Classic vs. Modern Fiction, part 2

A conversation with Joseph Harris

This is my first response in a conversation conceived of and initiated by Joseph Harris on the subject of classic vs. modern fiction, in which I have been asked to speak on behalf of the classic form. If you haven’t already, begin by reading his essay, then come back here for my response.

Now you have read Harris’s essay, you might ask what the fuss is. Harris describes us both as traditionalists. What are we to argue about then? I think it is simply this, Harris seeks to treat traditional matter in modern form.

My end goal, if I’m being honest, is not to become a good modern writer but to synthesize two competing systems. Said plainly: I want to steal what’s best about both worlds and bring them together.

In short, Harris seeks to put old wine in new wineskins. Is that possible? Is it desirable? He has asked me to speak for the nay side, so here goes.

Because a modern audience may not all recognize the reference, I chose the metaphor of old wine in new wineskins from the gospel of Luke:

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.

New wine will burst old wineskins because new wine gives off fermentation gas and new wineskins are flexible enough to stretch, whereas old wineskins are stretched out and brittle and will burst if you put new wine in them. Is there a similar danger in Harris’s project of putting old wine in new wineskins? (We both agree that the old wine is better!) I think the danger is not that the old wine will burst the new wineskins, but that the new wineskins will spoil the old wine.

Let’s examine Harris’s description of this new wineskin point by point. I will then offer my own description.

Harris begins by describing three characteristics of modern fiction,

• Accessibility

• Cold plot logic

• Spiritual and philosophical detachment

All art becomes less accessible with time. As I described in my essay, The Half Life of Allusions, stories are built on other stories, stories all the way down, and as the allusions that a writer makes become less well know to readers over time, their works become less accessible. They require more study to reveal all their virtues. And since few works are worth the bother, most old work fades from view, leaving only the classics behind, the books that are worth the effort. But this is not a fault of the classic form. A work written in the classic form today, but with contemporary allusions, would not suffer from this type of accessibility problem.

It might suffer, however, from the fact that many modern readers are accustomed to modern forms and for that reason alone the older forms are less accessible to them. For instance, many readers are so accustomed to either first person or deep third person storytelling that they don’t know what to do with a story in what is now (falsely) called the “omniscient point of view.”

But again, this is not the fault of the form itself. It is merely a matter of what people are accustomed to. The reading public has adapted to changes in form and content before and could presumably do so again.

Harris’s idea of cold plot logic is new to me. I find it interesting but I can’t decide if I agree with it or not. But it puts me in mind of a phenomena I think of as the rise of documentary fiction. This is particularly evident in historical fiction where audiences increasingly want works that are not only historically consistent with the period, but retell historical events with scholarly accuracy. Perhaps because TV and movies play so fast and loose with history, and with reality itself, that people in search of more verity in their drama turn to books and demand to find it there. In other words, cold plot logic may be a response to a more pedantic audience.

When it comes to spiritual and philosophical detachment, I am, of course, entirely in agreement with Harris. Modern writers and modern readers, for the most part do not want spiritual and philosophical engagement in the works they read. One might argue, though, that this is more a matter of the wine than the wineskin. Omitting spiritual and philosophical content is less a matter of style than one of content.

That is the question, of course: are style and content so intertwined that one necessarily follows the other? If we want old wine, must we necessarily use old wine skins? This actually mirrors a conversation that I have been having offline with Dappled Things editor Katy Carl about contemplative realism. I won’t describe contemplative realism here except to say, inadequately, that it is an attempt to define a spiritualized version of literary realism. My argument, in that debate, was that the fairy tale is a better form for that subject matter, and that contemplative realism is, to keep with my present metaphor, an attempt to put new wine in an old wineskin, with all the perils that attend that enterprise.

How would I have defined modern writing, had the task fallen to me? Perhaps like this: Modern writing is cinematic. Take for example, Anthony Doer’s All the Light We Cannot See, which Harris cites as an example of a moderately paced and complex modern work. If you have not read it, head over to Amazon and check out the sample scenes at the beginning. I say scenes, not chapters, because that is what Doer is creating in his opening pages: a set of cinematic establishing shots:

The first shot: leaflets swirling down over a village

The second shot: Bombers over water, closing in on a distant town

The third shot: A blind girl in a room in that town, hearing the bombers approach

The fourth shot: A young German corporal in the same town also waiting for the bombers

This is how a movie director tells a story. It is good movie storytelling. But it is not how a novelist tells a story. And this is not some idle matter of changing style. It is a fundamental change in storytelling with profound consequences.

A movie is addressed to the senses. It enters through the eyes and the ears. It is immersive, and its impact depends, in no small degree, on the capacity of the equipment used to project it. It is a direct physical experience.

