Letter to a Young Novelist

This brings us to another realization, no less important than the previous one. Although the starting point of a novelist's invention is what he has lived, that is not, and cannot be, its endpoint. The invention’s end is located at a considerable distance—sometimes a cosmic distance—from its origin, because as a theme is embodied in language and narrative, the autobiographical material is transformed, enriched (sometimes leached of value), integrated with other remembered or invented materials, and manipulated and structured—if the novel is a real creation—until it achieves the complete autonomy that fiction must assume to live of its own accord. (Those stories that never cast off from their authors and that serve only as biographical documents are, of course, failed fictions.) The task of the novelist is to transform the material supplied by his memory into an objective world constructed of words, the novel. Form is what allows the text to cohere, to take concrete shape; and it is in the manipulation of form, if my conception of the literary project is correct (and I repeat, I have my doubts), that the novelist enjoys complete freedom and therefore responsibility for his results. If what you are reading between the lines is that, in my opinion, fiction writers are not responsible for their themes (since life assigns them) but are responsible for the way they convert them into literature, and that as a result it is possible to say that they are ultimately responsible for their success or failure—for their mediocrity or genius—that is indeed exactly what I mean to say.

Why, of all the infinite occurrences of a writer's life, do some stimulate creativity so vigorously, and so many others filter through the memory without rousing the imagination? I don't know for sure. All I have is a suspicion. And that is that the faces, anecdotes, situations, and conflicts that impress themselves on a writer, leading him to dream up stories, are precisely those representing that dissent from real life, from the world as it is, which, as I noted in my previous letter, is the root of the novelist's vocation, the hidden impulse that drives a woman or a man to defy the real world by replacing it symbolically with fiction.

Of the many examples that might be cited to illustrate this idea, I choose that of a minor writer—though he was prolific to the point of incontinence—of eighteenth-century France, Restif de la Bretonne. I don't choose him for his talent—he didn't have much—but for the clear-cut nature of his particular rebellion against reality, his discomfort in the real world, which drove him to engineer fictional realities designed to mimic the world as he would have liked it to be.

In the many novels written by Restif de la Bretonne—the best known is his lengthy novelistic autobiography, Monsieur Nicolas—eighteenth-century France, rural and urban, is documented by a painstaking sociologist and rigorous observer of human types, customs, daily routines, work, festivals, superstitions, attire, and beliefs, in such a way that his books have become a veritable treasure trove for researchers: historians, anthropologists, ethnologists, and sociologists have helped themselves liberally to the information excavated by the tireless Restif from the quarry of his era. Nevertheless, in being transposed into his novels, this social and historical realism so copiously described undergoes a radical transformation, and that is why it is possible to speak of the novels as fiction. In the teeming world he creates, similar in so many details to the real world that inspired it, men fall in love with women not for the beauty of their faces, the slenderness of their waists, their good breeding, or spiritual charms but ultimately for the beauty of their feet or the elegance of their boots. Restif de la Bretonne was a fetishist, which in real life made him an eccentric among his contemporaries, an exception to the rule, that is to say, a "dissident" from reality. And that dissidence, surely the driving force of his vocation, is revealed to us in his works, in which life is corrected, reworked in the image and likeness of Restif himself. In the world as Restif experienced it, it was natural and normal that the principal female attribute, the object of pleasure coveted by men—all men—should be that delicate extremity and, by extension, its coverings, stockings and shoes. Few writers make it possible to grasp so plainly the process by which fiction transforms the through the subjective urges—desires, appetites, dreams, grudges, and so on—of novelists as this instructive Frenchman.

All creators of fiction are embroiled in the same process, though less thoroughly and blatantly. There is something in their lives like the fetishism of Restif—a noble craving for justice, an egotistical drive to satisfy the most sordid masochistic or sadistic urges, a reasonable human longing to live a life of adventure, an undying love, and so on—that makes them wish passionately for a world different from the one they live in, a world they are then compelled to construct of words and upon which they stamp, usually in code, their questioning of real life and their affirmation of that other reality which their selfishness or generosity spurs them to set up in place of the one they've been allotted.

Perhaps, my budding young novelist friend, this is the right moment to speak of a notion dangerous when it is applied to literature: authenticity. What does it mean to be an authentic writer? What is certain is that fiction is, by definition, fraud—something that is not real, yet pretends to be—and that all novels are lies passing themselves off as truth, creations whose power of persuasion depends entirely on the novelist's skill at performing conjuring and sleight-of-hand tricks, like a circus or theater magician. So does it make sense to speak of authenticity in fiction, a genre in which it is most authentic to be a trickster, a swindler? It does, but in this way: the authentic novelist is the novelist who docilely obeys the rules life dictates, writing on those themes born out of experience and possessed of urgency and avoiding all others. That is what authenticity or sincerity is for the novelist: the acceptance of his demons and the decision to serve them as well as possible.

The novelist who doesn't write about what deep down stimulates and inspires him and who coldly chooses subjects or themes in a rational manner because he believes that way he'll have a better chance at success is inauthentic and most likely a bad novelist (even if he is successful—the best-seller lists are crowded with very bad novelists, as you are well aware). But it seems unlikely to me that anyone will become a creator—a transformer of reality—if he doesn't write encouraged and nourished from the depths of his being by those ghosts (or demons) who've made us novelists determined protesters and reconstructors of life in the stories we tell. I think that to accept that imposition—to write about what obsesses us and excites us and is viscerally though often mysteriously part of our lives—is to write "better," with more conviction and energy, and to be better equipped to undertake the exciting but also arduous and sometimes disappointing and harrowing task of composing a novel.

Those writers who shun their demons and set themselves themes because they believe their own aren't original or appealing enough are making an enormous mistake. In and of itself, no literary theme is good or bad. Any theme can be either, and the verdict depends not on the theme itself but rather on what it becomes when the application of form—narrative style and structure—makes it a novel. It is the form a theme is couched in that makes a story original or trivial, profound or superficial, complex or simple; that lends its characters depth, ambiguity, credibility, or turns them into lifeless caricatures, the creations of a puppeteer. That is another of the few rules of literature which, it seems to me, brooks no exceptions: the themes of a novel themselves promise nothing, because they'll be judged good or bad, appealing or dull, solely in view of what the novelist does to turn them into a reality of words ranged in a certain order.

Well, my friend, I think that's all for now.

Fondly,