Epistolary authority, uncertainty, and mystery

When I wrote about the epistolary form and other framing devices in gothic storytelling earlier this week I forgot to mention The Screwtape Letters. I want to correct that. But first, check out this short Substack piece, which looks specifically at the opening “Author’s Preface” of Dracula.

In the essay I quoted Monday the author argued that framing devices like letters and diaries create a metanarrative “uncertainty” that tinges the reader’s perception of the story, building suspense and horror. The form itself generates the gothic’s sense of the uncanny. I agreed, and added that the epistolary or found document form also contributes the sense of discovery or unveiling that digging through old documents produces, heightening the genre’s feeling of mystery.

The above piece from The Middling Place about Stoker’s preface looks at another aspect of the form, namely the authority and veracity established by presenting a story’s “sources” in the manner of non-fiction:

This is not a fictional story written by an author. In fact, the author has nothing to do with the story. . . . Because they were found, they must be fact and not fiction. Obviously, we know that these are indeed works of fiction, yet it is a technique used by the author to make it seem less so.

In other words, they “substantiate authenticity.” The verb “seem” near the end is especially important, as while all fiction is an illusion of sorts—or a dream, as I prefer to think of it—the gothic relies upon and exploits the seemingness of the illusion more than usual.

So, what framing devices like letters or diary entries do for a gothic tale, in brief:

• Create uncertainty

• Engender a sense of discovery

• Establish the illusion of authenticity or reality

The Middling Place author does a good job examining how this works through a close reading of Stoker’s preface to Dracula. Consider two other cases.

First, the Coen brothers’ Fargo opens with this notorious title card:

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.

At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.

Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

I say “notorious” because some people think this crossed a line, but considered in relation to Dracula and the other examples provided in those two Substack essays, the Coens don’t seem to be doing much different here. Leaving that aside, those who view this opening text as a violation or lie confirm the ability of this kind of preface to sell the strange and unbelievable as authentic—which was the whole point, according to the Coens.

But Fargo poses as a low-key true crime story. The gothic asks its readers to accept much more, which brings me back to The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis’s opening note to this epistolary novel is often forgotten—it’s not even included in the sample on Amazon—but look at these sentences and, in light of the above, think about what they accomplish for Screwtape:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

Like Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, or what have you, this one sentence both 1) tells the reader that what he is about to read is real and 2) suggests immediately the mystery of its origins and contents. Not only can the editor not explain what we’re about to read, he won’t. Lewis reinforces these effects throughout the note while maintaining what seems, on a literal reading, the dry, dispassionate language of the textual critic. Consider this line from the final paragraph:

In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters.

The authenticity or reality of the story—one can picture the scholar, frustrated, working into the night to compile and arrange Screwtape’s correspondence—as well as the mystery are reiterated one last time, and lines in the middle like “The reader is advised to remember that the devil is a liar” develop the aforementioned uncertainty. The whole effect is powerfully tantalizing, and though I’ve never heard anyone describe Screwtape as gothic, Lewis uses these effects masterfully.

By a nice coincidence, I just started Dracula last night. It’s engrossing. The gestures toward authenticity, uncertainty, and mystery embedded in Stoker’s preface are not the whole reason for this—plenty of bad books open with similar notes (pick up any Dan Brown novel)—but they have a subtle power worth learning from.

The epistolary and the gothic

Speaking of letters, here’s a second epistolary topic I came across last week but didn’t have time to write about when I briefly returned to Emma on Friday:

One of the items I included in Quid, my Substack digest, over the weekend was this handy short guide to the gothic by literary historian Rebecca Marks. She opens by quoting the note at the beginning of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s ur-gothic novel from 1764, and highlights the role of framing devices in gothic literature. She returns to this topic about halfway through:

Gothic novels are filled with letters, diary entries, found manuscripts, dreams, and reported speech, and Gothic paintings are full of so-called ‘liminal’ or negative spaces (windows, graveyards, ruins, dungeons, corridors, shadows). The idea is that we, as consumers of the Gothic, can never be sure about the truth because it’s always shrouded in degrees of separation.

Having just picked up Dracula to read for the first time (minus an abortive attempt in college) as well as being a fan of MR James and especially Poe—one of whose earliest stories was literally titled “MS. [manuscript] Found in a Bottle”—this rings true. Marks compares the way the gothic uses such framing devices to modern found footage horror like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity and credits their prevalence in the gothic to “the sense of uncertainty” they create.

No argument here. What I’d add is that these forms come with a not insignificant sense of discovery built in. This creates not only the “sense of uncertainty” Marks describes, but enhances it with a sense of chronological distance. That means getting the story will require assembling it bit by bit, slowly revealing the shocking truth. If one finds an epistolary horror novel scary because of the uncertainty created by the form, one keeps reading because of the tingling sense that one is slowly uncovering what’s really going on, a feeling we usually ascribe to whodunnits.

Not all gothic stories are mysteries, but I’d say all gothic stories have an element of mystery. In both, the construction of the real story in the reader’s mind is an important part of the storytelling process. In mysteries this involves clues; in the gothic it involves atmosphere and suggestion.

