The Devil Is in the Details

In paragraph 49 of his How Fiction Works, James Wood gives us a peek inside his skull: "I confess to an ambivalence about detail in fiction. I relish it, consume it, ponder it. ...But I choke on too much detail, and find that a distinctively post-Flaubertian tradition fetishes it: the over-aesthetic appreciation of detail seems to raise, in a slightly different form, that tension between author and character we have already explored. If the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style, it can no less be told as the rise of detail."

We are now reaching the soul of his book. Wood is beginning to distinguish himself from two giants of contemporary criticism: Roland Barthes and William Gass.

Of detail, there can be too much or too little, according to Wood; but what it must never do is explain its presence. Never apologize, never explain. Never comment. Let the detail itself illuminate the character, even if it is superfluous. These gratuitous bits are "reality effects" (Barthes's term for the illusion of reality fiction delivers). Wood agrees, but only up to a metaphysical point: "fictional reality is indeed made up of such 'effects', but realism can be an effect and still be true. It is only Barthes's sensitive, murderous hostility to realism that insists on this false division." Details are more than mere effects, more than the furniture of the narrative. They somehow give us the truth.

William Gass, another detail-oriented realism-murdering critic, takes the hit of over-aestheticization in his essay "The Test of Time," quoting from Thoreau:

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. (Walden, chapter 9, "The Ponds")

We cannot say with certainty what will live, and survival, by itself is no guarantee of quality; but I think we can say something about what is deserving. Thoreau's two unsimple sentences put me out on that pond, in prose as clear as its water is. ... There's no moment too trivial, too sad, too vulgar, too rinky-dink to be unworthy of such recollection, for even a wasted bit of life is priceless when composed properly or hymned aright...

Gass is saying that it is not the 'what' of fiction, but the 'how' that allows the work to stand the test of time. For Wood, it is not so much the 'how' as the "what and only the what' and the 'how much'.

De gustibus non est disputandum

James Wood ends the third chapter of How Fiction Works with this observation: "Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time-signatures. ...The artifice lies in the selection of detail."

You've gotta' love that 'tattoo of randomness.'

R.I.P. Alain Robbe-Grillet

We take a break from our reading of Wood's book to note the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French novelist who had some things to say pertinent to our discussion here. Below are quotes from his essay 'From Realism to Reality' in For A New Novel:

All writers believe they are realists. ... Realism is not a theory, defined without ambiguity, which would permit us to counter certain writers by certain others; it is, on the contrary, a flag under which the enormous majority—if not all—of today's novelists enlist. And no doubt we must believe them all, on this point. It is the real world which interests them; each one attempts as best as can to create "the real." ... Realism is the ideology which each brandishes against his neighbor, the quality which each believes he possesses for himself alone

...the novel is not a tool at all. It is not conceived with a view to a task defined in advance. It does not serve to set forth, to translate things existing before it, outside it. It does not express, it explores, and what it explores is itself.

Realism [according to Western academic criticism]...merely requires from the novel that it respect the truth. The author's qualities would be, chiefly, perspicacity in observation and the constant concern for plain speaking.

The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation.

[As a novelist] I do not transcribe, I construct. This had been even the old ambition of Flaubert: to make something out of nothing, something that would stand alone, without having to lean on anything external to the work; today this is the ambition of the novel as a whole.

In this new realism, it is therefore no longer verisimilitude that is at issue. The little detail which "rings true" no longer holds the attention of the novelist, in the spectacle of the world or in literature; what strikes him—and what we recognize after many avatars in his writings—is more likely, on the contrary, the little detail that rings false.

Spongeworthy!

We continue blogging our reading of James Wood's How Fiction Works. Today we will be looking at the third chapter, "Flaubert and the Rise of the Flâneur." This is Wood's second chapter concerning Flaubert. In Chapter Two, he pointed out Flaubert's use of "different time signatures" to present details in a realistic, almost cinematic manner; there is a sort of temporal foreshortening in modern writing wherein short-term occurrences sit side-by-side with long-term or even eternal occurrences.

In this chapter, he cites the invention of the flâneur as a sort of "porous scout" for the author, a walking camera (or sponge) whose perceptions and impressions control the narrative. This combines the idea of the close third person POV with the modernist attention to detail; we only see what the character sees and we only see it the way s/he does.

Again, there is nothing controversial here: writers are always chastening their workshop fellows for using description as mere decor, or as travelogue. Description must characterize, they say, or perform some double function—more, say, than mere mood setting. When we see the streets of London through our hero's eyes, we are given privileged insight into his state of mind. This fiction does better even than, many would claim, film.

Flo Bear

"Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him." So James Wood begins the second chapter of How Fiction Works. This seems non-controversial.

"We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible." Wood at 32.

Ah, the protagonist of this study strides upon the stage. Flaubert. We are either of him or in contradistinction to him. The telling detail and the essential gesture, the cool cinematic eye, the tale that tells itself: however romantic they feel in Flaubert (for whom the act of writing is a heroic act of self-sacrifice, an Atlas shrugging off a world, if you will), these are the 19th Century precipitants of the so-called 'death of the author.' The withdrawing valet becomes the absent god. T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Monroe Beardsley, and the New Critics, generally, warned us about resorting to biography and authorial intentions in our attempts to understand texts—they understood the potential authoritarian implications. Barthes merely drove the point home.

Yet, nowadays we live in a world of James Frey and JT LeRoy. A world of Oprah and the ascendancy of the memoir. Post-modern identities. Authenticity. Confession. The cult of CELEBRITY. Personal struggles illuminate texts, indeed imbue them with meaning. Are we, then, witnessing the re-birth of the author (what's the correct word here? resurrection? reincarnation?)? Is AUTHOR-ity once again on the rise?

Let's turn our attention back to the work, Wood seems to be telling us. Let's focus in on those luscious telling details. He hasn't yet (on my reading) explicitly staked out a position on this 'death of the author' vs. the 'cult of celebrity' brouhaha; though, with his emphasis on textual detail and stylistic modernism, it feels like he is leaning for the former. This is, in any case, orthogonal to his real subject in this book: realism. And I'm pretty sure we'll have a bone or two to pick with his uses of the words 'truth' and 'reality' with regard to fiction.