he could not bear to have the pleasing reflections revolving in his mind

Going from Evelina, 1778, to Cecilia, 1782, and to Camilla, 1796, you notice that the sentences have become longer, more leisurely, and more packed: short stories closed inside them –

Charmed with the youthful nurse, and seeing in her unaffected attitudes, a thousand graces he had never before remarked, and reading in her fondness for children the genuine sweetness of her character, he could not bear to have the pleasing reflections revolving in his mind interrupted by the spleen of Miss Margland, and, slipping away, posted himself behind the baby's father, where he could look on undisturbed, certain it was a vicinity to which Miss Margland would not follow him.

-that from a page picked at random – her style getting farther away from the one that Samuel Crisp asked her to use in her letters to him when she was young, in a note to her during the winter of 1773, “Dash away, whatever comes uppermost – the sudden sallies of imagination clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth Folios”—that is the character Evelina’s mode of letter-writing, though she never knew Crisp and he never wrote to her – but by Camilla the sallies are Folios: pages 291 – 293 of my 1972 Oxford edition are filled with the information that Edgar loves Camilla, which we have already heard more than once. How many more times are we going to hear it? I am up to page 367* and the story ends on 913. The author has become a scanning eye across a multitude: the secondaries can wander off and hold conversations of their own, she’ll follow them, going from one character to another and stopping and rounding them up for a head-count.

Miss Margland screamed, and hid her face with her hands. Indiana, taught by her lessons to nourish every fear as becoming, shriekt still louder, and ran swiftly away, deaf to all that Edgar, who attended her, could urge. Eugenia, to whom Bellamy instantly hastened, seeing the beast furiously make towards the gate, almost unconsciously accepted his assistance, to accelerate her flight from its vicinity; while Dr. Orkborne, intent upon his annotations, calmly wrote on, sensible there was some disturbance, but determining to evade inquiring whence it arose, till he had secured what he meant to transmit to posterity from the treachery of his memory. Camilla, the least frightened, because the most enured to such sounds, from the habits and the instruction of her rural life and education, adhered firmly to Sir Hugh, who began blessing himself with some alarm; but whom Dr. Marchmont re-assured, by saying the gate was secured, and too high for the bull to leap, even supposing it a vicious animal.

Burney wants you to have your eyes on them all – why? for a reason? what reason? – to make them familiar? too familiar? -- “the latent springs,” she says, “the multifarious and contradictory sources of human actions and propensities” (what is the ending of Cecilia if it isn’t a Middlemarch that doesn’t know what it is?)-- what are they doing? how are they positioned in space? how are they acting? what do they think about other people’s friends?

Mr. Tyrold, according to the system of recreation which he had settled with his wife, saw with satisfaction the pleasure with which Camilla began this new acquaintance, in the hope it would help to support her spirits during the interval of suspense with regard to the purposes of Mandlebert. Mrs. Arlbery [the new acquaintance] was unknown to him, except by general fame; which told him she was a woman of reputation as well as fashion, and that though her manners were lively, her heart was friendly, and her hand ever open to charity.

The reader has heard similar news about Mrs Arlbery before. I am reading a reprint of the first edition, which was written under pressure: words were left out of sentences when the book went to the printers, and serious revisions waited for the second and third editions. “Fanny finished the book – which is about 350, 000 words long – in a period of two years that also included the birth of her child and her subsequent illness.” Fanny Burney: a Biography, 2000, Claire Harmon. The repetition, then, those long expositions, they were physically written to Crisp’s instructions, “clap’d down on paper,” “whatever comes uppermost” – not spiritually written like that though, and when I say spirit of course I mean style.



* It changes.

that unknown incommunicable depth

Doris in The Silent Sea commits herself to death but she is not to blame; the author doesn't weigh the action as if it is an action; the book doesn't treat the action as if it is a conscious piece of willed behaviour undertaken by an actual person or fictional person-representative even though, in the plot, it is in fact that absolute thing; she decides to ride the cart through that scrubland for a reason that should have been an active reason; in another character it would even have been a heroic reason but in her it deflates. With the threat of her own importance coming towards her she shrivels up and dies.

Instead her innocence is stressed, and her hints about death are treated as if they come out of her as passively as wet stool.

Which panics me when I read it; the author has hamstrung her character, she is being kind and killing her, which is so sinister; the actions of the author horribly mimicking a liar.

It is terrible for a woman to be like that, hints Catherine Martin earlier in the book when she has a character write to Doris' mother, "She has been sheltered and reared as within convent walls; and up to a certain age this may be right for girls; but she is now over sixteen," yet the prose itself continues this conventing of her; it describes her Lulu eyes, "confiding wide-eyed gaze of a child," "her slender rose-tipped fingers," her toylike activities, "Doris put down the little pink dress and went to the piano" -- the hero isn't knocked for preferring her; it's treated like a normal fact of nature and he's a healthy man -- the equivalent in Middlemarch would be Rosamond, and the hero's attitude to her is Lydgate's attitude toward Rosamond, "That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music."

In Martin: "The face and form, so exquisite in their beauty and innocence, seemed to him a type of that spiritual loveliness which man worships rather than dreams of possessing."

Rosamond Vincy is an efficient animal, which Lydgate cannot see, and there's the disaster waiting for both of them, but Doris doesn't have this trap-jaw part of herself or anything else in its place (references to "that unknown incommunicable depth of inner personality" but no follow-up), she's a death-wish girl, and the hero can see it -- because she keeps talking about it -- and she's placid and gentle, which the hero can also see, and the author doesn't make her anything else.

(Her mask is genuine.

"Doris saw him drawing towards her, she turned to meet him with grave simplicity, without hesitation or embarrassment. ‘I was so sorry, after you had gone on Saturday evening," she said" -- this is all true.)

Martin suggests -- hints -- that the ideal maiden is not ideal -- but she doesn't violate her by psychological-descriptive frottage, the way Eliot treats Rosamond; she leaves her to witter almost unmolested by complexity and then she does her in.

She is a character whose movements all are treated as if they were happening without her, and as if they were brought into her by outside forces until all that was left for her was an opinion about the whiteness of an orchid. "All white flowers are so lovely." Like the death lily. And there are meaningful representative remarks about hothouse flowers compared to "those that grow out in the sunshine, and in the light of the moon and the stars—where the birds sing, and the dawn comes red into the sky over the tops of the trees." These are the words of Doris herself, who might be saying, I prefer not to be this hothouse flower. But she has been exposed to birds singing and dawn coming red into the sky over the trees (growing up in her wilderness garden) so if this is a hint then the hint is muddled; the poetry in "the light of the moon and the stars" has lured the author away from a decisive expression of her point, and even though Martin admired George Eliot for her "depth of philosophic thought" she has not paid her back by following her own thought to the depths or byways.

