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Good Letters

20080908-verisimilitude-satisfaction-and-pleasure-or-what-i-look-for-in-a-novel-by-santiago-ramosAn early scene in Ingmar Bergman’s film Through A Glass Darkly places Bergman’s brooding protagonist, the post-suicidal, proud old novelist David, hunched over the galley proofs of his latest novel, slowly adding adjectives with a heavy pen.

When I first saw that scene, my thoughts turned to genre: is Bergman trying to kill the novel? How listless that pen, how plodding, insufficient, the words that David is scrawling and declaiming out loud. There’s no truth in those words; the real truth is something that David doesn’t want to face, and that the film will expose, that perhaps only the film could expose.

But what can fiction see that film can’t? So many contemporary novelists have fretted over this question. Some, like Jonathan Franzen in his famous Harper’s essay, argue for fiction above film; others, like Michel Houellebecq and Norman Mailer, dabble in film themselves, with mixed results. No one should blame their succumbing to temptation. The camera is awesome: a direct view of nature and of human action, a privileged pipeline to reality, needless of the mediation of human words.

But as James Wood argues in his elegant new book, How Fiction Works, it is precisely this mediation that allows fiction its own unique angle on reality—an interest I share and have posted about before here and here.

Wood’s book deals with many different aspects of fiction, but these aspects find a unity in a common concern: “If the book has a larger argument, it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.” Holding them together means holding all the themes of the book together: “the chapters of the book have a way of collapsing into one another, because each is motivated by the same aesthetic…. I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.”

In two chapters—“Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur” and “Detail”—Wood directly engages with the claim that some novelists make of being an indifferent camera, recording detail accurately and reporting it to the reader. Wood concedes the existence of this conceit, but notes that the difference between the camera and the novel lies in who is choosing the details, in that those details are sometimes actions that occur at different tempos (a woman sweeping, a motorbike whizzing by, an old man sipping some tea while reading the paper, etc.). “The artifice lies in the selection of detail,” says Wood. We are “like helpless cameras,” but “our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects.” So a good fiction writer knows how to see better than a camera, and can select and expose in a unique way, foisting his subjective curiosity onto an objective exposition.

More powerfully, perhaps, the novelist can choose to exclude detail. Commenting on this line in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “and Mr. Casey had told him that he had got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Queen Victoria,” Wood claims that “the source of the comedy and the liveliness here lies in a nice paradox of expectation and its denial: the sentence has insufficient detail in one area and overspecific in another.”

What we crave is specificity, a “concrete allusion,” and we crave it because it is, in a way, satisfying: “Is specificity itself satisfying? I think it is, and we expect such a satisfaction from literature.” This satisfaction is a sign of verisimilitude; the writer has told us something that rings true. It is also possibly related to the pleasure that Aquinas speaks of in his definition of beauty: id quom visum placet, “That which pleases merely by being seen.”

The naming if detail, withholding it, implying it, exposing it: these literary acts have epistemological weight. And though it may be true that only a filmmaker could expose and puncture the cold heart of David the novelist, there are other aspects of David’s life that could only be explored by a novelist. Wood explores many other aspects of fiction writing, but what makes his book worth reading is his concern for what these aspects are ultimately for.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Santiago Ramos

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