by James Wood
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How would we know when a detail seems really true? What guides us? The medieval theologian Duns Scotus gave the name “thisness” (haecceitas) to individuating form. The idea was adapted by Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry and prose is full of thisness: the “lovely behaviour” of “silk-sack clouds” (“Hurrahing in Harvest”); or “the glassy peartree” whose leaves “brush / The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush / With richness…” (“Spring”).
Thisness is a good place to start.
By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion. Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, recalls a man dying at his feet, with a spear in his stomach, and how “my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down … my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under the wheel.”4 The man lies on his back, looking up at Marlow anxiously, gripping the spear in his stomach as if it were “something precious, with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from him.” By thisness, I mean the kind of exact palpabilities that Pushkin squeezes into the fourteen-line stanzas of Eugene Onegin: Eugene’s country estate, for instance, which has not been touched for years, where the unopened cupboards contain fruit liqueurs, “a book of household calculations,” and an obsolete “calendar for 1808,” and where the billiards table is equipped with a “blunt cue.”
By thisness, I mean the precise brand of greenness—“Kendal green”—that Falstaff swears, in Henry IV, Part 1, clothed the men who attacked him: “three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green came at my back and let drive at me.” There is something wonderfully absurd about “Kendal green”: it sounds as if the ambushing “knaves” did not just jump out from behind bushes, but were somehow dressed as bushes! And Falstaff is lying. He saw no men dressed in Kendal green; it was too dark. The comedy of the specificity—already perhaps inherent in the very name—is doubled because it is a fiction posing as a specificity; and Hal, aware of this, presses Falstaff, reiterating the ridiculous precision: “Why, how couldst thou know these men in Kendal green, when it was so dark thou couldst not see thy hand?”
By thisness, I mean the moment when Emma Bovary fondles the satin slippers she danced in weeks before at the great ball at La Vaubyessard, “the soles of which were yellowed with the wax from the dance floor.” By thisness, I mean the cow manure that Ajax slips in while racing at the grand funeral games, in Book 23 of The Iliad (thisness is often used to puncture ceremonies like funerals and dinners that are designed precisely to euphemize thisness: what Tolstoy calls making a bad smell in the drawing room).5 By thisness, I mean the single “cherry-coloured twist” that the tailor of Gloucester, in Beatrix Potter’s tale of the same name, has not yet sewn. (Reading this to my daughter recently, for the first time in thirty-five years, I was instantly returned, by the talismanic activity of that “cherry-coloured twist,” to a memory of my mother reading it to me. Beatrix Potter means the red satin that must be sewn around the eyelet of a buttonhole on a fancy coat. But perhaps the phrase was so magical to me then because it sounded so sweet: like a licorice or sherbet twist—a word that was still used, then, by confectioners.)
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Because thisness is palpability, it will tend toward substance—cow shit, red silk, the wax of a ballroom floor, a calendar for 1808, blood in a boot. But it can be a mere name or an anecdote; palpability can be represented in the form of an anecdote or a piquant fact. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus sees that Mr. Casey’s fingers can’t be straightened out, “and Mr. Casey had told him that he had got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Queen Victoria.” Why is this detail, about making a birthday present for Queen Victoria, so alive? We begin with the comic specificity, the concrete allusion: if Joyce had written only “and Mr. Casey got cramped fingers making a birthday present,” the detail would obviously be relatively flat, relatively vague. If he had written: “and he got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Aunt Mary,” the details would be livelier, but why? Is specificity in itself satisfying? I think it is, and we expect such satisfaction from literature. We want names and numbers.6 And the source of the comedy and liveliness here lies in a nice paradox of expectation and its denial: the sentence has insufficient detail in one area and overspecific detail in another. It is clearly inadequate to claim that Mr. Casey got his permanently cramped fingers from making “a birthday present”: What titanic operation could possibly have crippled him like this? So our hunger for specificity is excited by this comic vagueness; and then Joyce deliberately feeds us too much specificity with the detail about the recipient. It is gratifying to have been given so much fact, but the fact about Queen Victoria, posing as specific, is really very mysterious, and flagrantly fails to answer the basic question: What was the present? (There is a deeper political secret: making a present for Queen Victoria means that Mr. Casey, a radical, has been in prison.) Joyce’s sentence is thus made up of two mysterious details—the gift and its recipient—with the latter posing as the answer to the former mystery. The comedy is all to do with our desire for thisness in detail, and Joyce’s determination to merely pretend to satisfy it. Queen Victoria, like Falstaff’s fictional Kendal green, is represented as the detail that promises to illuminate the surrounding gloom; or, we might say, the fact that promises to ground the fiction. It does ground the fiction, in one sense: our attention is surely drawn to the concretion. But in another sense, it is funny because it either is (like Kendal green) or seems (Queen Victoria) more fictional than the surrounding fiction.