Ada Cambridge can look at a character behaving in a limp manner and in a straight voice she calls her cowardly; she even considers a difference between innate cowardice and cowardly behaviour: "she was, if not quite a coward, cowardly."

I think this is why I contrast them: here is one author who can state an idea brusquely, bring it out, turn it over, and think about it on the page, then here is another author who seems to be paralysed at the hinting stage: "that unknown incommunicable depth of inner personality" might as well be another standard gesture.

In my mind Doris is so aware of Catherine Martin steering her around that in her despair she has turned limp, she is waiting for the day when the predator will lose interest and let her drop from its jaws, and she is hoping that a reader will identify the cause of her limpness and say to themselves, "This is the waving arm of a kidnap victim signalling to me from the top window of a house while I walk by in the street."

drain it, and make a little colony

Then I tell myself I have recognised another piece of Catherine Martin's personality to go with the fear of explaining herself too clearly, and I think, Perhaps she was a perfectionist, perhaps she was afraid of being wrong, perhaps she was afraid of fog, and these observations begin to represent themselves like clues, which is a tendency I might want to suppress, O this understanding that seems too easy, and Catherine Martin so dead so lost so long, forgive me I suppose, and not many biographical details of her in circulation: a regressive writer who published The Explorers under her initials only, M.C., and An Australian Girl anonymously, and then The Silent Sea as Mrs Alick MacLeod (she was not Mrs Alick MacLeod, her husband was an accountant named Frederick), until Dale Spender in 1988 looks at these names and says that possibly "she wrote even more but that it has not -- as yet -- been attributed to her" (Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers).

Stella doesn't have the many-sidedness that George Eliot ("Martin also wrote of George Eliot with great admiration, speaking, for example, of Eliot's ‘superb individuality’, her ‘wide culture’ and ‘intellectual grasp’, and of ‘the depth of philosophic thought’ which characterised her works and which ‘marks a new departure in fiction’" -- Rosemary Foxton) gave to Dorothea Brooke, who could have sounded like a prig too if she had not been so naive and sincere that her own ambition makes her into a joke; she runs into a trap because she doesn't know how to recognise it. Then the ambition to live in selfless dedication leads her into an ignoble circumstance.

But Stella is not flawed like that, her refinement does not betray her, the problems come from the outside, they are not within, she meets a villainous woman in a drawing room, her high-mindedness is correct, it is the people around her who work to thwart her; she is not the villain as well as the victim though Dorothea is both those things, and is Don Quixote the clown-knight.

Martin's opinion, in the Mallee chapters, about the land being refurbished to grow fruit and corn, might have been a legacy of Middlemarch. Dorothea makes plans --

"I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well. I should know every one of the people and be their friend"

-- which is close to the position Stella finds herself in at the end of An Australian Girl. "Give me two hundred acres to cut up into little farms --" she says, but the book ends before the plan is allowed to work itself out.

Which could even be understood as a muffled reference to the hymn of the uncompleted life that comes at the end of Eliot's story even though the evidence for that assumption would never be perfect.

Dorothea is a range of characters inside herself; Stella is only one or maybe two. I begin to wonder if priggishness is the faith that you alone in all humanity have only a single flat clear side or dimension.

The prose agrees with Stella's opinions; she believes that Ted is not intelligent and the world provides clues to back her up; she would like to run away from him and the world justifies her feelings by making him an alcoholic. (The alcoholism was not there before. It was born from her desires. It was abrupt.) Her ideas about properness are allowed to structure the material universe and so this universe is a universal strait jacket. Martin hasn't given herself the freedom (does not want the freedom, in her heart of hearts: doesn't desire it, fears it?), the freedom that George Eliot takes for herself, to make her characters despicable, mistaken, or pitiful. Eliot's characters are to blame for their predicaments -- Dorothea is to blame for marrying Casaubon -- she did it, she was the one, but this blame breaks the reader's heart perhaps.

for you, reader

Telling M. how the Heike was structured I picked the idea of a television series, saying to him, look, you have one large umbrella-idea that runs from the start to the end, and in this work it is the rise and fate of the Heike clan, the rise so proud and domineering that you wait for them to fail because the laws of life say that everything must fall, gravity, hubris, old age, all that feeling. Then they slip, they slip further, someone burns a monastery by mistake, this error haunts the rest of the piece, they're toppling now, and you wait to see them meet the ground. The slip and then the fall are two sub-umbrellas under the main umbrella, as in a season of television you find one large umbrella -- how are we going to defeat the monster that appeared in episode one? -- then smaller umbrellas -- are those two warriors going to fall in love? followed by the question, is their relationship going to last now that he has discovered she is a werewolf?

Under those umbrellas you find the still-smaller sub-umbrellas or tiny cocktail parasols that run for a few hundred pages, or ten pages, or one page, the story expanding into the realm of the very small as if discovering first its own molecules, then the particles inside the molecules, which sometimes are single chapters or songs meant to be recited or sung; the Heike is a performance cycle, the collaborative composition of many people, which is a point of difference between this and that other long Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji, work of a single woman (though you can assume (along with the scholars) that her daughter or some other person wrote chapters near the end, also how much did it change when the readers who wanted to keep the book decided to write copies for themselves in that age before mechanised printing, with us having only the transcriptions, no original, and the earliest partial, material, and fragile copy dated one century after the author died?), written down, read aloud after it had been written but written first, written prime, written before anything else, existing first in a written form, emerging first like a rising vivid squid that comes like a blushing rosebud into the expressive extroverted part of the world when Murasaki Shikibu began to draw the letters with her brush, starting its life in a bath of ink, George Eliot almost a thousand years later in Adam Bede explaining the theory, "With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader," though the next line about showing us the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope is not in any sense applicable to the Genji, which is about a prince of the Heian period living in Kyoto where people often do not even have their names mentioned because those words said and abandoned to the air and to the ears, not kept safely in the mouth and mind but stripped nude so that they can be thrust into the intelligence of any passing terror, are too accusatory, too brutal, and the author prefers not to turn them into a public spectacle by vulgarly writing them down.

Which leaves the readers righteously confused but at least the nonexistent people in the book have had their feelings respected.

Which is an interesting notion, the politeness of Heian life, in which real people are only mentioned circumspectly by their titles or by a description, so as to avoid the crass nakedness of names and simultaneously to intensify the social-inbred atmosphere of the courtly clique (where you have to be in the know to fully appreciate everything), this politeness applied to fictional characters, whose feelings can't be hurt, who will never judge you no matter what you call them, who will never snub you or discriminate against you, who will never have their revenge even if you call them by a familiar slang, these characters treated as respectfully as if they were standing next to you, or sitting in the building over there, fanning themselves and ready to take offence (increase in politeness equalled by the steady increase of possibilities for delicate offences and insults, one tree with many flowers), and yet they will not know you, the fanning woman will never refer to you as anything at all, not even circumspectly, which means that you will never beat her at this niceness-game, and she will continue to sit fanning in her cage, radiating impermeable manners (since in order to permeate them you would have to extract the character from the book), and beating you. (The characters have never lived and yet they are also Heian.)

lightbulbs

Sometimes in a long book I forget who's who and then one note in the juxtaposition chorus goes dung in a baffled space, the present is supposed to echo deeply off the past but it does not; there is a deadness in some aspect of the character's behaviour when they appear after a long time away and speak again, when I can tell (by the way the author has made a phrase) that their conversation is supposed to have extra meaning due to who they are, whatever the hell that is.

And sometimes I only realise that I could tell in retrospect when the clues mount up, memory hits me, and I think, Wait, this is so and so. Then I see that there have been clues for pages and that I was disturbed by them without knowing what I was disturbed by: it was disquiet, it was a stranger coming up to you fervently and calling you by your name and Hey, yes, hi, hello! you say, while you wonder, Who are you?

That happened last year when I was reading Pynchon's V. and there was a character who was supposed to have resonance when she turned up again, but I thought she was new, and didn't realise that she had been there in the beginning, chapter one or two, then gone underground, the buzz of juxtaposition not there, the character dead, or not dead but subdued. Here was a woman who had been brought in, I thought, to fall in love with one of the male leads, a fresh existence in the book, but then I realised after she said a few words about gear sticks that she had to be the one who had appeared at the beginning, and then she was also that woman; they were not separate, and this new doubled-person had a different point of view on everything; she was more tomboyish than she had been a moment earlier (though her behaviour on the page had not changed) and in an instant this behaviour made no sense, ladies and gentlemen, or else seemed too convenient (for the plot) and too warped from what she should be (in my mind: suddenly she was out of character), and not even aging a few years and shifting to another part of the country (as she'd done) accounted for it I thought, this abrupt girlfriendishness in which she had become engaged, and which I had been following tamely and which I imagined she had been introduced to conduct (so she had, but earlier than I had imagined).

And she was left there by her creator, who had to finish the book somehow, sending off his characters or abandoning them when they were still in the middle of an action. Some books will kill their characters, some will chase them away (Christina Stead does one or both), some will summarise their fates (Dickens), some will philosophise (Middlemarch), some will present themselves with a problem, as does Yambo Ouologuem when he spends the book, Bound to Violence, describing massacres, armies, wild huge actions, then finishes the manuscript with two people sitting alone and holding an unrushed discussion; some will fade their people out gently, like John Crowley in Little, Big, when everybody is at a table among trees and the book looks over the weather that attacks their house, the lightbulbs going out (darkness setting in as the story prepares to vanish); then there is Titus Groan and everyone in a procession, going inside the castle -- the book ends -- they go in and the book ends at the same time; they have walked themselves out of the book. Inside the castle and outside the book they are still walking; they continue on, they are going past the spine, they are off the edge of the table, they are out of the room, they have found their way into the kitchen and they are heading past the cockroach traps into the area under the fridge with the crumbs and shadows and those hard objects like springs and boxes that hide under there, the workings of the machine.

of what we now know

On Sunday I started a novel by William Heinesen, the same author whose short stories I was reading earlier this year in Faroese Short Stories -- the one who wrote about the two women whose house blew away in a storm -- the author who couldn't mention a man without also mentioning his ship, and then the name of the ship, and then the king of Sweden, and then the king of Sweden's son -- the author who loved digressions -- that one.

The novel starts modestly but gradually it thickens, the characters pile up, their histories pile up, there are several different flavours of everything -- three different Christian leaders (two pastors, one prophet), multiple women dating the British soldiers who are stationed on the Faroes, several ship-owners individually worrying about their fish -- everybody arguing, sailing off, becoming pregnant, dying, falling in love -- and every time someone falls in love or dies it's a new love and a new death, not like any of the rest, and we go inside the heads of cynics and journalists and mystic fox-farmers from Iceland. Then there is the war, which is World War II, people are worried about the Communists, and there is the growing pro-Faroes movement among the islanders, who are subjects of the Danish king. The thoughts of the characters are sketched in quickly and sharply, even crudely, simply, but the simplicity has a purpose; it makes each cast member easy to identify. The subtlety of the book comes not in the fineness of their thoughts but in the variety and shading between competing points of view. And this builds and builds and the story moves along in a bubbling mass.

But I was thinking about Lisa over at ANZ Litlovers, who, in the middle of November, mentioned a Ghanaian Literature Week, held by Kinna over at Kinna Reads, and Lisa had read a Ghanaian short story for this book week, and, coincidentally, I'd been reading Money Galore by the Ghanian writer Amu Djoleto only a month before, and Money Galore was what I was thinking of, in connection with the Heinesen book, which was named The Black Cauldron.* It was the tempo of the two books that I was reflecting on, the way that Money moved in jerks, jumping up one minute, fading out the next minute, and how different it was to the constant bubble of Cauldron, how opposed they were, temperamentally speaking. Because inside each book there is a personality that has nothing to do with the characters or the narrative, and is only concerned with the thickness or thinness of the writing, the speed and start and stop of the sentences, "the particular density with which detail occurs in that writing, the span of sensory stuff in that writing," as David Malouf said once on the radio.

Djoleto writes like a man who had moments of excitement when the story riveted him, moments when he knew exactly what he wanted, followed by moments when he was wandering from A to B and not sure how he was going to get there. He gropes, he repeats. His women characters will enter in a mass of detail, the exact shade of their skin tone will be noted, then their build, but this description will not play a role in their development afterwards, their actions are sketchy, their brains are halfhearted; they become a collection of vaguely sexy presences. They enter with a summary of themselves; the rest is a diminishing of their original essence. We hear passing references to the construction of a new public toilet, and then suddenly the toilet exists, ready to be opened by a politician, and the formal opening is a scene that bounces into focus -- it is a comic set piece. The book wakes up then drowses again. The author gets deeply interested in a headmaster's office, and for a few pages it looks as if this headmaster's school is going to play an important ongoing role in the book, then we go somewhere else, the school becomes background noise, the introduction was out of proportion to its importance.

Money has its own pace, a shout followed by a mumble, or a leap followed by a stall -- a book like a lumpy bed. And I thought, also (my brain walking up West Africa to the chopped-out reverse-L of Mali), of Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, which has the dense bubbling-pace of Heinesen with a different emotion behind it: the book is one flood of brutality and murder, a tightrope performance on a wire of satirical rage. Heinesen is satirical as well, but less brutal. Both of them will vary the bubbling by taking the reader from a scene with one character to a scene with two or three characters, to a scene with a mass of characters, and then back again. Brutality in Ouologuem is almost absolute, but the flavours of that brutality are so various, so florid, that it becomes both decorative and hideous. Add ennui and it would be Decadent. Mass deaths are followed by more detailed personal deaths and then the miniature story of a dynasty that goes mad and dies. There is gross indiscriminate death and then very precise death. A single kitten is poisoned. A man is torn apart by exactly three crocodiles. One crocodile would have been enough. Two, and you could call it a reasonable amount of competition among natural enemies. But three is just enough to be overkill. The edge of absurdity is tickled with a fingertip.

George Eliot plays this one-character, two-characters, group-of-characters game blatantly in public, devoting whole chapters to one idea or the other -- those groups of men talking in the local pub in Middlemarch, or in the barber shop in Romola, etc -- and then scenes between married couples or family members. Like this she gives us the domestic setting and then the community whose ideas will affect the domestic setting, putting these two spheres of action in proximity. Djoleto doesn't have this ongoing attention to the community; he brings it in when he needs it for a crowd scene and then it's gone.

At the start of the month in a coffee shop I listened to someone giving their opinion on commas (authors used to use more commas in the old days because they didn't know any better, said this person, but now we know better and we take them out), and I thought of this speaker when I came across an editor online explaining that The Man Who Loves Children "breaks an awful lot of what we now know to be rules for good writing" adding "You couldn’t get away with it now" -- and I remember them because I know that if Djoleto had handed in Money Galore during a writing class he would have had it given back to him with marks in the margins, "add more here" "build up to this part" "uneven" "who is speaking here?" and "fix."

But then I hear Ruskin stepping in and saying, no, this unevenness is human, and he tells the story of the glass beads again, and says that he prefers flawed exploratory sincerity to accomplished callow gloss, and he points out that Djoleto wanted to (judging by the story) write about corruption in Ghanaian politics, and behold, he has done that. Would evenness have made the book better? Evenness would have made it even, which is a different thing. It's been proposed that Dante came up with The Divine Comedy because he wanted an excuse to say the name of Beatrice (as lovers love to speak or hear the name of the beloved: see also: Proust) and Money might as well have been written to showcase the opening of that public toilet, a scene that gives us the author's opinion of his country's politicians in one tight burst.**

How do we describe, how do we value, how do we judge? Could I say that Djoleto's book moves like an organism, that it has periods of wakefulness and periods of restfulness, and periods when it wants to sit and fatten itself and periods when it is very lean, and, so, when I'm tempted to describe one of those dense and bubbling books as organic, because I want to do tribute to its motion, its vitality, am I perhaps using the word too quickly and easily, am I disregarding a less flattering idea of "the organic," of life, the life that is not steadily vital, but fades and dies and revives and gasps and dies again ...

Give us uneven beads, says Ruskin the Awkward, devilled in front of his naked wife, give us awkwardness --







*Which has nothing to do with Lloyd Alexander's fantasy novel. Same title but two books completely alien. Heinesen sets his story in a Faroese harbour nicknamed "the Cauldron" and one of the characters makes a sarcastic mechanical diorama-cum-social-critique which he calls "The Black Cauldron," and, therefore ...

Alexander's cauldron is an honest to god necromagical black pot.

** I came across that idea of Dante for the first time in one of Borges' non fiction pieces. If you can get hold of the Selected Non-Fictions then look in the Nine Dantesque Essays section and it should be there somewhere.

crumbling stone

I'm still turning over the potential nothingness of most of Gormenghast castle in my head, so excuse me while I part-repeat myself. I'll throw in a few new words so this won't be totally boring. The castle is huge, according to Peake, but vaguely huge, with miles of stone, hundreds of rooms, so big that it can't be detailed by the author (suggests the author indirectly), and this absurd uncontained hugeness is a part of the structure itself, and so it seemed wrong to me when I saw the building framed by the screen in the 2000 BBC television miniseries as though it were a compassable assemblage like an architectural butte; and if I ever filmed it, I think I would give you a very high high shot, with a patch of green nature in one of the lower corners -- because the reader knows there is a forest and a mountain, and paths running away into them so we need the greenery there -- and the rest of the screen would be rooftops, on and on, tiny, detailed, like grains on a beach (but then you will remember that people as large as yourself are living under those grains and your brain will pitch forward and slew around in terrifying vertigo), rooftops covering the rest of the screen, taking up one whole wall of the theatre where you're sitting, which for the effect I want should be an IMAX. And you will feel as if you are falling forward and drowning.

Then we will have Gormenghast wallpaper, which will be the same thing, with the blot of sward by your pillow, or by the sink or by the dog bowl or television or whatever you want, (depending on the room, depending on your furniture) and the rest of the four walls will be nothing but detailed tiny fields of tiny tiles, each tile absolutely delineated and in black and white to make it more unreal and disorienting.

Or else nothing except one small area of detail, measuring less than a cubit square as you will be able to see when when you put your arm against the wall, and in here the story in the books takes place, and beyond that a void with words sketched across it, "crumbling stone," "vistas" and so on, just these thin lines of sketch stretched across the whistling gap to keep it from dropping away. I thought, "If he is writing then he is compelled to name, there is no way to write and not name something, which is perhaps why it had never occurred to me before, this idea of the castle being nothing." Every word either names a thing or prepares it for placement, the ors and buts and verbs and thens being the design and scaffolding, and then the nouns bringing the thing about and submitting it to a category of existence, pin, leg, moose, or table, and even if I write, "There was no moon" (as Beckett does somewhere in Molloy, I think) I have still named a moon and created a moon, and then I tell you that my created moon is somewhere else, which is what I would expect you to understand when you read "no moon" -- not "the moon had stopped existing" but "the moon existed and it was not visible in the sky right then."

I can't deny the moon. I have named its absence, but then I haven't, because I've still named it and not the phenomenon of not-it, which needs a hyphen, "There was a not-moon," or a newly minted word, "There was an unmoon." It was an unmoonish night, I say, and not very starrish either.

"Unmoon? No such thing. Means nothing to me. Pointless," says the reader probably. Can you write about an object in a way that removes it? And then there is Romola's flashing eye, which has a strange existence. If we were somehow in the room where these two people were staring at one another we wouldn't expect to see the flashing eye (am I being presumptuous? are there readers who seriously expect flashes? I'm wary of this "we" but on I'll go) because the rest of the book around this scene has been written in a way that signals Realism. Film it, and we'd see the woman sitting, we'd see her turn her head to her husband, we'd see him put his keys in his scarsella, all of these would be real events, in the terms of the fictional-real, but the flashing eye would be symbolic everywhere, and the flash would go away instantly and live in one of the rooms that Peake never visits.

And once when I was standing on one of the upper floors of the Leid Library at UNLV and looking through a window at the horizon I saw a yellow strip at the feet of one mountain, an area of open desert between the city and the foothills, and then because I was so tall at that moment I saw the desert on the other side of the same mountain, which was the same barren tawny tiger colour, and in that moment I imagined leaving the building and travelling over the mountains, and going and going like Voss, and finding nothing there, until realising finally that the only patch of detail in the world was the city of Las Vegas, and there is nothing else out there at all, no world, no northern hemisphere, no sea, only Las Vegas, and the rest was only the rumours that had come to us through the internet and books, somehow generated by the city itself, which likes to keep us here with the desert cutting us off like an axe from something else, which is maybe Gormenghast castle.

paused and turned her eyes on

The idea of a theatre in the last post didn't come from Peake. I was trying to work out something around a sentence in George Eliot's Romola. The sentence goes like this: "Her eyes were flashing, and her whole frame seemed to be possessed by impetuous force that wanted to leap out in some deed." Romola is the person with the flashing eyes, and she is flashing them at her husband, pausing while she flashes, staying still: "Romola had paused and turned her eyes on him as she saw him take his stand and lodge the key in his scarsella." It's this contrast between stillness and action that stopped me, the body tensing (that is how I picture her "possessed by impetuous force") and all the dramatic movement being placed in the eye.

Around a real eye the muscles pinch and go taut or loose, but the eye itself, the genuine eye, stays round and non-indignant, rotating slightly in the socket but not moving in the free way that a hand or a leg moves. The face moves, the cheeks move, the lips are narrowed or fattened, the angle of the chin changes, all of this goes into a facial expression, but the eyes on their own, flashing like lightbulbs or fireflies -- never, never, never. Two bits of wet and glass. The fictional eye is more flexible. Every real eye wishes that it could be fictional.

I was trying to sketch out a difference between Peake's characters (who take their eyes into a room and then the author sees the room), and Romola, whose eyes are performing a movement of their own without the help of a moving body (the force of them is throwing itself at her husband, they're walking forward and grabbing his shirt). "She's stuck in place, she's still, she's like a what, like a building containing two objects, like a theatre," I thought, "with her eyes like two actors."

She is a presentation-box and her eyes are onstage. Her eye is expressive. The fictional flash is a concentrated emotion. I've seen fictional eyes flash before. The most modern example I think I've read is the one near the end of the first Dune Prelude. One character loses her temper and "Her eyes flashed fire." The flashing eye is always sure of its object. It flashes at someone. The person with the flashing eye is having her emotions obviously. They are clear. (Emotions are not often this clear.) It's as if she's given him a photograph of her mood, look, here it is, unmistakeable. No more work is required. She doesn't have to move a muscle. Romola doesn't actually need to tense her body, or tremble, or perform whatever subtle action it is that suggests the "impetuous force." The character is in fact disabled. She is fixed in place by her emotions and she is therefore harmless.

The author has borrowed the attributes of the entire body, all of its expressive moving power, and given them to the eye. The flash is a fantasy of an effective action that is not taking place.

The flashing eye stays where it is and directs its rays outward. There must be absolute puissance within for the eye is charged like a battery. Most surprising: the owner of the eye is not exhausted and does not collapse. She has moved beyond doubt and now she transfers this lack of doubt to the other party. His job is to know that she is angry. A human being who has lost doubt has moved briefly away from the physical realm, where multiplicity and confusion is normal, and onto a high plane of ideas, where clarity can be obtained. Therefore the flashing eye becomes unnatural. The globe spits out a straight burst of light. A flash of light is spearlike, dry, active, it is not a soggy bobble, it isn't stuck in a bone cup and laced up with meat.* Free and direct, it is maybe Romola's hallucination of herself, just then, as she sits, congealed, locked inside a cage of horror, facing her husband, who has done something terrible.

When Romola's eyes flash she is primarily her eyes, she has absconded from the rest of her body and left it standing empty, and if you could extract the eyes right there in the book and put them in a cage then you would have her like one who had captured her ghost.







* Maybe the eye is productiveness in Walter Benjamin's formulation and the flash is effectiveness: "Effectiveness and productiveness are incompatible. Dampness, closeness, vagueness in productiveness; dryness, outline, distance in effectiveness." (I'm borrowing this from a fragment called "Notes (II)" in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1: 1927-1930. Rodney Livingstone translated.)

I don't have the Dune Preludes here to check that line (it's somewhere near the end of House Atreides and she's arguing with Leto if you want to look it up) but I'm almost sure of that flash.

it gives you an itch to look into the nests of spectres

The father in Bruno Schulz has his cosmology of mannequins, Ponge has his cosmology of bread, and so there is this idea of starting in one place and swelling out, stepping from one point to another (and once you've reached that one you can see the next, so that the more you step, the further you can go, although each step is still a step), until you've reached a point on your single path where you can look back and observe that bread is the universe, or mannequins are humanity and "To see a world in a grain of sand" -- writes Blake -- is a great thing -- "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand." Here in Las Vegas the casinos try to provide us with the sights of the world in a street but we are not fooled, this is not infinity; the street ends, and a grain of sand ends too, but you are considering the grain and it is your consideration that is understood to be infinite, not the object, which is your trigger; and maybe it helps if the trigger is roundish, unique, and so tiny that you struggle to make it out, like a grain, and not, like a roadway, a clear cluttered straightish line that comes to a halt.*

(The Las Vegas Strip is so fulsome, no wonder people feel free to knock it, and call it tacky and undignified. "No dignity is perfect which at some point does not ally itself with the mysterious," writes Thomas de Quincey. The grain, self-contained, focussed, and delicate, is more obviously mysterious than the Strip. Submerged historical processes created the Strip, as they created everything, but the street would rather not have you think about them. "Look," it says, "at this big clean Eiffel Tower. You can make out every single rivet!" Away goes the mystery of the rivets, which might even be decoration and not functional. Possibly there are other forces, more modern forces, keeping the structure together.)

In Ponge, one thing, bread, discovers its equivalents everywhere -- one type of object shows the potential to summarise all objects -- Walt Whitman's persona in the person of a loaf -- and this discovery is the essence, is the poem -- not the thing itself but the discovery, the step-step-step, the taking of steps -- which is thought, or one way of illustrating it.

"When you are hunting something," wrote Victor Hugo in Toilers of the Sea, "you are undergoing a course of training; when you are seeking to discover something, you are caught up in a chain of action. If you have been in the habit of looking into birds' nests, it gives you an itch to look into the nests of spectres."

So, following on from this, say that Ponge, looking at fire, is training himself to look at bread, or vice versa, whichever came first in his life. Lucretius, once he starts thinking about atoms, starts to believe that every natural effect can be explained if you introduce the idea of tiny particles to the equation. He is wrong, so singular concentration is not always fruitful. But go back: this might be the opposite of Ponge. On one hand you take a single starting point and colour the universe diversely (Ponge), on the other hand you take the diverse universe and colour it with one quality (Lucretius). I think I'm just fooling myself with language but the point I'm trying to get to is this: with a system you re-author the universe, you have the appearance of being correct. A barber in George Eliot's Romola says that narrowness is dangerous:

"Besides, your druggist, who herborises and decocts, is a man of prejudices: he has poisoned people according to a system, and is obliged to stand up for his system to justify the consequences. Now a barber can be dispassionate; the only thing he necessarily stands by is the razor, always providing he is not an author. That was the flaw in my great predecessor Burchiello [also a barber]: he was a poet, and had consequently a prejudice about his own poetry. I have escaped that; I saw very early that authorship is a narrowing business, in conflict with the liberal art of the razor, which demands an impartial affection for all men’s chins."

The physical activity of the razor (constantly in contact with the world) opens you out; the mental activity of poetry and druggist-systems closes you in and gives you something to defend; the outward-directed person should have nothing to defend, suggests the barber, and if changing one's mind, as Ruskin says somewhere in Modern Painters,** is an essential part of thinking and being fruitfully thoughtful, then the poet and the druggist are not as alive as the barber who shaves chins. "Much time is wasted in general on the establishment of systems," Ruskin says too, "and it often takes more time to master the intricacies of an artificial connection, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully connected."

And yet the barber is not completely freethinking, he has his standards, his world is coloured, he measures and assesses, as the reader finds out a few paragraphs later when he goes on talking to his customer, a handsome stranger. "Ecco!" says the barber, "your curls are now of the right proportion to neck and shoulders; rise, Messer, and I will free you from the encumbrance of this cloth. Gnaffè! I almost advise you to retain the faded jerkin and hose a little longer; they give you the air of a fallen prince."

Maybe say that the difference between this barber and his druggist, is that the barber thinks of the result, the druggist thinks of the structure you climb through to get there. The barber sees a man in tatty clothes and intuits, quickly, that the best advice he can give to this man is the opposite of normal advice -- he must not buy clean new clothes, he must keep the old ones -- inventing a new process on the spot, this barber. The new process is unconventional but he trusts in his own prescience -- "almost " -- almost he believes it will work -- and also he likes to tickle people with his opinions.







* Or it seems to. The street itself (going purely north and ignoring the other direction) turns from South Las Vegas Boulevard into North Fifth Street and then ends near a freeway, if you follow it directly, but if you resist directness and turn right around a circle then the street that used to be North Main Street sacrifices its name and becomes the rest of the Boulevard. Now North Las Vegas Boulevard, it heads through the city, going and going for miles, past fast food places and houses, shedding its lanes, getting thinner and more anaemic and less important, and eventually running away into the open desert. Wasting down almost to nothing it walks parallel to the Great Basin Highway for a while, dies away into a dirt road, recovers itself, wriggles, crosses the Basin, and perishes finally at an insignificant T-intersection.

** I can't see it but I know it's in there somewhere. Volume three or four or five. Somewhere near the beginning.

The Hugo was translated by James Hogarth.

convulsed with a hellborn fever

On Monday I asked a security supervisor from one of the Strip casinos if he thought Ruskin would have made good security or not, and the conclusion we sort of came to was, Perhaps. "Was he judgmental?" "Extremely judgmental." Then maybe yes ... Or maybe not, but, adds the supervisor, sometimes you get a weird one who surprises you. Could he make decisions? He could. Well that's a good sign.

His pedantic steadiness might have been helpful when he had to write out incident reports, but to get to the report-writing stage he would have had to talk to the guests, gamblers, and visitors, greeting and smiling, following various procedures, being polite and patient, and coping with comatose drunks, who, once woken, would have thrashed and hooted, tearing at his clothes, arms, and hip-mounted radio equipment, not knowing who he was or where they were, or what was going on, in fact knowing almost nothing, having moved purely into the realm of those senses the author would have called animal, sensual, and lower -- an inhabitance he would have despised, surely, respecting knowledge as he did, and writing in his diary, after dinner parties, that the evening had been "boring" because nobody had taught him anything new.

His impatience with smalltalk would present problems in the security world; he would struggle to execute that part of the engagement procedure known in some casinos as Delight.

In Modern Painters, in the category of visual "facts [that] are unimportant" or not worthy of an artist's attention, he placed "a gambler quarrel[ing] with another gambler" and "a sot enjoying himself with another sot." A history painter should not take either of these scenes as his subject, he warned, otherwise the painting will be "trivial." Employed as a casino security guard he would have to work in the land of the Historical Trivial, "the entirely infernal atmosphere of the common cafes and gambling-houses ... infecting every condition of what they call 'aesthesis,' left in the bodies of men, until they cannot be happy with the pines and pansies of the Alps" -- or, in the case of Vegas, happy with the rocks and flowers of the Spring Mountain ranges, the fields and peaks outside the city, along with those other parts of the state so little remembered that you can buy a frame for your license plate that reads Nevada at the top and then Outside Las Vegas at the bottom, dividing all 286,350 square kilometres of the region as people usually divide them, into the one thousand and sixty two square and valley-kept kilometres of Clark County where the city sits, and then afterwards, the rest, an open mysterious wedge-shaped place where someone must live but nobody knows who, and something must happen but nobody knows what, and nobody knows these things because they are too busy getting drunk on the Strip and gurgling and trying to tear off security's trousers and throw up on its shoes.

And therein lies another problem, because Ruskin went vivid with horror at the sight of stain, filth, or dirt, and this vomit on his shoes would have repelled him even more than that time Bartolomé Esteban Murillo pointed a foot at him.

But observe another point in the lower figure. It lies so that the sole of the foot is turned towards the spectator; not because it would have lain less easily in another attitude, but that the painter may draw, and exhibit, the grey dust engrained in the foot. Do not call this the painting of nature: it is mere delight in foulness. The lesson, if there be any, in the picture, is not one whit the stronger. We all know that a beggar’s bare foot cannot be clean; there is no need to thrust its degradation into the light, as if no human imagination were vigorous enough for its conception.

(He's describing Murillo's Two Children Eating a Melon and Grapes.)

The pavement of the Strip is dirty, dotted, spittled with spit,** and covered with the escort service cards, each one smaller than a playing card, that are handed out by Latin American men who rattle the stacks in their hands; you can pick up dozens of soft-porn illustrations this way, women with stars or bubbles on their nipples to keep the pictures legal, women in leotards bending over, women gnawing their bra straps, etc -- and as he lifted his eyes away from these cards in convulsive distress Officer Ruskin would have noticed that the refurbished erupting volcano outside the Mirage was an even stranger imitation of the real thing than the handpainted Victorian marble and fake woodgrain that he hates across several of his books, and as he fled from the volcano to the huge gilt statue of three severed heads outside the same casino -- Siegfried, Roy, and a tiger -- he would have noticed that there was no sign of workmanship on the surface, that it was absolutely free of the human fingerprint of creation, a smooth and flawless object made from no evident natural material.

"Their work should be full of flaws," he said, of young artists, "for these are the signs of effort." Be wary of gloss and finish. But there is no sign of effort around him here; every effect along the whole Strip is achieved by a power that removes flaws. There is ambition and spectacle but none of the personal evidence he liked, signs that people with fingers and minds had been at work -- the hidden carving at the top of the spire, put there by the sculptor who made it for the exuberant human pleasure of making it, the independently-imagined griffon that hangs its paws forward like a "sleepy puppy," and the uneven glass bead that was not clipped out in a factory.

But here, around him on the Strip, the only clear evidence of individual effort has been placed inside all the things he hates, like the dirty spit-marks on the concrete, each positioned there with an individual and induplicate aim, as varied as the leaves that he sees nature provide in infinite arrangements for his joy; and there is your hidden carving and your flawed glass bead and griffin, in a blob of spit (but not made -- not good, not human, because not intelligent, he thinks, as a great brainless tide closes in, and he works out his categories, sorting and numbering the different kinds of intelligence into lists, and unknowingly in spite of his dislike of German philosophy,* he demonstrates one of the observations of Kant, who saw people sort and organise things); and the protest against smooth surfaces is carried out by the thrashing drunk, who knocks one of the guards' factory-manufactured radios off its belt-clip and smacks it to bits.

George Eliot opened Daniel Deronda in a "scene of dull, gas-poisoned absorption" which was a European casino's gaming room, and "gambling" she wrote privately, was "a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the dull faces bending round the gaming tables, the raking-up of the money , and the flinging of coins toward the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs -- all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth." Michael Flavin's book on Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel comes with the subtitle, "a leprosy is o'er the land," a quote, he says, from "a prize-winning entry in the National Anti-Gambling League's hymn-writing competition," and as I try to imagine leprosy o'er the land, seeing it whitely misty drifting down, I realise that I'm remembering two Alice Oswald lines describing frost: "Last night without a sound / a ghost of a world lay down on a world." My leprosy is frost. Baudelaire saw --

Around the gaming tables faces without lips,
Lips without color and jaws without teeth,
Fingers convulsed with a hellborn fever
Searching empty pockets and fluttering bosoms

-- writing like this so that later Walter Benjamin could observe, in his essay, Some Motifs of Baudelaire, that gambling might obtain money for you, like work, but it was unlike work in that it did not build on your past knowledge, and experience was no use to you, each dice-roll was as likely or unlikely to come up trumps as the last one or the next one or the one yesterday or the one next week. Perhaps this would appeal to Ruskin least of all, this spectacle in which learning, knowledge, experience, history and everything else he valued, loved, and stormed over -- the past, in a word: the intelligent past -- had absolutely no importance.

The past, he always had his eye on the past, the childhood root of an adult's knowledge -- and there's a long-lost good little boy that I think I see running through Ruskin's work, a bossy child, subordinate and praiseworthy, showing the latest draft of Modern Painters or The Stones of Venice to his mamma and papa at the breakfast table "as a girl shows her sampler" he tells us in Praeterita, explaining his writing methods in the language of an obedient student. "My own literary work, on the contrary, was always done as quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry." (He is comparing himself to Thomas Carlyle, the student who is not so quiet and good.) He looks at a picture by Turner and thinks, "The painter has returned affectionately to his boyish impression, and worked it out with his manly power." Turner was like him, he thinks, Turner needed his childhood too, Turner was faithful to the past, Turner would not have been great had he not loved his boyish impressions, and it was not only Turner who was like this but other geniuses as well -- and even the "imaginative mind" itself agreed with him, the very food of it was the past, and the gut of it was memory.

How far I could show that it held with all great inventors, I know not, but with all those whom I have carefully studied (Dante, Scott, Turner, and Tintoret) it seems to me to hold absolutely; their imagination consisting, not in a voluntary production of new images, but an involuntary remembrance, exactly at the right moment, of something they had actually seen.

Imagine all that any of these men had seen or heard in the whole course of their lives, laid up accurately in their memories as in vast storehouses, extending, with the poets, even to the slightest intonations of syllables heard in the beginning of their lives, and, with the painters, down to the minute folds of drapery, and shapes of loaves or stones; and over all this unindexed and immeasurable mass of treasure, the imagination brooding and wandering, but dream-gifted, so as to summon at any moment exactly such groups of ideas as shall justly fit each other: this I conceive to be the real nature of the imaginative mind ...

There's a void when he looks at the rolling dice, an absence where the past should be, and in fear he picks the coin out of Rosencrantz's hand at the start of the Stoppard play and throws it into that darkness, this coin that defies chance and proves it too, by continually coming up heads, making a pattern across what should be a patternless open reach, marking the void, like a spoon that can take bites out of the ocean.

A hard-working cardsharp would be closer to Ruskin's ideal than an ordinary lucky gambler. At least the cardsharp is applying some knowledge.

Benjamin draws parallels between gamblers and factory workers. "Gambling even contains the workman's gesture that is produced by the automatic operation, for there can be no game without the quick movement of the hand by which the stake is put down or a card is picked up." This is even truer today when all the pokie player has to do is press a button, rest, watch, wait, and press the button again, archetypical factory work. "Since each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the labour is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler."

The German goes on to make refinements, to quote Goethe and muse about the gambler's job of wishing. "A wish, however, is a kind of experience … The further a wish reaches out in time, the greater the hope for its fulfilment." But Officer Ruskin, who hated factories, would never have moderated his view into anything sunnier than condemnation. The only wish we should project far forward in time, he would perhaps have said, is the wish to enjoy eternal life in heaven (feeling a pang if this is happening during the doubting phase of his life, loftiness if he's still an Evangelical), as, staring at this Benjamin essay with rage, he wonders if he sees gambling trying to take the place of God.







* "The reader," he writes in Modern Painters, "must have noticed that I never speak of German art, or German philosophy, but in depreciation." Pretty much, replies the reader.

* although it depends where you are. You can eat off the pavement in front of the Bellagio.

Baudelaire was translated by William Aggeler. The poem is called Le Jeu. Alice Oswald's two lines were borrowed from Pruning in Frost, which you can find in The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, or, if you're in North America, in a collection named Spacecraft Voyager I published by Graywolf Press with a front cover illustration that looks like one of the giant crystal trees in WoW's Northrend, or if you want you can read it online. I like everything I've heard about her new Memorial. Plans afoot to get hold of that somehow. Benjamin was translated by Harry Zohn and I read the essay in the Schocken Books paperback edition of Illuminations.

"The entirely infernal atmosphere …" appears in the footnotes to Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds. Footnote one hundred and thirty four if you're keen. The "beggar’s bare foot" comes from Stones of Venice. All the other stray quotes come from Modern Painters. That "boring" and its cousin-words can be picked out of several entries in his journals. Eliot wrote about the "dull faces bending round the gaming tables" in a letter to her friend Mrs William Cross. I want to give the woman a less anonymous title but I can't find her referred to as anything other than "Mrs William Cross:" a widow with ten children, wearing her husband's name over her own, a breathing tombstone. With all the Cross children around her she made a necropolis.

the fastidious blocked cleric

Ideas about trapping and being trapped were still in my head when I opened Kathryn Hughes' 1999 biography of George Eliot and saw from a sentence at the start of the Acknowledgments that she had been trapped too, in the book in fact, for, "Several times," she says, "during the writing of this book I feared that I had turned into Edward Casaubon, the fastidious blocked cleric from Middlemarch who has been working for far too long on the 'Key to all Mythologies.'"