And to return to a pet theory: this fits well with my sense that UFO and alien stories are the modern replacement for the gothic. The same thrill offered by the pretense that The Castle of Otranto or one of MR James’s stories are old manuscripts dug up in dark archives is to be had from the grainy photographs, blurry film footage, photocopies of redacted Air Force files, or an especially juicy eyewitness interview many years after the fact. Any good UFO story is going to involve forgotten secrets revealed by carefully reconstructing the truth from old files.

Letter-writing in Emma revisited

Back in July I shared some observations on the moral significance of letter-writing in the early chapters of Emma. In short: the way characters communicate in writing and interpret others’ writing reveals significant aspects of their virtue—or the lack thereof. I’ve been thinking about that ever since, and as my wife and I near the end of the book I find that Austen, great writer that she is, has bookended the story with a few more letters and reflections on language.

After the revelation that the dandyish Frank Churchill and the shy, tortured Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged the entire time, Frank writes a letter to explain himself. Notably, he writes to his stepmother, who is the most unreasonably receptive audience possible, and not to the father he spent years ignoring or neglecting or the girls he led on in order to conceal the engagement. As for the letter itself, it is unusually long* (Austen specifically notes how thick the envelope is), and, like Frank himself, smooth, plausible, self-congratulatory, and deftly spun to exonerate himself.

It works—at least temporarily. Mrs Weston, the recipient of Frank’s letter, is satisfied by his explanations, and Emma herself finds most of his excuses convincing. It’s Mr Knightley who sees through it, and offers an entertaining commentary during his reading. He can find only one point of agreement with Frank:

He has had great faults, faults of inconsideration and thoughtlessness; and I am very much of his opinion in thinking him likely to be happier than he deserves: but still as he is, beyond a doubt, really attached to Miss Fairfax, and will soon, it may be hoped, have the advantage of being constantly with her, I am very ready to believe his character will improve, and acquire from hers the steadiness and delicacy of principle that it wants. And now, let me talk to you of something else.

This is the transition to Mr Knightley’s proposal to Emma, an occasion Austen uses to contrast the character of these two men as seen through the character of their communication. Austen summarizes his speech thus:

The subject followed; it was in plain, unaffected, gentlemanlike English, such as Mr. Knightley used even to the woman he was in love with, how to be able to ask her to marry him, without attacking the happiness of her father. Emma’s answer was ready at the first word.

And rightly so. Where Frank is evasive, Mr Knightley is direct. Where Frank’s letter reveals self-absorption, Mr Knightley’s proposal shows consideration—both for the woman he hopes to marry and her needy, hypochondriac father. But note as well the way he speaks: “plain, unaffected, gentlemanlike English.” This description is a chiastic echo of Mr Martin’s letter to Harriet near the beginning, which Austen describes with the same three laudable qualities:

[A]s a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.

That Austen bookends her story with these reflections on virtue and communication is significant, I think, and brilliantly done. There’s a reason we go back to her work.

As I noted in that original post, one’s writing may not be an infallible guide to the content of one’s character, especially if we get stuck on the nuts and bolts: grammar and spelling, both of which are poorly taught now. But what one writes—and how, stylistically—are revealing. Something worth considering in an age of casual, instantaneous, unceasing, and almost universally unvirtuous communication.

*Years ago I read through and transcribed boxes full of mid-19th century letters for the antique auction where I worked. I still remember noting that most of them were confined to a single sheet, perhaps but not always filled on both sides.

Notes on Christopher Nolan’s best movie

Alley (Andy Serkis), Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), and Angier (Hugh Jackman) in Tesla’s Colorado laboratory in The Prestige (2006)

A few days ago I started rereading The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, a World Fantasy Award winner about Victorian magicians locked in a mutually destructive rivalry. I last read it as a senior in college almost twenty years ago. It’s very good—much richer and more absorbing than I remembered—and rereading the book has also got me thinking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation.

The book and the film are quite different (Priest was, it’s worth noting, in awe of the movie) but I don’t intend to examine those differences here. The movie has been one of my favorites since it came out and has rewarded years of viewing. But what I’ve realized now, to my surprise, is that after almost two decades and seven more films, The Prestige remains Nolan’s best movie.

I write this as a fan of Nolan—not a fanboy, but a fan, someone who likes and appreciates what he does and looks forward to each new Nolan project. I don’t intend to disparage his more recent movies, most of which I’ve liked. I just think that, with hindsight, The Prestige stands out as a work produced 1) at the height of Nolan’s powers and 2) before he became distracted by some of the qualities that have defined—and occasionally weakened—his subsequent movies.

Some notes toward refining my argument:

• Technically The Prestige is pretty much perfect. Wally Pfister’s anamorphic cinematography is beautiful and atmospheric and incorporates handheld work for a subtle contemporary feel without succumbing to the Bourne-style chaos of the mid-2000s. It also, like Barry Lyndon and Amadeus, allowed for shooting by candlelight. (Read American Cinematographer’s article on The Prestige; I ate this up when the movie came out.) The film feels real and authentic, a mood enhanced by the costume and set design, which establish the easily-caricatured Victorian London as a real place.

