I was just thinking it had been too long between Sweater Weather posts! Looking forward to your new book. I wonder whether this disembodiment you speak about is related to my pet peeve about unidentified settings in novels. I can't stand it when the author creates a generic town and won't tell me what state or region it is in, because for me that specific physical feel of a climate and subculture is important to my psychological understanding of these people talking in a room, the context of their embodied emotions, so to speak. I don't need a lot of description so much as the well-chosen detail, as you said.
really really incisive . . . have been reading a lot of russian literature recently and wondering why it feels so momentously good & i think this is a big part of it
This is such an insightful essay and so well-written. I have been thinking a lot about the interior-exterior debate while writing about characters and I haven’t read anyone talk about it other than what the phenomenological thinkers have done in their works. It was refreshing and I shall keep thinking of this essay when I sit to write next. Thanks!
Thank you for this brilliance! I am fully obsessed with your work as a fellow non-wealthy Alabamian who loves Henry James and fries fish in times of stress, but of course, because of bodies and history, we are not "fellows" and cannot be for reasons vapor can't explain.
Part of the disembodiment moves this sort of fiction away from genre work which can be relentlessly embodied. Do we need to know what sort of jeans she was wearing? Maybe not, unless you're working Bret Easton Ellis' old turf.
agree. sensibility. I first understood this reading (rereading) the prologue in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and the the move into the first chapter in the desert.
This helped me think about my own contemporary fiction bugbear, hyperparticularity, in a new way -- the excruciating detail-for-the-sake-of-detail, the extremely clever turn of phrase that *signals* something sensory and meaningful but never really adds up to anything beyond a well-executed nod to "the sensory" or "the regional". I think my gripe is in the same family as yours. This *is* exactly what I mean:
"But you know the kind of descriptive writing I mean, in which we get a sense of how sweaty a character’s shirt is but have no sense of what this is meant to tell us except that it’s humid outside."
I like the way you put this, the idea of characters "engaging with the physical matrix of reality" which constitutes them and is constituted by them, since it helps get me out of the problem of feeling like what I want is for the mental state of characters to always be projected onto the landscape, which doesn't work either (at least, not in 2022, I think).
And it also re-orients the conversation from the craft wisdom that one must be particular and not abstract; my issue with hyperparticularity isn't just that it's not generalizable enough (though I sometimes have that complaint), and isn't just that publishing and the MFA circuit seem seriously allergic to ideas, but that these details do not resonate and they do not intersect enough with the rest of the story, both the interiority of the character and the social/natural mileau and the themes and everything else that's going on. They are there just to provide a momentary sensory jolt that implies significance but never delivers.
I think it’s a shame to consider Cusk’s comments to have a universal application. Outline is so vapor-y because it is a novel about (among some other things), language, and the limitations of language, and the ways in which it is violent. It’s a philosophical little novel (Apparently also a bit gossipy — apparently a number of the Irish poets and so forth are recognizable people drawn verbatim from life, very autofiction. And also, much British Modernist. I once wrote a paper about Outline, I have Thoughts.) I’m a big fan of that series, but I also see that it has limitations, in that the books are discussing a few ideas, and they’re using a very particular style so that they can look at those ideas. In that context you can really see the problem of “character,” because it becomes something Dickensian and sticky, something that forbids you to turn the lens of an idea because you’d be too busy thinking about the particularities of how this person and that person were together in this particular situation. (Of course, “sticky” isn’t bad, and “Dickensian” isn’t either, maybe, but they would both be anathema to Cusk’s Woolfian language project.)
Also: in the UK, Cusk hasn’t been enshrined at all, as far as I can tell. People think she’s various degrees of funny, interesting, stupid, and obnoxious, like they do with Jeanette Winterson or Will Self. It’s so funny that Americans have elevated her so much.
The problem seems to be that a lot of people are reading Cusk and maybe thinking that what’s cool about the stylistic choices aren’t how they create a very particular vehicle for this one particular person to drive toward particular ideas, but rather that they capture ~something~ about modern life, which they do — “the totalizing aura of isolation and alienation in contemporary life” — but it’s captured toward an end. It’s not mimetic reproduction for its own sake, even though one of the tricks of those books (especially Outline), is that it can look like that at first read. But there’s a great deal of writing that is just this memetic reproduction, which is of course the subject of your next really good essay.
