By Ford Madox Ford
Inasmuch as an authentic rendering—a rendering made with extreme artistic skill—will give you more the sense of having been present at an event than if you had actually been corporally present, whereas the reading of the most skillful of literary forgeries will only leave you with the sense that you have read a book the artistic rendering is the more valuable to you and therefore the greater achievement. I once heard a couple of French marine engineers agreeing that although they had traversed the Indian ocean many times and had several times passed through, or through the fringes of typhoons, neither of them had ever been in one till they had read Conrad’s “Typhoon.”…
To produce that or similar effects is the ambition of the novel today…
The fact is that with Elizabeth English became a supple and easily employable language and, making the discovery that words could be played with as if they were oranges or gilt balls to be tossed half a dozen together in the air, mankind rushed upon it as colts will dash into suddenly opened rich and easy pastures. So it was, for the rich and cultured, much more a matter of who could kick heels the higher and most flourish tail and mane than any ambition of carrying burdens or drawing loads.
In the end, however, what humanity needs is that burdens should be carried and provided that things get from place to place the name of the carrier or horse is of very secondary importance. If it is the fashion we will go down to the meadow and watch the colts cavorting: but all the while we are aware that the business of words as of colts or of the arts is to carry things and we tire reasonably soon of watching horse-play! For if I say “I am hungry,” the business of those words is to carry that information to you, and if you read the “Iliad” it is that the art of that epic may make Hecuba significant to you…
The struggle—the aspiration—of the novelist down the ages has been to evolve a water tight convention for the frame-work of the novel. He aspires—and for centuries has aspired—so to construct his stories and so to manage their surfaces that the carried away and rapt reader shall really think himself to be in Brussels on the first of Waterloo days or in the Grand Central Station waiting for the Knickerbocker Express to come in from Boston though actually he may be sitting in a cane lounge on a beach of Bermuda in December. This is not easy…
It is for instance an obvious and unchanging fact that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story—but a generation of readers may come along who would prefer witnessing the capers of the author to being carried away by stories and that generation of readers may coincide with a generation of writers tired of self-obliteration. So you may have a world of Oscar Wildes or of Lylys. Or you might, again, have a world tired of the really well constructed novel every word of which carries its story forward: then you will have a movement toward diffuseness, backboneless sentences, digressions, and inchoatenesses.