-
9. Plot, Characterization, and Setting
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
9 Plot, Characterization, and Setting In the 3rd volume [of the USA trilogy] don’t let yourself slip and get any perfect characters in—no Stephen Daedeluses—remember it was Bloom and Mrs. Bloom saved Joyce . . . If you get a noble communist remember the bastard probably masturbates and is jallous as a cat. Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols. —Hemingway to John Dos Passos (1932), Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters Remember Charlie in the first war all I did mostly was hear guys talk; especially in hospital and convalescing. Their experiences get to be more vivid than your own. You invent from your own and from all of theirs . . . Then some son of a bitch will come along and prove you were not at that particular fight. Fine. Dr. Tolstoi was at Sevastopol. But not at Borodino. He wasn’t in business in those days. But he could invent from knowledge we were all at some damned Sevastopol. —Hemingway to Charles Poore (1953), Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters Hemingway’s habit of eliding words in his correspondence sometimes leaves his meaning open to multiple interpretations. A case in point is the above excerpt from a letter to Charles Poore, a longtime admirer of Hemingway in the pages of the New York Times Sunday Book Review and who was then editing The Hemingway Reader for Scribner’s. Is Hemingway saying that because Tolstoy, who served at the battle of Sevastopol (1855) during the Crimean War, could invent from his own firsthand experience, therefore readers could now experience that battle through his fiction? The full wording of the last sentence would then be: “But [because] he could invent from [the] knowledge [of personal experience] we [readers] were all at some damned Sevastopol.” Or is he implying that because Tolstoy could invent from knowledge, however acquired, including his own war experiences , he was thus able to depict the battle of Borodino (1812) in the Napoleonic wars, at which he was not present?1 Or, to suggest a third possibility, is he saying that Tolstoy could invent the battle of Borodino by drawing 204 Plot, Characterization, and Setting 205 on his readers’ experience of war, conflict, and tragedy—“But he could invent from knowledge [because] we were all at some damned Sevastopol”? Hemingway believed each of these propositions: that writers invent from their own experiences; that they invent by drawing upon similar experiences they’ve had or have heard about; and that readers fill out the fiction they read from their own experiences, which is something that writers, especially impressionists, depend upon. The reader’s role in making fiction come to life is what this final chapter addresses. Again we explore the critical role of suggestiveness, this time in story characterization. Before we do, however, I must dispense with what might seem an important element of short stories but really isn’t—plot. In 1949 Eudora Welty explained why this book has little to say about plot, situation, or incident (three roughly synonymous terms): Clearly, the fact that stories have plots in common is of no more account than that many people have blue eyes. Plots are, indeed, what the story writer sees with, and so do we as we read. The plot is the Why. Why? is asked and replied to at various depths; the fishes in the sea are bigger the deeper we go. To learn that character is a more awe-inspiring fish and (in a short story, though not, I think, in a novel) one some degrees deeper down than situation, we have only to read Chekhov. What constitutes the reality of his characters is what they reveal to us. And the possibility that they may indeed reveal everything is what makes fictional characters differ so greatly from us in real life; yet isn’t it strange that they don’t really seem to differ? This is one clue to the extraordinary magnitude of character in fiction. Characters in the plot connect us with the vastness of our secret life, which is endlessly explorable. This is their role. (90) I sometimes think, although obviously hyperbolically, that there are about half a dozen narrative plots. Take, for instance, the revenge plot, which is the plot of Hamlet, Moby-Dick and “The Cask of Amontillado”— as well as that of the movie Death Wish and its four dreadful sequels. Then there’s the love triangle plot, which we see in Le Morte Darthur, The Scarlet Letter...