The Art of Fiction

Citation

Lodge, D. (2011). The Art of Fiction. Vintage. (First published 1992.)

Chapter Summary

The book collects fifty short essays that, according to the publisher, began as articles in the Independent on Sunday and the Washington Post. The library catalogue records the subtitle "illustrated from classic and modern texts", and each essay takes a single topic and illustrates it with a passage from a classic or modern novel; the British Library contents note names the writer or writers whose work serves as the example for every essay. The first hardback (Secker & Warburg, 1992) ran to about 240 pages with a bibliography and index; the Vintage paperback has 256 pages. The contents list shows no thematic sections, so the groupings below simply follow the order of the essays.

Essays 1–5: Beginning; The Intrusive Author; Suspense; Teenage Skaz; The Epistolary Novel

The collection opens, appropriately, with "Beginning", illustrated by Jane Austen and Ford Madox Ford. It then turns to the narrator who comments on the story (George Eliot and E. M. Forster), to suspense (Thomas Hardy), to "teenage skaz", the colloquial first-person voice of J. D. Salinger, and to the novel in letters (Michael Frayn).

Essays 6–10: Point of View; Mystery; Names; The Stream of Consciousness; Interior Monologue

These essays deal with whose perspective controls the narrative (Henry James), withheld information (Rudyard Kipling), the naming of characters (examples from Lodge's own fiction and from Paul Auster), and two ways of rendering consciousness, the stream of consciousness (Virginia Woolf) and interior monologue (James Joyce).

Essays 11–17: Defamiliarization; The Sense of Place; Lists; Introducing a Character; Surprise; Time-shift; The Reader in the Text

A sequence on description and arrangement: making the familiar strange (Charlotte Brontë), place (Martin Amis), the list as a device (F. Scott Fitzgerald), the first presentation of a character (Christopher Isherwood), surprise (Thackeray), departures from chronological order (Muriel Spark) and the reader addressed within the text (Laurence Sterne).

Essays 18–25: Weather; Repetition; Fancy Prose; Intertextuality; The Experimental Novel; The Comic Novel; Magic Realism; Staying on the Surface

Style and mode: weather (Austen and Dickens), repetition (Hemingway), elaborate prose (Nabokov), intertextuality (Conrad), the experimental novel (Henry Green), the comic novel (Kingsley Amis), magic realism (Milan Kundera) and a deliberately external style (Malcolm Bradbury).

Essays 26–33: Showing and Telling; Telling in Different Voices; A Sense of the Past; Imagining the Future; Symbolism; Allegory; Epiphany; Coincidence

Narration and meaning: the classic distinction between showing and telling (Fielding), multiple narrative voices (Fay Weldon), historical fiction (John Fowles), dystopia (George Orwell), symbolism (D. H. Lawrence), allegory (Samuel Butler), epiphany (John Updike) and coincidence (Henry James).

Essays 34–41: The Unreliable Narrator; The Exotic; Chapters etc.; The Telephone; Surrealism; Irony; Motivation; Duration

The unreliable narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro), the exotic setting (Graham Greene), the division of novels into chapters (Smollett, Sterne, Scott, George Eliot and Joyce), dialogue by telephone (Evelyn Waugh), surrealism (Leonora Carrington), irony (Arnold Bennett), motivation (George Eliot) and narrative duration (Donald Barthelme).

Essays 42–50: Implication; The Title; Ideas; The Non-fiction Novel; Metafiction; The Uncanny; Narrative Structure; Aporia; Ending

The final essays cover implication (William Cooper), titles (George Gissing), the novel of ideas (Anthony Burgess), the non-fiction novel (Thomas Carlyle), metafiction (John Barth), the uncanny (Edgar Allan Poe), narrative structure (Leonard Michaels) and aporia (Samuel Beckett), before the book closes, as it began, with Jane Austen, in "Ending", alongside William Golding.

