Let us analyze what the two scenes have conveyed. In the original scene, Roark is impervious to Keating’s or the world’s view of his expulsion. He does not even conceive of any “comparative standard,” of any relation between his expulsion and Keating’s success.
Roark is courteous to Keating, but completely indifferent.
Roark relents and shows a touch of friendliness only when Keating acknowledges his respect for Roark’s architectural ideas and only when Keating shows an earnest sincerity.
Roark’s advice to Keating about independence shows the generosity of taking Keating’s problem seriously—Roark gives him advice, not about a specific choice, but about a crucial basic principle. The essence of the difference between their fundamental premises is focused in two lines of dialogue. Keating: “How do you always manage to decide?”—Roark: “How can you let others decide for you?”
In the rewritten scene, Roark accepts the standards of Keating and his mother—the estimate of his expulsion as disaster and of Keating’s graduation as triumph—but he is generously tolerant about it.
Roark shows interest in Keating’s future and eagerness to help him.
Roark accepts the charity of Keating’s condolences.
At Keating’s insulting comment on his ideas, Roark shows concern by asking: “Why?”
Roark shows a tolerant respect for all differences of opinion, thus confessing a non-objective, relativistic view of ideas and values.
Roark gives Keating specific advice about his choice, finding nothing wrong in Keating’s reliance on another man’s judgment.
Roark is modest about his self-confidence and tries to minimize it. He does not hold self-confidence as a major virtue, he sees no wider principle, no reason why he should be confident in issues other than his work. Thus he indicates that he is merely a superficial, concrete-bound professional man, who might have some integrity in regard to his work, but no wider concept of integrity, no wider principles, no philosophical convictions or values.
If Roark were that type of man, he would not be able to withstand for more than a year or two the kind of battle he had to fight for the next eighteen years; nor would he be able to win it. If that rewritten scene were used in the novel, instead of the original scene (with a few other “softening” touches to match it), none of the subsequent events of the story would make sense, Roark’s later actions would become incomprehensible, unjustifiable, psychologically impossible, his characterization would fall apart, and so would the story, and so would the novel.
Now it should be clear why the major elements of a novel are attributes, not separable parts, and in what manner they are interrelated. The theme of a novel can be conveyed only through the events of the plot, the events of the plot depend on the characterization of the men who enact them—and the characterization cannot be achieved except through the events of the plot, and the plot cannot be constructed without a theme.
This is the kind of integration required by the nature of a novel. And this is why a good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
There is no rule about which of these three attributes should come first to a writer’s mind and initiate the process of constructing a novel. A writer may begin by choosing a theme, then translate it into the appropriate plot and the kind of characters needed to enact it. Or he may begin by thinking of a plot, that is, a plot-theme, then determine the characters he needs and define the abstract meaning his story will necessarily imply. Or he may begin by projecting certain characters, then determine what conflicts their motives will lead to, what events will result, and what will be the story’s ultimate meaning. It does not matter where a writer begins, provided he knows that all three attributes have to unite into so well integrated a sum that no starting point can be discerned.
As to the fourth major attribute of a novel, the style, it is the means by which the other three are presented.
4. Style. The subject of style is so complex that it cannot be covered in a single discussion. I shall merely indicate a few essentials.
A literary style has two fundamental elements (each subsuming a large number of lesser categories): the “choice of content” and the “choice of words.” By “choice of content” I mean those aspects of a given passage (whether description, narrative or dialogue) which a writer chooses to communicate (and which involve the consideration of what to include or to omit). By “choice of words” I mean the particular words and sentence structures a writer uses to communicate them.
For instance, when a writer describes a beautiful woman, his stylistic “choice of content” will determine whether he mentions (or stresses) her face or body or manner of moving or facial expression, etc.; whether the details he includes are essential and significant or accidental and irrelevant; whether he presents them in terms of facts or of evaluations; etc. His “choice of words” will convey the emotional implications or connotations, the value-slanting, of the particular content he has chosen to communicate. (He will achieve a different effect if he describes a woman as “slender” or “thin” or “svelte” or “lanky,” etc.)
Let us compare the literary style of two excerpts from two different novels, reproduced below. Both are descriptions of the same subject: New York City at night. Observe which one of them re-creates the visual reality of a specific scene, and which one deals with vague, emotional assertions and floating abstractions.
First excerpt:
Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink.
Second excerpt:
That hour, that moment, and that place struck with a peerless co-incision upon the very heart of his own youth, the crest and zenith of his own desire. The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, the city of the night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match. He realized suddenly that the beauty of other cities of the night—of Paris spread below one from the butte of Sacré-Coeur, in its vast, mysterious blossoms of nocturnal radiance; of London with its smoky nimbus of fogged light, which was so peculiarly thrilling because it was so vast, so lost in the illimitable—had each its special quality, so lovely and mysterious, but had yet produced no beauty that could equal this.
The first excerpt is by Mickey Spillane, from his novel One Lonely Night. The second excerpt is by Thomas Wolfe, from his novel The Web and the Rock.
Both writers had to re-create a visual scene and convey a certain mood. Observe the difference in their methods. There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane’s description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness. Wolfe does not describe the city; he does not give us a single characteristic visual detail. He asserts that the city is “beautiful,” but does not tell us what makes it beautiful. Such words as “beautiful,” “astounding,” “incomparable,” “thrilling,” “lovely” are estimates; in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities.