4. Jack Finney and the Case of Too Many Details
I just finished reading a book about time travel called Time and Again. Hokey title? Well, apparently the others in the series are called Time After Time and About Time, so where time-related puns are involved, I’d say I’m getting off light. The author, Jack Finney, is probably most famously survived by his work (Invasion of) The Body Snatchers.
This book is about 85% setting and primarily a travel narrative, even if it is fictitious. While Finney has grudgingly provided a plot (Si Morley, a visual artist and former soldier, is selected by the military to participate in a time travel program, and he elects to go back in time to witness a mysterious interaction between his girlfriend’s grandfather and a man with a blue envelope that will supposedly someday lead to her grandfather’s suicide), it does little more than provide the basic motivation for his main character to move around the city of New York as it was in the year 1882, cataloguing the appearance and location of New York landmarks, comparing them to the present, and vivifying the scenes of action now frozen in decaying photographs and etchings. Finney does this with a compulsive kind of attention, especially to what intersection Si Morley is at in any given scene (this book probably reads very differently for those who know New York well). But beyond the visual descriptions, Time and Again is also an ethnographic study that pays delighted attention to parlor games of the time, horse-drawn transportation options, the setting of one’s watch by the Western Union Telegraph system, and the still-detectable shadows of the Civil War and Smallpox.
It’s clear that Finney did a lot of research to write this book, and that he did the research before he developed the plot that would attempt to hold it together, because he goes out of his way to present this research even when it works counter to the course of the story See: interrupting the flow of action to provide the names of the intersecting streets, and coming up with disjointed dialogue for Si that fits Finney’s desire to reveal historical information.
Finney fell in love with his research, for which I don’t blame him because New York in 1882 is pretty cool, especially to someone suffering through New York in 1970 when the book was written. That’s one reason why Time and Again is more a travelogue than it is a novel: because Finney fundamentally struggles with the balance of plot against description/definition of place.
Here’s a weird thing: he so loves the New York etchings and photographs he’s unearthed in his research that he includes them in what then becomes “the classic illustrated novel Time and Again” (according to the front cover). These images are not in leiu of, but in addition to his written descriptions of setting. With these pictures present, there’s the danger that Finney may feel as if he doesn’t have to try as hard to describe what he wants me to see. I didn’t get that impression, though. The impression I get is that Finney feels an incredible burden to convey as precisely as possible the actuality of the place, so much so that he provides corroboration. It’s as if he doesn’t trust his descriptions enough to allow them to stand alone without the pictures. The presence of these pictures has had a couple probably unintended consequences on my reading of the book.
First, they act as gauges for the effectiveness of his descriptions. When I come upon a picture, I inevitably compare it to the description I’ve just read (the written description always precedes the image) to see if and where I misunderstood his descriptions. Here’s an example:
A flagpole rose from the roof of the tower, an American flag fluttering rapidly from it; and at the top of the pole directly behind the flag I saw a large bright-red ball. The ball was made with a hole through it apparently, like a doughnut; it surrounded the pole and must have been visible up there for miles around.
Then I turned the page, and there was the image:
Neither one was particularly elucidating. It wasn’t until the action of the scene, when the ball begins to drop a la Times Square down the pole, that I fully understood the description. So my conclusion here is that description is always most effective in a dynamic scene, where things are moving in relation to other things. It’s in the interest of effective communication to move away from descriptions of static images. And it’s in the interest of the descriptions themselves to not have to compete with images for the same pay-off.
The second unintended consequence of this juxtaposition, for me, is the realization of just how redundant, almost anti-climactic, the “real” images are. Even if the description of setting sometimes becomes procedural and longwinded, the process of piecing together the image in my mind is a pleasurable experience. Then I turn the page and feel deflated by the “reality” of the image.
So a possible tool in conveying setting in travel writing is to include the images themselves, but is there a more successful way to interweave image and text in a travel narrative? How do I make sure my images aren’t subtracting from my descriptions, and vice versa?
I think the big drawback to Finney’s use of images is simply the fact that images and text are attempting to perform the same function. A way to make it work is to favor writing about the process of procuring the image (which he does, occasionally) in order to reveal some aspect of the place that the image leaves out. Contextualizing the image in the dynamic framework of a moving world and making sure that the writing and the image aren’t tasked with the same representation both seem like sure and basic steps to avoiding the anticlimax I feel every time I reach a new image in Time and Again. Then the other step is to only include the images when absolutely necessary, and that necessity has to be implicitly clear to the reader upon seeing the image. If the image doesn’t have that “Aha!” factor, there’s a good chance it’s duplicating the efforts of the text.
Beside the struggle to describe/define versus advancing the plot, Finney’s work reads as a travel narrative because Finney gets entangled in the nature of travel and travel narratives themselves. Here’s a nice excerpt from the middle of the book that is pretty meta in its description of what Finney is trying to achieve with the book and what travel writing attempts more generally to convey:
I once talked with a friend who’d spent a vacation in Paris; like most people he’d loved the city, walking it every day till his legs trembled, pleased with nearly everything he saw. But it wasn’t till he’d been there nearly two weeks that one morning Paris and its people suddenly became something more than a background for his vacation. He was sitting in a café, out on the walk, having a tiny cup of Paris-tasting, Paris-smelling coffee, watching traffic stream by, pleased as always with the countless people on bikes expertly threading their way between and around the cars and buses and trucks. Then a traffic light changed, the stream stopped and waited, and a man on a bike, one foot on the pavement, lifted his arm and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. And he turned real. In that instant he was no longer a quaint part of a charming background; he turned into a real man, tired from pumping that bike, and for the first time, it occurred to by friend that there was a reason so many people picturesquely rode bikes through the heavy traffic, and the reason was to save bus fare and because they couldn’t afford cars. After that, for the few days that were left to him there, my friend continued to enjoy Paris. But now it was no longer an immense travel poster but a real city, because now so were its people.
With the inclusion of this paragraph, I come to understand Finney’s obsessive relation of details and inclusion of artifacts as a battle to break the reader through the “travel poster” of New York of 1882 in order to bring it to life as a real place. And like the above anecdote, it is the details we don’t notice in the images, primarily the actions those images can’t capture, like the swipe of a hand against a forehead, that make a place “real” for a traveler or a reader.
Ultimately, in spite of the drawbacks I’ve named, I think Finney’s (and his character, Morley’s) attempts pay off: by the end of the book these encyclopedic details have a cumulative effect, and I feel an affinity for the characters as characters, not historical set-pieces. I share Morley’s (and Finney’s) elation at seeing the Statue of Liberty’s arm posted up by itself on the side of the West Fifth Avenue, waiting another four years to be united with the rest of the statue in the harbor in 1886, and I can feel the cold and the tobacco spit besotted hay lining the floors of the horse-drawn buses. These kinds of details break me through the poster, and I am thankful for them.
Footnote: The thing that still amuses me, also, is that I the reader am supposed to share Morley's reference time, the year 1970, when it is about as hard for me to imagine that time, in certain regards, as it is to imagine the year 1882, since I lived in neither time. Mostly the stuff having to do with only hiring secretaries you can molest.
3. Blindfolded Setting Exercise & Comments
Below is my senses exercise, but first here are some observations on the process of writing it:
1. I think the “Most Under-Utilized Sense in Writing” Award should probably go to touch, and the senses related to it (pressure, itching, temperature, balance, and body position awareness). Touch is particular and particularly grounding – it’s hard to argue why this is without sounding tautological (“Touch is important because we use it to touch everything”).
2. Another thing about touch that is important is that it’s a harder sense to divorce from the body than hearing and sight. We use our entire bodies to feel the world around us, as opposed to a small portion of our heads. We're also used to having our vision and hearing manipulated away from the real world (film), whereas touch is too intimate for that. I’m invested in maintaining a strong sense of the body in all writing, but especially in travel writing, because the presence of a unique body is an unavoidable reminder of subjectivity. I think writing from a feigned omniscient or objective standpoint when describing a place is particularly perilous, because it makes your travel narrative sound like an equation when it will always really be a personalized translation. Objectivity also produces a static image of a place; creating a dynamic world requires action and, more compellingly, interaction. There’s the literal and metaphoric “rub.”
3. In the absence of a line of sight, I found myself looking for other lines along which to arrange detail and provide a “lay of the land.” An easy line, the secondary line Garcia Marquez uses, was chronology, and another was sound, since we can locate the direction of sounds around us. Mine I divided into “Front” and “Back” here, so it was a dichotomous “line of sound.” Some people I’m certain can probably even create a “line of smell,” but my sense of smell is notoriously bad, so it doesn’t ring true to me.
4. On the subject of smells, perhaps because my sense of smell is bad and because smells are closely connected to memory, I feel a sense of profound mystery and vague nostalgia when describing smells. Smell to me is the sense closest to ESP. That probably comes across here at the end.
Here it is:
Your legs are folded under you, and your feet have been slowly going numb again. You feel a vague warm pressure where your toes are melting away. You shift, and sand sloughs at your ankles, swallowing you down a little further into the cold earth. Your jeans have wicked moisture from the sand; they cling to you like blood pressure cuffs, causing your legs to throb.
In fact, you are damp all over. It is morning and you stayed here all night, the constant blowing and sucking of the wet wind like the respiration of the undead on your neck.
When the wind blows over you now, you shiver and shudder. But in the moments of calm between gusts, you are warm. You feel like a container of warmth, a battery fully charged, an indomitable spirit, capable of expanding and rising onto your numb feet, capable of withstanding the stinging needles of their revival, capable of breaking through the rope that burns coarse at your wrists. In the beneficence of the sun’s heat, you even feel capable of pushing out all the slivers from your back at once, like a porcupine, shedding the itching evidence of your struggle against the wood object you’ve been pinned around. You feel renewed. And then the wind rolls over you again, the heat is gone, and you are miserable.
You are hungry, but also sick with a stabbing pain. Your stomach roils in time to the sound of the waves advancing and retreating, the constant churning that has worn a bedsore in your mind. In the night you were forced to urinate where you sat, and the faint smell to which you thought you might acclimate has evolved just enough over time to stay constant in your nostrils, a sour stab of shame. Brine from the tide has coated your nose, your mouth and throat. It is thick at the back of your tongue and causes you to gag. Your mouth tastes like salt, like metal and like the decaying exoskeletons of countless bottom-feeders. Your nose has started running in the cold, a tingling and maddening drip, and you turn your head to crush the itch against your shoulder, brushing your cheek against the rough wood behind you.
Somewhere behind you are different sounds, sounds distinct from the aggressive rush of the waves. You count three unique bird calls: the one that sounds like a single note thrown in a can and shaken up; the one that has three notes, each brassy and progressively higher than the last; and one that dips in the middle, sounding like a hard-won effort. The sound of the birds had begun in the early morning, and for a while it was only the birds and the sea that parenthesized your existence, closing you in from either side.
The other sounds came later. At their first whisper, you twisted your body and strained against the wood and the rope to hear past the birds, biting on your cracked lip until the taste of copper, an electric taste that to you always seemed at odds with the human body, seeped into your mouth. At the far limit of your hearing were voices, cadences too complex, starts and stops too irregular and familiar to be anything else. You tried calling, but your throat was dry and you could barely hear yourself over the waves.
The voices grew steadily louder, and now you can almost make out what they are saying. You catch words and occasional phrases in your own language. You keep trying to call, but no one ever calls back. No one runs to your aid.
You smell something new too, something dark, sweet, and herbal, some unfamiliar spice that reaches you with surprising intensity over the fish smell of the sea and the condemning smell of urine. Its strength and unknown source unnerve you. You want to ascribe the new smell a name, take ownership over it somehow, but none of the comparisons you could make tell the right story. It is blood orange without the citrus, blood sausage without the saltiness, cumin without the nose-tickling sting, cherries crushed into the dust of Mars, and soon you begin to wonder: for whom am I preparing this description? Your stomach sinks as you realize you don’t know, as you realize you may never encounter another man whom you can call “friend” ever again.
2. Garcia Marquez and the Senses
“On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”
Above are the first three sentences of a popular story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the next sentence, he will introduce the focal point of the whole story, the very old man with enormous wings who is face down in the mud in the corner of the yard. But before we get there, here are three precious sentences of setting doing the kind of heavy lifting I just talked about previously.
In the post below, I focused exclusively on the sense of sight – how we convey a picture. But if you ask Flannery O’Connor, in order to convey a place, to “immerse” the reader, we really need at least three senses firing, not just the visual. Any less than three and the reader begins to withdraw from the world, feeling deaf and blind. And lest you think we only have five senses to resort to in our description of setting, Wikipedia’s “Common Misconceptions” page is here to help:
“Although definitions vary, the actual number ranges from 9 to more than 20. In addition to sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which were the senses identified by Aristotle, humans can sense balance and acceleration (equilibrioception), pain (nociception), body and limb position (proprioception or kinesthetic sense), and relative temperature (thermoception). Other senses sometimes identified are the sense of time, itching, pressure, hunger, thirst, fullness of the stomach, need to urinate, need to defecate, and blood carbon dioxide levels.”
