September 17th, 2002
A GOOD TRIP: The Anatomy of a Tree and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction
Consider:
It’s not your first trip, not even your second. In fact, you’ve done this trip a lot. You’ve spent entire nights sitting in Denny’s clenching your jaw and eating chicken strips with ranch dressing. But this trip is different. You’re taken to some party. It’s way out in the country and while you’re driving there you can’t see anything but the taillights in front of you and they’re dancing to the Grateful Dead. When you get to this party you walk into a room full of jocks and they’re all sitting on chairs in a square, white room with nothing in the middle. It’s like one of those rollerskating things where the boys line up on one side and the girls gather around in clusters on the other and there’s nothing in the middle but blue ice swirling with party lights. There’s music on and everything and the girls are talking and the guys are slouching in their baggy pants so their boxers ride three inches above the waistband. There’s a keg in the kitchen and the only move people make is to go get more beer. But it’s cheap beer, rice beer, and on this trip, beer isn’t what’s needed. You stand in the doorway, look around the room, at the jocks staring back at you, at the two football players in line at the keg, and your eyes grow wide and you shake your head and laugh. This isn’t a real party, after all. So you turn around, walk down the stairs and wander around the side of the house where you find a tree, plop down in front of it and stare at the obsidian sky soaking through the bare, white branches.
The blackness disappears the more you stare and you begin to see nothing but the tree in front of you. And you know it’s nothing but a tree, a bare tree at that, but it’s glowing and if you look hard enough you swear you can see tin foil balls twinkling against the whiteness of the bark. Your eyes move down, you feel the roots pushing up, branching out under the ground. You follow the roots, the hills they make under the brown grass, up into the trunk of the tree and your eyes rest there, on the knotty skin covering the meat. Your pupils are black and wide and the skin parts and you can see inside, to the rings and pulp and scars. This you know: the tree’s strength starts there. Everything else follows. The night is cold but you’re not shivering and nothing matters but knowing this tree. Your eyes climb the ringed staircase. The trunk reaches up, shoots off into boughs. They reach out toward the midnight sky, their tips touching silver stars, green buds in spring. You follow every arm and sub-arm and sub-sub-arm and you feel like a spider spinning a maze and when you’re done, you take a step back and see that it’s just a tree but not just a tree but a TREE. And now you’re on to something.
Consider:
This isn’t the first time you’ve taught this, it’s not even the second. In fact, you’ve taught this for years. Spent hours in front of a classroom, marking up chalkboards and text books. But this time it’s different. You’ve walked into a classroom that isn’t your own, heard the professor talking about the rules of fiction and the historical significance of post WWII literature. You do a mental throw-up and on your way to your office your eyes swirl red. You slam the door, lock yourself inside, sit in front of your typewriter and pound out a twenty-two page essay about why you hate the way writing and literature is taught. When your blood has cooled, you get up, pace around the office, pick up Homer, Dante, Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, flip through them, push them back into the shelf, rub your index finger against their spines. You think back to all the times you’ve read them, in classes, on a windy night that kept blowing the fire out, and all the coffee stains that have soaked into the pages. And you know one thing– those are novels. So you sit down to your typewriter with a new quest in mind and think of all the things that make a novel a great novel, a story a great story, art great art.
You start small, analyze the writing, see in every great work the vivid detail that shows us, propels us through the continuous fictional dream, and the active verbs that allow us to feel, the concrete detail that captures the imagination, the clarity of the language, and the language and diction themselves. Then you look past that, at the most important element of fiction– the plot. At how the “germ” develops from an interesting character, a setting, or a theme, into a sequence of events that properly expresses them. And you notice how the characters speak and look and feel and behave and come to life and the emotion they convey. And how through them, and the struggles they undergo, you learn about yourself, how “… it helps us know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitation…” Then finally, you go beyond all of this, and you notice what every great lasting piece of work has– a theme. Not a message but a theme. A look past the realistic portrayal of a snapshot in time to some fundamental “meaning of events.” You follow this theme and notice that it pervades everything, every detail and concrete noun the writer’s used. You step back, look at the web created and see that it’s just a story but not just a story but a STORY. And now you’re on to something.
