Elements of Fiction

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Elements of Fiction

• Chao-ming Chen
• Department of English, NCCU

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I. Whats a novel?

• A fictitious prose narrative of considerable
  length, in which characters and actions
  representative of real life are portrayed in a
  plot of more or less complexity. (Oxford English
  Dictionary)
• . . . only some work in which the most thorough
  knowledge of human nature, the happiest
  delineation of its varieties, the liveliest
  effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the
  world in the best chosen language. (Jane
  Austens Northanger Abbey)
• . . . a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a
  pudding, . . . our only business with it could be
  to swallow it. (Henry Jamess The Art of
  Fiction)
• Imitation of realty
• Middle-class genre (realistic novel)

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II. Fiction? (a make-up story)

• Fiction and Fact (fiction, fingereto make or
  shape fact, facereto make or do)
• Fiction and Life
• Fiction and History
•  
• History Realism Romance
  Fantasy
• ________________________________________

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III. Act of Readinglike dreaming, quite intimate
and demanding

• Involvement (identification and association)
• Detachment (aesthetic distance being
  disinterested)
• Like the sexual act, the act of fiction is a
  reciprocal relationship. It takes two. Granted, a
  writer can write for his own amusement, and a
  reader can read in the same way but these are
  acts of mental masturbation, with all the
  limitations that are involved in narcissistic
  gratification of the self. . . . The meaning of
  the fictional act itself is something like love.
  The writer, at his best, respects the dignity of
  the reader. (Robert Scholes)
• The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act.
  . . . For what connects fictionas does
  musicwith sex is the fundamental orgastic rhythm
  of tumescence ad detumescence, of tension and
  resolution, of intensification to the point of
  climax and consummation. In the sophisticated
  forms of fiction as in the sophisticated practice
  of sex, much of the art consists of delaying
  climax within the framework of desire in order to
  prolong the pleasurable act itself (Robert
  Scholes, The Orgastic Pattern of Fiction)

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IV. Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism

• To define and locate the reality of fiction
• Realism physical reality
• Modernism psychological reality, diverse
  realities
• Postmodernism what is reality? Is reality
  representable?

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V. Analyzing Fiction

• A. Narrative technique
• Narrators (first-person, third-person, and
  omniscient?)personified narrator
• Narrative medium and language
• Narrative and representation
• Ways of telling
• Free indirect discourse
• Tone and mode

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V. Analyzing Fiction

• B. Character
• . . . all novels . . . deal with character, and
  that it is to express characternot to preach
  doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories
  of the British Empire, that the form of the
  novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so
  rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.
  (Virginia Woolf)

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V. Analyzing Fiction

• C. Plotan ordered, organized sequence of events
  and actions
• D. Structure (order and chronology)
• Patterns completion, reiteration, contrast,
  repetition, complementarity
• E. Setting
• F. Theme or thesis?
• G. Symbol and image
• H. Speech and dialogue
• . . . the decisive and distinctive importance of
  the novel as a genre is that the human being in
  the novel is first, foremost and always a
  speaking human being the novel requires speaking
  persons bringing with them their own unique
  ideological discourse, their own language
  (Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel)

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VI. A good novel?

• . . . the greatest works are those which
  succeed in blending the realists perception and
  the romancers vision, giving us fictional worlds
  remarkably close to our sense of the actual, but
  skillfully shaped so as to make us intensely
  aware of the meaningful potential of existence