A written story works completely differently. It is not addressed to the senses. It is addressed to memory. Whatever sensory impression the reader receives, it is pulled up by the words from their own memory. And here’s why that difference matters: words can pull up not only sights and sounds, but all the other sensory experiences: taste, smell, touch, and that strange tingling sensation that one is being watched. But more still than this: it can recall emotions, ideas, and stories. There is so much more in the human memory than just sight and sound. Memory is a repository not only of experience, but of meaning.

Memory is also the locus of contemplation. As I noted in my recent article in Dappled Things, a novel, because it is addressed to memory and not the senses, allows us to be both fully present in the realm of the senses and fully contemplative at the same time, and therefore to contemplate the rawness and immediacy of action in a way that neither physical experience nor cinematic experience allows. Only those media that address themselves to memory can achieve this effect.

The richness and the efficacy with which a novel can call all of this up from memory, however, depends on the active participation of the reader, on their receptivity to literature of this kind. That receptivity, or at least the full expression of it, is learned by practicing this kind of reading, ideally from childhood. The modern reader’s receptivity, alas, is formed more to receive sound and light through the senses than meaning through memory. What does an author like Doer do, therefore? He uses words to pull movie scenes from the reader’s mind which they can then receive as a movie.

Contrast Doer’s establishing shots with the more traditional, more novel-like approach as exemplified by the opening of Anne of Green Gables.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

There is plenty in this passage to draw visual images from memory. The road dipping down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook. Dark secrets of pool and cascade. Mrs. Rachel sitting by her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passes.

But notice that there is no “shot” here, no framed picture. There is no one spot where you could set up a camera and capture all that is described in this paragraph, which includes the whole course of the brook through the woods, the road, the woods, the ladies’ eardrops (which would be invisible to the eye in a wide shot) Mrs. Rachel, sitting at her window. (Mrs. Rachel is possessed of a door and a window, but no house in sight! If we see a house, it comes from memory.)

Notice the appeal to memory in this, and to the way in which, because we have memories, we encounter familiar places. If we were familiar with this place, the sight of the brook would bring to mind not just the portion we could see, but the whole of its course and character — a thread of meaning that is present to our experience the moment we see it, though it could never be fitted into a single photographic frame. Notice how the stream is anthropomorphized: intricate and headlong and keeping secrets while within the privacy of the woods, but becoming tame and well behaved under the watchful eye of Mrs. Rachel — all of which, of course, prefigures the character and adventures of the titular heroine who is soon to make her appearance.

The novel can do so much more with so much less by addressing itself to memory rather than to the senses, including evoking the full meaning of the encounter of the senses themselves.

Harris list four characteristics which he considers the strengths of modern storytelling:

• Pacing

• Consistency

• Visual storytelling

• New genres

The first thing we should note about this is that pacing means something quite different between classical storytelling addressed to memory and modern storytelling addressed to the senses. Does the opening paragraph of Anne of Green Gables have pace? On the face of it, it has no action at all. It never moves. Mrs. Rachel is sitting at her window watching the stream from the beginning to the end. And yet look at how much is accomplished in that simple static observation. Notice how we feel ourselves not only located in that spot, but engaged in it, as if we had long lived there and explored it and knew its inhabitants and natural features by sight and reputation. No film or cinematic novel could accomplish nearly so much in the same amount of time.

Pacing in a movie or cinematic novel is a much more simple and implacable thing. It is all about time, about physical beats. How often does the picture change? How swift is the action. How fast do we get our actors on and off the stage. Our only tools of engagement are sight and sound, so the sights and sounds better change quickly or the pace will drag. Cinematic storytelling tends to be frenetic, and that means there is seldom time for anything but sound and fury. No wonder it seems to have culminated in the dominance of superhero movies, derided by Martin Scorsese recently as “not cinema.” Because, of course, you can tell a more leisurely and more nuanced story on film, but such films have become increasingly rare. The golden age of the cinema came very shortly after it was invented. The limitations of being able to address the audience only through sight and sound seem to have driven it to an ever more frenetic pace — ever faster, ever more furious.

Pacing, true artistic and literary pacing, is not the ability to go fast, it is the ability to adjust your pace to the moment and to the occasion. It has to do with sustained tension, not sustained speed. Traditional storytelling gives a talented author full control over pace and tension. Cinematic storytelling is like a spur in the author’s flank, driving them to an ever more frantic gallop.

The limitations of cinematic storytelling also manifest themselves in Harris’s next point about consistency. I think it is a bit unfair here to pick on Dickens, who was writing serial fiction to pay the bills and had to make this week’s chapters fit with last week’s chapters that had already been printed. Indeed, there is a much more egregious example of the inconsistencies that resulted from this circumstance than the one Harris cites. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens begins the tale as a first person account by an “Elderly Gentleman” who becomes acquainted with little Nell and her Grandfather. But clearly by the end of the third installment, Dickens had tired of this device, or found it cumbersome, so he concluded the chapter thus:

And now that I have carried this history so far in my own character and introduced these personages to the reader, I shall for the convenience of the narrative detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves.

