FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- WRITING A NOVEL

FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY – WRITING A NOVEL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 14, 2009

REFERENCE: I am struggling to write a novel of my time in South Africa in the late 1960s during the time of apartheid. I wrote one novel as a memoir (In the Shadow of the Courthouse 2003) recalling life of the 1940s during WWII. To me, 1968 was a pivotal year in the story of Western man, and I was a witness to it in a dramatic way. I have attempted to tell that story over the past several years taking many false steps, getting discouraged, many times starting all over again, and now, at last, I am writing it episodically, chaotically, haphazardly and, hopefully, honestly, as my experience and imagination link together creatively. It was in that spirit that this fragment of philosophy was written.

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The remarkable thing about novelists is how unremarkable many are who become quite famous for their work.

Ernest Hemingway barely got through high school but lived in the fantasy world of his summers in Michigan from his upper middle class home in Oak Park, Illinois. F. Scott Fitzgerald could never spell as well as a fourth grader, flunked out of Princeton in his freshman year, and dreamed of upper class status as the essence of being. He had experienced the precipitous decline of his family on the edge of wealth from his boyhood home in St. Paul, Minnesota. William Faulkner was physically lazy to the point of inertia, spending less than a semester at the University of Mississippi. He faked a military career during WWII by going to Canada becoming an RAF cadet for a few months. He then returned to his home in Oxford, Mississippi in an RAF lieutenant’s uniform playing out the charade of a wounded aviator and war hero to his gullible country folks. During this reincarnation, he changed his name from Falkner to Faulkner.

Novelists of such distinction are accomplished liars who live in their imagination to discover and project the unbridled truth that pervades the existence of us all. They do this by telling us stories.

Hemingway told the story of up tight men who had to display their macho superiority to women as a blind to their cowardice. Fitzgerald celebrated the empty lives of the wealthy and want-to-be’s in the flippant flapper age of the 1920s. Faulkner revealed how the no accounts of society were coming to fill the vacuum of the dying gentrified class of the south. His Yoknapatawpha saga with the rise of the Snopes signaled a dying world, not only in this tiny fictional county but also throughout Western society.

Hemingway and Faulkner connected with the world through the word. They won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Hemingway for his sparse prose and simple declarative sentences that got inside moral duplicity, and Faulkner for the body of work that touched the common soul.

It is no accident that many of America’s great novelists and poets of the twentieth century were born and reared in the Middle West. This includes Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Meredith Wilson, Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Lee Masters. They weren’t looking to Europe for legitimacy but were tumbling in the rural darkness to discover their unique identity, marveling at the common frailty of the human character and turning it into art.

They understood that everything is connected to everything else. Everything has to go somewhere. Nature knows best. We cannot change that fact. There is no free lunch. Everyone pays one way or another for the life they lead.

Since everything is interlinked, there are certain laws that apply, and certain patterns that are realized. Everyone in life is swimming around in these patterns. They move about, they think, as individual contractors irrespective of these patterns, but these writers prove this is not the case. They show through their art that we all live in accordance with these rules, manifestations of our programming.

Life boils down to subtleties, which are not easy to identify since we exist mainly on automatic pilot. Novelists look for these subtleties, listen to them, struggle with them in their own temperament, and penetrate them to reveal their ephemeral nature. To do so they have to be wide-awake and keep their eyes and ears alert to the variances between what we do and what we think we do.

Novelists are determinant, that is, in telling the story they are always fixed on the outcome. They see what it all means because they are not lost in the details. They see ahead because they don’t have the luxury of being lost in the moment. They see the path we follow, what we do next, and the turns we take. It is the plot of the novel but not a simple chronology. It has starts and stops, regressions and progressions, and like a life, is unfinished in the end, but with holistic meaning.

Time is an invention of man and not of Nature, and therefore is misleading, misdirecting, and often misinterpreted.

That said there is a connecting thread through the story which links all the episodes together in what is considered the stuff of life. The life that has been captured is not real but taken out of the writer’s experience and imagination and stuffed into a fabrication that purports to be real. In so doing it connects the reader to those dimensions in the reader’s life and imagination. It is entertainment, not edification, as Somerset Maugham has put it. Ironically, it could be argued there are more meaningful psychology and sociology in a good novel than any textbook on the subject.

Novels are created to bring the story to life by making character, personality and conflict more reasonably and easily examined in the context of the story. The novelist rises above the clamber of the current reality of his story by looking at it from a distance.

The challenge is to have a plot and connecting threads that are the stuff of life and hang together not artificially but as they hang together in the chaos of life. That’s the point. Since we are all connected, we can live a pointless life if we choose to like holding a book upside down and attempting to read it. If we do, the novelist shows life is a tragic comedy in which existence triumphs over living.

The novel is moving into new territory. Life has become complex and so has our programming. Consequently, there is not just one point but a thousand points, a whole series of points, patterns, rules and determinants.

The story can be told backwards or forward, episodically or haphazardly to create a climate of tension with the determinant revealed before the story is told, and then told in a nonlinear fashion as life, itself, unfolds. It would be heresy for a mystery novel to remove its cliffhanger aspect, but something like the perspective of God when the end is known before the story being told unravels. It is the end of history.

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