Key Concepts

Essays 1–10: Narration and Perspective

• Intrusive author: a narrator who comments openly on the story and its characters.
• Skaz: a first-person narrative in a colloquial, spoken voice, here a teenager's.
• Point of view: the perspective through which the events of a story are presented.
• Stream of consciousness and interior monologue: two techniques for rendering a character's thoughts, given separate essays.

Essays 11–25: Description, Order and Style

• Defamiliarization: presenting familiar things in a way that makes them seem strange and newly seen.
• Time-shift: narrating events out of chronological order.
• Intertextuality: a text's relation to and use of other texts.
• Magic realism: fiction in which impossible events occur within an otherwise realistic world.

Essays 26–41: Narration and Meaning

• Showing and telling: presenting events dramatically as against summarising and commenting on them.
• Epiphany: a moment of sudden revelation or insight.
• Unreliable narrator: a narrator whose account the reader has reason to doubt.

Essays 42–50: Structure and Self-consciousness

• Metafiction: fiction that draws attention to its own fictionality.
• Aporia: an irresolvable doubt or contradiction, here illustrated by Beckett.
• Ending: the closing of a narrative, set against "Beginning" to frame the book.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• One technique at a time. Each essay isolates a single device and grounds it in a specific passage, so the book works as a set of short, self-contained lessons that can be read in any order.
• A wide range of examples. The contents run from Fielding, Smollett and Sterne to Ishiguro, Amis and Barthelme, and include Gothic, comic, experimental and dystopian fiction. The publisher stresses the book's appeal to students, aspiring writers and general readers.
• A novelist-critic's perspective. Lodge uses his own fiction as an example in "Names", and reviewers quoted by the publisher praise the combination of scholarship and readability; the Financial Times judged it the best popular study of fiction since Forster's Aspects of the Novel.
• Critical terms made concrete. Terms from criticism and theory such as defamiliarization, intertextuality, metafiction and aporia are introduced through examples rather than abstract definitions.

Limitations

• Breadth rather than depth. Fifty topics in about 250 pages means each essay is short; the book introduces techniques but does not develop a sustained argument about the novel.
• Mainly British and American fiction. The publisher describes its subject as British and American fiction; Kundera, writing in Czech and French, is a rare exception, so readers interested in other literary traditions will need other books.
• No arrangement by theme. Related topics (point of view and the unreliable narrator, for example) are far apart in the sequence, so readers must make the connections themselves.
• A book of its moment. The essays date from the early 1990s, and the contents of the later Vintage editions are the same fifty essays, so fiction written since then falls outside them.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the course on the novel, Lodge is the most practical companion to E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, which his "Intrusive Author" essay draws on: Forster offers a few large categories (story, people, plot, pattern and rhythm), while Lodge breaks technique into fifty small units with a passage for each. Marina MacKay's The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel is better as a structured overview of the form's history and elements, with a glossary and further reading; Lodge's essays can be read alongside its chapters on narration, character and plot.

The historical and theoretical studies in the course, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination and Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, ask why the novel exists and what kind of form it is. Lodge's book is better read before them, as a toolkit for describing what novels do on the page.

How to Use This Book

The book suits first-year students, creative-writing students and general readers; it assumes no prior knowledge of criticism, though familiarity with some of the novels discussed helps.

• Dip in or read through. The essays are self-contained. A useful core for a first course is Essays 1–10 (beginning, narration, point of view and consciousness), together with "Showing and Telling", "The Unreliable Narrator", "Irony", "Metafiction" and "Ending".
• Regroup the topics. Read related essays together, for example "Point of View", "Telling in Different Voices" and "The Unreliable Narrator", or "Time-shift", "Duration" and "Narrative Structure".
• Practise on other texts. After each essay, find the same technique in a novel being studied and write a short paragraph analysing it in Lodge's manner.
• Writers' use. Creative-writing students can treat each essay as a prompt and attempt a passage that uses the device.
• Follow up. Use the bibliography to move from Lodge's brief treatments to fuller critical accounts, and pair the essays on story and character with the corresponding lectures in Forster.