Writing at scale
An article a few months ago, in a popular magazine of political and cultural affairs I will not name for fear of losing friends, described how students of literature at an American university were unable to make head or tail of a passage of Dickens. The example given was the opening of Bleak House, which begins, ‘London. Michaelmas term lately over…’ Stirring, cinematic, rendered in a voice which combines sweeping, prophetic repetition with the homely idiom of a raconteur, this is wonderful prose, and hardly difficult, although it does give one something of a head-start to have lived through some Michaelmas terms in one’s time…
My dismay at the limitations of Modern Man’s reading comprehension was redoubled when I was unable to understand a passage of Dickens, myself. I had become the object of my own smug disapproval. The wicked are caught in their own snare, as the Proverbs say. Towards the beginning of Our Mutual Friend, the great man’s last completed novel, the hapless Twemlow is compared to a dining table, and no matter how many times I read the passage I couldn’t quite make sense of whether Dickens meant to talk about a real table, or a dinner guest who somehow resembled a table. If the former, it seemed strange that this table should go on to emerge as a distinctly human character. If the latter, the metaphor seemed totally unenlightening, as if calibrated to confuse.
I admit to having been a bit slow on the uptake: in retrospect, the latter interpretation is obviously the correct one. Nonetheless I think something of my confusion was intended by Dickens. There is a strain throughout the book of furniture that seems almost alive, while human actions are often strangely mechanical, particularly when motivated (as in this book they so often are) by mercenary considerations. The plot culminates in an especially disagreeable, and especially mercenary, character being thrown away like a bag of rubbish. I intend to write more about this, but I can’t currently find my copy of the book in which I had highlighted all the interesting mentions of furnishings.
It was this character of dislocation between animate and inanimate in Our Mutual Friend which seemed to resonate with T.S. Eliot as he was writing The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem contains a description of people flowing towards oblivion over the Thames which echoes the very beginning of Dickens’s book, an eerie description of the same river, in which a body is found in dubious circumstances. The Waste Land was for a while going to be called He Do the Police in Different Voices. This is a line from Our Mutual Friend, coming as a carer recommends one of her charges to a prospective adoptive couple, describing his ability to read the newspaper aloud. The capacity to read other writers’ works convincingly has not always been a great recommendation in fiction; Henry Crawforth’s aptitude for it in Mansfield Park is a sign of his actorly duplicity, his lack of essence. Dickens’s character is quite the opposite, the phrase melancholic and resonant more because it speaks of his carer’s keenness to be rid of him than any aspect of his character. The sentence’s disjunctive grammar suggests something of this multiplicity, ‘he’ halfway to being ‘they’ as it takes the plural form of the verb ‘do’. ‘The police’ is, or are, perhaps the disruptive force here, being a noun which appears singular but behaves like a plural.
Our Mutual Friend has the strangest and least successful ending of any Dickens book I have read, involving a plot twist which makes much of the preceding action a kind of pantomime. Its artifice makes the whole fictive enterprise seem mechanical, the characters turning from thing into another, like coins in the author’s palm. It’s worth reading, but I can’t think of a worse introduction to Dickens, exhibiting both his gifts and his faults at an exaggerated scale. In fact, ‘exaggerated scale’ could describe both his gifts and faults at once, as he was capable of both sweeping, vivid depictions of a whole city in one paragraph, and low-resolution melodrama. Austen wrote in a letter to her nephew about how her stories were written on two inches of ivory, at a fine and delicate scale. Dickens’s broad chisel works on the whole tusk.
Scale is among Dickens’ many contributions to contemporary fiction. New Yorker critic James Wood identified Dickens as the governing spirit of what he termed ‘hysterical realism’, a species of novel that gives broad views of society across various social strata, populated by near-cartoonish characters, and animated most of all by painterly description. (Wood is himself subject to cruel treatment in a rather crude novel by Edmund Caldwell, Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant, which somehow interweaves invectives about Wood’s supposedly arid formalism with a cartoonishly partisan description of the Israel-Palestine conflict.) Zadie Smith’s debut White Teeth is Wood’s paradigmatic example, but there is also a Dickensian quality of scale to writers like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. These writers use various devices to achieve a sense of great scope, not least by writing very long books themselves, with characters drawn from various parts of society. DeLillo orientates in the vastness by focussing on small events or even objects: the assassination of JKF in Libra; a literal baseball in Underworld. Foster Wallace is deliberately disorientating, infamously putting much of his book’s content in endnotes which sometimes contain further narrative but most often give an overwhelming quantity of background information, so that reading Infinite Jest often has the accidental quality of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
Wallace’s title comes from Hamlet’s speech to the skull of his clownish teacher Yoric, ‘a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy’. It is significant that the title refers to a character who is never seen on stage, unless you count his skull, a ‘piece of him’ which would never have been seen while he was alive. Wallace’s book is about a film so entertaining that one cannot stop watching it, a film which cannot of course be ‘shown’ by Wallace’s book. Books written since the invention of television have had to reckon with the fact that their readers will almost always have the option of doing something more immediately gratifying, and more viscerally entertaining, than reading. Although I would not especially recommend it as a novel, Infinite Jest is the most overt attempt I know of to contend with this, being about a film which is so entertaining that those who begin watching cannot ever stop, and die in front of the screen. The book, however, can safely contain the film (though admittedly without ever describing it in much detail), because it can be assumed that books are not as dangerously entertaining.
