Notes

Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

0.   David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)
0.   Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (2016): “The true heart of every story is its literary truth, and that is there or not there, and if it’s not there, no technical skill can give it to you. You ask me about male writers who describe women with authenticity. I don’t know whom to point you to. There are some who do it with verisimilitude, which is very different, however, from authenticity.”

Narrating

0.   See Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing for examples of this rare success.
0.   This interview can be found in The New Brick Reader , ed. Tara Quinn (2013).
0.   Barthes uses this term in his book S/Z (1970; translated by Richard Miller, 1974). He means the way that nineteenth-century writers refer to commonly accepted cultural or scientific knowledge, for instance shared ideological generalities about “women.” I extend the term to cover any kind of authorial generalization. For instance, an example from Tolstoy: at the start of The Death of Ivan Ilyich , three of Ivan Ilyich’s friends are reading his obituary, and Tolstoy writes that each man, “as is usual in such cases, was secretly congratulating himself that it was Ivan who had died and not him.” As is usual in such cases : the author refers with ease and wisdom to a central human truth, serenely gazing into the hearts of three different men.
0.   I like D. A. Miller’s phrase for free indirect style, from his book Jane Austen , or The Secret of Style (2003): “close writing.”
0.   See, for instance, Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (2013).
0.   Nabokov is a great creator of the kind of extravagant metaphors that the Russian formalists called “estranging” or defamiliarizing (a nutcracker has legs, a half-rolled black umbrella looks like a duck in deep mourning, and so on). The formalists liked the way that Tolstoy, say, insisted on seeing adult things—like war, or the opera—from a child’s viewpoint, in order to make them look strange. But whereas the Russian formalists see this metaphorical habit as emblematic of the way that fiction does not refer to reality, is a self-enclosed machine (such metaphors are the jewels of the author’s freakish, solipsistic art), I prefer the way that such metaphors, as in Pnin’s “leggy thing,” refer deeply to reality: because they emanate from the characters themselves, and are fruits of free indirect style. Shklovksy wonders out loud, in Theory of Prose , if Tolstoy got his technique of estrangement from French authors like Chateaubriand, but Cervantes seems much more likely—as when Sancho first arrives in Barcelona, sees on the water the galleys with their many oars, and metaphorically mistakes the oars for feet: “Sancho couldn’t imagine how those hulks moving about on top of the sea could have so many feet.” This is estranging metaphor as a branch of free indirect style; it makes the world look peculiar, but it makes Sancho look very familiar.
0.   As soon as we imagine a Christian version of this narration, we can gauge Updike’s awkward alienation from his character. Imagine a devout Christian schoolboy walking along, and the text going something like this: “And wouldn’t His will always be done, as described in the fourth line of the Lord’s Prayer?” Free indirect style exists precisely to get around such clumsiness.
0.   See the brilliant, but taxing long story, “The Depressed Person,” which sinks us into the repetitive feedback loop of the “depressed person.”
0.   Letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, October 5, 1901, in Henry James, Selected Letters , edited by Leon Edel (1974).
0.   This is Gé rard Genette’s term, from Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method , translated by Jane E. Lewin (1980). Elmore Leonard calls these the boring parts that readers tend to skip: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Flaubert and Modern Narrative

0.   The ants crawling across the face represent almost a cliché of cinematic grammar. Think of the ants on the hand in Buñ uel’s Un Chien andalou, or on the ear at the start of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur

0.   See Baudelaire’s seminal essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863).
0.   The differences between Balzacian and Flaubertian realism are threefold: First, Balzac of course notices a great deal in his fiction, but the emphasis is always on abundance rather than intense selectivity of detail. Second, Balzac has no special commitment to free indirect style or authorial impersonality, and feels wonderfully free to break in as the author/narrator, with essays and digressions and bits of social information. (He seems decidedly eighteenth-century in this respect.) Third, and following on from these two differences: he has no distinctively Flaubertian interest in blurring the question of who is noticing all this stuff. For these reasons, I see Flaubert and not Balzac as the real founder of modern fictional narrative.