• Also on the technical side: the editing (by Lee Smith, who has cut several other Nolan movies) is excellent, probably the best of Nolan’s career. It’s really the editing that makes this movie. Though The Prestige tells its story along multiple chronological timelines, jumping forward and backward in time with occasional flashes forward or backward as characters remember or reflect, it does so effortlessly. Despite its complexity it is easy to follow and requires almost no internal explanation.

• The music by David Julyan is, as so often with Nolan’s films, there to enhance atmosphere and mood rather than to soar on memorable leitmotifs. It does its job perfectly, without distraction or—as in the last few Nolan films—drowning out dialogue.

• The performances are also excellent, the standouts being Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, both of whom play two roles. This is where rewatching The Prestige most pays off—once you know what’s going on with Alfred Borden it’s easy to see, through Bale’s performance, that he’s two people with distinct, conflicting personalities: one cautious and softspoken, one aggressive and brash. This has the unique effect of making the ending more powerful after the twist has been revealed.

• Of course, all of this technical and artistic craft is in the service of a good story, which is the best reason to watch any movie. There are plenty of technically admirable movies that are not interesting, entertaining, or meaningful. The Prestige is all of these.

Why The Prestige stands out so much in retrospect: it has, on paper, a lot of Nolan’s tics and preoccupations—multiple identities, family tragedy, crime, deception, the nature of reality, and memory—but allows them to arise naturally from the story. By contrast:

• Music: I enjoy some Nolan movie soundtracks (Interstellar is perhaps the last great one), but since Inception they have gotten more bombastic and intrusive. This is, perhaps, emblematic of the rest of my complaints below.

• The Prestige was the last of Nolan’s movies to be shot before he began his ongoing experiment with large-format filmmaking, especially IMAX. He has used this as more than a gimmick—like 3D, which he rightly avoided—but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the form has started to overwhelm the story. The frequent switching between formats and aspect ratios in his more recent movies is also just distracting. I find myself wishing more and more for a film with a single consistent visual technique, especially one as wonderful as what Nolan and Pfister created in The Prestige.

• More seriously, even if we disregard form or technique, the structure of Nolan’s movies since has become a more and more overt, obvious part of the story. Where The Prestige smoothly moves the audience back and forth through several different timelines, both trusting the audience enough to understand and expertly editing the film to make its structure intuitive and invisible, his movies since Inception call attention to their structure and require frequent, heavy-handed exposition. (Despite these efforts, the “[Nolan movie] ending explained” genre on YouTube continues to thrive.)

• Related: The Prestige uses, like many of Nolan’s movies before and since, non-linear storytelling. Again, it does so effortlessly and without calling attention to itself. More recent movies like Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and most obviously and incomprehensibly Tenet use it as a flourish. When some critics wonder whether this kind of chronological tossed salad is necessary for these stories, they’re not being unreasonable.

• I wouldn’t call The Prestige a special effects movie, but several sequences rely heavily on effects—Tesla’s lab, Angier’s transporter machine, and subtle shots of the Borden twins working together. They’re seamlessly integrated, even the digital effects Nolan now has a reputation for shunning. Nolan’s insistence on practical stuntwork and in-camera effects is laudable, but it sometimes feels—like the large format film—like a gimmick that is taking over his movies. Witness all the jokes online about Nolan finding real cyclopes or having his actors throw real thunderbolts for his Odyssey project.

• Finally, The Prestige is rich, dense, intricately plotted, but tight, running just over two hours. With the exception of Dunkirk, which Nolan said he wanted to feel like the third act of a much larger story, every movie from The Dark Knight on has been two and a half hours long or longer. I like or love several of these, but the feeling of sprawl and self-indulgence is palpable, especially when the increasingly showy plots require multiple scenes of people talking about what’s going on for the audience’s benefit.

In short, The Prestige perfectly unites story and form. Nolan continues to make good movies, but with their increasing emphasis on spectacle, teasing structure, and technical gimmickry, he has never quite struck the same balance he did in The Prestige.

Again, these are note and observations. Perhaps more thoughts later, especially once I’ve finished rereading the novel and watched the movie again.

I’ll end by noting that Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, did an excellent job adapting Priest’s novel. This second reading impresses upon me more than the first just how difficult this story would be to construct for the screen. I’m glad they took the effort—and over several years, which I think may be yet another factor distinguishing The Prestige from the films since—because the story is brilliant, surprising, suspenseful, and moving, and deserved to be told well.

From the Themes Files: political novels

In his inaugural Substack post last month, Tim Powers recounted this story:

I was on a panel about vampire stories one time, and one of the panelists said, “Well you know, Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women.” And I said, “No, it’s actually about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”

“Dracula wasn’t a metaphor,” Powers continues. “He was a vampire.”

That’s been on my mind because, earlier this week, a Substack note by novelist Aaron Gwyn—whose novella The Cannibal Owl I read last week and loved—turned into yet another Substack tempest in a teapot. Gwyn’s claim:

The political novelist is a fiction writer in diminished form. The great novelist’s intentions, motivations, and biases are forever obscured behind a rhetorical mask. The great novelist doesn’t aspire to be a political actor, but a ventriloquist.

