James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction (Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
James Baldwin
One of the pleasures of Gabriel Marcía Márquez's interview (posted about on Monday) was discovering how photography participated in his writing process. It struck a cord, and not simply because I make photographs. Common wisdom among beginning writers is to find a writer as a mentor. What I never hear in café and bar discussions or on the blogosphere is the value of finding a visual artist as mentor. This is an insular view of writing and the arts in general. I wonder if this view has taken hold because the visual arts seem so far removed from life in this country, tucked behind grand edifices or behind studied hipster nonchalance. While we can debate the value of how English literature is taught in high school and college, at least it's taught. Art and the history of art, meanwhile, are "elective."
This unhappy realization lodged in the back of mind, I bolted upright upon discovering a writer aware of what an artist can teach: James Baldwin.
When asked about what writing he seeks out, James Baldwin describes being "fascinated by a certain optic-- a process of seeing things." To make his point, he then relates:
I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, Look again, which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.
Seeing differently, seeing "obliquely," is something that Baldwin accomplishes not only through subject matter and description but also through a certain twisting of technique. Let's take characters and character development for a moment. Main characters are important. We all know this. As Gardner points out (quoted on Wednesday), people in airports and bookstores pick up books hoping to find characters they can enjoy being with (however that enjoyment is defined). Often enough, this knowledge translates in the writing process into focusing on that main character's dialogue, motivations, and fatal flaws. Baldwin, however, comes at it from another angle. He's considered one of the masters of the minor characters. He focuses on them. Via this technique, he throws the main ones into relief.
Minor characters offer pivotal perspectives upon main characters. It's for that reason that I consistently find myself wanting more interactions between main characters and coworkers, between main characters and the baker and butcher, and between main characters and their siblings and aunts and uncles. Main characters do not live in a vacuum; people are a vital part of the dreamworld. They also afford the writer new avenues for getting across critical information, themes, and attitudes. Baldwin discusses:
Well, minor characters are the subtext, illustrations of whatever it is you're trying to convey. I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoyevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom that the major ones don't. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven't got the same weight or intensity.
Which isn't to say that they are insignificant:
Oh no, if you fuck up a minor character you fuck up a major one. They are more a part of the decor -- a kind of Greek chorus. They carry the tension in a much more explicit way than the majors.
Baldwin gives the example of Rufus, the brother who commits suicide, from Another Country:
Ida was important, but I wasn't sure I could cope with her. Ida and Vivaldo were the first people I was dealing with , but I couldn't find a way to make you understand Ida. Then Rufus came along and the entire action made sense.... From the moment Rufus was gone, I knew that if you knew what had happened to Ida, you'd equally understand Rufus, and you'd see why Ida throughout the book was so difficult with Vivaldo and everyody else -- with herself above all, because she wasn't going to be able to live with the pain. The principle action in the book, for me, is the journey of Ida and Vivaldo toward some kind of coherence.