Part of what makes film, television, video games and even the internet compelling is the immediacy of the scale which they confront you with. What a film like 2001 can show and make convincing in an instant is the sense of huge expanse. Although this can easily be stated in literature, it takes time for scale to become convincing. The immediacy of scale, the feeling of being surrounded and immersed in a giant world, is also an appeal of many video games, which allow you to roam through or scroll over vast spaces, without leaving the limited confines of daily life. This is certainly what I found (and occasionally still do find) appealing in the game-world: being presented by an expanse of territory which one can roam over, and control.
The appeal of the internet is not so different. Even the most banal act of checking the news or emails makes me feel connected to something vast, a world effortlessly larger than myself. Ever since I began using computers and phones regularly as a teenager, reading has not been easy. I often look back to prelapsarian times, in history or in my own life, when books could simply be devoured. Most often, however, the attention must be marshalled, distractions consciously put away. This is something I have, if anything, become worse at over time. I realised with a shock today that I have read only one full-length book cover-to-cover so far this year, despite having handed in my PhD thesis at the very end of last year and hence having no legitimate excuses.
The screen seems to offer vast expanse, but what it really expands into is one’s own time. It looms, very much like the strange monolith in 2001, making life a little more like the human zoo, making the viewer older without having been anywhere, done anything. If it seems like these things can offer scale, perhaps that is not quite right. They offer expanse, but an expanse which is really emptiness. The word ‘scale’ is from the Italian scala, meaning ‘stair’. Writing reaches great distances, but only by processing one sentence at a time, step by step.
Timely as always, Paul. I received a rather obscure, slim Dickens for Christmas and read it with a sort of hasty diligence that meant I was frequently left with a sense of bafflement at what, exactly, he was trying to get across. In hindsight I wonder how much of this could be framed as an issue of scale, from both ends: CD packing too many ideas into too modest a container, rushing through them short-handedly to pull off his ultimate effect; me, bereft of contemporary referents to navigate the terrain, stumbling about uncomprehendingly in the sketch of a world (and, to complicate matters, an Otherworld) long passed.
Since Dickens I’ve moved onto Anthony Powell’s Music of Time sequence – a real jump of scale if ever one could be executed –and the difference in my own enjoyment, and my own desire and patience for sitting with the novel(s) when not sat on the Underground, say, is immense. A large part of this no doubt will be generally greater cultural familiarity with Powell’s setting over Dickens’ (although in the grand view so much is similar: London, one long lifetime apart), but I think there could also be something of the scalar at play: Powell’s stateliness commanding reassurance that all will become clear, in time; or perhaps that nothing ever will, in the grand view again, in much the way that life itself is rarely clear except as the experience (at the scale) of stuff, and stuff happening. Probably if there is continued value in the novel – and obviously there is – it is in something like the generosity of form that stands against instant gratification and the immediate resolution of bewilderment: prolonged accommodation of bewilderment as a muscle that one must train oneself to live within consciously.
Saw the new staging of Arcadia at the Old Vic last night, and of course that deals with a lot of the same matter too. Many thoughts sparked: Diolch Paul!
its interesting you use the phrase 'human zoo' because Sloterdijk, in 'Rules for the Human Zoo', says that philosophy has just been ways of defining how the human zoo should function. Those who are literate, who can read, are the ones who do the breeding and take custody of the rest
S: "Since the Statesman and the Republic there have been discourses which speak of human society as if it were a zoo which is at the same time a theme-park: the behavior of men [menschenhaltung] in parks or stadiums seems from now on a zoo-political task. What is presented as reflections on politics are actually foundational reflections on rules for the maintenance of the human zoo."
it feels like there is an something implicit in your post here which is not far from sloterdijk. something like: mediated scale via 'letters' is related to elites and the guardian's ability to dominate/rule over scale. the rest are overwhelmed by scale, by the 'screen which expands', as you put it.
S:
"The domestication of man is the great unthinkable, from which humanism from antiquity to the present has averted its eyes. Recognizing this suffices to plunge us into deep waters. And in those deep waters we are flooded with the realization that at no time was it, or will it be, possible to accomplish the taming and befriending of men with letters alone. Certainly reading was a great power for the upbringing and improvement of men. It still is today, to some extent.
But nonetheless, breeding, whatever form it
may have taken, was always present as the power behind the mirror. Reading and breeding have more to do with each other than culture historians are able or willing to admit. Even if it is impossible to adduce evidence for this suspicion, or to pin down the relation between the two, the connection is nonetheless more than a random suggestion.
Literacy itself, at least until the very recently accomplishment of universal literacy, has had a
sharply selective sorting effect. It sharply divided our culture and created a yawning gulf between the literate and the illiterate, a gulf which in its unbridgability amounted almost to a species differentiation. If, despite Heidegger's prohibition, one wanted to speak anthropologically, one could define humans of the historical period as animals, some of whom could read or write. By taking a single step further, one could define them as animals that reproduce or breed themselves, while other animals are bred--an idea that has been current as part of Europe's pastoral folklore since Plato. This is similar to Nietsche's claim in Zarathustra that few of the people in small houses will to live there. Most are willed into them. They are objects, not agents, of selection."