by James Wood
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In Wallace’s case, the language of his unidentified narration is obtrusive and sometimes hard to read. No analogous problem arose for Chekhov and Verga, because they were not faced with the saturation of language by mass media. But in America, things were different: Dreiser in Sister Carrie (published in 1900) and Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt (1923) take care to reproduce in full the advertisements and business letters and commercial flyers they want novelistically to report on.
The risky tautology inherent in the contemporary writing project has begun: in order to evoke a debased language (the debased language your character might use), you must be willing to represent that mangled language in your text, and perhaps thoroughly “debase” your own language. Pynchon, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace are to some extent Lewis’s heirs (probably in this respect only), and Wallace pushes to parodic extremes his full-immersion method: he does not flinch at narrating twenty or thirty pages in the style quoted above.8 His fiction prosecutes a courageous argument about the decomposition of language in America, and he is not afraid to decompose—and discompose—his own style in the interests of making us live through this linguistic America with him. “This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl,” as Pynchon has it in The Crying of Lot 49. Whitman calls America “the greatest poem,” but if this is the case then America may represent a mimetic danger to the writer, the bloating of one’s own poem with that rival poem, America. Auden frames the general problem well in his poem “The Novelist”: the poet can dash forward like a hussar, he writes, but the novelist must slow down, learn how to be “plain and awkward,” and must “become the whole of boredom.” In other words, the novelist’s job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring. Wallace is good at becoming the whole of boredom; a necessary achievement.
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So there is a tension basic to stories and novels: Can we reconcile the author’s perceptions and language with the character’s perception and language? If the author and character are absolutely merged, as in the passage from Wallace above, we can sometimes feel “the whole of boredom”—the author’s corrupted language just mimics an actually existing corrupted language we all know too well, and are in fact quite desperate to escape. But if author and character get too separated, as in the Updike passage, we feel the cold breath of an alienation over the text, and begin to resent the over-“literary” efforts of the stylist. The Updike is an example of aestheticism (the author gets in the way); the Wallace is an example of antiaestheticism (the character is all): but both examples are really species of the same aestheticism, which is at bottom the strenuous display of style.
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So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author’s own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character’s presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. In this sense, the novelist is a triple writer, and the contemporary novelist now feels especially the pressure of this tripleness, thanks to the omnivorous presence of the third horse of this troika, the language of the world, which has invaded our subjectivity, our intimacy, the intimacy that James thought should be the proper quarry of the novel, and which he called (in a troika of his own) “the palpable present-intimate.”9
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Another example of the novelist writing over his character occurs (briefly) in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Tommy Wilhelm, the out-of-work salesman down on his luck, neither much of an aesthete nor an intellectual, is anxiously watching the board at a Manhattan commodity exchange. Next to him, an old hand named Mr. Rappaport is smoking a cigar. “A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well.”
It is a gorgeous, musical phrase, and characteristic of both Bellow and modern fictional narrative. The fiction slows down to draw our attention to a potentially neglected surface or texture—an example of a “descriptive pause,”10 familiar to us when a novel halts its action and the author says, in effect, “Now I am going to tell you about the town of N., which was nestled in the Carpathian foothills,” or “Jerome’s house was a large dark castle, set in fifty thousand acres of rich grazing land.” But at the same time it is a detail apparently seen not by the author—or not only by the author—but by a character. And this is what Bellow wobbles on; he admits an anxiety endemic to modern narrative, and which modern narrative tends to elide. The ash is noticed, and then Bellow comments: “It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well.” Seize the Day is written in a very close third-person narration, a free indirect style that sees most of the action from Tommy’s viewpoint. Bellow seems here to imply that Tommy notices the ash, because it was beautiful, and that Tommy, also ignored by the old man, is also in some way beautiful. But the fact that Bellow tells us this is surely a concession to our implied objection: How and why would Tommy notice this ash, and notice it so well, in these fine words? To which Bellow replies, anxiously, in effect: “Well, you might have thought Tommy incapable of such finery, but he really did notice this fact of beauty; and that is because he is somewhat beautiful himself.”
