Novelists are Oxymorons

Novelists are oxymorons. They are sensitive and insensitive. Full of heart and heartless. You have to be full of heart to feel what other people are feeling. On the other hand, if you start thinking of all the damage you are going to do, you can't write the book-not if you're reasonably decent.

I've always been drawn more toward realism than fantasy, because it seems to me that realism is endlessly interesting and finally indeterminable. Realism is a species of fantasy that's much more integrated and hard-core than fantasy itself; but if you are ready to come to grips with the inevitable slipperiness of most available facts, you come to recognize that realism is not a direct approach to the truth so much as it is the most concentrated form of fantasy.

In the course of fashioning a character, you invariably reach a point where you recognize that you don't know enough about the person you are trying to create. At such times, I take it for granted that my unconscious knows more than I do. As you go through life, you do, after all, observe everyone, wittingly and unwittingly. . . . .the unconscious is a powerful computer that rarely needs new sources to fashion a portrait, because so much knowledge has already been stored away.

Why did Tolstoy dislike Shakespeare so? I expect the answer is that Tolstoy was always searching for subtle but precise moral judgment. That required a detailed sense of the sequence of events that could produce a dramatic or tragic event. You had to know how to assess blame. For that, you needed to know exactly when and why things happened.

But there, very much in the way, was Shakespeare, the greatest movie writer who ever existed-centuries before cinema had a silver screen. Shakespeare was not interested in making careful connections with his characters. Shakespeare was looking to get the most dynamic actors together under any circumstance available, no matter how contrived. He was looking for superb exchanges of dialogue and fantastic moments, vertiginous possibilities for the English language, whereas Tolstoy lived for the sobriety of moral judgment. So he considered Shakespeare a monster who paid attention to causality only when it was useful to him.

THE NEW YORKER December 23 & 30 from "Birds and Lions: Writing from the Inside Out" by Norman Mailer