as fiction. They don’t have to. The reader knows she’s reading a novel
from the moment she picks up the book and willingly submits to its con-
ventions. Joyce, in his first novel, was already moving toward the exper-
imentalism of his later style, but even more traditional writers of
realistic fiction sometimes draw attention to their writing’s artifice,
unintentionally laying bare its devices, as it were. Here’s how Dickens
begins David Copperfield:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that sta-
tion will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life
with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been
informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.With the protagonist’s speculation about whether he’s going to be the hero
of his own life and his words referring to the very pages (part of the “hard-
ware”) on which it’s written, we enter a dizzyingly recursive self-referen-
tial loop reminiscent of an Escher print. By the end of the second sentence,
however, Dickens has drawn our attention away from the fictional con-
ventions he’s employing and begun to immerse us in the grand and com-
pelling illusion of the life of David Copperfield. To a slightly greater
degree than Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist,Dickens subordinates his lan-
guage, style, and use of novelistic conventions to character and plot.
Sometimes, however, perhaps without intending to, writers employ a
language and style that prevents readers from rising above the level of
decoding into emergent worlds of imagination. Poststructuralist critics
balk at the idea of seeing through a text to its action and characters,
arguing that a text’s “transparency” is an illusion, that readers can never
see “through” language to what it names. But once again they have
trapped themselves in binary thinking. It’s not a matter of either-or. In
On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner makes some practical observa-
tions about this dilemma, offering the useful notion that the language of
fiction partakes of varying degrees of opacity ranged in a continuum
from relatively opaque to relatively clear. Most novelists, Gardner
writes, subordinate their language to plot and character. Others, how-
ever, “do present characters, actions, and the rest, but becloud them in a
mist of beautiful noise, forever getting in the way of whatthey are say-
ing by the splendor of their way of saying it.” The whatnovelists say is,
of course, the encoded model of the world that readers must unpack
from their words. Gardner adds that when, at the other end of the con-
tinuum, writers direct readers’ attention more toward imaginary worlds
than their language,
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 155