This is the second post prompted by reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. As I wrote previously, this is not a book review so much as a handful of supplementary comments and speculations. Go here for the first part of this discussion.
Detail
Anton Chekov famously stated that if a writer hangs a rifle on the wall in the first act, then he had better fire it in the second. The implication is that good writers exercise an economy of detail, including only what is necessary for the sake of the story. However, after Wood’s survey of detail, it seems fair to say that every novelist since Chekov (including Chekov himself) has failed to meet Chekov’s standard. Wood writes of “a distinctively post-Flaubertian tradition which fetishizes “the over-aesthetic appreciation of detail.” Later, he calls it the “cult of ”detail”.”
Why the rise to prominence of the seemingly irrelevant detail? Wouldn’t writing be better if it were uncluttered? One suggestion comes from Roland Barthes. In his essay, “The Reality Effect,” Barthes speculates that the “”irrelevant” detail is a code we no longer notice.” It denotes reality. “[I]t is there to create the effect, the atmosphere of the real. It simply says: “I am the real.” (Or if you prefer: “I am realism.”)” According to Wood, it doesn’t even do that; it merely signifies reality, by what he calls the “referential illusion.”
Another suggestion is that the proliferation of arbitrary detail may denote arbitrariness. Maybe we have internalized assumptions about our world and these have worked themselves out in our writing, like bits of shrapnel breaking through the skin. We witness arbitrariness in our world – random bombardments of gamma radiation from solar flares, pointless detritus in the ditch beside the road, irrational statements from world leaders – and it emerges almost unconsciously in the aesthetic we adopt as we engage what we witness in our art.
Wood offers a third suggestion: “one of the obvious reasons for the rise of this kind of significantly insignificant detail is that it is needed to evoke the passage of time, and fiction has a new and unique project in literature – the management of temporality.” As I read it, Wood is claiming that detail denotes temporality. Maybe, but I can’t help but think detail is related to temporality in another way too. Detail contributes to the story’s pacing and rhythm, and to the overall narrative arc.
I like to think of the novel’s rise in tandem with the rise of its musical counterpart, the symphony. Early Haydn symphonies were light and breezy, short occasional pieces for small ensembles. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, composed twenty years before Haydn’s death, was sprawling by comparison and, for its time, would have required a sizable orchestra to achieve its breadth of sound. With his 5th symphony, Beethoven added trombones to the mix and by his 9th symphony there was a chorus. From the brief 12 or 15 minute works of the young Haydn, listeners had to sit more than 60 minutes with the mature Beethoven. Things only got bigger with late romantics like Bruckner and Mahler. The unfolding story of the symphony is the story of an expanding form that incorporates an increasing amount of musical “detail.” Symphonies aren’t less coherent for being longer. We don’t listen to Mahler and say: “That was cluttered with too much detail.” We tend to think there is something necessary about the expanded form, and all the “detail” contributes to it.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but it points to the fact that detail can relate to temporality in a novel by helping to enlarge the form. It contributes to suspense. It defers gratification. And perhaps, for those reasons alone, contributes to a more mature reading experience.
Truth, Convention, Realism
Wood has already written about realism when discussing the rise of the “significantly insignificant detail” but he rounds out his book with a chapter devoted to realism and the conventions that deliver that realism to us. In brief, Wood notes that the minute a convention is established, it rusts; the most successful novels are those which push the limits of convention while providing the reader with clues about how to read within the newly staked boundaries.
Many readers and critics feel disdain for realism because “it is just another convention reflecting the aspirations of petit bourgeois readers.” My own feeling is that the majority of readers and critics don’t care about such things. That is because of a convention which Wood dubs “commercial realism.” In fact, Wood refers to it as a style but I see no reason to put off the leap to a convention. “It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling…” It is Graham Greene, John Le Carré, P.D. James. It is what sells. And because it sells, it is ubiquitous. In fact, it is so ubiquitous, it’s everywhere.
This is where writing – all writing – reveals itself as inherently political. Anyone who aspires to be a “good” writer and who adopts “commercial realism” as the criterion for assessing that goodness is, whether he knows it or not, the creature of a political game. Words have value, but our culture understands that value only to the extent it can be monetized. Manufactured. Packaged. Distributed. Sold. Consumed. Each stage in the process from Manufacture to Consumption is supported by a regulatory framework that includes laws of copyright, business practices, trade, and taxation. Yet the social machinery necessary for the production of a commercial novel is so entrenched that the conventions associated with the commercial novel are almost impossible to change. On our present course (or non-course), it is entirely conceivable that a hundred years from now, MFA-approved writers, like good frotteurs, will still be cranking out a polished prose that nimbly shifts from an omniscient third person to free indirect speech and back again, telling us heart-rending stories of personal triumph that begin to blur with every other heart-rending story of personal triumph we’ve ever read.
But who cares? That’s what sells.