Each of these, however, may by itself become the subject-matter of a
literary essay, provided the writer's own moods and appreciations are
included; otherwise it is a topic for sociology, history, or topography,
not for literature.
By fate in a story I mean the writer's feeling for causality. As the
maker of an image of life, the writer must portray life as molded by
its past and by all the circumstances surrounding it. He must present
character as determined by personal influence, by nature and the milieu;
he must have a vivid sense for the interrelation of incidents. The
feeling for fate is independent of any special philosophical view of
the world; it does not imply fatalism or the denial of the spontaneous
and originative force of personality; it is simply recognition of the
wholeness of life. Nor, again, does it imply the possibility of
predicting the end of a story from the beginning, for the living
sequence, forging its links as it proceeds, is not mechanical; but it
does imply that after things have happened we must be able to perceive
their relatedness--the beginning, middle, and end as one whole. In the
story, there must be the same kind of combination of necessity and
contingency that there is in life: we must be sure that every act and
incident will have its effect, and we must be able to divine, in a
general way, what that effect will be; but owing to the complexity of
life, which prevents us from knowing all the data of its problems, and
owing to the spontaneity of its agents and the creative syntheses
within its processes, we must never be able to be certain just what
the effect will be like; our every calculation must be subject to the
correction of surprise.
Pages:
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258