I was just thinking it had been too long between Sweater Weather posts! Looking forward to your new book. I wonder whether this disembodiment you speak about is related to my pet peeve about unidentified settings in novels. I can't stand it when the author creates a generic town and won't tell me what state or region it is in, because for me that specific physical feel of a climate and subculture is important to my psychological understanding of these people talking in a room, the context of their embodied emotions, so to speak. I don't need a lot of description so much as the well-chosen detail, as you said.
Thank you. This is a writing class in one essay. News I can use!
really really incisive . . . have been reading a lot of russian literature recently and wondering why it feels so momentously good & i think this is a big part of it
This is such an insightful essay and so well-written. I have been thinking a lot about the interior-exterior debate while writing about characters and I haven’t read anyone talk about it other than what the phenomenological thinkers have done in their works. It was refreshing and I shall keep thinking of this essay when I sit to write next. Thanks!
“Dioramas of the mind” is so perfect. Loved this essay, for all the reasons. You must be a writer’s dream editor.
prophetic
Thank you for this brilliance! I am fully obsessed with your work as a fellow non-wealthy Alabamian who loves Henry James and fries fish in times of stress, but of course, because of bodies and history, we are not "fellows" and cannot be for reasons vapor can't explain.
Part of the disembodiment moves this sort of fiction away from genre work which can be relentlessly embodied. Do we need to know what sort of jeans she was wearing? Maybe not, unless you're working Bret Easton Ellis' old turf.
Thank you very much.
agree. sensibility. I first understood this reading (rereading) the prologue in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and the the move into the first chapter in the desert.
Great essay and references Brandon. Thank you! Now have some near-writing projects for the week to look at them.
This helped me think about my own contemporary fiction bugbear, hyperparticularity, in a new way -- the excruciating detail-for-the-sake-of-detail, the extremely clever turn of phrase that *signals* something sensory and meaningful but never really adds up to anything beyond a well-executed nod to "the sensory" or "the regional". I think my gripe is in the same family as yours. This *is* exactly what I mean:
"But you know the kind of descriptive writing I mean, in which we get a sense of how sweaty a character’s shirt is but have no sense of what this is meant to tell us except that it’s humid outside."
I like the way you put this, the idea of characters "engaging with the physical matrix of reality" which constitutes them and is constituted by them, since it helps get me out of the problem of feeling like what I want is for the mental state of characters to always be projected onto the landscape, which doesn't work either (at least, not in 2022, I think).
And it also re-orients the conversation from the craft wisdom that one must be particular and not abstract; my issue with hyperparticularity isn't just that it's not generalizable enough (though I sometimes have that complaint), and isn't just that publishing and the MFA circuit seem seriously allergic to ideas, but that these details do not resonate and they do not intersect enough with the rest of the story, both the interiority of the character and the social/natural mileau and the themes and everything else that's going on. They are there just to provide a momentary sensory jolt that implies significance but never delivers.
Pretty freakin brilliant, as always, my good sir.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
I think it’s a shame to consider Cusk’s comments to have a universal application. Outline is so vapor-y because it is a novel about (among some other things), language, and the limitations of language, and the ways in which it is violent. It’s a philosophical little novel (Apparently also a bit gossipy — apparently a number of the Irish poets and so forth are recognizable people drawn verbatim from life, very autofiction. And also, much British Modernist. I once wrote a paper about Outline, I have Thoughts.) I’m a big fan of that series, but I also see that it has limitations, in that the books are discussing a few ideas, and they’re using a very particular style so that they can look at those ideas. In that context you can really see the problem of “character,” because it becomes something Dickensian and sticky, something that forbids you to turn the lens of an idea because you’d be too busy thinking about the particularities of how this person and that person were together in this particular situation. (Of course, “sticky” isn’t bad, and “Dickensian” isn’t either, maybe, but they would both be anathema to Cusk’s Woolfian language project.)
Also: in the UK, Cusk hasn’t been enshrined at all, as far as I can tell. People think she’s various degrees of funny, interesting, stupid, and obnoxious, like they do with Jeanette Winterson or Will Self. It’s so funny that Americans have elevated her so much.
The problem seems to be that a lot of people are reading Cusk and maybe thinking that what’s cool about the stylistic choices aren’t how they create a very particular vehicle for this one particular person to drive toward particular ideas, but rather that they capture ~something~ about modern life, which they do — “the totalizing aura of isolation and alienation in contemporary life” — but it’s captured toward an end. It’s not mimetic reproduction for its own sake, even though one of the tricks of those books (especially Outline), is that it can look like that at first read. But there’s a great deal of writing that is just this memetic reproduction, which is of course the subject of your next really good essay.
Your titles and subtitles crack me up.
Ahhh!!! I needed this one. Amazing work.