a dispenser of bric-a-brac

In a post a little while ago at ANZLitLovers a rule was quoted, "Omit needless words" and another one "Murder your darlings" -- "Puritanical" said the writer who was discussing those rules, "As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits," which are my feelings too, "but," I thought, "what are needless words? What is a needless word?" Some people say that suddenly is a needless word, and others advise against really and very, or anything else that makes a writer seem undecided, but David Foster Wallace used really and very and all kinds of vagueness, and he -- see -- like this:

I felt unbelievably sorry for him and of course the Bad Thing very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really me. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him, or something like that.

Wyatt Mason, quoting that excerpt, goes on:

The mix of registers here is typical of Wallace: intensifiers and qualifiers that ordinarily suggest sloppy writing and thinking (“unbelievably”; “really” used three times in the space of a dozen words; “something like that”) coexisting with the correct use of the subjunctive mood (“as though the driver were”). The precision of the subjunctive—which literate people bother with less and less, the simple past tense increasingly and diminishingly employed in its place—is never arbitrary, and its presence suggests that if attention is being paid to a matter of higher-order usage, similar intention lurks behind the clutter of qualifiers. For although one could edit them out of the passage above to the end of producing leaner prose—

I felt sorry for him. It was irrational, but I felt as though the driver were me. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him.

—the edit removes more than “flab”: it discards the furniture of real speech, which includes the routine repetitions and qualifications that cushion conversation. Wallace was seeking to write prose that had all the features of common speech.

Not only Wallace, but George Eliot and hundreds of others -- all speaking -- here's Felix Holt, the Radical:

It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined tastes!

Omitting needless words:

Facts rarely hit the medium required by our opinions and tastes.

Which "discards the furniture of real speech," and so Eliot's style is hamstrung. What is that style? She goes along talkingly and slips you sharp ideas along the way: she has a sage chat. Elsewhere in Felix she gives us a sentence about Mrs Transome's embroidery. The sentence starts with the kind of dimity that would get itself described as use of needless words: "A little daily embroidery had been a constant element in Mrs Transome's life" -- and then, without altering the essential furniture, she cools into something like anger, the whole temperature of the sentence grows colder and brighter, or else (depending on your inner reading-voice) sours -- "that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor anyone else wanted, was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman." And ah, we've gone from platitudes about this embroidery to what it really means for Mrs Transome: she is wasting her life, she is trapped. 'Soothing' enters like a transit station between the chirpy mood of the beginning and the more sarcastic and melancholy mood of the end. The needless words are needed, they're part of the journey from platitude to point.

Compare the feints and hesitations of a good actor. If the actor recited their lines from beginning to end without pause, without inflection, would we understand what the lines meant? Yes, but they would become unfelt and unthought, in other words, inhuman. The actor would not be an actor, and a writer who does not act is not a writer: writers act, it is one of their jobs. And they are the script too, and all of the scenery. 'Needless words' in Wallace and Eliot aren't the meaning: they indicate the thought behind the meaning. Humanity is the aim, not words or needless words.

Christina Stead, lover of folk tales and Arabian Nights and other richness, of course she can be trimmed --

The distribution began. Sam made himself a dispenser of bric-a-brac, with a pin pot here, a matchbox there, a napkin ring beside, and a snuffbox neighbouring, and again a pin pot, according to the choice of men and women.

into

The distribution began. Sam dispensed the bric-a-brac, with a pin pot, a matchbox, a napkin ring, and a snuffbox, and again a pin pot, according to the choice of men and women.

And there, the voice that bounced along in singsong time has been hobbled. Well done you. And as a reader I conclude, that there are no needless words, or: no category of needless words, no box containing very and really and other things that can be eliminated from sentences as if elimination were a magic potion swallowed or a juju worn with fidelity to make problems go away. It seems to me that the only answer for a writer is to find out what they should write like, and write like it, and then they will be able to use 'very' as much as they like; no one will care. Which is difficult, or I assume that it is, and it would be much easier if you could identify needless words in the way you register the presence of rats or possums in the ceiling and then have them exterminated, but it's not that simple, or it doesn't seem to be.

Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me, that, with every precaution you take against such an evil, you put yourself into the power of the evil.

says Emerson. The "trick" to writing, says Mark Tredennick, is

to heighten it with an art that’s true to one’s own nature; that makes your writing sound like itself, like someone speaking ...

