This is an unpublished review I wrote of two books, The Pace of Fiction by Brian Gingrich (OUP, 2021) and Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks: The Twenty-Five Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature (Simon & Schuster, 2021).
It may have been the opening rat-image, and my refusal to change it, that put the editor off. Or perhaps it was the fact I couldn’t hide my impatience with Wonderworks. (It really is shameful trash.) Or maybe the whole thing wasn’t coherent and referenced enough. Whatever the reason, the review was spiked — and I got a kill fee.
Brian Gingrich’s book, although patronising to working writers, is better than I’ve made it sound. If you’re interested in analysing your own writing in a literary critical way, and want to sharpen up your sense of scene and summary (rather than sticking with show and tell), then I would recommend it.
For what’s going to come tomorrow, which is some thinking about chapter endings, (particularly cliffhangers) in relation to genre, I need to put this in your hands first —
Picture a man being attacked by a dozen invisible rats. How pitiful he would look. He would be a whirl of kicking, grasping, chucking and strangling. This is how Brian Gingrich appears to me, for the first quarter of The Pace of Fiction. But, of course, what’s attacking him may not be rats. Because I can’t see them, and because I can’t see inside his head, I can’t be sure they aren’t gadflies, fiends, seagulls or sprites. Whatever they are, though, they collectively torment him in a most awful fashion – and he cannot be calm until he has finally got rid of them.
The reason Gingrich’s attackers are invisible to me, but swarm his vision, is that I am just a writer of fiction whereas he is a contemporary literary critic of the narratological variety. So where I see no danger at all in speaking of novels in terms of “scenes” and “summaries”, in saying the words “show” and “tell”, Gingrich feels that unless he disenchants these humble terms of craft, they will act as a summoning. They will bring upon him ghost-rats of caveat, of gnawing doubt, of jugular-ripping – and they will tear him to bits. He’ll be critical dead meat.
And so, rather than keep batting them away, Gingrich does the best he can to divert his attackers: he drags in the juicy carcase of Henry James.
To be clear Henry James, totem of scene-and-summary critics, had an idea of scene vague enough to resemble that cited by earlier nineteenth-century writers: he may have associated “scene” with a “drama” opposed to some kind of “picture,” he may have ventured to claim that “To report at all closely and completely of what ‘passes’ on a given occasion is inevitably to be more or less scenic” – but even that claim he followed by a ruminant “... and yet ...” ... It was left to twentieth-century critics to manufacture a schema out of James’s frail drama/picture binary ...
Do it to the Master! Not me!
And, if this wasn’t enough, Gingrich also offers up the plump corpses of the contemporary creative writing gurus Sandra Schofield, Peter Selgin and Josip Novakovich.
In contemporary discourses of craft, scene has moved to the center, pushing summary to the margins, and its looseness results less from its in- than its over-determinateness – its inflation, according to now cinematic- or television-dramatic imperative, into a “showing” that is “action,” “event,” “demonstration,” “characterization,” dramatization of narrative voice, even narrative itself, so that it serves all functions, contains everything, and risks meaning nothing.
By page 93, Gingrich feels safe enough to say,
My approach to the pace of fiction is guided by scenes and summaries, and those modes or units – in their development, metamorphosis, evolution ... – have determined my course. I have been ‘searching’ for the scene-and-summary novel.
He is even relaxed enough to allow that, having covered Tom Jones and Pamela, Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, he has found the purest example of what he calls “realist pace” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
Chapter endings drift upward in a spirit of diffusion; they defuse a momentary drama (offer a salve) and gesture toward an enduring one (an irony, a thorn). Ellipses work between chapters, ensuring narrative progress without stirring the reader with the summary sweeps of Dickens or Balzac. Even the pauses maintain pace in Eliot’s novel… Eliot is always working to distribute equal attention to the different parts of the novel’s web.
(I can’t speak for the ghost-rats, but I am fairly sure that such undefined critical terms as “upward” and “web” would drive them into even more of a frenzy of nipping than “scene”.)
Like George Eliot, and like his most obvious master Fredric Jameson, Brian Gingrich is all about statement after insightful statement. Frequently quotable, rarely epigrammatic, he wants to say what is sayable just as well as it can be said.
The single-word review of The Pace of Fiction, which I wish I’d been able to write – given the book’s disrespect of my fellow writers, past and present, whose deliberately unschematic and practically magical subtleties of pacing go far beyond what Gingrich can admit – is “Pedestrian”. But while Gingrich doesn’t soar, he is always sure and swift of foot. The book races in summary through the history of the novel, from Cervantes to Morrison, pausing to examine representative scenes.
What is a scene? Here is where Gingrich is most useful for writers, in helping us crystallize our vagueness. A scene isn’t just one thing, it’s two. If you look to the etymology of “scene”, which Gingrich brilliantly does, you’ll see that it is both “background spectacle” and “foreground action”.
A booth or a tent stands somewhere in ancient Greece ... and one of its walls proves useful as a background against which a dramatic performance can be acted out. Some centuries later, the classical Latin word scaena has come to mean not just stage or background but also the performance that takes place on or before it; and some centuries after that, it has come to denote a structural subdivision of a play, a scenic unit, as well.
Like Gingrich’s literary pacemakers, I won’t dawdle when I can dismiss. Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks is one of the most gratifyingly stupid books I’ve read. But you can only start to appreciate its deep and ludicrous pleasures once you’ve realized that it’s the literary critical equivalent of a Monty Python or Horrible Histories sketch.
To the Python/Horrible/Fletcher world view, all history and myth – from Imperial Rome to Arthurian Albion to the Russian Revolution – is equally accessible and inhabitable, because they were just like us, weren’t they? (The past isn’t a foreign country; they do the exact same silly things there; they just wear differently silly clothes.) For Python, they were all basically public schoolboys, so we can rip the piss out of their pedantry, oneupmanship and poor dress sense. For Horrible Histories, they were all naughty kids, so we can troll their traumas and tantrums, literally. For Fletcher, they had the same neurological equipment, the same wetware, so we can assume an unproblematic cultural commonality. The fact that our and our ancestors’ shared values (or value addeds) are – what a surprise – the scientistic psychological upselling of late Imperial America is nothing to bother us. And don’t worry your pretty little heads about the specifics of the science, either.
Since neuroscience is a specialized field rife with arcane terminologies and byzantine complexities, the following chapters will not belabor the technical. They will fold in the highlights of what we know, doing so as colloquially as possible, with a view to assisting you in using the invention [of literature] more effectively.
He won’t let the scary complexity hurt us. And so (not forgetting Python) we get:
When Agamemnon premiered more than twenty-five centuries ago, it ... gave its audience a chance to experience ancient literary versions of two modern psychiatric treatments for posttraumatic fear. Like autobiographical review, Agamemnon prompted spectators to review their posttraumatic memories in a physically safe and emotionally supportive environment. And like EMDR, the play’s chorus delivered that prompt in a dynamic performance that shifted the eyes left and right. And although we cannot travel back in time to gauge the therapeutic effectiveness of those long ago treatments, we have been able to observe their healing action on twenty-first-century trauma survivors.
Here Fletcher is disingenuous – his shtick is entirely based on backwards time travel. Like Gingrich, he offers a chronological coach tour of literary landmarks, but Fletcher goes further back (Enheduanna, 2300 BCE) and comes further forwards (Elena Ferrante and Tina Fey). The main difference is, Gingrich – once he’s freed himself of rats – doesn’t just drive and narrate, he invites us to get off the bus, go for a wander, check out the scene, hear from the locals. He’s still a tourist guide, but at least he himself paces the dusty ground. He knows he’s brought us to a very different place with very different people. Fletcher, because he’s a far more arrogant and less inquisitive driver/tour guide, stays in his air-conditioned microclimate, points out points of interest to make his points, and repeats self-help slogans to his equally seatbound audience: “Become Your Better Self”, “Feed Your Creativity” and “Live Your Dream”.
Everything we see on our travels through the breakthrough product innovations of the past can have “psychological benefit, enriching our lives with a vast catalogue of time-tested literary inventions”. We visit Middlemarch, Elsinore, Wonderland and the Inferno – and what we we come away with, each and every time, is an inspirational fridge magnet.
But isn’t collecting those why we travel in the first place?
Using a more compelling scientific take on how stories stir our neurotransmitters into action to hallucinate images from the written word, Will Storr's book 'The Science of Storytelling' provided me with a useful framework to pull my creative writing into better shapes.