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an
essay by J. Mark Bertrand
The
best novels are not didactic, they are peripatetic.
The
word didactic, of course, means “intended to instruct,” but
it carries connotations of pedantry and moralizing. To be
didactic is to wear one’s spectacles on the tip of one’s nose.
Peripatetic is an altogether more active term. Quite literally,
it means “to walk.” Although the peripatetic school of philosophy
was founded by Aristotle, who is said to have wandered back
and forth while giving his lectures, I have always associated
the term with Socrates, a thinker from the streets. I can
imagine him walking and thinking, thinking and walking, working
out a line of argument as he rambles, bringing a pattern out
of confusion.
In
On
Moral Fiction,
John Gardner argues that just as scientists have their ‘scientific
method,’ fiction has its method, too. “Fiction goes after
understanding,” he writes, “by capturing, though imitation,
‘the ineluctable modality of the world’—that is, characters
who subtly embody values and who test them, with clear but
inexpressible results, in action.”
In
other words, just as the scientist validates theories through
experiment, the novelist tests ideas through character and
action. He works them out through the process of story, thinking
on his feet.
That
is peripatetic fiction.
“What
would happen if….”
It’s
the question that drives all fiction.
That
‘if’ can contain a person, a situation, or even an entire
world. The ‘if’ is the given, but it isn’t the story. The
story is the ‘what would happen,’ the working out of the ‘if’
through character and plot.
As
a novelist, I can know the ‘if’ before I begin to write, but
I never fully know the ‘what would happen’ until it has
happened, until I’ve worked it all out on the page. The ‘if’
is to me what a hypothesis is to a scientist—good as far as
it goes, but useful only as a starting point. To turn the
‘if’ into a novel, I have to apply my method.
“I
didn’t know what I really thought
until I tried to write it down.”
How
many times have you heard this before? Perhaps the simplest
way for the average person to discover what she really thinks
about a subject is to have to write it down. How many times
has the blank page or blinking cursor clarified a muddled
mind? How many of us begin with the intention of setting the
world straight, only to find once the words are down that
we have nothing really clever or useful to add to the conversation?
The
same thing happens with writing. Sometimes an ‘if’ never develops
into a ‘what would happen’—at least, not in my hands. I’ve
had plenty of ideas that would be perfect for someone else
to write, but only a few that have worked perfectly for me.
Not because I couldn’t think of anything to write, but because
I couldn’t think of anything different
to write.
If
the writing comes too easily, if a chapter seems to be “writing
itself,” that’s often a sign that the author is channeling
stale ideas, plugging in scenes and characters she’s seen
a thousand times before. That’s not so difficult. Most people
can jumble the familiar pieces and reassemble them in a reasonable
way. Some make a living at it. Good for them.
The
test of a peripatetic novelist, though, is that she works
things out for herself. She doesn’t borrow from the public
domain if she can help it.
“Begin
with the end in mind.”
You
can write without taking such chances, of course. To borrow
a phrase from Stephen Covey, you can “begin with the end in
mind,” skipping over the process
of testing. Maybe the result will be didactic, and maybe it
won’t. But it will never be peripatetic, because the peripatetic
novel must
be worked out.
It must be packed and unpacked, layered and fractured and
puttied over. It is a disarmingly complex thing, because it
involves the whole engagement of a human mind—the author’s.
Which is why peripatetic novels often require the whole engagement
of the reader’s mind to appreciate—something many novels simply
do not require.
“Nihil
est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.”
This
is the axiom of the peripatetic school of philosophy. “Nothing
is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” A warrant
for empiricism, certainly, but also not a bad piece of advice
for novelists. Ours is not an abstract labor. We deal in particulars,
in the realm of the senses. We create scenes by observing
details and mannerisms, eschewing arguments in favor of images
and impressions.
At
some point, every novelist sets aside her notes and says,
“Let’s run with this and just see what happens.” I doubt there
are very many writers, for example, who ruthlessly outline
individual scenes in advance. Most of us are content to bring
characters together in a particular place with only the vaguest
notion of what needs to result, and we’re prepared to make
do if an entirely different, unexpected outcome follows.
Peripatetic
writing applies that same willingness to the entire project.
The novelist says, “These are my ideas. These are the characters
who subtly embody them, the people I will test through action.