In an essay I read recently in Spectrum, David Malouf reflected on the intimacy that grows in good books between a writer and a reader. He said something that a writer like me takes great comfort from; for I am a writer who gets bored fast with narrative—especially my own. There are readers like me, I’ve come to realise; David Malouf thinks they are the truest readers. What a reader really means, if I may paraphrase Malouf, when she says she couldn’t put the book down, is not, or not just, that she couldn’t wait to find out what happens next; what she means is that she couldn’t bear to break the spell of the writer’s telling—of the book’s voice. Great writing, even good functional writing, compels us more by how it speaks than by what it says. The real narrative of the best books may be how the reader is changed and moved by the music, by the enchantment of the voice of the work.

I don't have that Spectrum essay, but here's Malouf saying a similar thing on ABC radio:

Well I've come to the conclusion that in the end what people are actually interested in, in writing, is the actual writing. They may not necessarily say that to themselves but when they choose one writer rather than another, it's the particular music of that writer that they're responding to, the particular tone of that writing, the particular density with which detail occurs in that writing, the span of sensory stuff in that writing.

When is a word unneeded? When it's being used poorly. When is it being used poorly? When it doesn't contribute to meaning or to the illusion of thought. All this advice boils down to is: write well. Which is marvellously unhelpful.

dust, swirling beneath me

Last week I discovered a two-dollar copy of David Malouf's An Imaginary Life at the local St Vincent's and felt delighted. This is the same St Vincent's where I found his book of short stories, Dream Stuff, and also a Johnno, parts of the story underlined by a student, and, inside the cover, the name of the student, who might now (I looked him up) be the Head of Mortgage Credit Intelligence at the National Australia Bank. His Facebook profile picture, if this is the same person, suggests that he owns a black wetsuit and a jetski, or would like to.

On one page he has underlined this:

Johnno cared for nothing and nobody. No crime was beyond him. He was a born liar and an elegant shoplifter, who could walk through Woolworths at a steady pace and emerge with his shirt fairly bulging with model cars, pencil sharpeners, rubbers, exercise books, wind-up teddy bears, toy trumpets -- anything you liked to name.

My other Maloufs came from library sales. Remembering Babylon, a piece of prose as beautiful as the day, a book that was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and the Booker, won the inaugural IMPAC, the Prix Baudelaire, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Best Foreign Novel at the Prix Femina, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and a Best Novel prize from the Los Angeles Times, is underscored, footnoted, the margins crammed with jagged grey pencil remarks:

Fairytale opening opportunity to see something extraordinary

George is inadequate

Everybody language is foreign

The person who wrote in this book has one symbol of their own, like an O with a stroke through it, that I haven't worked out yet. I thought at first it was @, but they don't seem to be using it that way.

In darkness one light shows O hope

On the title page of this Imaginary Life someone has written, Dea Lea, And this is really my favourite book! T, while someone else, possibly Lea, has tucked a clean envelope with "Nancy Joan" on it in curly blue ball-point between pages sixteen and seventeen, leaving me to me wonder if she ever got past that point in the story. Malouf's narrator is dreaming that he has left the building where he is sleeping and walked over the surface of a river "which swirled like smoke under me and I was moonlight.

I came to the further bank. A vast plain stretched away, flat, flat, featureless, it was all dust, swirling beneath me, and out of the dust no creature stirred, not a serpent even. It was original."

He means that it was newly-formed, virgin, unique, but when I read that last line as I was typing it out just then (not suffused in the book but flipping it open casually it at the stiff part where the envelope still sits) I read it in a tone-deaf way, as if it had been written for Kath & Kim, and I saw the narrator by the river, looking at this plain, whining, "It was original, it was noice, it was un-yew-suwul," because "It was original" is a natural Kath & Kim line.

In an instant, without thinking about it, I reconceived the entire book like that, seeing the picture I'd had of it before, elated, thoughtful, submerged, stirring, running concurrently with another picture, brash, noisy, declarative, and the narrator jerking about like a fluorescent light. Just for that moment, I thought: "I had this book wrong when I read it the first time. Of course - Malouf is Australian - so is Kath & Kim - if Imaginary Life is like Kath & Kim then that makes sense. Why couldn't I see it? It's cultural" - and an argument for An Imaginary Life being written in the tone of Kath & Kim assembled itself in my mind. Somehow the bones of the story remained the same but now the narrator, Ovid, approached everything in a changed way. He didn't care that he couldn't speak the language in his exile-village. When he wanted to make someone understand he shouted and enunciated like a bad tourist. He treated everybody as if they were stupid, he wasn't humble for a second, he made an exasperated moue at the story's feral boy and asked him why he had to be so difficult.

Trying to describe this now is like trying to describe a dream, this half-and-half piece of writing that existed solidly in my mind for a few moments, taking shape like a flash of real insight, as if I had finally outfoxed a problem. The world with this centaur-book in it was the world I lived in, and had always lived in without knowing it.

In the next paragraph there is an apparition of men and horses and Ovid believes he is seeing gods.