavishly and indiscriminately followed Balzac's method.
Besides what I've summarized, the topics covered are: "The Character", "Identification and Complexity", "Language", "Dialogue" and several others.
The book is short and clear; Wood also expresses his judgment regarding the evolution of narrative, which he describes as a renewal of conventions to serve the representation of artifice and truth.
I haven't said much about Wood. He is a critic for the New Yorker, and it’s not necessary to delve deep, because when a book is good, who cares about the author.
If for you this book is not enough, then you can turn to Bourneuf Roland, and if he is not enough either, then you might start thinking about writing one yourself, a book.
*"He achieved them with a few strokes, with a certain speed, adding insignificant details until forming an incredibly real figure: the reader experiences the strange sensation of knowing very little about a character and simultaneously knowing everything about him and his world. I owe the most accurate description of such an experience to Dario Voltolini: you close your eyes, touch the whale's skin with a finger, and see the whole whale. You take a quick look at two Americans barbecuing and see America. It was a trick practically only he managed." Alessandro Baricco
What Carver wrote before becoming Carver. Repubblica - March 17, 2009
Or we could mention William Hogarth, according to whom it can take as many as three hundred pencil strokes or just three to draw a face. Clearly, the matter and the importance of details have always been subjects of investigation and interest, and the ability to know how to arrange them is a sign of a writer's skill.
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