He then continued the story in third person. This inconsistency is not a characteristic of classical literature, but of working to a deadline for serial publication. No such inconsistencies will be found in classical works where the author had time to write and revise as a whole.

What will be found in many of them is a greater variety of narrative styles. Why? Because when a work is addressed to memory rather than to the senses, there are many more ways to create a narrative and one may choose the narrative mode that best suits the moment. If modern work is more consistent, it is because cinematic storytelling, constrained by the necessary cinematic dictum to show not tell, can hardly vary its narrative mode at all since it lacks any alternative mode of storytelling. To call this a virtue is to make a virtue of necessity.

Harris says of this: “If I had to summarize the difference, I would say that older fiction chooses thematic consistency while modern fiction chooses dramatic consistency.” And I’d say that that is a reasonable summary. But it is reflective of the limitation of cinematic storytelling. The development of a mature theme requires access to memory and to meaning, which is readily available to the classic novelist, but requires heavy lifting, at least, in cinematic storytelling, and is often achieved only at the sacrifice of pace.

But there is something else going on in the consistency of modern storytelling. We have studied and analyzed the mechanics of storytelling. We understand the neurobiology of storytelling like never before. But what this means is that we have discovered its most basic and predictable formulas. Just as the food industry now understands just how to make addictive food out of the perfect balance of fat, salt, sugar, and simple carbohydrates, the publishing industry now knows how to make addictive stories out of simple archetypes and action beats. It knows how to manufacture the literary equivalent of a Happy Meal. It knows how to manufacture romance novels that people consume like potato chips. It knows how to manufacture YA fantasies that people drink down like Coca Cola. It knows how to manufacture MFA-style literary fiction to flatter the egos of the literati. Each of these things sound just the same as every other of their species, and that’s the point. What Harris calls inconsistency in classic literary forms, I call variety, and I rejoice in it. Consistency, as Emerson observed, is the hobgoblin of little minds. Give me the riot of those who wrote by genius, not by formula. Give me the mad chef, not the spotty teenage fry cook who gets a beep when it’s time to pull the fries out of the fryer. Once you optimize a process to the point where a monkey can do it, it ceases to be worth doing.

Harris’s next virtue of modern storytelling is visual storytelling. And this, of course, is exactly what cinematic storytelling is. As Harris observes, its mantra is, “show, don’t tell.” Show, don’t tell, as far as I can determine, originated in the early days of cinema when the studios were recruiting the novelists of the day to write screenplays. “Show, don’t tell,” was a mantra used to train people accustomed to writing novels to write movies instead. It has become advice on how to write novels. And if this advice makes any sense at all for novelists, it is only because they have been converted to cinematic storytelling.

To a classical novelist writing a classical novel, “show don’t tell” makes no sense at all. The classical novelist is addressing his work to memory, not to the eye or to the ear. His art does not lie on a line between showing and telling. His task is neither to show nor to tell but to evoke, as Lucy Maud Montgomery evoked so much and on so many levels in the seemingly simple opening paragraph of Anne of Green Gables. This is why so many contemporary aspiring novelists go back to the classics looking for examples of “show don’t tell” and are utterly bewildered by their inability to apply this simple dichotomy rationally and consistently to the works they read. “Show, don’t tell” is the mantra a cinematic storytelling, not of the classic form of the novel.

Harris finally lists “new genres” as a strength of modern storytelling. I would suggest that it is more fundamental than that. I think that modern storytelling gave birth to genre itself, at least as we currently understand it. I’m not sure when “genre” became an academic subject of interest, but genre today is primarily a commercial category system designed to guide the production and distribution of similar content to readers of narrowly defined tastes.

I will mention yet again one of my favorite possessions, the anthology, The Best of Both Worlds, by Georgess McHargue, published by Doubleday in 1969. It includes stories from every genre, but the word genre is not mentioned once. The book is divided into sections, the titles of which are:

1. Adventures and Mishaps

2. Families and Other People

3. Three Wishes and More

4. Long Ago and Far Away

5. Heroes Sung and Unsung

6. Possibly Impossible

7. Anteaters, Otters, and Others

8. Quests and Discoveries

You would find the modern genres scattered all over those categories. As Harris says, thematic consistency was the greater concern. The point of The Best of Both Worlds was to encourage people to read widely. The point of genre is to encourage people to read narrowly. McDonald’s knows it is easier to keep you coming back if your children are addicted to Happy Meals. Disney knows it is easier to keep you coming back if your children are addicted to Disney Princesses.

