The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton

Author:Edith Wharton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner Books

VI

The evening party with which “War and Peace” begins is one of the most triumphant examples in fiction of the difficult art of “situating” the chief actors in the opening chapter of what is to be an exceptionally crowded novel. No reader is likely to forget, or to confuse the one with the other, the successive arrivals at that dull and trivial St. Petersburg reception; Tolstoy with one mighty sweep gathers up all his principal characters and sets them before us in action. Very different—though so notable an achievement in its way—is the first chapter of “The Karamazoff Brothers” (in the English or German translation—for the current French translation inexplicably omits it). In this chapter Dostoievsky has hung a gallery of portraits against a blank wall. He describes all the members of the Karamazoff family, one after another, with merciless precision and infernal insight. But there they remain hanging—or standing. The reader is told all about them, but is not allowed to surprise them in action. The story about them begins afterward, whereas in “War and Peace” the first paragraph leads into the thick of the tale, and every phrase, every gesture, carries it on with that slow yet sweeping movement of which Tolstoy alone was capable.

Many thickly-peopled novels begin more gradually—like “Vanity Fair,” for example—and introduce their characters in carefully-ordered succession. The process is obviously simpler, and in certain cases as effective. The morning stroll of M. and Mme. Reynal and their little boys, in the first chapter of “Le Rouge et le Noir,” sounds a note sufficiently portentous; and so does Major Pendennis’s solitary breakfast. In a general way there is much to be said for a quiet opening to a long and crowded novel; though the novelist might prefer to be able to fling all his characters on the boards at once, with Tolstoy’s regal prodigality. There is no fixed rule about this, or about any other method; each, in the art of fiction, to justify itself has only to succeed. But to succeed, the method must first of all suit the subject, must find its account, as best it can, with the difficulties peculiar to each situation.

The question where to begin is the next to confront the novelist; and the art of seizing on the right moment is even more important than that of being able to present a large number of characters at the outset.

Here again no general rule can be laid down. One subject may require to be treated from the centre, in the fashion dear to Henry James, with its opening in the heart of the action, and retrospective vistas radiating away from it on all sides, while others—of which “Henry Esmond” is one of the most beautiful examples—would lose all their bloom were they not allowed to ripen almost imperceptibly under the reader’s absorbed contemplation. Balzac, in his preface to “La Chartreuse de Parme”—almost the only public recognition of Stendhal’s genius during the latter’s life-time—reproves the author for beginning the book before its real beginning.

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