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The tension between the author’s style and his or her characters’ styles becomes acute when three elements coincide: when a notable stylist is at work, like Bellow or Joyce; when that stylist also has a commitment to following the perceptions and thoughts of his or her characters (a commitment usually organized by free indirect style or its offspring, stream of consciousness); and when the stylist has a special interest in the rendering of detail.
Stylishness, free indirect style, and detail: I have described Flaubert, whose work opens up and tries to solve this tension, and who is really its founder.
Flaubert and Modern Narrative
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However you feel about Flaubert (I love him and hate him in equal measure), novelists should thank him the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors 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. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.
Take the following passage, in which Frédéric Moreau, the hero of Sentimental Education, wanders through the Latin Quarter, alive to the sights and sounds of Paris:
He sauntered idly up the Latin Quarter, usually bustling with life but now deserted, for the students had all gone home. The great walls of the colleges looked grimmer than ever, as if the silence had made them longer; all sorts of peaceful sounds could be heard, the fluttering of wings in bird-cages, the whirring of a lathe, a cobbler’s hammer; and the old-clothes men, in the middle of the street, looking hopefully but in vain at every window. At the back of the deserted cafés, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses’ workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller’s stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.
> This was published in 1869, but might have appeared in 1969; many novelists still sound essentially the same. Flaubert seems to scan the streets indifferently, like a camera. Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, what is just outside the edges of the camera frame, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate these details are—the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air.
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The reason that we don’t, at first, notice how carefully Flaubert is selecting his details is because Flaubert is working very hard to obscure this labor from us, and is keen to hide the question of who is doing all this noticing: Flaubert or Frédéric? Flaubert was explicit about this. He wanted the reader to be faced with what he called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose, the details simply amassing themselves like life. “An author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere,” he famously wrote in one of his letters, in 1852. “Art being a second nature, the creator of that nature must operate with analogous procedures: let there be felt in every atom, every aspect, a hidden, infinite impassivity. The effect on the spectator must be a kind of amazement. How did it all come about!”
To this end, Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the tables. Flaubert’s details belong to different time signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously.
The effect is lifelike—in a beautifully artificial way. Flaubert manages to suggest that these details are somehow at once important and unimportant: important because they have been noticed by him and put down on paper, and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come at us “like life.” From this flows a great deal of modern storytelling, such as war reportage. The crime writer and war reporter merely increase the extremity of this contrast between important and unimportant detail, converting it into a tension between the awful and the regular: a soldier dies while nearby a little boy goes to school.
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Different time signatures were not Flaubert’s invention, of course. There have always been characters doing something while something else is going on. In Book 22 of The Iliad, Hector’s wife is at home warming his bath though he has in fact died moments before; Auden praised Breughel, in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” for noticing that, while Icarus fell, a ship was calmly moving on through the waves, unnoticing. In the Dunkirk section of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the protagonist, a British soldier retreating through chaos and death toward Dunkirk, sees a barge going by. “Behind him, ten miles away, Dunkirk burned. Ahead, in the prow, two boys were bending over an upturned bike, mending a puncture perhaps.”
Flaubert differs a bit from those examples in the way he insists on driving together short-term and long-term occurrences. Breughel and McEwan are describing two very different things happening at the same time; but Flaubert is asserting a temporal impossibility: that the eye—his eye, or Frédéric’s eye—can witness, in one visual gulp as it were, sensations and occurrences that must be happening at different speeds and at different times. In Sentimental Education, when the 1848 revolution comes to Paris and the soldiers are firing on everyone and all is mayhem: “He ran all the way to the Quai Voltaire. An old man in his shirt sleeves was weeping at an open window, his eyes raised towards the sky. The Seine was flowing peacefully by. The sky was blue; birds were singing in the Tuileries.” Again, the one-off occurrence of the old man at the window is dropped into the longer-term occurrences, as if they all belonged together.