Detail

0.   Sá ndor Má rai, Embers , translated by Carol Brown Janeway (translation from the German version, 2001).
0.   The Guermantes Way, Part 2, Chapter 1.
0.   It is from Anna Karenina , and is a nice example of self-plagiarism. In that novel, not one but two babies—Levin’s and Anna’s—are described as looking as if string is tied around their fat little arms. Likewise, in David Copperfield , Dickens likens Uriah Heep’s open mouth to a post office, and Wemmick’s open mouth, in Great Expectations —to a post office. Stendhal writes, in The Red and the Black , about how politics ruins a novel in the way a gunshot would spoil a music concert, and then repeats the image in The Charterhouse of Parma. Henry James wrote that Balzac, in his monkish devotion to his art, was “a Benedictine of the actual,” a phrase he liked so much he used it later about Flaubert. Cormac McCarthy writes, in Blood Meridian , “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand,” and returns to that lovely verb seven years later in All the Pretty Horses : “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.” Why shouldn’t he? Such things are rarely examples of haste and more often proof that a style has achieved self-consistency. And that a kind of Platonic ideal has been reached—these are the best, and therefore unsurpassable words, for these subjects.
0.   The image was heavily borrowed by Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men (2005), where people are forever having their boots fill up with blood—usually their own, however.
0.   From The Death of Ivan Ilyich ; Tolstoy likens talking about death, which polite society must ignore, to someone making a bad smell in a drawing room.
0.   Lawrence’s story “Odour of Chrysanthemums” begins like this: “The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston—with seven full wagons.” Ford Madox Ford, who published it in the English Review in 1911, said that the precision of the “Number 4” and the “seven” wagons announced the presence of a real writer. “The ordinary careless writer,” he said, “would say ‘some small wagons.’ This man knows what he wants. He sees the scene of his story exactly.” See John Worthen’s biography D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912 (1991).
0.   A nice index of this can be found in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762–63), in which he says that poetic and rhetorical description should be brief, to the point, and not lengthy. But, he goes on, “it is often proper to Choose out some nice and Curious” detail. “A Painter in Drawing a fruit makes the figure very striking if he not only gives it the form and Colour but also represents the fine down with which it is covered.” Smith recommends this in such a fresh and ingenuous way—as if he is saying, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to notice the fine down on a piece of fruit?”—that he makes the very concept of detail sound somewhat novel and newfangled.
0.   Maupassant, “The Novel,” preface to Pierre and Jean (1888).
0.   Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cé zanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense (1948), translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (1964).
0.   From Nabokov, “First Love” (1925) and Updike, Of the Farm (1961). And one can hear how David Foster Wallace comes out of this tradition, too, even if he renders comically or ironically a level of obsessive detail that Updike renders more earnestly.
0.   The Nabokov-Wilson Letters , edited by Simon Karlinsky (1979).
0.   Collected in The Rustle of Language , translated by Richard Howard (1986).
0.   Syst è me de la mode (1967).
0.   Book Four, Chapter 11.
0.   “A shot can be a word, but it’s better when it’s a sentence,” says Francis Ford Coppola in Live Cinema and Its Techniques (2017). He means that details are stronger when complex and enigmatic.

Character

0.    Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett , edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson (2006).
0.   Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970).
0.   As, by report, Pushkin spoke of Onegin and Tatiana: “Do you know my Tatiana has rejected Onegin? I never expected it of her.”
0.   Philip Roth’s The Counterlife is an example of another novel that takes what it needs from metafictional game-playing to make a grave and fundamentally metaphysical argument about the different ways of living, and narrating, a life. Gabriel Josipovici discusses Beckett in this spirit in his book On Trust (2000). He points out that Foucault liked to quote from The Unnamable , as evidence of the death of the author: “No matter who is speaking, someone says, no matter who is speaking,” wrote Beckett. Josipovici comments that Foucault forgets that “it is not Beckett saying this but one of his characters, and that the point about that character is that he is desperately seeking to discover who speaks, to recover himself as more than a string of words, to wrest an ‘I’ from ‘someone says.’”
0.   Except for the hero and narrator of Frederick Exley’s one good novel, A Fan’s Notes , who explicitly invokes the example of Augie.
0.   “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists and Mystics : Writings on Philosophy and Literature (1997).
0.   Spatial metaphors, of depth, shallowness, roundness, flatness, are inadequate. A better division—though not perfect, either—is between transparencies (relatively simple characters) and opacities (relative degrees of mysteriousness). Many of the most absorbing accounts of motive, from Hamlet to Stavrogin to the subjects of W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants , are studies in mystery. Stephen Greenblatt argues in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) that in his tragedies, Shakespeare systematically reduced the amount of “causal explanation a tragic plot needed to function effectively and the amount of explicit psychological rationale a character needed to be compelling. Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity.” Why does Lear test his daughters? Why can’t Hamlet effectively avenge the death of his father? Why does Iago ruin Othello’s life? The source texts that Shakespeare read all provided transparent answers (Iago was in love with Desdemona, Hamlet should kill Claudius, Lear was unhappy with Cordelia’s impending marriage). But Shakespeare was not interested in such transparency. Greenblatt’s argument also touches on section 88, where I show how the novel threw off the essential juvenility of plot in favor of “unconsummated” stories, and section 111, where I discuss the novel’s possible contribution to Bernard Williams’s desire for complexity in moral philosophy.

