by James Wood
America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.
Notice how Wordsworth, like Flaubert, adjusts the lens of his optic as he pleases: we have several lines of generalized cataloging (the Swede, the Russian, the American, etc.), but we end with a sudden plucking of a single color contrast: “And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.” The writer zooms in and out at will, but these details, despite their differences in focus and intensity, are pushed at us, as if by the croupier’s stick, in one single heap.
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Wordsworth is looking himself at these aspects of London. He is being a poet, writing about himself. The novelist wants to record details like this, too, but it is harder to act like a lyric poet in the novel, because you have to write through other people, and then we are returned to our basic novelistic tension: Is it the novelist who is noticing these things or the fictional character? In that first passage from Sentimental Education, is Flaubert doing a bit of nice Parisian scene-setting, with the reader assuming that Frédéric is seeing perhaps a few of the details in the paragraph while Flaubert sees all of them in his mind’s eye; or is the entire passage essentially written in loose free indirect style, with the assumption that Frédéric notices everything Flaubert draws our attention to—the unopened newspapers, the women yawning, and so on? Flaubert tries hard to make this question unnecessary, to so confuse author and flaneur that the reader unconsciously raises Frédéric up to the stylistic level of Flaubert: both must be pretty good, we decide, at noticing things, and we are content to leave it there.
Flaubert needs to do this because he is at once a realist and a stylist, a reporter and a poet manqué. The realist wants to record a great deal, to do a Balzacian number on Paris. But the stylist is not content with Balzacian jumble and verve; he wants to discipline this welter of detail, to turn it into immaculate sentences and images: Flaubert’s letters speak of the effort of trying to turn prose into poetry.2 We nowadays more or less assume, so strong is the post-Flaubertian inflection of our era, that a fancy stylist must sometimes write over his or her characters (as in the example from Updike and the one from Wallace); or that they may appoint a surrogate: Humbert Humbert famously announces that he has a fancy prose style, as a way, surely, of explaining his creator’s overdeveloped prose; Bellow likes to inform us that his characters are “first-class noticers.”
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By the time the Flaubertian innovations have reached a novelist like Christopher Isherwood, writing in the 1930s, they have been polished to high technical shine. Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939, has a famous early statement: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” Isherwood makes good on his claim in a scene-setting passage like this, from the opening of the chapter entitled “The Nowaks”:
The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was a big stone archway, a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills which advertised auctions or crimes. It was a deep shabby cobbled street, littered with sprawling children in tears. Youths in woollen sweaters circled waveringly across it on racing bikes and whooped at girls passing with milk-jugs. The pavement was chalk-marked for the hopping game called Heaven and Earth. At the end of it, like a tall, dangerously sharp, red instrument, stood a church.
Isherwood asserts even more flagrantly than Flaubert a randomness of detail, while trying even harder than Flaubert to disguise that randomness: this is exactly the formalization you would expect of a literary style, once radical seventy years ago, that is now decomposing a bit into a familiar way of ordering reality on the page—a set of handy rules, in effect. Posing as a camera who simply records, Isherwood seems merely to turn a wide bland gaze to the Wassertorstrasse: there, he says, is an archway, a street littered with children, some youths on bikes and girls with milk-jugs. Just a quick look. But, like Flaubert, only much more assertively, Isherwood insists on slowing down dynamic activity, and freezing habitual occurrence. The street may well be littered with children, but they cannot all be “in tears” all the time. Likewise the cycling youths and the walking milk girls, who are presented as part of the habitual furniture of the place. On the other hand, the tattered bills and the ground marked with the children’s game are plucked by the author from their quiescence, and made temporally noisy: they flash at us, suddenly, but they belong to a different time signature than the children and youths.
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The more one looks at this rather wonderful piece of writing, the less it seems “a slice of life,” or a camera’s easy swipe, than a very careful ballet. The passage begins with an entrance: the entrance of the chapter. The reference to hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses introduces a note of menace, which is completed by the sardonic reference to commercial bills advertising “auctions or crimes”: this may be commerce, but it is uncomfortably close to the political graffiti—after all, isn’t auction and crime what politicians, especially the kind involved in communist or fascist activities, do? They sell us things and commit crimes. The Nazi “crosses” nicely link us to the children’s game called Heaven and Earth, and to the church, except that, threateningly enough, everything is inverted: the church no longer looks like a church but like a red instrument (a pen, a knife, an instrument of torture, the “red” the color of both blood and radical politics), while the “cross” has been taken over by the Nazis. Given this inversion, we understand why Isherwood wants to top and tail this paragraph with the Nazi crosses at the start and the church at the end: each changes place in the course of a few lines.