Filed Under: Reviews and Musings |
It’s not your first trip, not even your second. In fact, you’ve done this trip a lot. You’ve spent entire nights sitting in Denny’s clenching your jaw and eating chicken strips with ranch dressing. But this trip is different. You’re taken to some party. It’s way out in the country and while you’re driving there you can’t see anything but the taillights in front of you and they’re dancing to the Grateful Dead. When you get to this party you walk into a room full of jocks and they’re all sitting on chairs in a square, white room with nothing in the middle. It’s like one of those rollerskating things where the boys line up on one side and the girls gather around in clusters on the other and there’s nothing in the middle but blue ice swirling with party lights. There’s music on and everything and the girls are talking and the guys are slouching in their baggy pants so their boxers ride three inches above the waistband. There’s a keg in the kitchen and the only move people make is to go get more beer. But it’s cheap beer, rice beer, and on this trip, beer isn’t what’s needed. You stand in the doorway, look around the room, at the jocks staring back at you, at the two football players in line at the keg, and your eyes grow wide and you shake your head and laugh. This isn’t a real party, after all. So you turn around, walk down the stairs and wander around the side of the house where you find a tree, plop down in front of it and stare at the obsidian sky soaking through the bare, white branches.
The blackness disappears the more you stare and you begin to see nothing but the tree in front of you. And you know it’s nothing but a tree, a bare tree at that, but it’s glowing and if you look hard enough you swear you can see tin foil balls twinkling against the whiteness of the bark. Your eyes move down, you feel the roots pushing up, branching out under the ground. You follow the roots, the hills they make under the brown grass, up into the trunk of the tree and your eyes rest there, on the knotty skin covering the meat. Your pupils are black and wide and the skin parts and you can see inside, to the rings and pulp and scars. This you know: the tree’s strength starts there. Everything else follows. The night is cold but you’re not shivering and nothing matters but knowing this tree. Your eyes climb the ringed staircase. The trunk reaches up, shoots off into boughs. They reach out toward the midnight sky, their tips touching silver stars, green buds in spring. You follow every arm and sub-arm and sub-sub-arm and you feel like a spider spinning a maze and when you’re done, you take a step back and see that it’s just a tree but not just a tree but a TREE. And now you’re on to something.
Consider:
This isn’t the first time you’ve taught this, it’s not even the second. In fact, you’ve taught this for years. Spent hours in front of a classroom, marking up chalkboards and text books. But this time it’s different. You’ve walked into a classroom that isn’t your own, heard the professor talking about the rules of fiction and the historical significance of post WWII literature. You do a mental throw-up and on your way to your office your eyes swirl red. You slam the door, lock yourself inside, sit in front of your typewriter and pound out a twenty-two page essay about why you hate the way writing and literature is taught. When your blood has cooled, you get up, pace around the office, pick up Homer, Dante, Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, flip through them, push them back into the shelf, rub your index finger against their spines. You think back to all the times you’ve read them, in classes, on a windy night that kept blowing the fire out, and all the coffee stains that have soaked into the pages. And you know one thing– those are novels. So you sit down to your typewriter with a new quest in mind and think of all the things that make a novel a great novel, a story a great story, art great art.
You start small, analyze the writing, see in every great work the vivid detail that shows us, propels us through the continuous fictional dream, and the active verbs that allow us to feel, the concrete detail that captures the imagination, the clarity of the language, and the language and diction themselves. Then you look past that, at the most important element of fiction– the plot. At how the “germ” develops from an interesting character, a setting, or a theme, into a sequence of events that properly expresses them. And you notice how the characters speak and look and feel and behave and come to life and the emotion they convey. And how through them, and the struggles they undergo, you learn about yourself, how “… it helps us know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitation…” Then finally, you go beyond all of this, and you notice what every great lasting piece of work has– a theme. Not a message but a theme. A look past the realistic portrayal of a snapshot in time to some fundamental “meaning of events.” You follow this theme and notice that it pervades everything, every detail and concrete noun the writer’s used. You step back, look at the web created and see that it’s just a story but not just a story but a STORY. And now you’re on to something.
Filed Under: Reviews and Musings |
