`A Puff of Palpability'

Late in Steven Millhauser’s 1999 novella Enchanted Night, a storefront mannequin comes to life and with her human admirer wanders a Connecticut town in the moonlight:

“Hand in hand she walks with him along the railroad embankment, past telephone poles with aluminum numerals screwed into the wood, past milkweed pods, past storebacks and garbage cans.”

Near the beginning of Emile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873), Florent Quenu, newly returned to Paris after escaping unjust imprisonment on Devil’s Island, walks through a charcuterie and admires a window display:

“There were vast quantities of rich, succulent things, things that melted in the mouth. Down below, quite close to the window, jars of rillettes [“potted meat, made from pork or goose”] were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some boned hams, nicely rounded, golden with breadcrumbs, and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Then came the larger dishes – stuffed Strasbourg tongues, with their red varnished look, the colour of blood next to the pallor of the sausages and pigs’ trotters; strings of black pudding coiled like harmless snakes; andouilles [“sausage made of chitterlings”] piled up in twos and bursting with health; saucissons in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; pies, hot from the oven, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great cuts of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as crystallized sugar.” [notes by Bryan Nelson, translator of the 2007 Oxford University Press edition]

Both passages revel in specificity of detail. When I read Millhauser’s book for review nine years ago, I remember my delight at his mention of the “aluminum numerals screwed into the wood” -- humble objects, a detail in the American landscape I have seen all my life and vaguely wondered about but never investigated. Millhauser, a fabulist, has the eye of a documentarian.

Zola’s Homeric catalog of meats (Nelson refers to his “epic type of realism”) is sufficiently detailed to stimulate the reader’s nausea or salivary glands, depending on his palate. One marvels at the loving care (“golden with breadcrumbs,” “bursting with health”) he lavishes on cuts of meat scorned by culinary sophisticates. Nelson in his introduction notes that Zola’s quasi-scientific naturalism becomes “a kind of surnaturalism, as he infuses the material world with anthropomorphic life, magnifying reality and giving it a hyperbolic, hallucinatory quality.” In other words, Zola’s realism is sometimes surreal and Millhauser’s fantasy is rooted in close observation of the real world. Millhauser, who has spoken to me of his admiration for Zola, is usually more economical than the Frenchman in his deployment of details, though in Portrait of a Romantic (1977) he spends pages doting on old children’s games and toys.

These passages came to mind as I was reading the chapter titled “Detail” in James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Wood’s is a lover’s eye and his beloved is fiction and its power to seduce us into a convincing alternative reality. He attributes much of fiction’s seductive force to the growing centrality of observed detail for novelists since Flaubert. Here’s Wood:

“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 ties with string (ah, the others are mine but that last example is from Tolstoy!).”

This is typical of Wood. He’s never stuffy, and often prudently personal. His prose, logical, suffused with intelligence and frequently aphoristic, is focused on the human urge. In this, Wood is reminiscent of V.S. Pritchett. Both wrote fiction while writing about it. Wood continues:

“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 [in Seize the Day] 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…”

We know what he means, and Updike at his ripest comes first to mind. Too often there’s something cloyingly self-congratulatory about a novelist parading the acuity of his vision: “Aren’t I sharp-eyed and clever to have noticed this previously unnoticed detail?”

Wood is an important critic because he reminds us that reading good fiction remains one of life’s chief pleasures, one the theorists and apologists for genre fiction haven’t yet curdled for some of us. He takes it seriously but not earnestly. His touchstones, familiar to longtime readers, are here – Bellow, Joyce, Chekhov, Henry Green, Henry James (he’s very good on What Maisie Knew), Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. For a writer (and reader) who famously lost his faith, Wood is touchingly devoted to creation and it’s rendering in fiction. After citing Duns Scotus’ notion of “thisness” (haecceitas) and Hopkins’ adaptation of it, Wood applies the idea to fiction:

“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.”

And Wood is exhilaratingly contemptuous of attempts to stuff the meat of fiction into ill-fitting casings:

“The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as `a novelistic character.’ There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat [he doesn’t take E.M. Forester too seriously, calling Aspects of the Novel “imprecise”], some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.”