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So the narrator who promised that he was a mere camera, quite passive, recording, not thinking, is selling us a falsehood? Only in the sense that Robinson Crusoe’s claim to be telling a true story is a falsehood: the reader is happy enough to efface the labor of the writer in order to believe two further fictions: that the narrator was somehow “really there” (and in fact Isherwood was living in Berlin in the 1930s), and that the narrator is not really a writer. Or rather, what Flaubert’s flaneur tradition tries to establish is that the narrator (or designated authorial scout) is at once a kind of writer and not really a writer. A writer by temperament but not by trade. A writer because he notices so much, so well; not really a writer because he is not expending any labor to put it down on the page, and after all is really noticing no more than you and I would see.
This solution to the tension between the style of the author and the style of the character presents a paradox. It announces, in effect: “We moderns have all become writers, and all have highly sophisticated eyes for detail; but life is not actually as ‘literary’ as this implies, because we don’t have to worry too much about how such detail gets onto the page.” The tension between the style of the author and the style of the character disappears because literary style itself is made to disappear: and literary style is made to disappear through literary means.
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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. Suppose I am walking down a street. I am aware of many noises, much activity, a police siren, a building being demolished, the scrape of a shop door. Different faces and bodies stream past me. And as I pass a café, I catch the eye of a woman, who is sitting alone. She looks at me, I at her. A moment of pointless, vaguely erotic urban connection, but the face reminds me of someone I once knew, a girl with just the same kind of dark hair, and sets a train of thought going. I walk on, but that particular face in the café glows in my memory, is held there, and is being temporally preserved, while around me noise and activities are not being similarly preserved—are entering and leaving my consciousnes
s. The face, you could say, is playing at 4/4, while the rest of the city is humming along more quickly at 6/8.
The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented.
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So realism is at once true and artificial, pulled between life and art, the capacious and the selective, the camera and the painting. And see how vital these tensions still are, and what an alert contemporary writer can do with them, in Teju Cole’s novel Open City. Cole’s narrator, Julius, a young American intellectual, half-German and half-Nigerian by birth, wanders around New York City gathering impressions, hearing stories, and floating his ideas. Julius is a twenty-first-century flaneur, who has read Roland Barthes and Edward Said and Kwame Anthony Appiah—a good noticer and reader, an exceptional listener. Alert to his own mixed origins, he seeks out people and stories that are neglected or politically occluded: he talks to a Liberian refugee, a Haitian shoeshiner, an angry Moroccan intellectual. He is compassionate, empathetic, learned, liberal; almost our ideal sense of ourselves. But he also narrates his own story, and the novel gradually reveals him to be an unreliable narrator. We begin to see that he isn’t as empathetic as he thinks he is; he congratulates himself on the achievement of his liberalism, on the fineness of his noticing eye, while neglecting inconvenient or even grievous actions in his own life. Julius listens well to the story of a Liberian refugee, but he’s rude to his African American cab driver; he seeks out a Moroccan intellectual in Belgium, but is complacently unaware that his neighbor’s wife in New York died a few months ago.
Cole activates the tension in flaneurial realism between saturation and selection, and transfers it to the moral and political sphere. In the aesthetic or literary realm, the flaneurial tension is between what you helplessly record and what you choose to represent (between the cinematic and the painterly). In the moral or political realm, that tension manifests itself thus: what should we notice, and how much do we actually forget or neglect? And what do we then do about what we notice? It’s all very well to listen to the Liberian refugee, but if I do nothing to help him or change his political circumstances, I am perhaps just a well-read flaneur, a morally idle Flaubertian. Maybe life, morally speaking, is just such a process of hapless noticing and neglect? And as readers of Cole’s book, will we truly notice Julius’s moral and political lapses, or will we neglect to see them? Will we read Open City, close it, and then do nothing about our own careless habits of witness? Will we become mere flaneurs of the text itself?
Detail
“But it’s not possible any other way: only in the details can we understand the essential, as books and life have taught me. One needs to know every detail, since one can never be sure which of them is important, and which word shines out from behind things…”1
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In 1985, the mountaineer Joe Simpson, twenty-one thousand feet up in the Andes, fell off an ice ledge and broke his leg. Dangling uselessly from his ropes, he was left for dead by his climbing partner. Into his head, unbidden, came the Boney M. song “Brown Girl in the Ring.” He had never liked the song, and was infuriated at the thought of dying to this particular soundtrack.
In literature, as in life, death is often attended by apparent irrelevance, from Falstaff babbling of green fields, to Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré noticing architectural details just before taking his life (in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes), to Prince Andrew on his deathbed dreaming of a trivial conversation in War and Peace, to Joachim in The Magic Mountain moving his arm along the blanket “as if he were collecting or gathering something.” Proust implies that such irrelevance will always attend our deaths, because we are never prepared for them; we never think of our death as likely to occur “this very afternoon.” Instead:
One insists on one’s daily outing so that in a month’s time one will have had the necessary ration of fresh air; one has hesitated over which coat to take, which cabman to call; one is in the cab, the whole day lies before one, short because one must be back home early, as a friend is coming to see one; one hopes that it will be as fine again tomorrow; and one has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one on another plane, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time, more or less at the moment when the carriage reaches the Champs-Elysées.2
An example that comes close to Joe Simpson’s experience occurs at the end of Chekhov’s story “Ward 6.” The doctor, Ragin, is dying: “A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, which he had read about the day before, ran past him; then a peasant woman reached out to him with a certified letter … Mikhail Averyanych said something. Then everything vanished and Andrei Yefimych lost consciousness forever.” The peasant woman with the certified letter is a bit too “literary” (the grim reaper’s summons, etc.); but that herd of deer!
How lovely the simplicity with which Chekhov, deep inside his character’s mind, does not say, “He thought of the deer he had been reading about” or even “He saw in his mind the deer he had been reading about,” but just calmly asserts that the deer “ran past him.”
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On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the river Ouse. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, was obsessively punctilious, and had kept a journal every day of his adult life, in which he recorded daily menus and car mileage. Apparently, nothing was different on the day his wife committed suicide: he entered the mileage for his car. But on this day the paper is obscured by a smudge, writes his biographer, Victoria Glendinning, “a brownish-yellow stain which has been rubbed or wiped. It could be tea or coffee or tears. The smudge is unique in all his years of neat diary-keeping.”
The fictional detail closest in spirit to Leonard Woolf’s smudged journal describes the last hours of Thomas Buddenbrooks. Thomas’s sister, Frau Permaneder, has been keeping a deathbed vigil. Passionate but stoical, she gives way at one moment to her grief, and sings a prayer: “Come, Lord, receive his failing breath.” But she has forgotten that she does not know the whole verse, falters, “and had to make up for her abrupt end by the increased dignity of her manner.” Everyone is embarrassed. Then Thomas dies and Frau Permaneder flings herself to the ground and weeps bitterly. A second later, control has been reasserted: “Her face still streamed with tears, but she was soothed and comforted and entirely herself as she rose to her feet and began straightway to occupy her mind with the announcement of the death—an enormous number of elegant cards, which must be ordered at once.” Life returns to busyness and routine after the tearing of death. A commonplace. But the selection of that adjective “elegant” is subtle; the bourgeois order stirs to life with its “elegant” cards, and Mann suggests that this class retains faith in the solidity and grace of objects, clings to them indeed.
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In 1960, during the presidential campaign, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy fought the first-ever televised debate. It is often said that the sweating Nixon “lost” because he had a five o’clock shadow, and looked sinister.
People thought they knew what Richard Nixon looked like, until he was placed alongside the fairer Kennedy, and the television lights blazed. Then he looked different. Likewise, the married Anna Karenina meets Vronsky on the night train from Moscow to Petersburg. By morning, something important has changed, but is as yet not properly acknowledged by her. To evoke this, Tolstoy has Anna notice her husband, Karenin, in a new light. Karenin has come to meet Anna at the station, and the first thing she thinks is: “Oh, mercy! Why have his ears become like that?” Her husband looks cold and imposing, but above all it is the ears that suddenly seem strange—“his ears whose cartilages propped up the brim of his round hat of black felt.”
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Boney M., the single smudge, Nixon’s shadow: in life
as in literature, we navigate via the stars of detail. We use detail to focus, to fix an impression, to recall. We snag on it. In Isaac Babel’s story “My First Fee,” a teenage boy is telling a prostitute a tall tale. She is bored and skeptical, until he says, fancifully, that he took “bronze promissory notes” to a woman. Suddenly, she is hooked.
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Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice—to notice the way my mother, say, often wipes her lips just before kissing me; the drilling sound of a London cab when its diesel engine is flabbily idling; the way old leather jackets have white lines in them like the striations of fat in pieces of meat; the way fresh snow “creaks” underfoot; the way a baby’s arms are so fat that they seem tied with string (the others are mine but that last example is from Tolstoy.).3
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This tutoring is dialectical. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things that now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.
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Writers can be like those twenty-year-olds, too—stuck at different floors of visual talent. As in all departments of aesthetics, there are levels of success in noticing. Some writers are modestly endowed noticers, others are stupendously observant. And there are plenty of moments in fiction when a writer seems to hold back, keeping a power in reserve: an ordinary observation is followed by a remarkable detail, a spectacular enrichment of observation, as if the writer had been, previously, just warming up, with the prose now suddenly opening like a daylily.