Notes on the fictive dream

John Gardner (1933-82)

After mentioning James Dickey’s Deliverance here last week, I decided it was finally time to reread it. I’m glad I did. Not only is it a great and challenging story—both harrowing and rich, absolutely dripping with menace and meaning—Dickey wrote it brilliantly. Rereading proved not only enjoyable but instructive.

When I read Deliverance, both twelve years ago and last week, I was absorbed. Utterly. Each time I finished a chapter I felt as though I were not simply setting a book aside but returning to the real world, like swimming up from a deep green pool in the Cahulawassee. And if you regularly read this blog, you might recognize that I’ve had this rare experience several times this year. I’ll return to the other books that have given me this sensation, but Deliverance is the one that got me thinking more specifically and precisely about this feeling. How did Dickey achieve it?

I don’t like calling stories “immersive,” since dunking something isn’t particularly hard, and instead prefer older terms of praise like “involving,” “engaging,” and especially “absorbing” that suggest the work behind creating such a state. The image of absorption works particularly well for a good story; like a sponge taking in water, a good story absorbs the reader’s imagination quickly and gives it shape and color (and, if you have one in mind, a purpose), and can hold onto it quite a long time. But there’s an even better metaphor for the writer’s goal.

The dream

The effect I’ve been describing here is what John Gardner called “the fictional dream” or “the fictive dream,” and creating a fictive dream was for him the ultimate, overriding goal of the fiction writer. In The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Gardner gives one of his most detailed explanations of the fictive dream:

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths. In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist. We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing.

The goal: create a dream. The two guiding principles: vividness and continuity. These are important for the writer first. Elsewhere in The Art of Fiction, Gardner describes the way a writer, when everything is going well, becomes so enraptured by the dream he is creating that he becomes unconscious of the physical process of writing. The writer can’t depend on these moments to come, of course, but when they strike they are important: not only for the writer, who “when the dream flags . . . can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again,” but, once the story is finished, for the reader. The dream is contagious.

Waking the dreamer

But in this post, and as a result of experiencing several such fictive dreams this year, I’m more concerned with the dream created on the reader’s end—which is the decisive end. If the dream doesn’t work here, the story will fail on some level. Possibly totally.

The long passage from The Art of Fiction above introduces a chapter called “Common Errors” in which Gardner outlines a number of ways the writer can inadvertently awaken the reader from the dream. Among them:

• Lack of concrete detail (the fundamental requirement for vividness according to Gardner)

• Abstraction instead of specificity or concreteness

• Basic mechanical mistakes or overreliance on weak sentence structures (e.g. passive voice, participle phrases)

• Faulty, distracting, or inappropriate diction

• Needless explanation or “cloddishly awkward insertion of details”

• “Faults of soul,” i.e. in the attitude of the writer toward his subjects, including the opposing extremes of frigidity and sentimentality

Fiction characterized by these errors only ever works in spite of them. Avoiding these errors—which, again, are common—is partly a matter of taste and instinct, but also a matter of discipline: of the training of the writer’s taste and instinct and most especially the discipline of sharp-eyed and exacting revision. The writer needs his tastes and instincts trained in order to notice these errors and be unsatisfied until they’ve been corrected; he needs discipline to actually do it, and to continue the training that will sharpen his eye and his craft.

But if these are the ways in which the writer, as a builder of dreams, can fail, how can he succeed? This is both easier and more difficult to say. The best answer is to learn by example.

Exempli gratia—four good dreams

One of the things I’ve appreciated most about Gardner’s Art of Fiction, as well as On Becoming a Novelist, which is also excellent, is the way he both sets stringent standards for writers of fiction and refuses to give hard and fast rules about writing. His counsels are demanding but flexible. What matters is constructing the vivid and continuous fictive dream, and any rule that stands in the way of creating that dreamlike state must bow to this greater purpose.

This flexibility of means can be seen clearly in the books I mentioned near the beginning of this post. These are the novels I’ve read this year that created exactly the kind of fictive dream Gardner describes, that totally absorbed me into their dreams, that vividly and continuously sustained their dreams to the point that I really felt as though I were waking up when I set them aside. They were:

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—A searing highbrow postmodern Western about American scalphunters in Mexico in the early 19th century. Bleak, often accused of nihilism. Third person, told in what Gardner would call a “mannered” style.

• John Macnab, by John Buchan—An adventure novel in which well-to-do politicians challenge themselves to poach deer and salmon in the Scottish highlands without getting caught despite telling the landowners what they intend to do. Serious and suspenseful but fundamentally lighthearted, appreciative of the outdoors, and life-affirming. (Full review here.) Third person, unflashy but rock solid diction.

• Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—An adventure novel in which one of the characters from John Macnab sets out on a final adventure in the Canadian wilderness following a terminal diagnosis. (Full review here.) Elegiac and melancholy, meditative, deeply but not obviously religious. Third person, with passages of first person presented as found documents.

• Deliverance, by James Dickey—A survival novel about a bunch of middle class suburban businessmen and their ill-fated canoe trip through the north Georgia mountains, during which the narrator must shed the trappings of civilization in order to survive. Both introspective and physical, beautiful and shocking. First person, lushly and poetically descriptive (but never purple).

Despite a shared vague outdoor adventure motif, these novels differ quite strikingly from each other, and their authors’ sensibilities diverge even more sharply than their stories. So after finishing Deliverance, I reflected on what these four actually had in common, writing-wise, that made them so totally absorbing.

First, there are the essentials of fiction:

• Masterful control of the language; no mechanical errors whatsoever regardless of style.

• Good characters vividly realized regardless of the size of the cast (from Deliverance, which has four central characters and only a handful of others, few of whom appear in more than one scene or even have names; to John Macnab, which has dozens of named characters).

• Solid, well-constructed plots with interesting complications. (Possible exception: Blood Meridian, which is more of an open-ended quest as befits a story based on real life, however loosely, but never feels directionless.)

• Related: good pacing, introducing the story quickly and steadily escalating in intensity. Buchan is exceptionally skilled at this, though Deliverance is the most obvious example to read for this technique.

As I said, these are essential to all good fiction, but it is possible to have these without conjuring the vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind as these four novels did. So what distinguishes these four from others I’ve read that had the same mastery of the fundamentals but not their powerful dreamlike quality? I kept returning to the following four traits:

• In narration, not only error-free mechanical control of the language but a musicality and tone that complemented the story. This is what the poetry of Deliverance, the byzantine and operatic diction of Blood Meridian, and the strong, straightforward narration of Buchan’s novels have in common despite all their superficial differences. Their narrative voice—regardless of perspective—creates atmosphere.

• Carefully and precisely described action. Throughout these novels, all of which feature complex dramatic action, often with multiple sets of characters operating parallel to or at odds with each other (e.g. the scalphunters’ pursuit by Indians at multiple points in Blood Meridian; the converging of friends, hostile gamekeepers, and others on the poachers in John Macnab; the terrible wait for help during Deliverance’s rape scene), the action remains comprehensible. The reader is never left trying to figure out what’s happening, who is doing what, or what he’s supposed to be seeing.

• Precisely described sensory details. When Gardner writes above that the writer should engage the senses, “preferably all of them,” he could have been writing with these novels in mind. The reader feels the heat of the desert and recoils from the noise and smell of combat and gore in Blood Meridian; he labors for breath in the snow alongside the protagonist of Sick Heart River; and, most vividly for me, having experienced this firsthand back home, he feels the chill and damp of the river in Deliverance and the otherworldly coolness and lightness of his own flesh after stepping out onto solid ground again.

• Last, most obviously and strikingly—and, I think, most importantly for the sake of the fictive dream—a pervasive, uninterrupted, sensuous, tactile sense of place. The geography of these books, their authors’ descriptions of location, are among the best I’ve ever read.

I think setting may be the most important of these for three reasons. First, in our own experiences of actual nighttime dreams you’ll have noticed that when you or some tiresome person (me, all too often) insists on describing a dream you usually begin by setting the scene: “I was in the airport, sort of” or “I was at church, but not really” or “I was in the hallway at school and then…” This should make clear to us the fundamental role of setting in storytelling, even the literally unconscious kind.

Second, by way of a negative example, I’ve noticed that poorer quality fiction—not only obviously bad airport thrillers and ponderous wannabe literary fiction but even otherwise clever, inventive novels—suffer from a lack of a sense of place. When a novel tries to get by on its action, theme, or ideas without dramatizing them in a believable place, the dream it creates will fail either the vividness or the continuousness test—if it creates a fictive dream at all.

Third, setting unites all of the other points in that bullet list: it provides the scene of the action, many of the sensory specifics, and, through the way the author describes it, a great deal of the atmosphere of the story.

And atmosphere is everything in a dream. It’s the difference between a sweet dream and a nightmare.

The life blood of fiction

You’ll have noticed that my four major points above overlap pretty generously. If you imagine them as a Venn diagram—four circles labeled The Language or The Atmosphere, The Action, The Sensory, and The Setting—the point at which all four overlap could be labelled The Details.

As I mentioned near the beginning of this post, the details are, for Gardner, the fundamental element in creating the vivid and continuous fictive dream. From earlier in The Art of Fiction:

In all the major genres, vivid detail is the life blood of fiction. Verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief through narrative voice, or the wink that calls attention to the yarn-teller’s lie may be the outer strategy of a given work; but in all major genres, the inner strategy is the same: The reader is regularly presented with proofs—in the form of closely observed details—that what is said to be happening is really happening.

This doubles as a pretty good description of dreaming.

Again, one of the hallmarks of Gardner’s teaching on writing is his steadfast avoidance of ironclad rules. Notice that he does not say how much detail the writer should include—a vexatious point. That’s where the writer’s training in taste and artistic sensibility should come in. The rules can be bent or even broken according to the well-trained writer’s judgement; what matters is whether it helps create and sustain the fictive dream. Hence Gardner’s reference to the writer’s “outer” and “inner” strategies above. The outer can differ dramatically from author to author and even from book to book—which is the point of my examination of those four novels—but the inner must not deviate from the goal outlined by Gardner.

The writer ignores Gardner’s advice at his own peril. If you’d like to see the results, there are plenty of bad books out there. But if you want to know how well the conception of fiction as dream can work, or why and how the books that have affected you most strongly—the books that absorbed you—did so, I recommend any of the four novels that prompted this post.

They absorbed me, to my great benefit and enjoyment. I hope they’ll do the same for you.

More if you’re interested

I call longish posts like this one “writing notes,” and I do them as much to work through aspects of craft for myself as I do for anyone who may chance to read them. If you’ve stuck with me this long, I hope you’ve found these reflections helpful. I’ve written briefly about Gardner and the use of details before, in this post about vividly realized minor characters. If you’d like an example of how faulty, unimaginative diction in the form of weak verbs can fatally wound the fictive dream, you can read about that here.

Finally, Gardner himself is worth your while. Check out The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist if you have any interest at all in the craft of writing fiction (and On Moral Fiction if you have any interest in what good fiction should do). And while they’re vanishingly rare online, interviews with Gardner are like a splash of icewater to the face. Here’s a good one from the mid-1970s in which the interviewer can’t quite bring himself to believe that Gardner means what he says.