There was, of course, genre literature before 1969. The science fiction, fantasy, crime, and cowboy pulps had a long history. But somewhere between then and now, genre took over the mainstream. It may well have been through The Lord of the Rings, which Harris mentions as a foundational favorite, that the mainstream publishers discovered the marketing power of genre. Tolkien, perhaps, made genre respectable, or at least less disreputable.

I loved The Lord of the Rings when I first read it in university. My enthusiasm for it has perhaps cooled somewhat over the years, as I have become more conscious of its flaws, but I am still a huge admirer of the work. But I am fascinated by how many people, like Harris, regard it as something fundamentally new.

I will fully admit my bias here. Fantasy is my first love, and that genre didn’t really exist before J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He created something new by combining myth, folklore, and fairy tale. The reason this matters to me is that I’ve tried reading the precursors to fantasy and they don’t come close to scratching the itch. Fantasy is a specific combination I happen to enjoy. It’s also probably the most metaphorical genre existing today, giving the author freedom to explore concepts and ideas in a deeply thematic way. Despite being new, fantasy’s purposes and intentions are very old.

To which I would say that genres, in their contemporary sense, didn’t exist in their current form before The Lord of the Rings. I shall have to ask Harris which of the precursors he had read and found disappointing. He lists myth, folklore, and fairy tale as precursors. But I don’t think fairy tale really fits. That is something different. And what is missing is the long history of romance literature, in the old meaning of the word, particularly the Arthurian cycle and the Grail Quest. The Lord of the Rings is essentially a Grail quest. The fellowship of the ring are the knights of the round table. They are separated in their quest and each faces some form of soul-testing temptation. The themes are essentially moral and spiritual. Gandalf is Merlin. Aragorn is Arthur, the king who will return and restore the world. The biggest difference is that rather than salvation coming from finding the grail, it comes from destroying the ring — the anti-grail. That difference, between the quest to gain something good and a quest to be rid of something evil, is significant of course, and well worth discussing, but that is a subject for another day.

It is also worth noting here that The Lord of the Rings is not, itself, modern writing. It is classical in form. In this it is one of the oddest cultural catalysts. It spawned a vast number of imitations that are, in fact, nothing like the thing they are imitating. Or rather, their only real similarity is that they took the wedding of Norse mythological elements with the grail quest plot outline and made something quite different — and modern — with it. The only similar work that comes to mind — spawn of a million dissimilar imitations — is Pride and Prejudice.

So, do I think it is possible to put old wine in new wineskins? No, honestly. The new wineskins are too small, too uniform. Harris says this of the Marvel films and the works of Pixar and George Lucas and Christopher Nolan:

They utilize explosive action, tight pacing, and exuberant worldbuilding to weave something compelling on many levels.

And I think that’s the key innovation of modern writing. There’s an emphasis on the craft rather than just the idea. Many old books that I’ve read have a great premise, or lovable characters, or a satisfying ending, but show a lack of skill in the actual telling of the story.

I don’t think writers back then were lazy or stupid. But audiences may have been less demanding, the market less saturated, and competition less fierce.

I don’t know what books Harris has been reading. And I suppose that as we continue this conversation, I need to ask. But if anything it is the modern audience that has grown lazy and stupid. Or rather, has had its tastes and its powers of appreciation blunted by a constant diet of Pepsi and Happy Meals.

I suppose I could talk here about the long history of the development of literary craft and the shorter, but still quite long, history of literary craft analysis and discussion going back long before the advent of the literature we are here calling modern (not to be confused with literary modernism which is, for our present purpose, one of the several classical forms). We may get there, as this conversation continues, but I don’t think this is the time for it.

And it is important to acknowledge that almost all the examples of the classic form that we might encounter or discuss are now half a century old or more and that the passage of time has therefore diminished their accessibility by obscuring their allusions, and that we have now a generation raised on the new stuff and therefore not so well equipped as we who grew up with the old, to appreciate the fullness of its range. Harris and I are, after all, of different generations, he a millennial, I a baby boomer. It is something of a miracle that we can even speak to each other civilly considering the mutual contempt in which our generations generally seem to hold each other. To expect that we should have the same reactions to classical and modern literary forms is perhaps too much to ask.

And that is a significant problem. Because if we consider, as Harris and I both do, that the old wine is still worth drinking, and therefore still worth making, but if the full richness of its flavor is lost in new wineskins, what are we to do? Writing in the classic forms with modern allusions is certainly part of the answer, though the fragmentation of the culture makes it more difficult to work in a form that relied heavily on the power of allusion. But a generation who has learned to receive stories on a steady diet of cinematic novels, and on cinematic films and TV shows, is likely to struggle with the classic forms, with the novel that addresses itself to memory rather than to the senses. But what to do about that is a subject for another day.