1. Argumentation.
Rhetoricians, as everybody knows, arbitrarily but conveniently distinguish four forms, or moods, or methods, of discourse: namely, narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. It may be stated without fear of well-founded contradiction that the natural mood, or method, of fiction is the first of these,––narration. Argumentation, for its own sake, has no place in a work of fiction. There is, to be sure, a type of novel, which is generally called in English “the novel with a purpose,” the aim of which is to persuade the reader to accept some special thesis that the author holds concerning politics, religion, social ethics, or some other of the phases of life 45that are readily open to discussion. But such a novel usually fails of its purpose if it attempts to accomplish it by employing the technical devices of argument. It can best fulfil its purpose by exhibiting indisputable truths of life, without persuasive comment, ex cathedra, on the part of the novelist. In vain he argues, denounces, or defends, appeals to us or coaxes us, unless his story in the first place convinces by its very truthfulness. If his thesis be as incontestable as the author thinks it is, it can prove itself by narrative alone.
2. Exposition.
Exposition, for its own sake, is also out of place in fiction. The aim of exposition is to explain,––an aim necessarily abstract; but the purpose of fiction is to represent life,––a purpose necessarily concrete. To discourse of life in abstract terms is to subvert the natural mood of art; and the novelist may make his meaning just as clear by representing life concretely, without a running commentary of analysis and explanation. Life truly represented will explain itself. There are, to be sure, a number of great novelists, of whom George Eliot may be taken as the type, who frequently halt their story to write an essay about it. These essays are often instructive in themselves, but they are not fiction, because they do not embody their truths in imagined facts of human life. George Eliot is at one moment properly a novelist, and at the next moment a discursive expositor. She would be still greater as a novelist, and a novelist merely, if she could make her meaning clear without digressing to another art.
3. Description.
Description also, in the most artistic fiction, is used only as subsidiary and contributive to narration. The aim of description––which is to suggest the look of things at a certain characteristic moment––is an aim necessarily static. But life––which the novelist purposes to represent––is not static but dynamic. The 46aim of description is pictorial: but life does not hold its pictures; it melts and merges them one into another with headlong hurrying progression. A novelist who devotes two successive pages to the description of a landscape or a person, necessarily makes his story stand still while he is doing it, and thereby belies an obvious law of life. Therefore, as writers of fiction have progressed in art, they have more and more eliminated description for its own sake.
4. Narration.
The Natural Mood of Fiction.––Since, then, the natural mood, or method, of fiction is narration, it is necessary that we should devote especial study to the nature of narrative. And in a study frankly technical we may be aided at the outset by a definition, which may subsequently be explained in all its bearings.
Clayton Meeker Hamilton (November 14, 1881 – September 17, 1946) was an American drama critic.
This book is a complete course in writing fiction. Drawing examples from the works of such masters as Poe, Hawthorne, and Robert Louis Stevenson, it offers a guided course through such vital topics as Realism, Plot, Characters, Setting, Point of View, The Epic, Structure of the Short Story, and much more.
