Craft as a Liberal Art

A friend of mine, Lidia, had a poster above her desk. “I want to believe,” it read, under a picture of a disc-shaped UFO flying over a farm.

It distracted me when we studied together. I saw it as an invitation to daydream about HG2G’s infinite improbability drive and Star Trek’s warp-speed. Often, instead of studying, I drew aliens. One day, I finally asked her, “Why that poster?”

She said, “Every anthropology class I’ve ever been in, someone mentions Ancient Aliens. I say there’s no such thing. They say, what about the pyramids? The thing is, every time I point out that there’s no reason to believe it was aliens, they say it’s because of a conspiracy to cover up the truth. That’s not true. I want to believe. I really do. If there was any evidence that aliens did build the pyramids, I would be the first to defend it. I really would. To think that humanity has always been influenced by little dots in the sky. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The problem isn’t that it’s a bad idea. It’s that it has no evidence. They say, ‘we don’t know how the Egyptians built the pyramids,’ like not knowing their tools is evidence that aliens did it. Just because we don’t know the tools, doesn’t mean we can make something up. We just don’t know, and that’s okay. In some ways, it’s beautiful, too.”

Lidia had a different undergraduate experience than I did. She studied Anthropology at a public university. At the time, I considered my experience studying Liberal Arts at Thomas Aquinas College more enlightened. Unfortunately, by senior year, I realized I had learned the literary equivalent of Ancient Aliens.

In a seminar about Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, a peer said the protagonist, Tarwater, was a prophet. I told her, (let’s call her Maggie), “I agree he thinks he’s a prophet, but I don’t think the reader needs to take it as such.” Maggie said, “But it says he’s a prophet in the third person, so that’s the author talking.”

It didn’t sit well with me, but I didn’t know why. If I had studied craft, I would have known not to trust Maggie. The grammatical third person does not necessitate authorial voice. However, my senior year I read The Art of Fiction by John Gardner while researching for my senior thesis and discovered what I didn’t know I was looking for. In Chapter Six, “Common Errors,” John Gardner discusses something he calls “psychic distance,” which he defines as “distance that the reader feels between himself and the events of the story.” He explains that a third person narrator is capable of stepping into the point of view of the character and narrate as the character would.

In other words, third person narration need not be taken as authoritative. The author has a tool at her disposal, psychic distance, a tool which allows her to step into the mind of her characters while speaking in the grammatical third person, a tool which she can use to better tell a story.

In literature, like anthropology, ignorance of the tools by which a work is crafted leads to misunderstanding.

Let’s make a case for Maggie. We’ll say: reader has no obligation to study craft. One reading is just as valid as the next. If a reader must study craft to understand a work, then wouldn’t it lose its appeal? Its ability to take the reader away to a new world? Its ability to create catharsis?

To some extent, this is true.

But consider Maggie’s initial argument: “It’s in the third person, so it’s meant to be trusted as true.” This is an assumption. Without argument, it’s just as believable as its contrary: “It’s in the third person, so it should not be trusted as true.”

The problem isn’t that one person has a different reading than someone else. The problem is the arbitrary choosing of principles while we study texts. Maggie failed to defend or create a method for criticism or interpretation. With a lack of knowledge of craft, she chose a method that made intuitive sense to her, without meditating on the principles.

The arbitrary choosing of principles leads to error when analyzing texts. Without studying craft, assumptions about interpretation are made, and conclusions are drawn based on these assumptions. Reading, enjoying, feeling catharsis without craft is fine. Analyzing without craft is dangerous.

In How to Read A Novel, Caroline Gordon argues, “If we are to become good readers of fiction it behooves us to try and understand the nature of the process.” This isn’t to say that one needs to be versed in craft to feel catharsis, to be moved by a story, to love the story. However, if one is going to have a “Socratic Seminar” over a work, it is important to consider some tools by which the work is made.

The great strength of Thomas Aquinas College is its philosophy program. As a Liberal Arts curriculum, it aims to educate students in how to think freely. Philosophy lends itself well to this, because (generally) philosophers begin by outlining their methods. We spent a whole year studying Aristotle’s Organon before advancing to his Physics and De Anima. Other works in the curriculum, like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, teach their methods before advancing their ideas. My seminar spent our first two classes on Hegel discussing what “self-othering” was before getting to his “ideas.” Syllogism, method, dialectic, are almost as much a part of philosophy as the ideas themselves.

Fiction, however, is more like architecture or construction. While the opus of the architect and builder is made of stone, the tools are made of wood. The papyrus on which the sketch was drawn decomposed long before the Colosseum began to fall; the tools forgotten. The same is true of drafts. We see the published work; we do not see the red and blue ink scratching out adjectives and noting slips in POV.

But literature is a necessary part of the life of any free thinker. This is why analyzing literature is crucial to a liberal arts curriculum. To think well about ethics, the science of human action, one must become acquainted human action. This can be done by living one helluva life, or, by picking up a story. Stories allow us to live many lives. In reading The Odyssey one becomes Odysseus, feels the joy of his virtues and the pains of his vice. What it is to be loved by Kalypso; to be hated by Poseidon.

As logic helps us think freely about philosophy, craft helps us think freely about literature.

In the seminar on The Violent Bear It Away, we came to the conclusion that it was a bad book. The prophecy was misplaced, too overwhelming at the start, and fell short at the end. The stakes went unanswered. Had we considered that third person narration could be “intimate psychic distance,” then our conclusion would have drastically shifted. Tarwater would not be a prophet, but a man with devout faith and a heavy psychological burden.

We didn’t consider psychic distance, or that the grammatical third person was merely a phenomenon of grammar, but essentially still shifting POV (point of view). The Violent Bear It Away is a beautiful example of shifting POV. While the grammatical third person remains, the POV moves from one character named Tarwater, to another, to another. This shifting POV allows for psychological realism at the start.

This shifting POV puts less stress on the power of the prophesy, and more stress on the change of heart in the lives of each character. Taking the narration as objective, it’s about a failed prophet. Taking the book as being told by shifting POV and movements in psychic distance, it’s a book about broken people encountering sin and grace. When the prophecy is finally fulfilled, the reader (or, in this case, critic/interpreter) is less focused on its accuracy and more focused on the changes in the hearts of the characters. It’s a surprise that the prophecy is coming true at all! The truth of the prophecy is not an element of the world building, a stake that needs to be answered, but a divine coincidence, or maybe even grace.

You don’t need to be a scholar to learn these simple rules of craft. You could learn this from Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Caroline Gordon’s How to Read a Novel. These two books are classics of craft and easy to read. They teach you the tools which fiction writers use and have used for ages.

Still, what might Maggie say?

I’d hate to put words in her mouth, but considering that I already have, let’s speculate. She might say: “tools” are innovations only present in contemporary literary fiction. No writer before an MFA program would have cared about rules of craft. They would just have written.

That’s not the case. We see these tools in use as early as Homer calls upon the muses to sing of Achilles wrath (thereby establishing POV). It’s present, too, in Der Nibelungenlied when the narrator calls attention to his reactions at the story he tells. Dante’s Divine Comedy frequently reminds the reader that Dante is writing the story as he sits as desk. Cervantes plays with POV and psychic distance by setting the narrator of his Don Quixote as a historian who does not care to remember the town of La Mancha. Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is centuries ahead of its time, setting the narrator as a peasant in the village. Due to this frame of reference, the narrator is simultaneously omniscient and unreliable. Much of the novel is told through things the narrator heard in rumors, while eavesdropping, or things the narrator probably made up.

Jane Austen and Gustav Flaubert are often hailed as the innovators of psychic distance for birthing what’s sometimes called “free indirect discourse,” i.e., when the narrator narrates from inside the mind of the character. The narrator of Pride and Prejudice sometimes talks about the weather one way while telling of Mr. Darcy but narrates the same weather a different way while telling of Elizabeth. This is essentially the same tool of shifting POV in The Violent Bear It Away.

The history of literature is not just a history of stories, but a history of craft. Every storyteller had to consider not just what story does she wish to tell, but how she ought to tell it. Craft is how the story is told. Consequently, if a reader wants to understand what a story means, she must not only answer, “What is the story?” but also, “How is it being told?”

It would be lovely if that weren’t the case. To think that one could analyze a story without considering how the story was composed is the sort of fantasy that deserves a poster over a desk, a daydream, like a UFO flying over a field. “I want to believe.” We would have a generation of Proust’s if considerations of craft were unnecessary for literary analysis. Sadly, that’s not the case. To think freely about the pyramids, you must consider to tools. To think freely about literature, you must consider the pen.*

*For anyone still denying that considering craft is important, “consider the pen” was a metaphor I used to give my piece the sense of a conclusive end. In this metaphor, the “pen” stands in place of “craft.” A pen is used to write, craft is used to write, although in different ways. These two things are similar in one way, but different in another. Those similarities and differences allow for “pen” to be an apt metaphor for “craft.” Had you not considered craft to interpret this last sentence, you might have thought, “What do pens have to do with any of this?” Assuming you considered craft, you understood the metaphor.

Bibliography

Gardner, John. “Common Errors.” Chapter. In The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, 111–12. New York City, NY: Vintage Books, 1991.

Gordon, Caroline. How to Read A Novel. Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019.