A Brief History of Consciousness

0.   This is Harold Bloom’s formulation, in The Western Canon (1994) and elsewhere, borrowed from Hegel.
0.   Theory of Prose , translated by Benjamin Sher, 1990.
0.   To my mind, this is also a weakness with a certain kind of postmodern novel—say Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day —still in love with the rapid, farcelike, overlit simplicities of Fielding. There is nothing more eighteenth-century than Pynchon’s love of picaresque plot accumulation; his mockery of pedantry, which is at the same time a love of pedantry; his habit of making his flat characters dance for a moment on stage and then whisking them away; his vaudevillian fondness for silly names, japes, mishaps, disguises,; silly errors, and so on. There are pleasures to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases, and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists. The massive turbines of the incessant story-making produce so much noise that no one can be heard. The Nazi Captain Blicero in Gravity’s Rainbow , or the ruthless financier Scarsdale Vibe in Against the Day , are not truly frightening figures, because they are not true figures. But Gilbert Osmond, Herr Naphta, Peter Verkhovensky, and Conrad’s anarchist professor are very frightening indeed.
0.   And it is no accident that this leap forward in characterization is accompanied by great technical developments: Stendhal’s loose, relaxed, chatty kind of writing allows him to write a kind of interior monologue that is very close to stream of consciousness; one passage of this kind of narration, fairly late in the novel, continues for four pages without interruption.
0.   Dostoevsky’s analysis of ressentiment has turned out to have great prophetic relevance for the troubles we currently find ourselves in. Terrorism, clearly enough, is the triumph of resentment (sometimes justified); and Dostoevsky’s Russian revolutionaries and underground men are essentially terroristic. They dream of hard revenge on a society that seems too soft to deserve sparing. And just as the narrator of Notes from Underground “admires” the cavalry officer he hates, so perhaps a certain kind of Islamic fundamentalist both hates and “admires” Western secularism, and hates it because he admires it (hates it, in Dostoevsky’s psychological system, because it once did him a good turn —gave him medicine, say, or the science that could be used to crash planes into buildings).
0.   Am I the only reader addicted to the foolish pastime of amassing instances in which minor characters in books happen to have the names of writers? Thus Camus the chemist in Proust, and another Camus in Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest , and the Pyncheons in The House of the Seven Gables , and Horace Updike in Babbitt , and Brecht the dentist in Buddenbrooks , and Heidegger, one of Trotta’s witnesses in Joseph Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb , and Madame Foucault in Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale , and Father Larkin in David Jones’s In Parenthesis , and Count Tolstoy in War and Peace , and a man named Barthè s in Rousseau’s Confessions , and come to think of it, a certain Madame Rousseau in Proust …
0.   Swann’s Way (“Combray”).

Form

0.   The thought occurs to me that the book you are currently reading uses a similar form, for similar reasons: numbered paragraphs allow me to dart around, float an idea, return to an earlier idea, and then to contradict myself a bit later.… And it was a convenient way to write, because like Jenny Offill’s narrator, maybe like Offill herself, I was a busy parent, with two young children (four and six when I was writing the first edition of this book in 2007). Short paragraphs allowed me to write the book in small pieces, at home, amidst family interruptions and obligations (mostly joyful).
0.   Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (1980).
0.   Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson (New York Edition, 1907).

