The Art of Fiction － David Lodge － Preface
For twelve months between 1990 and 1991, the poet James Fenton contributed a weekly column to the book pages of The Independent on Sunday entitled “Ars Poetica”, the title of a famous treatise on poetry by Roman poet Horace. Each week Fenton printed a short poem or extract from a poem, and wrote a commentary designed to throw light on both the text and some aspect of the art of poetry in general. Early in 1991 the literary editor of the newspaper, Blake Morrison, rang me up and asked if I would be interested in writing something similar about prose fiction when James Fenton had finished his stint.
Usually I take time to consider journalistic proposals, and more often than not I say no in the end； but on this occasion I had decided to say yes almost before Blake had finish his pitch. For nearly thirty years, between 1960 and 1987, I was an academic as well as a novelist, teaching English Literature at Birmingham University. Over that time I published several books of literary criticism, mainly concerned with novels and “The Novel”, and for many of those years I offered a course called Form in Fiction. After taking early retirement from my university post in 1987 I found that I had little inclination or incentive to go on writing criticism for an essentially academic audience； but I felt that I still had things to say on the art of fiction and the history of the novel that might be of interest to a more general reading public, and sensed that weekly newspaper column might provide an ideal platform.
I settled quite quickly on a format that was topic-centred rather than text-centred, since a novel, unlike many excellent poems, cannot be quoted in its entirety in a newspaper article. Each week I chose one or two short extracts from a novels or stories, classic and modern, to illustrate some aspect of “The Art of Fiction”.
（Following on Fenton’s “Ars Poetica”, this was a more or less inevitable name for the series, and I have retained it for the book in spite of some uneasiness at trespassing on the title of a venerated essay by Henry James.）With a few exceptions － Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James － I took my examples from a different author, brace of authors, each week. I confined myself almost exclusively to English and American writers, because this is, as academics say, “my field” and I am less confident of doing accurate close analysis of novels outside it. I have commented on some of these passages before in print, but not in exactly the same terms.
I began with “Beginning” and always intended to end with “Ending”. In between these two, one week’s article sometimes suggested the topic for the following week, but I didn't design the series as a systematic, progressive introduction to thd theory of the novel. In revising the pieces for book publication I have inserted a number of cross-references, and provided an index, which should compensate for the somewhat random sequence of topics.
Once a teacher, always a teacher. Although the book is intended for the “general reader” I have deliberately used, with explanations, a number of technical terms which may be unfamiliar to such a reader, because you cannot analyse a literary text without an appropriate descriptive vocabulary, any more than you can strip down an engine without an appropriate set of tools. Some of these terms are modern, like “intertextuality” and “metafication”, and some are ancient, like the names of figures of speech in classical rhetoric （“metonymy”, “synecdoche” etc.）, which modern linguistics has not yet improved upon. An alternative title for this book, if Wayne Booth hadn't used it already, would be The Rhetoric of Fiction. I have always regarded fiction as an essentially rhetorical art － that is to say, the novelist or short story-writer persuades us to share a certain view of the world for the duration of the reading experience, effecting, when successful, that rapt immersion in an imagined reality that Van Gogh caught so well in his painting “The Novel Reader”. Even novelists who, for their own artistic purposes, deliberately break that spell have to cast it first.
The original articles were written to prescribed length, but I usually submitted my copy slightly over-long, leaving the task of trimming it to fit the available space in the capable hands of Blake Morrison and his assistant Jan Dalley. （I should like to record here my appreciation of the skill and tact with which they carried out this task.） In revising the articles for book publication I have restored some of the passages which they were obliged to cut, and some which I deleted myself from earlier drafts, and have added new material, both illustrative and argumentative, to nearly all of them. One item has been replaced by a new piece on “Chapters”. To throw light on the nuts and bolts of fiction, I have drawn more frequently on my own experience as a writer than seemed either appropriate or practicable in the original newspaper articles.
The book is approximately thirty per cent longer than the original series. But I have not attempted to “cover” any of the topics exhaustively. Most of them, after all, could be subject of full-length essays or whole volumes, and in many cases already have been. This is a book for people who prefer to their Lit. Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into, a book that does not attempt to say the definitive word on any of the topics it touches on, but one that will, I hope, enhance readers’ understanding and enjoyment of prose fiction, and suggest to them new possibilities of reading － and, who knows, even writing － in this most various and rewarding of literary forms.
