The Thisness of the August Twilight

Claire Keegan, James Wood, and Words Belonging to Characters

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent a lot of time frustrated by vague assertions that something is “well written.”

In the case of fiction, this incantation can take more or less damning forms. The less damning tend to be followed by specificity—the writer is good at describing landscapes or birds, or they have an ear for dialogue, and so on. The more damning uses the writer’s simple line-level competence to excuse problems at other levels, or to condescend to those macro-failings. When I was working on my first novel and didn’t have much sense of what readers wanted other than good sentences, I started to dread something I heard a lot from knowledgeable readers: “Yes, yes, I mean, yes, it’s well written, but…” They didn’t mean that my prose was in any way exceptional, just that it wasn’t the most glaring failing of what I was doing.

So what even is good prose? The easiest answer is in the tradition of Strunk and White: Clarity, directness, concreteness, brevity, more clarity. Lots of nouns, fewer descriptors and to-be verbs. No words that aren’t doing something specific. Orwell echoes these precepts in his famous essay Politics and the English Language, which you should absolutely read if you haven’t—it’s a lot more interesting than a style manual.

Anyway, you know all of those basic principles of prose, whether you’ve read the Orwell or not, because you were smart enough to find your way to this newsletter. The whole point is that merely good prose isn’t enough—the ability to throw a baseball from second to first doesn’t mean you get to play shortstop for the Red Sox. We’re interested in greatness, or at least a distinctive luminosity, even though we have a hard time saying what that means in general terms.

I want to try to give an account, with the help of a specific example, of one way in which fictional prose slips the grimy bonds of mere goodness.

James Wood has spent a lot of his life making an admirable effort to systematize the aesthetics of fictional prose. Here’s a point Wood makes in his magisterial How Fiction Works in the chapter on “thisness,” a term coined by the medieval Scottish philosopher Duns Scotus:

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs 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.)

At first glance, Wood’s account might seem essentialist. Taking off from Scotus’s “thisness,” he appears to imply that the writer’s task is to locate the deep nature of things—here’s the way it really is when a cab idles or a leather jacket crinkles. But ultimately, as Wood makes clear elsewhere in the book, he’s actually referring to a kind of sublime subjectivity—here’s the way it really is (for me). In fiction, we might go further: Here’s the way it really is (for me (the character)).

I recently had a writing teacher who stands a good chance to go down as the writing teacher who made the biggest impact on me. Among the mantras of his that have stuck with me: “This isn’t the character’s language.” It may sound ludicrous, but I hadn’t considered that even first-person narration might belong to characters in that way. Prose always seemed to me virtuosic; a performance by the writer. Any narrator, even one claiming their own “I,” was just a vehicle for the prancing of the novelist.

This belief was one of my stupidest. Initially, I wanted to write at greater length about Claire Keegan, one of the most careful and loving prose stylists currently writing in English. Her characters go beyond owning their language, past inhabiting it, and into haunting it. I’ll have to owe her another newsletter of her own, because this one got too far into the tangled weeds of generality. Nevertheless, here’s some prose, from Keegan’s novella Foster, that goes well beyond good:

I put one foot through the steam and feel, again, the same rough scald. I keep my foot in the water, and then, when I think I can’t stand it any longer, my thinking changes, and I can. The water is deeper than any I have ever bathed in. Our mother bathes us in what little she can, and makes us share. After a while, I lie back and through the steam watch the woman as she scrubs my feet. The dirt under my nails she prises out with tweezers. She squeezes shampoo from a plastic bottle, laters my hair, and rinses the lather off. Then she makes me stand and soaps me all over with a cloth. Her hands like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

Keegan gives us all the conventional “intensity” and “closeness,” via sensory concreteness, that we’re taught to ask for in creative writing class. But the key to this paragraph isn’t in the senses; it’s in the meta-awareness at the end. The narrator, a young girl being deposited in a loving foster home, suddenly understands the limitations of her own language.

Or not so suddenly—given the calmness with which she processes this revelation, there’s a strong case to be made that, though it’s written in present tense, this paragraphs reveals a narrator looking backwards. That case gets firmer the farther you read in Foster. Temporal distance may be why she now has the language to denote the failings of her language at the time. She can inscribe the moment all the more strikingly because it’s a spectral memory, the flesh of which must be—and, wonderfully, can be—summoned in words.

The awareness of her own language and what it can and can’t do is finally more urgent and scalding than the water, because she’s not in the water when she’s giving us these words—she’s noticing her own past noticing. This is where the Wood/Scotus thisness meets the narrator in Foster: To access the essence of the thing in this book is to notice not for the first time, but to notice again. In so doing, the narrator engages in the kind of imaginative projection that the reader must also do, so her closeness to the events becomes our closeness.

That’s how “thisness” and “noticing” work in one excellent paragraph in one excellent book by one excellent writer, at least. I hope I’ve managed to lay out one way to push ourselves, as both writers and readers, beyond “well written.”

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Annnnnd we’re off! …Sort of:

The first panel is snide and ungrateful—Calvin at his worst. The second, however, is Calvin and Hobbes at their best. Striking off into the unknown, in league with all that could happen. I like Watterson best when he lets his characters be tranquil and silent, melding with the landscape they’re about to fill with their imaginations.

This strip alternates sandwiches two panels where Hobbes is alive between two where he’s inanimate. It’s a testament to how fluidly Watterson wields this device that I had to read this a few times to notice. We get to see the activation of Hobbes, along with the promise of a long-delayed launch, and then he powers down again. These mechanistic metaphors don’t do justice to Hobbes, but that is the feeling I got here—the tiger as part of the rocket machinery.

What are moms for if not to tell you when you’re being stupid? All other characters frequently play this role for Calvin, but few are as helpful as his long-suffering mom. Calvin can never admit that, of course. If he could, he wouldn’t be Calvin.

Other fun things

— Asad Haider graces us with the only deep dive you’ll ever need into the egregious misuse of terms such as “critical theory” by the Andrew Sullivans of this world

— Yukio Mishima is one of my all-time favorite novelists, and here’s a nice piece about his revival in English translation—I didn’t know he wrote a sci-fi novel, and I can’t wait to read it

— Once again, I’m asking you to subscribe to Discontents, the newsletter/podcast collective of which this newsletter is now a member. Check it out. You won’t regret it

A poem

Gerard Manley Hopkins notices