Now, let’s see what happens.” The incidents of plot, the moral
choices of heroes and villains, all of it becomes a working
out of ideas, a process of discovery in which the author finds
out what she really thinks. Whenever the results seem stale,
when the paths are too predictable, too familiar, the peripatetic
novelist backs up and tries again, dealing as much as possible
with raw materials and avoiding pre-manufactured characters
and plots.
In
essence, the novelist’s method is incarnational. When Gardner
talks about the relationship between character and idea, he
doesn’t say that characters “stand for” or “represent” certain
ideas. Instead, he uses the word “embody.” To embody an idea
is to pull it down from the ether of abstraction and give
it physical presence, to locate it in the tangible world,
to situate it in the aforementioned realm of the senses. The
process ought to hold great mystery for Christian novelists,
who profess faith in the word made flesh. As a metaphor, incarnation
has been applied to the arts by Christian aestheticians for
some time now, but it seems particularly apropos in fiction.
Embodiment is essential to our creed. We shuffle off this
mortal coil in hope of a happy return. Deep down we have this
conviction that things aren’t meant to be abstract, so an
art form that depends on making them solid serves us well.
“...clear
but inexpressible…”
So
the peripatetic novel is a laboratory where ideas are tested
and conclusions of one sort or another are drawn. Gardner
says these results are clear, but they are also inexpressible.
This is why book discussions, as rewarding as they are, tend
to be inconclusive affairs. Readers can’t help feeling that
when they reduce their experience of the novel to an ‘opinion,’
they have failed to do justice to what really happened on
the page. The book’s truth can’t be easily distilled into
a slogan—if that were possible, the author wouldn’t have needed
to write a novel to express himself.
Of
course, we have read more than our fair share of books that
can be reduced to slogans. (There is even a school of thought
in publishing that holds that any book that can’t be so reduced—then
transferred to an index card, a business card, or the head
of pin, depending on the theorist—is not, commercially speaking,
even worth writing.) But these were not peripatetic novels.
They were not records of an author’s search for truth. They
were merely vehicles for a truth he already possessed.
The
painter Edward Knippers has something interesting to say about
the relationship of art to the art object—in this case, the
relationship of the idea to the story. “With propaganda,”
he writes, “I can look at the art object, get the idea, and
then have the idea with no further reference to the art object.
There is no longer any symbiotic relationship between the
idea and the object. I think fine art has a symbiotic relationship
with the object. You cannot have the meaning totally separate
from the object at hand.”
This
comes from Knippers’ essay “Subject and Theme” collected in
It
Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God.
The symbiotic relationship between art and object, between
the message and its means of expression, is what makes the
truth of a peripatetic novel both clear and inexpressible.
When the truth is distilled, like flesh pulled away from bone,
it ceases to be what it was. In a sense, peripatetic novels
lend themselves to interpretation by resisting the most definitive
pronouncements.
I’ve
been re-reading a fine example of the peripatetic novel recently,
Walker Percy’s The
Moviegoer.
A few years ago, some friends got together and decided to
read every book on the Modern Library Top 100 list, starting
with #100 and working our way up. The
Moviegoer
is #60, a nice round number that gives those of us who’ve
read all or most of the intervening books a real sense of
accomplishment. Seven of us gathered for the Percy discussion,
and everyone loved the book. We had a hard time, though, accounting
for how it kept our interest. There’s a lot of alienation
and apathy, but not a lot of action. What was it that kept
the book moving forward?
My
theory was simple enough. The
Moviegoer
is that rare thing, a novel of ideas that, like a math problem,
shows its work. Binx Bolling, the smug, detached but somehow
endearing protagonist, has undertaken a philosophical search,
and Percy seems to have immersed himself in the search as
well. As a result—and I can’t even begin to explain how this
happens—the reader joins the search, too, at least in sympathy.
Binx walks and talks his way through a problem, and it’s Percy
walking and talking through him. Because of that deep commitment
of artist to art, the reader finds himself walking and talking,
as well, without ever having made the decision to do so. It
is a remarkable feat of peripatetic writing, a better illumination
of this line of thought than anything I could offer (which
is why I mention it now, at the end of my piece, and not at
the beginning, which would have made my musings irrelevant).
Of
course, what the method produces when applied by me or your
will look completely different than Percy’s clear, inexpressible
result. That’s the method’s beauty. Peripatetic novels have
a process in common, not an outcome. They don’t look alike.
(Who would want them to?) The only thing they share, really,
is a high order of creative engagement between the novelist
and his work, and a willingness to discover unanticipated
conclusions.
And
all it takes to write one, at the end of the day, is a willingness
to walk.
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