The noticings of details

  While painters labored at their easels, writers also wrestled with details. 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 favored the formulaic and the imitative rather than the individual and the original. 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 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.” 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 afterward, 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 depair, 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.

January 2, 2010. Uncategorized.