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From here, it is a small leap to the insistence, familiar in modern war reporting, that the awful and the regular will be noticed at the same time—by the fictional hero, and/or by the writer—and that in some way there is no important difference between the two experiences: all detail is somewhat numbing, and strikes the traumatized voyeur in the same way. Here, again, is Sentimental Education:
There was firing from every window overlooking the square; bullets whistled through the air; the fountain had been pierced, and the water, mingling with blood, spread in puddles on the ground. People slipped in the mud on clothes, shakos, and weapons; Frédéric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat who was lying face down in the gutter. Fresh groups of workers kept coming up, driving the fighters towards the guard-house. The firing became more rapid. The wine-merchants’ shops were open, and every now and then somebody would go in to smoke a pipe or drink a glass of beer, before returning to the fight. A stray dog started howling. This raised a laugh.
The moment that strikes us as decisively modern in that passage is “Frédéric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat.” First the calm, terrible anticipation (“something soft”), and then the calm, terrible validation (“it was the hand of a sergeant”), the writing refusing to become involved in the emotion of the material. Ian McEwan systematically uses the same technique in his Dunkirk section, and so does Stephen Crane—who read Sentimental Education—in The Red Badge of Courage:
He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.
This is even more “cinematic” than Flaubert (and film, of course, borrows this technique from the novel). There is the calm horror (“the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish”). There is the zoomlike action of the lens, as it gets closer and closer to the corpse. But the reader is getting closer and closer to the horror, while the prose is simultaneously moving further and further back, insisting on its anti-sentimentality. There is the modern commitment to detail itself: the protagonist seems to be noticing so much, recording everything! (“One was trundling some sort of bundle along the upper lip.” Would any of us actually see as much?) And there are the different time signatures: the corpse will be dead forever, but on his face, life goes on; the ants are busily indifferent to human mortality.1
Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur
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Flaubert can drive together his time signatures because French verb forms allow him to use the imperfect past tense to convey both discrete occurrences (“he was sweeping the road”) and recurrent occurrences (“every week he swept the road”). English is clumsier, and we have to resort to “he was doing something” or “he would do something” or “he used to do something”—“every week he would sweep the road”—to translate recurrent verbs accurately. But as soon as we do that in English, we have given the game away, and are admitting the existence of different temporalities. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust rightly saw that this use of the imperfect tense was Flaubert’s great innovation. And Flaubert founds this new style of realism on his use of the eye—the authorial eye, and the character’s eye. I said that Updike’s Ahmad, just walking along the street noticing things and thinking thoughts, was engaged in the classic post-Flaubertian novelistic activity. Flaubert’s Frédéric is a forerunner of what would later be called the flaneur—the loafer, usually a young man, who walks the streets with no great urgency, seeing, looking, reflecting. We know this type from Baudelaire,1 from the all-seeing narrator of Rilke’s autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and fr
om Walter Benjamin’s writings about Baudelaire.
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This figure is essentially a stand-in for the author, is the author’s porous scout, helplessly inundated with impressions. He goes out into the world like Noah’s dove, to bring a report back. The rise of this authorial scout is intimately connected to the rise of urbanism, to the fact that huge conglomerations of mankind throw at the writer—or the designated perceiver—large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail. Jane Austen is, essentially, a rural novelist, and London, as figured in Emma, is really just the village of Highgate. Her heroines never idly walk along, just thinking and looking: all their thought is intensely directed to the moral problem at hand. But when Wordsworth, at around the time the young Austen was writing, visits London in The Prelude, he immediately begins to sound like a flaneur—like a modern novelist:
Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls,
Advertisements of giant-size, from high
Press forward in all colour on the sight …
A travelling Cripple, by the trunk cut short.
And stumping with his arms …
The Bachelor that loves to sun himself,
The military Idler, and the Dame …
The Italian, with his Frame of Images
Upon his head; with basket at his waist
The Jew; the stately and slow-moving Turk
With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm.
Wordsworth goes on to write that if we tire of “random sights,” we can find in the crowd “all specimens of man”:
Through all the colours which the sun bestows,
And every character of form and face,
The Swede, the Russian; from the genial South,
The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote