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I confess to an ambivalence about detail in fiction. I relish it, consume it, ponder it. Hardly a day goes by in which I don’t remind myself of Bellow’s description of Mr. Rappaport’s cigar: “the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency.” But I choke on too much detail, and find that a distinctively post-Flaubertian tradition fetishizes it: the overaesthetic 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. It is hard to recall for how long fictional narrative was in thrall to neoclassical ideals, which favored the formulaic and the imitative rather than the individual and the original.7 Of course, original and individual detail can never be suppressed: Pope and Defoe and even Fielding are full of what Blake called the “minute particulars.” But it is impossible to imagine a novelist in 1770 saying what Flaubert said to Maupassant in 1870: “There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.”8 J. M. Coetzee, in his novel Elizabeth Costello, has this to say about Defoe:
The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up upon the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. “I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them,” says he, “except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.” Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.
Coetzee’s phrase “moderate realism” describes a way of writing in which the kind of detail we are directed to does not yet have the kind of extravagant commitment to noticing and renoticing, to novelty and strangeness, characteristic of modern novelists—an eighteenth-century regime, in which the cult of “detail” has not yet really been established.
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p; You can read Don Quixote or Tom Jones or Austen’s novels and find very little of the detail Flaubert recommends. Austen gives us none of the visual furniture we find in Balzac or Joyce, and hardly ever stops to describe even a character’s face. Clothes, climates, interiors, all are elegantly compressed and thinned. Minor characters in Cervantes, Fielding, and Austen are theatrical, often formulaic, and are barely noticed, in a visual sense. Fielding quite happily describes two different characters in Joseph Andrews as having “Roman noses.”
But for Flaubert, for Dickens, and for hundreds of novelists after them, the minor character is a delicious kind of stylistic challenge: How to make us see him, how to animate him, how to dab him with a little gloss? (Like Dora’s cousin in David Copperfield, who is “in the Life-Guards, with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else.”) Here is Flaubert’s sidelong glance at a minor character at a ball, never seen again, in Madame Bovary:
There, at the top of the table, alone among all these women, stooped over his ample plateful, with his napkin tied around his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, drops of gravy dribbling from his lips. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a little pigtail tied up with a black ribbon. This was the Marquis’s father-in-law, the old Duc de Laverdière, once the favourite of the Comte d’Artois … and he, so they said, had been the lover of Marie Antoinette, in between Monsieurs de Coigny and de Lauzun. He had led a tumultuous life of debauchery and dueling, of wagers made and women abducted, had squandered his fortune and terrified his whole family.
As so often, the Flaubertian legacy is a mixed blessing. Again, there is the tiresome burden of “chosenness” we feel around Flaubert’s details, and the implication of that chosenness for the novelist’s characters—our sense that the selection of detail has become a poet’s obsessive excruciation rather than a novelist’s easy joy. (The flaneur—the hero who is both a writer and not a writer—solves this problem, or attempts to. But in the example above, Flaubert has no adequate surrogate, because his surrogate is Emma: so in effect this is the novelist, pure and simple, watching.) Here is Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, being excruciatingly exact about a blind man he has seen in the street: “I had undertaken the task of imagining him, and was sweating from the effort … I understood that nothing about him was insignificant … his hat, an old, high-crowned, stiff felt hat, which he wore the way all blind men wear their hats: without any relation to the lines of the face, without the possibility of adding this feature to themselves and forming a new external unity: but merely as an arbitrary, extraneous object.” Impossible to imagine a writer before Flaubert indulging in these theatrics (“was sweating from the effort”)! What Rilke says about the blind man reads like a projection of his own sweaty literary anxieties onto the man: when no literary detail is insignificant, then perhaps each will indeed fail to “form a new external unity” and will be “merely” an “arbitrary, extraneous object.”
In Flaubert and his successors we have the sense that the ideal of writing is a procession of strung details, a necklace of noticings, and that this is sometimes an obstruction to seeing, not an aid.
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So during the nineteenth century, the novel became more painterly. In La Peau de chagrin, Balzac describes a tablecloth “white as a layer of newly fallen snow, upon which the place-settings rise symmetrically, crowned with blond rolls.” Cézanne said that all through his youth he “wanted to paint that, that tablecloth of new snow.”9 Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself. Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye. (There is so much detail in life that is not purely visual.) The Nabokov who writes, “an elderly flower girl, with carbon eyebrows and a painted smile, nimbly slipped the plump torus of a carnation into the buttonhole of an intercepted stroller whose left jowl accentuated its royal fold as he glanced down sideways at the coy insertion of the flower,” becomes the Updike who notices the rain on a window thus: “Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain.”10 It is significant that Updike likens the rainy window to a crossword puzzle: both these writers, in this mode, sound as if they are setting us a puzzle.
Bellow notices superbly; but Nabokov wants to tell us how important it is to notice. Nabokov’s fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing, hence on behalf of itself. There are beauties that are not visual at all, and Nabokov has poorish eyes for those. How else to explain his dismissals of Mann, Camus, Faulkner, Stendhal, James? He judges them, essentially, for not being stylish enough, and for not being visually alert enough. The battle line emerges clearly in one of his exchanges with the critic Edmund Wilson, who had been trying to get Nabokov to read Henry James. At last, Nabokov cast his eye over The Aspern Papers, but reported back to Wilson that James was sloppy with detail. When James describes the lit end of a cigar, seen from outside a window, he calls it a “red tip.” But cigars don’t have tips, says Nabokov. James wasn’t looking hard enough. He goes on to compare James’s writing to “the weak blond prose” of Turgenev.11
A cigar, again! Here are two different approaches to the creation of detail. James, I think, would reply that first of all, cigars do have tips, and second, that there is no need, every time one describes a cigar, to do a Bellovian or Nabokovian job on it. That James was incapable of doing such a job—the implication of Nabokov’s complaint—is easily disproved. But James is certainly not a Nabokovian writer; his notion of what constitutes a detail is more various, more impalpable, and finally more metaphysical than Nabokov’s. James would probably argue that while we should indeed try to be the kind of writer on whom nothing is lost, we have no need to be the kind of writer on whom everything is found.
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There is a conventional modern fondness for quiet but “telling” detail: “The detective noticed that Carla’s hairband was surprisingly dirty.” If there is such a thing as a telling detail, then there must be such a thing as an untelling detail, no? A better distinction might be between what I would call “off-duty” and “on-duty” detail; the off-duty detail is part of the standing army of life, as it were—it is always ready to be activated. Literature is full of such off-duty detail (James’s red cigar tip would be an example).
But maybe “off-duty” and “on-duty” just rephrases the problem? Isn’t off-duty detail essentially detail that is not as telling as its on-duty comrades? Nineteenth-century realism, from Balzac on, creates such an abundance of detail that the modern reader has come to expect of narrative that it will always contain a certain superfluity, a built-in redundancy, that it will carry more detail than it needs. In other words, fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail. Suppose I were to describe a man’s head like this: “He had very red skin, and his eyes were bloodshot; his brow looked angry. There was a small mole on his upper lip.” The red skin and bloodshot eyes and angry skin tell us, perhaps, something about the man’s disposition, but the mole seems “irrelevant.” It’s just “there”; it is reality, it is just “how he looked.”
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But is this layer of gratuitous detail actually like life or just a trick? In his essay “The Reality Effect,”12 Roland Barthes essentially argues that “irrelevant” detail is a code we no longer notice, and one that has little to do with how life really is. He discusses a passage by the historian Jules Michelet, in which Michelet is describing the last hours of Charlotte Corday in prison. An artist visits her and paints her portrait, and then “after an hour and a half, there was a gentle knock at a little door behind her.” Then Barthes turns to Flaubert’s description of Mme Aubain’s room in A Simple Heart: “Eight mahogany chairs were lined up against the white-painted wainscoting, and under the barometer stood an old piano loaded with a pyrami
d of boxes and cartons.” The piano, Barthes argues, is there to suggest bourgeois status, the boxes and cartons perhaps to suggest disorder. But why is the barometer there? The barometer denotes nothing; it is an object “neither incongruous nor significant”; it is apparently “irrelevant.” Its business is to denote reality, it 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.”)
An object like the barometer, Barthes continues, is supposed to denote the real, but in fact all it does is signify it. In the Michelet passage, the little “filler” of the knock at the door is the kind of thing that this writing “puts in” to create the realistic “effect” of time passing. Realism in general, it is implied, is just such a business of false denotation. The barometer is interchangeable with a hundred other items; realism is an artificial tissue of mere arbitrary signs. Realism offers the appearance of reality but is in fact utterly fake—what Barthes calls “the referential illusion.”
In Mythologies, Barthes wittily pointed out that those laurel-leaf haircuts worn by the actors in Hollywood’s “Roman” films signify “Romanness” in the way that Flaubert’s barometer signifies “realness.” In neither case is anything actually real being denoted. These are mere stylistic conventions, in the way that flares or the miniskirt have meaning only as part of a system of signification established by the fashion industry itself. The codes of fashion are entirely arbitrary. As far as he was concerned, literature was like fashion, because both systems make one read the signifying of things rather than their meaning.13
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Isn’t Barthes too quick to decide what is relevant and irrelevant detail? Why is the barometer irrelevant? If the barometer exists only to arbitrarily proclaim the real, why don’t the piano and boxes, too? As A. D. Nuttall puts it in A New Mimesis, the barometer doesn’t say “I am the real” so much as “Am I not just the sort of thing you would find in such a house?” It is neither incongruous nor especially significant, precisely because it is dully typical. There are plenty of houses that still have such barometers, and those barometers indeed tell us something about the kinds of houses they are in: middle class rather than upper class; a certain kind of conventionality; a musty devotion, perhaps, to second-rate heirlooms; and the barometer is never right, is it? What does this tell us? In Britain, of course, they are especially comical tools, since the weather is always the same: gray, a bit of rain. You would never need a barometer. In fact, barometers, you might say, are very good barometers of a certain middling status: barometers are very good barometers of themselves! (That’s how they work, then.)