I would tend to agree. See this post from last year about “the novel of ideas,” in which the novelist as artist becomes subservient to his message.

Well, Gwyn’s note got a lot of Substack litterateurs huffing and puffing. When Gwyn supplied a list of novelists who didn’t “engage politically,” one scandalized response read “You can tell someone hasn’t read Proust when he’s included on a list of writers who didn’t ‘engage politically.’” This observation is only slightly marred by the fact that no one should read Proust.*

More to my point, consider these comments by others:

Blood Meridian is about the military conquest of the west, whats more political than that?

Gilead is about religion and war and race and how all the above affect a family and has characters openly discussing whether or not they support Eisenhower.

The core conceit of Moby-Dick is treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility. . . . it’s explicitly an interrogation of American society and values.

Is it, though? Is that actually what any of these—novels in which ill-fated filibusters and scalphunters kill and are killed in the desert, in which an old man faces his mortality and yearns to leave something behind for his son, in which an obsessed sea captain dooms his entire crew—is “about”?

This topic sits squarely at the intersection of several of my driving interests and concerns, including two I’ve written about several times this year already: themes and particularity. Back in the spring I wrote about the overemphasis on “themes” in the study of literature, and this is what I mean. These specific examples, provoked by what I suspect is a bit of trolling on Gwyn’s part, are politically inflected and therefore even less tolerable than the usual.

Take Moby-Dick. Is that really “about” the working class and is it really “interrogating” anything? Or is it about one man’s obsession? To ask a question I asked back in the spring again with Moby-Dick in mind, would you rather read a novel about “treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility” or a novel about a maimed captain so bent on revenge against one whale that he drives his entire crew to their deaths in a round-the-world hunt? Which one of those sounds more interesting as a novel?

Let me put it this way: Visit Barnes & Noble and look at the many different editions of Moby-Dick that they will have in stock. What’s on the cover? Socioeconomic interrogation? Or a white whale large enough to endanger a ship?

Perhaps Melville, to stick with this example, really is doing what Gwyn’s politically-minded commenters say he is—though his thematic interests strike me as much more theological than economic or political. I don’t know. But whether Moby-Dick is actually “about” anything political, it would fail if it were not first about the captain and the whale. Particularity.

This is what I think Gwyn meant in his original note. A respectable theme must emerge organically from what is purposefully, deliberately a novel, a work of art. Approaching the work with a programmatic message in mind simplifies or sells out the art. It is “diminished” and “obscured” behind the rhetorical pose required of the message. Politics is the Procrustean bed of any form of art. It imposes on stories a shape that requires distortion.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Ayn Rand. Read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged with an open mind and you can’t help but be struck by 1) the talent she had in imagining and constructing vast stories and 2) the way she contorted and butchered her own art in the service of her risible messaging.

Gwyn, puckishly pressing one critic for his definition of a “political novel,” was answered with: “Presenting a view of how society and culture is organized through power structures, war, socioeconomics.” Gwyn rightly replied that “If you define ‘politics’ in that way, you’ve constructed a definition that’s sufficiently broad enough to encompass everything. In other words, you’ve emptied the term of all meaning.”

That’s what theme talk, especially of a political variety, does. Its vagueness is as much an enemy of good interpretation as the political is of honest art.

* What I have written, I have written.

Lewis and Poe (sort of) on originality

In his magisterial new biography Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, Richard Kopley quotes several early reviews for Poe’s Poems, published in New York following his expulsion from West Point and partially financed by his fellow cadets (who were famously annoyed that the finished book didn’t include the satirical verses he had composed about their instructors). There were a few negative reviews, but some mixed to favorable ones noting Poe’s potential. Here’s the New-York Mirror with a backhanded compliment:

“Every thing in the language betokens poetic inspiration, but it rather resembles the leaves of the Sybil when scattered by the wind.”

The “scattered” quality of an author’s early work is recognizable and relatable.

A short notice in the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, which Kopley credits to Poe benefactor John Neal (but the Poe Society of Baltimore maintains is only “possibly” Neal), applauds Poe’s “fine genius,” mixes this praise with criticism of “[s]heer nonsense” scattered throughout (“Pure poetry in one page—pure absurdity in another”), and ends with both praise and warning:

“He has a fine genius, we repeat it, and may be distinguished, if he will not mistake oddity for excellence, or want of similitude to all others, for superiority over them.”

By coincidence, I had recently come across this observation from CS Lewis in Mere Christianity:

“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

I was going to say that a striving that turns to strain is a common affliction of young writers, but Lord knows it’s a trap you can fall into no matter how long you’ve been writing. Stop trying so hard! Do your thing and let originality emerge organically, almost spontaneously. Oddity is not distinction, and uniqueness is not quality. Always a good reminder for myself.

Three items on learning by doing

Item: This morning Alan Jacobs shared a short post on Allan Dwan, who happened into the director’s chair by accident in 1911 and directed his last film in 1961. Along the way he gave Lon Chaney his break, discovered Carole Lombard, and—like many such early filmmakers—innovated both artistically and technically, those two aspects being deeply intertwined in filmmaking. Jacobs:

It’s fascinating to see how this industry—this art form—developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised—and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.

Item: Also this morning, Ted Gioia shared an essay on children and music lessons with a special focus on why so many kids quit not only the lessons but the instrument. In his own experiences with lessons, despite hating and quitting his piano them he kept playing on his own. Then:

I made up my own songs. I learned other songs I liked by ear. I actually played the instrument more after those awful lessons had been terminated. . . .

So I developed without jazz teachers, both as a musician and as a music historian. There’s some irony in that. I had access to amazing professors at illustrious universities, but jazz wasn’t part of the curriculum. In the field in which I made my reputation, I had to teach myself.

I’m not especially proud of that. Too much of what I’ve done in life has happened outside official channels. I’ve missed things by not accessing the right teachers at the right time. Things I did learn, I might have learned faster with proper guidance.

On the other hand, you learn very deeply when forced to invent your own pedagogy. And I take some comfort in knowing that there were almost no jazz teachers for the generations that came before me. Many of the jazz pioneers learned by doing—and they turned out okay.

The improvisatory, trial-and-error quality of both stories is fascinating, and both Jacobs and Gioia more or less directly point out that learning this way takes a long time—but one learns “very deeply.” Think of one of the greats in any field—filmmaking, music, writing, painting, science, even law, politics, and war—and they will almost certainly have started at the bottom, learning the nuts and bolts. Here’s a short list of directors who started off as gofers on the crew of low-budget director Roger Corman, for example.

But when you learn by doing, once you’ve mastered your art—insofar as that is possible in any art—a funny thing happens: your expertise translates into style. Which leads me to this third and final piece:

Item: Last week I saw this interesting Substack note from novelist Aaron Gwyn (whose excellent novella The Cannibal Owl I’ve just read and loved):

We all love a stylish writer, whether mannered and showy like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy or “invisible” like Elmore Leonard. But how will a writer or artist of any kind know what his strengths and weaknesses are without doing the work?

I remember learning once, when our kids were small, that playtime dangers are not to be avoided but embraced. Climbing trees, going up slides the wrong way, jumping off of swings, doing pretty much anything on a trampoline—these are how children learn what their bodies are capable of. It both teaches them limits and gives them confidence in what they can do. But they have to do it.

This is what I hate most about AI “writing”: by offering finished products without the process, it robs writers of all kinds—whether novelists, students, or office drones drafting e-mails—of the work. It tricks people into thinking they’re able-bodied adults while bypassing the whole childhood playground experience. It’s not only instrumental and pragmatic, it weakens the person who uses it without their even realizing it. But perhaps worst of all, the work, the nuts and bolts, is not only how you master the craft and art of writing, it’s one of the most fun parts of it.

Perhaps more thoughts on that later. But for now, read all the items above and note especially the importance of play and enjoyment in Gioia’s post on music lessons, and consider how AI advocates consistently portray writing—or whatever the process in question—as time-wasting drudgery. Someone is lying.

Like, totally

Writing in The American Scholar, novelist Max Byrd considers the simile: its varieties, uses, and abuses. He is correct to begin with the unusual pleasure a striking simile can provide:

“His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish,” writes Raymond Chandler. “He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into the mud,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, the undoubted master of the form. Or Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.”

Here are two similes packed inside one another in one Chesterton’s most dramatic settings, from The Man Who Was Thursday:

They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb.

These examples showcase the more familiar form of simile, the “comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’” that we all learn about in school. How about the epic or Homeric simile? These extended comparisons can stretch line upon line through the middle of the action of a poem. Byrd:

It takes a dramatic mind to carry a comparison through so logically and so far. The Homeric simile evokes a world far larger than a single flash of thought, however clever. Its length creates a scene in our minds, even a drama where contraries come alive: an army driving into battle, an ocean tamed into a harmless old gent, a bloody clash in the streets between aristocrats and rebels.

The epic simile is one of the keys to Homer’s markedly cinematic effects. In addition to its evocative and scenic qualities, as described by Byrd, it also works as slow-motion. Consider this in the middle of one-on-one combat in Book XIII of the Iliad:

[Aeneas] went against Idomeneus, strongly eager for battle,
yet no fear gripped Idomeneus as if he were a stripling,
but he stood his ground like a mountain wild boar who in the confidence
of his strength stands up to a great rabble of men advancing
upon him in some deserted place, and bristles his back up,
and both his eyes are shining with fire; he grinds his teeth
in his fury to fight off the dogs and the men. So
spear-famed Idomeneus held his ground and would not give way[.]

That’s Richmond Lattimore’s translation. In his more colloquial, dynamic translation, Stanley Lombardo breaks these similes out typographically to give them yet further emphasis. The pausing effect, which concentrates the imagination, is magnificent. Homer employs it a lot, to great effect.

