Particularity redux

A few weeks ago, in asking what it is that novels are supposed to do, I brought up the particularity of storytelling. Particularity—specifics, details, “proofs” that the story “is actually happening”—is one of the non-negotiable necessities of good storytelling. Even minimalist fables or didactic stories like Jesus’s parables begin with “a certain man.”

Yesterday I came across this episode of “What’s the Difference?” a YouTube series comparing books to their film adaptations. It’s a relatively new one covering Dr No, the sixth of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels but the first in the film series. The first half of the video impressed me, doing an excellent job of explaining Bond’s physical, psychological, and—one might suggest—spiritual degradation by that point in Fleming’s novels as well as the reserve of endurance that keeps Bond going.

But then the video’s two narrators, whom I call A and B below, introduce Honey Rider (Ryder in the film) this way: Upon arriving on Crab Key in the film,

A: Bond discovers Honey Ryder collecting seashells on the beach in what would become one of the most famous bikinis of the twentieth century.

B: In the book, Honey Rider is completely nude, save for the knife belt at her waist, and sports a badly broken nose. It’s a real sticking point with her character that she’s ashamed of the nose, and just really wants to be pretty? She also shares with Bond her ambition to move to the US and be a prostitute until she’s rich enough to move back to Jamaica and get married, so… it’s just real in line with what a dude writing a sexy spy novel in the fifties thought of women.

A: Right. But the movie in the sixties wasn’t much better.

There’s a lot going on here—not least the dismissive reference to Fleming as “a dude,” which has become a noticeable leftwing verbal tic—but I want to focus on the idea of Honey Rider as what Fleming “thought of women.” Women, categorically.

I’m not here to defend Fleming’s beliefs or attitudes about sex or the sexes—though I probably have a completely different set of objections to his morals than the people who made this video—but I have to point out one major problem with his facile take on the character: Honey Rider is not women. She is a specific, particular woman.

Honeychile Rider has an entire personal history that she gets to relate, herself, in the course of the novel, and her own independent set of motivations, goals, and needs, and these are specifically her motivations, goals, and needs. She’s smart, tough, and capable even if ignorant of much of the rest of the world, but that’s only because she was orphaned at a young age, left essentially homeless to be raised by an old nanny, and finally sexually assaulted by a violent drunk—which is how she got her broken nose and why she’s so self-conscious about it. She has few options, but she’s doing what she can to get by. She is one of the most well-realized, compelling, and tragic of Fleming’s characters, and that is all down to the specifics of who she uniquely is.

But the video’s creators ignore all this. It’s funnier to pass over this well-rounded, compassionately-presented, and interesting character as just another bimbo dreamed up by an old-timey misogynist. It also fits an acceptable narrative and a particular style of online posturing.

A few months ago I ran across a line from Malcolm Muggeridge in which he presciently criticized “thinking in categories, rather than thinking.” This kind of thinking, especially about storytelling, elides the specifics that are “the life blood of fiction” and collapses the particular into the general, so that you end up the kind of person who sees Honey Rider and thinks only “woman” before moving on to condemn Fleming and Bond. Or perhaps “white,” and then condemning all three.

Talking about specific characters as avatars of entire classes of people is lazy, incurious, unfair to both art and artist, and—perhaps worst of all—destructive of the imagination. If you find yourself talking this way, especially to make a flippant joke, stop.

I wrote a longish Goodreads review of Dr No when I last listened to it about two years ago. You can read that for more on one of Fleming’s most suspenseful, action-packed novels here.