The Role of the Prosaic in Fiction

       The best symposium was Plato's; all symposia since have been anticlimactic. My daimon, in his absolute way, says "Say no to all symposia," but I don't always listen.

       I cannot imagine why Canisius college, a small Catholic school downtown from SUNY/Buffalo, sponsored a symposium on so curious a topic as "The Role of the Prosaic in Fiction": a far cry indeed from the topic of Plato's Symposium. I cannot imagine either why I agreed to sit on it: The honorarium was modest, and I had no a priori interest in the subject. Perhaps it was out of respect for my fellow symposiasts: the late crusted reactionary George P. Elliott, some of whose fiction I admired but whose literary opinions -- an anticipation of the later John Gardner's -- I found disagreeable; and my friend and colleague the erudite, unpredictable, iconoclastic, large-spirited troublemaker Leslie Fiedler, from whose outrageous statements I have seldom failed to learn. Or perhaps it was that in April 1970 I was as aforementioned between lives, living alone for the moment in a cottage on Lake Chautauqua, writing a triad of novellas called Chimera, commuting up the Thruway to my classes, and more disposed than normally to the prospect of an extra evening in town, even for a symposium that would not likely be a love-feast.

       I have no recollection of what Elliott and Fiedler said about the role of the prosaic in fiction -- what a topic! -- or why they were symposing on a subject that cannot in itself have much interested them, either. I know that my own opinions were invented ad hoc, but that -- as sometimes happens -- having set them forth, I discovered that I believed them. Reviewing them now, I discover that I still do.

       The three meanings of prosaic are (1) of or like prose; not poetic; (2) matter-of-fact, straightforward; and (3) lacking in imagination, dull. Discarding most of the third sense -- since unimaginativeness has no legitimate role in literature -- I think that these definitions correspond to three functions of the prosaic in fiction, having to do with three aspects of the art itself: its matter, its manner, and its medium.

       1. With regard to the first aspect (and the last definition), I take "the prosaic" to mean humble facts, specification, Homely particulars. Their justification in fiction is mainly self-evident: Objects in literature aren't really objects, but only the names of objects, and readers and writers share the human pleasure in naming things. We start like Adam, saying "This is a tree; this is a helpmeet; this is a pomegranate"; and we go on, in life and in literature, through Homer's catalogue of ships, Virgil's Carthaginian frescoes, the passage on horse's harness in Don Quixote which I remember having to look up every noun of in my Spanish-English dictionary only to find that I didn't know what the English equivalents meant either, Henry James's celebrated "solidity of specification," Nabokov's urging his Cornell students to "caress the details" (Q: What kind of meat was in the butchers' barrels in those flaring streets where-along the young narrator of James Joyce's story "Araby" carries the secret burden of his love? A: Pigs' cheeks), and John Updike's credo that "Details are the giant's fingers." At forty and sixty and eighty, God willing, the old Adam in us is still pleased to remark: "This is a plinth; this is a paraboloid; this is a Pouilly-Fuissé 1966."

       Paul Valéry declared that the reason why he could never write a novel is that he couldn't bring himself to set down such prosaic particulars as "The Marquis went out at five"; Claude Mauriac, a French New Novelist, uses that line as the title of one of his novels. In realistic fiction, from Petronius through Proust to Pinget, such prosaic detail is the very substance. In satiric fantasy it is commonly the ground and foil for its contrary, Sancho Panza to Don Quixote: Rabelais's giant pisses real piss in unreal quantity; Gulliver in Lilliput besmirches his drawers; real brand-names and place names make Donald Barthelme's world at once less and more strange. In "irreal" fictions generally, convincing prosaic detail mediates between our waking world and the dreamed ones of, say, Kafka or John Hawkes -- as it does routinely in science fiction, pornographic fantasy, and various kinds of allegory. Finally, in the "minimal," "algebraical," or otherwise stripped-down fictions of Beckett, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, or Calvino, prosaic detail, when we come upon it, is the source of the fire for which the algebra exists. Such fictions remind us of Gertrude Stein's remark about the Spanish landscape: It has few things in it, and so each stands out with a peculiar substantiveness. Our relief, when we come upon the Homely chair in Ted Hughes's story "Snow," is as great as the narrator's; that chair is the only object in sight besides himself, and from it he infers a world.