To return to Byrd, what all good similes have in common—and what bad, forced, or embarrassing similes fail at—is vision:

“Perceptive of resemblances,” writes Aristotle, is what the maker of similes must be. There is one more step. The maker of similes, long or short, must perceive resemblances and then, above all, obey the first, and maybe only, commandment for a writer: to make you see. Consider Wodehouse’s “He found Lord Emsworth, as usual, draped like a wet sock over the rail of the Empress’s G.H.Q.,” or Patricia Cornwell’s “My thoughts scattered like marbles.”

“To make you see.” Good similes will not only catch superficial “resemblances,” as Aristotle puts it, but will draw attention to parallels on multiple levels. The best will not only evoke vivid, concrete images but convey moral import. In that passage from The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton doesn’t have to tell us how dangerous and unnatural this place is, we see it. In the Amis one at the beginning of this post (from Lucky Jim) we see Jim Dixon’s agonized posture in bed. And in that passage from Homer we see, in detail, Idomeneus’s tenacity, ferocity, and defiance.

We all know to show, not tell, but sometimes showing something else is the best way to tell us about the thing in question.

My favorite of my own similes comes from my master’s thesis. In describing the defensive situation of King Harold Godwinson with regard to his exiled brother Tostig in 1066—knowing all the while that two greater threats, King Harald Hardrada of Norway and Duke William the Bastard of Normandy, were also out there, plotting—I wrote:

Harold probably expected Tostig to join up with one of the two pretenders to the throne and return to his earldom remora-like, attached to the belly of a more powerful predator.

I remember this with satisfaction because my advisor actually wrote “Nice” in the margin, a compliment that did a great deal of good to me when I needed it. I was going to say it’s a shame I spent this one on my thesis, but as that’s still likely my most widely read work I guess that’s fine. A part of me is still hanging onto it for later, though.

Byrd goes on to consider the similarities and differences between similes and metaphors, the simile’s “childlike” qualities, and the work of imaginative preparation the “like” or “as” in a simile does to us as we read. It’s a delightful essay. Read the whole thing here.

Powers and Jacobs on history and fiction

Over the weekend on his new Substack, Tim Powers explained how he comes up with the plots of his historical fantasy novels by scrutinizing works of history and biography for the odd and inexplicable, moments the historians can’t account for with the evidence they have to work with:

A number of people who knew Lord Byron saw him on a street in London in 1811, while at that precise time Byron was delirious with a fever in Turkey. Biographers simply note the fact, leaving any possible explanation up in the air.

Why was Byron in two places at once?

Other examples abound: Edison’s dying breath in a bottle, Arthur Conan Doyle’s endorsement of obviously fake photos of fairies, a cockamamie experiment by Galileo to determine the speed of light. Powers takes these moments and, saving the appearances, makes the inexplicable explicable with magic.

This week at his blog, Alan Jacobs wrote about Irish novelist Thomas Flanagan’s loose trilogy about Ireland’s wars for independence (as well as Flanagan’s friendship with the great Seamus Heaney). In describing a moment in which a man’s memory of a friend is altered by previously unknown history—part of the cycle of “ever-ramifying and ever-elusive historical truth”—Jacobs notes that

For some, of course, the appeal of history is to unearth secrets, however carefully hidden—perhaps not to know everything, but to know more and more, even at the cost of digging up old bones (metaphorically and sometimes literally). And for still others, the appeal of fiction is to imagine all that the historian will never discover. This is perhaps why Flanagan wrote novels.

Both Powers and Jacobs are getting at the way fiction can press beyond the limits of responsible historiography into mystery—literal mysteries in the case of Powers, the everyday mysteries of life in Flanagan. These are things fiction can get at truthfully where history can only speculate. The result—speaking as someone with a foot in both camps, historian and novelist—if done well and responsibly, can reconcile irreconcilable facts and capture the what-it-was-likeness of the past. It can feel more real than reality.

Per Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, writing of the experience of ordinary people in past ages:

So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.

Yes, I’ve quoted that passage here before (here and here and alluded to here), but it’s been a few years and, as much as I struggle not to repeat myself, I ought to be able to include an occasional invocation of one of my intellectual lodestars as a treat.

Both posts above are good. Check them out.

Archetypes vs particulars

F1 and Top Gun: Maverick—both movies about men wearing helmets in vehicles? Or more?

“That’s just like Top Gun: Maverick.” This from my daughter halfway through my explanation of the plot of F1, which I finally saw Tuesday night. I had just finished describing the way veteran driver Sonny Hayes was brought in to teach cocky young driver Josh Pearce and the conflict that brewed up between the two of them. This, to her, instantly brought to mind Maverick and Rooster.

She didn’t mean this declaration as snark or criticism, just old-fashioned excitement at recognizing a parallel, and the thing is, she’s right. I love both movies, and their stories do, superficially, have a lot in common. Does that mean that Top Gun: Maverick and F1 are, at base, the same story? Or that they’re in some way inferior or unoriginal?

I’d say no, and that both succeed magnificently as entertainment on the strength of something I’ve preached about over and over here: particularity.

Back in the spring I railed a bit against overemphasis on vague “themes” and “archetypes” and especially “the Hero’s Journey” as interpretive schemes for stories. These approaches fixate on similarity to the detriment of the specific stories they interpret, which are often oversimplified in the service of strained, banal, misleading comparisons.

And yet, whether archetypes in the full Jungian sense exist, the human mind was designed to recognize and respond to patterns. We generalize for reasons beyond time-saving heuristics. And comparing stories—tens of thousands of them over thousands of years—does reveal recurring patterns, motifs, stock characters, and structural conventions. Here is one early pitfall: those who argue that because there are really only X number of plots, creativity and originality are illusions and nothing but rearranging what has been done before. This plays nicely into the rise of the AI lovers, who argue for AI “art” and “writing” by dismissing actual art and writing along similar lines. But that’s another error for another day. For now: ye shall know them by their fruits.

That said, I’ll call these recurrent patterns and conventions archetypes for now. But like Plato’s forms, these don’t exist in any undiluted version anywhere. We have to discern them within the particulars of stories—vivid detail being “the life blood of fiction.”

Every story, then, must balance the archetypal and the particular, the general and recognizable with the concrete and specific. We understand this intuitively and condemn stories that don’t strike this balance well. A story that leans too heavily in the direction of archetype, of familiar patterns, or that fails to develop believable specifics and defaults to the archetype, we call stereotypical or clichéd. Both of these words come from the world of printing, of reproducing precisely the same thing over and over.

To return to Top Gun: Maverick and F1, they do have many similarities. In both, an over-the-hill legend butts heads with an arrogant but gifted upstart before both learn how to work together to succeed at a goal. This is a story familiar not just from these two movies, but from many, many other action and especially sports movies. No debate there.

What keeps these two movies from being rehashes of old clichés is their attention to the particulars, not just with regard to the highly specialized worlds in which they take place in order to feel realistic but also with the characters invented to tell the story. Sonny Hayes and Maverick are both veterans in their fields who are called back to action, but under different circumstances and vastly different pressures. Both might be loners, but Sonny literally wrecked his burgeoning F1 career and went on to decades of aimless waste and Maverick, whatever has happened in the years between his two films, is still successful, in fact at the top of his game. Sonny, a freelance race car driver, is called back as a personal favor to his old friend Ruben. Maverick is ordered back because he is in the military. His personal drama comes through his relationship with Rooster, son of his dead co-pilot Goose, while Sonny has no history with Josh Pearce and their relationship develops as a professional rivalry. And the overall stakes could not be more different—financial ruin for Ruben or nuclear war with Iran.

The two films also explore different thematic territory, but the particulars, the specific details that make this story itself and not that story, that make this character a memorable individual distinct from that character, could be listed at much greater length.

Particularity not only makes stories and their characters feel real—what would either of these movies be without their attention to naval aviation or Formula 1 racing?—but keeps them fresh. Stories that simply hew to the archetype fail as stories. Compare Star Wars, which, despite being famously archetypal, still feels real and vital, both lived in an living, and something like Eragon, which does many of the same things and fails.

Stories that lean too far into the particulars are much rarer and usually incomprehensible. You hear much more complaint about cliché, and for good reason. But a story that feels familiar but attends studiously to its vivid, concrete specifics can be not only well-crafted art, but a crowd-pleaser.

* * * * *

I’ve written about particularity several other times over the years: with regard to Song of Songs, romance, and “humanity;” Cormac McCarthy’s novels, which could not have taken place anywhere but where he set them; and James Bond and Honeychile Rider, a particular man and a particular woman with particular histories, not stand-ins for “men” and “women.” Particulars being “the life blood of fiction” comes from John Gardner, whose concept of fiction as a “fictive dream” has profoundly shaped my writing. I wrote about that in some detail here.

The Poseidon Gary Stu

Rev Scott heroically tells everyone how it’s going to be in The Poseidon Adventure

Film criticism YouTuber Like Stories of Old posted a video yesterday examining “the cornered villain.” He offers several examples, the best of which are Die Hard’s Hans Gruber and Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre, antagonists whose well-laid plans face genuine threats of failure and who are therefore driven not only by greed, hatred, or ego, but by desperation. Their suavity, intelligence, cruelty, and ruthlessness may make them interesting, but what makes them compelling is their vulnerability.

This is a striking insight, and a good thing to remember when creating any character, not only villains. As it happens, this has been on my mind lately thanks to a recent reacquaintance with the hero of The Poseidon Adventure, which I watched a few weekends ago with my wife and kids.

The late great Gene Hackman plays Rev Scott, some kind of defrocked liberal priest or minister who preaches a weird existential gospel of helping oneself. What I remembered from the many times I enjoyed The Poseidon Adventure as a kid was the risks he ran in leading an escape from the capsized ship, his self-sacrifice at the end, and the heavy-handed religious allegory—crudely obvious to even twelve-year old Jordan. What I did not remember is how obnoxious Rev Scott was.

Loud, abrasive, self-regarding, confrontational, hectoring, and a condescending know-it-all to boot (watch his introductory scene and tell me whether any real human being talks about themselves like that), the film positions Rev Scott as a powerful hero but I found myself wishing something bad would happen to him. He has all the qualities the filmmakers want us to admire and no weaknesses. He is, in internet parlance, a Gary Stu. For most of the movie, he struggles only against the elements and the complaints of the doofuses relying on him to lead them out. He always knows the right path to take and succeeds at everything he attempts.