Sympathy and Complexity

0.   See “Words on the Street,” by Angel Gurria-Quintana, in Financial Times , March 3, 2006. I am grateful to Norman Rush for drawing my attention to this article.
0.   We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on—because it is alive and we are alive. It is amusing to watch evolutionary psychology tie itself up in circularities when trying to answer the question “Why do humans spend so much time reading fiction when this yields no obvious evolutionary benefits?” The answers tend either to be utilitarian—we read in order to find out about our fellow citizens, and this has a Darwinian utility—or circular: we read because fiction pushes certain pleasure buttons.
0.   “The Natural History of German Life” (1856).
0.   Book 4, Part 4, Chapter 13.
0.   “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in Mortal Questions (1974).
0.   See, especially, Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), and Making Sense of Humanity (1995).
0.   Book 4, Part 4, Chapter 13.

Language

0.   Stephen C. Heath, in Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1998).
0.   Though one wonders if a great deal of time was not spent just sleeping and masturbating (Flaubert likened sentences to ejaculate). Often, the excruciation of the stylist seems to be a front for writer’s block. This was the case with the marvelous American writer J. F. Powers, for instance, of whom Sean O’Faolain joked, in Wildean fashion, that he “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon wondering whether or not he should replace it with a semicolon.” More usual, I think, is the kind of literary routine ascribed to the minor English writer A. C. Benson—that he did nothing all morning and then spent the afternoon writing up what he’d done in the morning.
0.   Luká cs, in Studies in European Realism , distinguishes between the frozen detail of Flaubert and Zola, and the more dynamic detail of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Balzac. Luká cs borrowed this idea from Lessing’s Laoco ö n , in which Lessing praises Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield, not as something finished and complete, but “as a shield that is being made.”
0.   It is partly by shifts in register that we gain a sense of a human voice speaking to us—Austen’s, Spark’s, Roth’s. Likewise, by dancing between registers a character sounds real to us, whether Hamlet or Leopold Bloom. Movements in diction capture some of the waywardness and roominess of actual thinking: David Foster Wallace and Norman Rush exploit this to considerable effect. Rush’s two novels, Mating and Mortals , are full of the most fantastic shifts in diction, and the effect is the creation of a real but strange American voice, at once overeducated and colloquial: “This jeu maintained its facetious character, but there came a time when I began to resent it as a concealed way of short-circuiting my episode of depression, because he preferred me to be merry, naturally.” Or: “I was manic and global. Everything was a last straw. I went up the hill on passivity and down again.”
0.   Culture and Value , edited by G. H. Von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter Winch (1980). The italics are Wittgenstein’s.
0.   Letter to Grace Norton, March 1876, in Henry James: A Life in Letters , edited by Philip Horne (1999).
0.   James can, when he wants to, sail close to the wind in simile, thus nicely disproving Nabokov’s slanderous complaint to Edmund Wilson. In The American Scene , written in 1907, James likens the already crowded Manhattan skyline to a pincushion whose pins have been put in at nighttime, any old how. Later in the same book he compares it to an upturned comb, with teeth missing.
0.   See Elizabeth Royte, Garbarge Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (2005).

Dialogue

0.   Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green , edited by Matthew Yorke (1992).

Truth, Convention, Realism

0.   George Eliot, Adam Bede .
0.   “More About the Modern Novel” in The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927–1944 (1945).
0.   See S/Z (1970).
0.   From “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966). Quoted in Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense , translated by Carol Cosman (2004). Notice that Barthes sounds very little different, in the end, from Plato, for whom mimesis was merely an imitation of an imitation. The real reason for the French obsession with the fraudulence of realism—and with fictional narrative in general—has to do with the existence in French of the preterite, a past tense reserved exclusively for writing about the past, and not used in speech. French fiction, in other words, has its own, dedicated language of artifice, and thus must seem, to certain minds, unbearably “literary” and artificial.
0.   En lisant en é crivant (1980).
0.   Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy (2007).
0.   One of the best guides to these terms is Linda Hutcheon’s classic work, A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988).
0.   “Is Fiction an Art?” (1927).
0.   “Modern Fiction” (1922).
0.   Pages surely influenced by Chekhov’s story about a dying bishop, “The Bishop,” and an influence, in turn, on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead .