I usually take something to read where ever I go, even if it's just for the 10 minutes tube ride to my office. It doesn't necessarily mean that I actually read whatever I take along, but I like the feeling of having something to read with me (maybe this is a very protestant/frugal kinda thing, in the sense that I am afraid to 'loose' time by simply travelling without doing something vaguely 'productive'). For reasons quite unclear to me - and for the first time since I don't know when -, I am now travelling without anything to read, except for work related stuff; and, as much as I love Foucault, he's not precisely my favourite bedtime-story-author. So I found myself in my dad's appartment, searching (more or less desperately) for a book. Since the highlight's of my dad's library basically resume to Dan Brown, John Grisham, Tom Clancy and the likes, I finally wound up with a Patricia Cornwell thriller.
Now let me be clear before I continue that I have nothing against Patricia Cornwell in particular and thriller or whodunnits in general. I am certainly not the kind of (literary) person who considers anything underneath, say, the quality of a James Joyce as rubbish and not worth reading; far from it. But Patricia Cornwell made me realize how - in lack of a better word - 'used' I am to a certain kind of style, to a certain way of dealing with language in a novel.
I think it was Umberto Eco who defined the difference between high literature and popular literature by a difference in explicitness and redundancy, i.e. popular literature gives the reader a lot of hints about how to interpret characters, situations, etc.pp.: The bad person is not only a bad person because of his/her character, but would, for example, smoke, drink a lot, have a dark complexion, and so on (which is something that, needless to say, one can also find in Hollywood movies). Hence, there is a sort of abundance of information, drawing strongly on connotations and popular notions/prejudices. Even more important, not only does the narrator draw on such fairly popular notions and associations, but they are also explained and made explicit in the narration, thus leaving little or hardly any space for the reader to make up his/her own interpretation. Patricia Cornwell, to give an example, would write something like (I am quoting out of memory here, so pardon me, Trish, if I am not getting it quite right):
I slamed the door behind me with a loud bang. I was really annoyed by this guy.
The two sentences are quite redundant, if you ask me: Purposly slamming the door usually connotes one is angry. Moreover, these sentences are preceded by a situation in which two people get into a discussion/fight, and thus it is pretty obvious already that the protagonist is angry. So you don't really need the explicit information I was really annoyed by this guy.
Looking at it from another point of view, Roland Barthes once described the abundancy of information and detail in a novel as realistic effect. The 'useless' detail helps to construct the plausibility of the story; by inserting descriptive details, the narrator is suggesting: Look, this fictitious world is really there, I can see every little detail of it. Let me show you the browness of the table, the humming noise of a fly going through the room, the cherry red colour of the maiden's cheek, and so on and so forth.
What particularly strikes me in the case of Patricia Cornwell - and 'popluar' whodunnits and thrillers in general - is the following: A crime or murder story is in itself quite complex (at least on the level of plot); it asks the reader to - more or less conscioulsy - make up his own conclusions while reading. So on the level of the plot, the narrator/writer has quite high expectations towards the ideal reader and his/her ability to detect hints and solve the mystery (I don't think I ever managed to 'solve' a murder in a book before the protagonist did). Why, then, does the writer take me by the hand like a four-year-old to say: Look, that person slammed the door, so she/he must be really angry. Though maybe it is precisely the fact that you have explicitness and abundancy on the level of (linguistic) form that enables the author to be more or less implicit on the level of content, i.e. the plot. Otherwise the reader might not be able (or willing) to read along at all.
In any case, I was reminded of an essay Proust wrote about Flaubert's style, arguing that he (Flaubert) is constructing certain kind of moods, characters, etc. without being very explicit or detailed in his writing (so more or less the contrary of dear Mrs. Cornwell). Here is what Proust says (or, more precisly, what I remember that Proust says): Flaubert would write a sentence like 'Emma Bovary walked to the fireplace.' - No one said that she was cold.
No comments:
Post a Comment