Almost everything, that is. In a famous sequence late in the film, elderly, overweight Mrs Rosen (Shelley Winters), a former champion swimmer, volunteers to swim a long flooded corridor. Rev Scott insists she stay behind and let him do it—of course he does—in the process of which he is trapped by debris. Mrs Rosen then swims the passage, frees him, and leads him the rest of the way through only to die of a heart attack. Scott is, temporarily, wrecked by her sacrificial death.

It’s a justifiably famous scene, one of the most memorable in the movie. And why? The obvious answer is that Mrs Rosen, who has been dead weight up to this point, gets a moment not only to shine but to save the day.

But this sequence is also the first time we see this cocksure hero vulnerable, and the first time he has a relationship with another character beyond lecturing, bossing, and—in the weird case of the teenage girl—feebly comforting. For the first time in the film Rev Scott actually becomes interesting, because it is the first time he fails at anything and needs anyone else.

A few points of comparison from my recent reading:

• Every character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—and most notably the titular Eddie—is working to stay ahead of situations that threaten constantly to spin out of their control. Their desperation increases throughout the novel.

• In The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, protagonist Brendan Doyle and the host of villains he faces have palpable, intense vulnerabilities. (Powers really puts poor Doyle through the wringer—which helps make Doyle one of his best characters.) Guarding against weaknesses, like a dog favoring a wounded leg, is almost as important to them as what they want to get.

• In Freaky Deaky, Elmore Leonard creates a truly loathsome archvillain in Robin Abbott, a society girl turned hippie terrorist—manipulative, carnal, and frighteningly greedy. But as threatening as she is, she only becomes interesting once her plans start unraveling about two-thirds of the way through. By contrast, lesser villains like gangsta Donnell Lewis and wealthy burnout Woody Ricks have to navigate numerous vulnerabilities and are more interesting than the lofty Robin.

I love Gene Hackman—if I could use a time machine to cast a Griswoldville movie using actors from any time and place, he would play the grandfather—but he is shockingly bad in The Poseidon Adventure. Part of the problem was his phoning it in for a paycheck. But more significant was the character of Rev Scott himself.

It seems a piece of obvious advice, but characters, whether heroes or villains, need vulnerabilities and limitations not only to be believable, but to be interesting and compelling. If you want an example of how not to do it, The Poseidon Adventure might prove instructive.

Badly written, Emma

The early chapters of Emma concern Emma Woodhouse’s efforts to manipulate people into relationships, most prominently Mr Elton, the vicar, who is not as obliging as he seems, and her friend Harriet Smith, who is a pleasant dope with nothing going for her. When Harriet receives a surprise proposal from Robert Martin, a man held in high regard for his character, intelligence, and work ethic by everyone but who is—gasp!—a farmer, Emma casts about for reasons to tell Harriet to refuse.

When she reads Martin’s letter of proposal she discovers

not merely no grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.

In otherwords, it is the kind of writing anyone who cares about writing strives for.

Emma tries to spin this quality as a bad thing. At first she tries to suggest that, because Mr Martin doesn’t speak as well as he writes (heaven help all of us of whom this is true) that his sister must have helped him or written it for him, but by the end of the chapter she is dismissing the letter as merely “tolerable” and has convinced Harriet that it is of no importance because it is “short.”

A few chapters later, she has so warped the pliable Harriet’s perceptions that Harriet explicitly compares Mr Martin’s earnest letter to Mr Elton’s dumb riddle and finds the letter wanting:

“It is one thing,” said she, presently—her cheeks in a glow—“to have very good sense in a common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this.”

Emma could not have desired a more spirited rejection of Mr. Martin’s prose.

The comedy of these chapters lies in Emma’s blinding self-deception (Mr Elton wants her, not Harriet), snobbery (highlighted most clearly by Mr Knightley’s account of talking to Mr Martin in the next chapter), and her monumental hypocrisy (she counsels Harriet to reject Mr Martin in… a brief and direct letter, which she also ends up writing herself). But it’s striking that Austen chose the art of writing to express so much about Emma’s moral character. Mr Martin’s letter reflects his personal virtue and Emma’s reaction to it—most especially her continued doubling down, trying to will her opinion into reality—reflect her immaturity and selfishness.

Writing style is not an infallible guide to moral character, but deliberately rejecting good writing is always revealing. A certain kind of writer likes to pretend that form, style, and the basic rules of grammar and storytelling don’t matter, that they are free to write in whatever way they want. They scoff at the seasoned writers of yesteryear who have tried to lay out some of what works. George Orwell and Elmore Leonard are common targets, but you can best gauge their commitment by how violently they attack Strunk and White. And, like Emma, they work hard to sway others to embrace their error.

The rules usually find them out. Good writing is good writing wherever you find it, but one writes well by seeking it outside of oneself and conforming to it, not by trying obstinately to will one’s writing into excellence—just as Emma has to learn with regard to character, friendship, and love.