How Fiction Works

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

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 mis è res 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-Elysé es. 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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 Laverdiè re, 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.

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.” Cé zanne 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.

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.”

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 wain scoting, and under the barometer stood an old piano loaded with a pyramid 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

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.)

Anyway, one can accept Barthes’s stylistic proviso without accepting his epistemological caveat: fictional reality is indeed made up of such “effects,” but realism can be an effect and still be true. It is only Barthes’s sensitive, murderous hostility to realism that insists on this false division.

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fic tion. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace , Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. 14 The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself . In other words, the category of the irrelevant or inexplicable exists in life, just as the barometer exists, in all its uselessness, in real houses. There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.

The barometer, the puddle, the adjustment of the blindfold, are not “irrelevant”; they are significantly insignificant. In “The Lady with the Little Dog,” a man and a woman go to bed. After sex, the man calmly eats a melon: “There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.” That is all Chekhov writes. He could have done it like this: “Thirty minutes passed. Outside, a dog started barking, and some children ran down the street. The hotel manager yelled something. A door slammed.” These details would obviously be exchangeable with other, similar details; they are not crucial to anything. They would be there to make us feel that this is lifelike. Their insignificance is precisely their significance. And, as in the Michelet passage of which Barthes is so suspicious, one of the obvious reasons for the rise of this kind of signifi cantly insignificant detail is that it is needed to evoke the passage of time, and fiction has a new and unique project in literature—the management of temporality. In ancient narratives, for instance, like Plutarch’s Lives or the Bible stories, gratuitous detail is very hard to find. Mostly detail is functional or symbolic. Likewise, the ancient storytellers seem to feel no pressure to evoke a lifelike passing of “real time” (Chekhov’s thirty minutes). Time passes jerkily, swiftly: “And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.” Time lapses between the verses, invisibly, inaudibly, but nowhere on the page. Each new “and” or “then” moves forward the action like those old station clocks, whose big hands suddenly slip forward once a minute.

We have seen that Flaubert’s method of different temporalities requires a combination of details, some of which are relevant, some studiedly irrelevant. “Studiedly irrelevant”—we concede that there really is no such thing as irrelevant detail in fiction, even in realism, which tends to use such detail as a kind of padding, to make verisimilitude seem nice and comfy. You wastefully leave lights on in your home or hotel room when you aren’t there, not to prove that you exist, but because the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive.

In “The Dead,” Joyce writes that Gabriel was his old aunts’ favorite nephew: “He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks.” This might not look like anything much, at first; perhaps one has to be familiar with a certain kind of petit bourgeois snobbery to appreciate it. But what a lot it tells us about the two sisters, in just a handful of words! It is the kind of detail that speeds on our knowledge of a character: a state of mind, a gesture, a stray word. It pertains to human and moral understanding—detail not as thisness but as knowledge.

Joyce drops into free indirect style at the very end of the sentence, to inhabit the collective mind of the proper and snobbish old ladies, who are “caught” thinking about their brother-in-law’s status. Imagine if the line went: “He was their favourite nephew, Ellen and Tom’s fine son.” The sentence would tell us nothing about the sisters. Instead, Joyce’s point is that inside their own minds, in their private voices , they still think of their brother-in-law not as “Tom,” but as “T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks.” They are proud of his attainment, of his substance in the world, even a little daunted by it. And that gnomic “of the Port and Docks” functions like the birthday present for Queen Victoria: we don’t know what T. J. Conroy did at the Port and Docks, and it is exquisitely difficult to know how grand a job at the Port and Docks could possibly be. (That is the comedy.) But Joyce—working in a manner exactly opposite to Updike in that passage from Terrorist —knows that to tell us any more about the Port and Docks would ruin the psychological truth: this status means something important to these women. It is enough to know that.

This sudden capturing of a central human truth, this moment when a single detail has suddenly enabled us to see a character’s thinking (or lack of it), can be a branch of free indirect style, as in the example above. But not necessarily: it may be the novelist’s observation from “outside” the character (though it speeds us inside, of course). There is such a moment in The Radetzky March , when the old captain visits his dying servant, who is in bed, and the servant tries to click his naked heels together under the sheets … or in The Possessed , when the proud, weak governor, von Lembke, loses his control. Shouting at a group of visitors in his drawing room, he marches out, only to trip on the carpet. Standing still, he looks at the carpet and ridiculously yells, “Have it changed!”—and walks out … or when Charles Bovary returns with his wife from the grand ball at La Vaubyessard, which has so enchanted Emma, rubs his hands together, and says: “It’s good to be home” … or in Sentimental Education , when Fré dé ric takes his rather humble mistress to Fontainebleau. She is bored, but can tell that Fré dé ric is frustrated with her lack of culture. So in one of the galleries, she looks around at the paintings, and, trying to say something knowing and impressive, merely exclaims: “All this brings back memories!” … or when, after his divorce, Anna Karenina’s husband, the stiff and joyless civil servant, goes around introducing himself with the line: “You are acquainted with my grief?”

These details help us to “know” Karenin or Bovary or Fré dé ric’s mistress, but they also present a mystery. Years ago, my wife and I were at a concert given by the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. At a quiet, difficult passage of bowing, she frowned. Not the usual ecstatic moue of the virtuoso, it expressed sudden irritation. At the same moment, we invented entirely different readings. Claire later said to me: “She was frowning because she wasn’t playing that bit well enough.” I replied: “I think she was frowning because the audience was so noisy.” A good novelist would have let that frown alone, and would have let our revealing comments alone, too: no need to smother this little scene in explanation.

Detail like this—that enters a character but refuses to explain that character—makes us the writer as well as the reader; we seem like co-creators of the character’s existence. We have an idea of what is going through von Lembke’s mind when he shouts, “Have it changed!” but there are several possible readings; we have an idea of Rosanette’s awkwardness, but we can’t know what exactly she means when she says, “All this brings back memories!” These characters are somehow very private, even as they artlessly expose themselves. 15

“The Lady with the Little Dog” is almost entirely composed of details that refuse to explain themselves, and this suits the story because it is about a love affair that brings a great happiness somewhat inexplicable to the lovers. A married man—and expert seducer—meets a married woman in Yalta; they go to bed. Why do at least thirty minutes go by in silence as Gurov eats his melon? Several reasons come to mind: and we fill that silence with our reasons. Later in the story, the confident seducer decides, in ways he cannot fully express, that this ordinary-looking woman from a small town means more to him than anyone he has ever loved. He journeys from Moscow to the woman’s provincial town, and they meet at the local theater. The orchestra, writes Chekhov, takes a long time to tune . (Again, no commentary is offered: we are free to assume that provincial orchestras are inexpert.) The lovers snatch a moment outside the auditorium, on the stairs. Above, two schoolboys watch them, smoking. Do the boys know what drama is happening beneath them? Are they indifferent? Are the lovers troubled by the surveillance of the schoolboys? Chekhov does not say.

The perfection of the detail has to do with symmetry: two malefactors have encountered two other malefactors, and each couple has nothing to do with the other.