Okay, so probably the last handful on that list are not going to prove fruitful in our conveying of setting, though they’re surefire ways of upping the tension in a given scene. But let’s look at these three sentences of Garcia Marquez and see just how much info is crammed into them in terms of senses:
Sight: ash-gray, glimmered like powdered light (specific); rain, courtyard, sea, sky, sand, beach, mud (general)
Smell: stench, stew, rotten
Taste: stew, rotten (some overlap with these two senses)
Touch: drenched, rain, mud
Hearing: rain (this one’s borderline, I realize, and depends in part on your personal experience with rain. When I think of rain, I hear it before I see or feel it. You might feel differently about this and some of the other categorizations I’ve made.)
Equilobrioception: cross, sea and sky were a single ash gray thing (implied disorientation of balance)
Propioception: throw
Temperature: temperature (that was an easy one.)
Time: third day, Tuesday, March nights
In the course of three sentences, then, we get about nine senses firing at once.
I want to point out some additional genius moves here, sentence by sentence.
First, in the last post I mentioned that a reader is more likely to follow a visual description if it follows a path, a line of sight. The first sentence does exactly that: inside house>outside house>courtyard> sea. Having given us the lay of the land up front, Garcia Marquez can go back and elaborate different elements (the child, the beach) and I the reader will never feel disoriented.
Now, notice that weird little second sentence: “The world had been sad since Tuesday.” Huh? Is this some sort of precious announcement of magical realism? Well, maybe, but practically what this little sentence does is give the reader a chance to catch her breath between two rather long sentences packed with description.
Have you ever heard a writing instructor tell you to “vary your sentence length?” Well here’s why: the act of visualization and immersion takes effort. Have you ever read an entire book in a delirious afternoon, fully immersed, and finished it only to feel an incredible disorientation when you put it on the shelf and try to go wash the dishes? When you learn to immerse yourself in a book’s world, you are training your brain, and it takes time, both to train and then to retrain to the regular world. So what Garcia Marquez does with this second little sentence is give the reader a minute to catch her breath and catch up with the work her brain has started doing in reconstructing the scene.
Also, by writing “since Tuesday,” Garcia Marquez is taking the location he has arranged in the first section and stretching it back and forth through time. If you consider time the fourth dimension (we won’t ask Wikipedia about it), Garcia Marquez has gone from two to three to four dimensions in two sentences now. (If you’re keeping track of our “a two-dimensional picture is worth a thousand words” equation, the successful portrayal of four dimensions clocks in at precisely one million words.)
In the third sentence, Garcia Marquez answers a question that it is important for every writer to answer satisfactorily in the course of a story, for the benefit of herself as well as her reader. That question is: “How is today not like every other day?” This question is one of the mantras of Ron Carlson, and Garcia Marquez answers it here in terms of fundamental setting: the sands of the beach, while often “like powdered light” (a beautiful image) are today “a stew of mud and rotten shellfish” (also beautiful in its own right, if totally unpleasant). We get not only time, then, but a sense of particular history about the place that fills in that fourth dimension for us.
All this in three sentences. An incredible economy of language was the first challenge I mentioned in the last post; the second was the balance of description and definition. Let me elaborate on that: definition is the addition of information not in the current scene, information the characters would know already and not necessarily be thinking about, but information that the reader needs in order to make sense of everything. This is also referred to more generally as exposition: information we receive from somewhere outside the current scene. There are two pieces of exposition here: “because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench,” and “which on March nights glimmered like powdered light.” I’ve already explained the value of the second one in terms of conveying a sense of particular history. The first piece of exposition is crucial because it introduces the principle characters (Pelayo’s family) and the tension of the story (nothing like a sick child to raise the blood pressure of a story instantly). It provides information with a dire and fundamental purpose, and therefore earns its keep in a very small room.
Here’s a challenge I’m going to undertake now: I mentioned on my Kickstarter site the challenge of writing in a compelling fashion about a place when images of the world are not only readily available, but abundant. But that’s one sense only. Granted, it’s our predominant sense, but it’s only one of somewhere between nine and twenty. So I’m going to try and write a thousand words to describe a place without any over references to the visual. There will be some spillover, as I noted above that words like “rain” set off several senses at once, but no explicit visual description. I’m excited to see what it looks like.
If you do this too, please send your description to me: Kristen@kristenleighschwarz.com. Let me know if it’s okay to use parts of it on this site or in the book.
1. The Problem: Why Describing a Foreign Place is so Hard
Conveying setting is nowhere more important in writing than in the genres of travel writing and science fiction / fantasy. While the larger goals of these genres differ tremendously, they share a singular need to convey an unknown, alien place to the reader in a way that’s compelling. This seemingly straightforward task is nearly impossible. Why is it nearly impossible? A couple reasons.
First, let’s take the basic task of visual description in writing and examine it a minute, using the frayed old yarn, “a picture is worth a thousand words” as a starting point and accepted truth. If you haven’t tried writing a thousand words to describe a picture before, I suggest it as an exercise. I had to do this once for a photography class, because it’s important to be able to describe what you as a photographer are conveying, or trying to convey, or what other photographers have succeeded in conveying, for purposes of building upon it. It’s a useful exercise for writers too, especially if the picture includes a human face, say your girlfriend’s. There is so much to describe in a human face, but we often find ourselves falling back on the same details, like “her green eyes flashed in the sunlight.” I’ve noticed that with my beginning writing students, the eye color of choice has been almost invariably green. I’ve joked with my students that somewhere in Ireland, there is a writer’s workshop writing epic tales of brown-eyed heroines.
If your girlfriend has green eyes, well fine. Make sure you use full sentences and, after a thousand words, you’ll find you now have a cartographer’s view of that picture. You will look at it differently, noting, like with a map, the spatial relationships between the tiny details and landforms of the face, the curtain’s eight folds, the cat’s lopsided whiskers, the reflection in the vase of the abstaining father. This new vision will keep you from viewing the picture as a whole, as you were able to do before you started writing, but you’ll also probably be able to draw your girlfriend from memory much more convincingly from now on.
On the flip side, what your reader will have is a description from you that is so detailed she will struggle to keep it all in her mind at once, especially if the details don’t reflect a systematic order that mimics our line of sight when examining an image. Typically we sweep an image top to bottom, foreground to background, right to left, often looking at the center last because our eyes, metonymic skull tyrants, are as averse to being trapped in something as we are.
Yet even after compiling this exhaustive description, you and your reader will also know that, while a thousand words will get you quite a lot, there are plenty of details in the picture that have yet to be catalogued.
Now let’s consider mathematically what would be involved in conveying not just a flat picture, but the three-dimensional geography of place. Follow me on this one: we’re talking about going from a two dimensional image in the picture (x squared) to a three dimensional space at the travel site or Martian mall (x cubed), so that’s the square root of 1,000 words (31.622ish) cubed: 31,622 words to even begin to describe a place sufficiently, and that’s not even taking into consideration the way a place is constantly changing: the slant of light, the morning rush, the afternoon execution, the arrival of the space ship.
Very few people in the history of the world have had the lama-like patience to read 31,622 words of static setting, and I’m pretty sure they’re all dead now. So to convey setting in a compelling fashion, we’re talking about an incredible economy of words, somewhere in the range of one word for every hundred you might have had, because the description can’t go on so long that it saps the narrative of tension, forward motion, and action. There’s your first challenge.
Here’s the second challenge: since the setting in a travelogue or fantasy novel is (probably) wholly unfamiliar to the reader, the description of setting can’t just describe, but must also fundamentally define the landscape. Sometimes it’s enough to say “the palanquins were stacked by the ziggurat entrance,” or “ the cyberswills hung lazily from the docking station’s gravi-coupling,” and let the reader imagine what those things are and create their dimensions, but sometimes it’s not. A writer has to determine, based on an assumed reader’s frame of reference and on whether the visuals of the detail are crucial to the larger picture, where to stop and explain (“the cyberswills, greasy blue coils of fleshy bio-matter that fed off the docking station’s electricity, hung lazily”) or where to breeze on by.
So to convey setting, you first starve your words, then you send what’s left out to perform an incredible, highly choreographed balancing act. It’s like ballet. The result can be something exquisite out front, but really ugly behind the curtain, where you’re occupied pulling out your hair and looking for just the right detail.
There’s the problem. Next time. I’ll look at how some authors have chosen to tackle it.
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