The Fall and the Fiction Writer

Abstract: Locating the impulse of story-making in John Updike's remark to The Paris Review that "unfallen Adam is an ape," I argue that only by virtue of the original act of sin, and the consequent revelation of good and evil, did we acquire free will, and that our legacy is that of self-consciousness and mortality--the understanding, because we see ourselves as God does, that we bear responsibility for good and evil, and that being freed from the threat of death by the inevitability of it, we can choose between them. This free will, and the attendant capacities for shame and radical empathy, is best realized in the character-driven narratives of modern and contemporary fiction writers. ********** Some time ago, in an introductory general education course, I encountered a student whose prose surprised and greatly pleased me. On the first day of the semester, trying to make a point about memory and narrative, the way in which we create order out of the welter of past experience, I asked the students to recall a place, their sensory impressions of it--the loamy scent of the woods behind their house, the caked mud on their grandfather's boots on the cellar stairs--and to write a brief essay, a personal story, of their being there, in that place, doing something. I believe that she wrote about an open window in her parent's bedroom, and how she'd sit at the sill, the sun-bleached wood smooth beneath her elbows, and look out into the yard, and how one afternoon she discovered something about her mother, and herself, and their past, in that room, and how she was filled with a terrible longing that could still, ten years later, return with such force that she could hardly bear it. I remember reading her essay and being struck by the loveliness of her sentences, her sensitivity to detail, and the subtlety of her insights into the ordinary. Here is a writer, I thought. Here is someone special. As that semester continued, she'd show me personal essays she'd been working on, each remarkably sophisticated, the language nuanced and controlled, the metaphors startling and apt. And so she decided, with my encouragement, to enroll in my Introduction to Creative Writing the next fall, and in that course, after reading her first few short stories, I began to worry that she might not have it in her to become a fiction writer, after all. Her language had, for some reason, descended to flimsiness, at once hollow and overwrought; a kind of cheap ornamentation hung on plots that were either predictable or contrived, and the characters in these worlds, who were inevitably denied the gift of free will (because their actions had already been determined by the plots), showed up flat and functional. Where had she gone--this girl who could negotiate actual experience with such grace? Of course there's a great difference between the demands of a story and those of the personal essay, not the least of which is dramatic arc, the action that, in the sexualized language of plotting, rises from conflict to climax, and then, spent, falls to fretting or, simply, sleep. And to write a story, to create for it characters who move in this manner, is to enter a consciousness beyond your own, and to discover, if you've done it right and well, what you're capable of imagining, the light and darkness that must be in you after all, your birthright, so to speak. This is in fact the point at which most beginning writers hesitate, and then stop--the plumbing of their own desires, finding the language for and committing to paper the impulses by which, privately and publicly, they might be shamed. And this problem is often made more acute if the writer conceives of sin as either of the body or the will, and believes that she does the devil's work if she dirties herself in the particularities of this world, or expresses the nastier convolutions of her own heart. Betsy Lerner calls these writers "good children" arguing that they might deliver relatively well-written stories, but stories that make no impression, because to do so, to get at a truth other than the most conventional, they would have to risk their place at the dinner table. …