       2. Second, we can take prosaic to mean a "straightforward" or "naïve" as opposed to an oblique or self-reflexive manner of storytelling. Not much modern fiction is prosaic in this sense. Innocent story -- the "naïve anecdote," Robbe-Grillet calls it -- has pretty much gone the way of innocently representational painting and sculpture. It survives in non-"straightforward" forms such as parody and some fantasy, in nonfiction such as Capote's, Mailer's, and Tom Wolfe's, and in programmatically traditional writers like Styron, Updike, and Bellow, where even so it tends to a freight of symbolism, even allegory, or, at its most heavyfooted (as in Updike's otherwise admirable The Centaur), mythography-in-reverse.

       More usually, what prosaic "straightforwardness" there is in contemporary fiction is either a sly disguise, as in Kafka or Nabokov, a momentary relief, as in Beckett's occasional terse anecdotes, or, as with the cases of Homely detail I spoke of before, a kind of simplicity at which one arrives by way of irony and complexity. Fools, children, sentimentalists, pet dogs, and false-naïfs may wear their hearts on their sleeves; the rest of us can't be got to so easily. Artistic good faith is one thing, aesthetic simplism another.

       To sum up this point: The role of prosaic straightforwardness in modern fiction is characteristically duplicitous.

       3. The third sense of prosaic and the first of its definitions -- prose versus verse as a narrative medium -- seems to me the most interesting aspect of our subject. Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant, way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or of live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression -- a kind of rudimentary theater -- as do the best raconteurs of all times and places. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a one-man theater-of-mixed-means. Early written fiction -- the Sanskrit tale-cycles, the Thousand and One Nights, and so forth -- reflects this; while it typically and sometimes elaborately acknowledges its condition as writing (see for example the wonderful Kathapitha, or "Story of the Story," which opens Somadeva's enormous Katha Sarit Sagara, or "Ocean of Streams of Story"), such fiction is usually about people telling one another stories, interspersed with poems, songs, and dances.

       Verse especially, as a narrative medium, has served purposes more subtle than merely heightening the sensory appeal of language. Jaromir Hladik, the playwright in Borges's story "The Secret Miracle," chooses metrical verse as the essential medium for his drama because "it makes it impossible for the spectators to lose sight of irreality, one of art's requisites" -- in other words, it prevents our mucking up the useful distinction between art and life. In the eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth century, as verse-drama and narrative poetry were more and more supplanted by the novel and by realistic prose drama, one observes that grand opera and classical ballet -- those least prosaic, most irreal of narrative media -- flowered, almost as if in compensation, as the inheritors of the older narrative tradition. It passes in our century to the cinema, whose camera effects and musical soundtrack can redeem any scene from being prosaic in the pejorative sense and heighten, if not always save, the prose of the spoken dialogue -- always adding, even in the most realistic films, Borges's "essential element of irreality."

       But novels and stories in printed verse -- Philip Toynbee's, for example -- simply seem seldom to work, except in rare cases where the medium is employed with some ironical covering of tracks, as in Nabokov's Pale Fire. In most post-realistic prose fiction, the essential element in the transmutation of the prosaic into art is provided either by irreality in the conceit, as in Borges himself (and Kafka, Beckett, late Joyce, middle Malamud, Ionesco, Calvino, Landolfi, Gombrowicz, Grass, Brautigan, Barthelme, Vonnegut, and who have you), or by a radical unprosaicizing of the prose, as in late Joyce, Faulkner, Hawkes, some Nabokov, etc., or by radical manipulations of narrative viewpoint, dramatic form, or format, as in most of the aforementioned plus the French New Novelists, William H. Gass, Robert Coover, and The Something Else Press writers -- or by combinations of all of these.

       In short, the role of the prosaic in prose fiction comes first to something akin to the role of "flat" lines in poetry as described by Yeats when he remarked that a mountain is mountainous because it has valley on either side; and, second, to something akin to the role of ordinary reality in dreams: to supply the bones to be transformed by the writer's imagination into something rich and strange. To the extent that this transformation doesn't occur, one has prosaic fiction in the unhappy sense: dull and tedious writing.

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