Back when I was still in high school, an art history teacher addressed the question: "What makes this art?" Apparently, Jackson Pollock and his groupies have made such a large mark, that the art community seems to feel it is necessary to further define 'art' so that it still remains far from the grasp of the common man. After all, quite literally anyone can make a pollock-esque painting (I mean, splattering paint on a canvas? Really?), but they wouldn't want you to think so.
Anyhow, I was thinking yesterday about what makes a book good-- or, a work of art, so to speak. Naturally, this is a rather broad question, since a good book teaching mathematics would naturally achieve excellence with quite different tenets then, say, a rather spectacular coloring book. So, let me rephrase: what qualities do great works of fiction share?
In attempt to answer this, I first made a quick mental list of all the works of fiction that I have personally read, and consider to be great (that I could think of):
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
The History of Love by Nicole Kraus
A Small Rain by Madeleine L'Engle
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms by Hemmingway
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolfe
The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Cassandra by Crista Wolf
Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro
...and many, many others. So, what did these all have in common?
They moved me. Each and every one of these books, when I turned the last page, left a very particular feeling behind within me. I felt a different, better, and wiser person than I was when I started them. And they inspired me (much as I hate the word 'inspired' it's so tacky), they are all so very beautiful that they made me want to create something of beauty as well.
The idea of beauty is what brought me to their next quality. Each of these books was beautiful. And not only that, but they all discussed beauty. It was as if, in each book's fundamental quest to find and describe some sort of truth of the human experience, each had managed to trap a bit of true beauty, like a firefly in a jar, and hold it up for it's audience's amazement.
In "The Picture of Dorian Gray," Lord Henry, one of Wilde's pet characters, makes many observations on the nature of art and beauty, and many of these observations are handily noted in the book's preface. Here are a few of my favorites:
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless."
So then, according to Oscar Wilde, a great book would be well-written, quite beautiful (and therefore completely useless), and conceal the writer while revealing the audience. That is quite a tall order, but somehow all of the aforementioned books managed it. But how?
All of the characters were quite honest, all their faults were displayed. It made them more relatable, and therefore provided a clearer mirror for the audience to stand in front of. In Anna Karenina, for example, it is quite common for the reader to have something against every single character. But then again, rare is the person who doesn't have a single quality they don't like about themselves, and aren't we always the most vicious attackers of the faults of others when they are also our own?
They were more about the people than they were about the plot. There were rarely scintillating plot twists, gun fights, or fireworks, they could all be described rather as a complete series of deep, chronological observations.
The book as a whole knew far more than the characters. I think this is the most valuable quality of them all. If the characters are identifyable, the plot should be believable. After all, the characters we agree with would be reacting in exactly the same way to each situation as we would. Therefore, when, somehow, the book also manages to display some sort of great and beautiful picture, it makes the reader feel as if their lives, too, contain great and beautiful meaning. And perhaps that is the key, to write something that will, in the end, make the reader feel more beautiful, and more human.
Sadly, interesting as this all is, it seems to complicate rather than illuminate the fundamentals of writing. But that's alright. It will never fail to interest me.