Casaubon is the patron saint of all trapped writers, he huddles fussing over notes, he frets, he is stymied, he refuses help, he ruins his life, he dies before his work is finished, and even if it had been finished it would have been worthless. He married himself to his book, Hughes married herself to George Eliot, and the woman in Kate Jennings' book (the one I was reading in the last post) married a farmer, but after a while all of them realised that their decision was a confinement and they did not know when their confinement would end -- they were closed in, the job was endless, the marriage was going on and on, and why was this happening, bafflement, anguish: what's at the root of this suffering?

You are, says a voice (I am imagining this voice), and the sufferer responds -- Me? The voice reminds them that they entered the confinement freely, they walked in unrestrained, they said silently, "Yes," to the book or the marriage, and maybe they added out loud, "I know, I know, I understand that this is going to take some time out of my life, but I can handle it, I don't mind doing work, in fact I'm looking forward to the job," and the spirit of Writing or Marriage leapt through them, offering to drive them forward like a bullet, keen and concentrated, and they were beautifully glad, huge, and rapt, not thinking clearly, because the thousand impressions and memories that made up this impulse were flowing through them, as if the words Marriage or Book were a switch, and, click, they came on.

But somehow they've been deserted, the bullet has cracked, the clarity is gone, the world is a mist of fiddling details, and which detail needs your attention first, which one is the Key, not to all Mythologies, but to freedom and an answer? This isn't what I agreed to, says the sufferer, looking around. Oh, says the voice, it is. I said yes to a different set of circumstances. I was heading for work and purpose. Oh no no no, says the voice. Oh no. What made you think you knew how to get there? You'd never been to that point in the future before.

There is no prescience, there is no guarantee, and when they pictured themselves studying fruitfully -- and in that spirit said, "Yes, I want the job" -- they were not agreeing to future circumstances but to present delusions, which they didn't recognise at the time but now they do, now that it is too late, and oh, they say, I have learnt something, I suppose, I have learnt the route to the place where I am, and, looking back with their minds, they see the map lying crookedly behind them, a path passing through a hundred tiny decisions and circumstances until it runs to a temporary halt at the backs of their heels -- but it is moving again, and the next step has already been taken.

Forward, forward, says the world to the sufferer, persevere with the mist or else run away into a new mist, as Jennings' wife does, and Casaubon runs away too, accidentally, by dying on a bench under a tree, and his soul, once freed, begins to release his own wife, Dorothea, from her version of this trapping confinement, the marriage that she went into eagerly, gratefully, thinking that she would spend the rest of her life accepting wisdom from a wise and thoughtful man, "the fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier," but she learns her most relevant lesson in less than a year, Dorothea, you are capable of mistaking a pedant for a sage.

"I do," she said at the altar, and not to this but yet to this. Her wise man does not exist, or maybe he does somewhere else but not in her husband, who houses a different spirit to the one she imagined -- a cold, extinguished spirit; and he houses it so fully that he becomes something very rare, a totemic figure, the name Casaubon representing a particular kind of failure, a writer's failure, the failure of misconceived grand projects,* especially of projects that want to be definitive -- but these are projects that need energy, and courage, and elderly Casaubon has no energy left, down, down he goes, he sees death ahead of him, and fearfully he grows even more stiff, hurt, and frozen, feeling challenged by his eager wife, who, he thinks, "sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them." He is angry. "For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon's face had a quick angry flush upon it." What has she done? She has asked him when he is going to finish his book.

"My love," he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, "you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers."

He shows more passion when he's defending his failure than he does when he's writing the book. The prospect of living with a pedant has replaced the prospect of living with a wise man and Dorothea sees that she will live out this prospect now second by second until her married life ends.

Her predicament is like a punishment, but a punishment for what? What would convince the authorities to let her go? The problem would be solved if she could go back in time and choose again with a different and wiser understanding, -- "Now that I know, I won't marry him," she might say, standing there in the past with her head full of the future, which is now, for her, also the past, because she is remembering it -- she is recalling the horror of the marriage that she will never have.

Instead the author pushes her forward and makes her suffer in linear time like a living person, which feels inevitable but it isn't, not in a book. Eliot could demolish the marriage in a minute if it suited her. She could have planted the crucial piece of knowledge in Dorothea's head before the wedding, and killed the union before it began. She's the author, she can reach in and change anything she likes. She doesn't have to mimic realism. Dickens gave Oliver Twist perfect diction.

But there is a lesson in Middlemarch, and the substance of the lesson is not unique to Eliot: "Nothing ever becomes real till we have experienced it," Keats had written in a letter to a friend fifty years earlier. "Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it." Eliot wants her character to learn. Didn't the other characters warn her about Casaubon before she married him? They did, but Dorothea had to see for herself before she saw. Months had to pass before she learnt. By the time her husband asks her to swear that she will devote herself to his hopeless book she has achieved wariness, she restrains impetuosity, she sees another trap approaching, and she won't say yes or no: "I think it is not right," she answers, "to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to." ("Then," he might say, "you will never promise anything. We are all ignorant.")

Linear time is not only a convention of the novel here, it is a teaching tool in the book's interior world. Eliot makes the substance of Middlemarch into a demonstration of a principle, and, since the book is a thick thing that takes a while to read, Dorothea isn't the only one heading into a prolonged experience, we are too, and of course the experience was even more prolonged for the author, who may have been teaching herself as she wrote -- in fact it seems impossible not to imagine that she was, because where else does this drive of hers come from but discovery -- not from duty to the readers but from duty to herself, her own urges -- she creates time for Dorothea so that she can waste it for her own benefit -- (torture, stated Victor Hugo once, teaches us how to make our statues seem alive) -- and once that thought is established then the reading public starts to seem incidental to the whole project, which becomes the spectacle of Eliot presenting, to herself, an experience she'd never had -- unhappy marriage -- an unhappiness that she did not suffer with George Henry Lewes, a man, says Kathryn Hughes, who looked like an orangutan or a dog, but with whom the writer lived on "mutually sustaining" terms; he was an author himself, and one of his books was titled, The Principles of Success in Literature.







* Read the comments at the end of this post if you want to see his reputation in action. "I think dissertation-writing makes most people feel a bit Casaubon-y. Heaps of scattered notes and still more to read ..."

Hughes' biography is called George Eliot: the Last Victorian. A few days after I made this post she published an article about Bleak House in the Guardian. "I think it's Dickens's best book," she says. Victor Hugo mentions torture and statues in L'Homme qui rit, which is usually translated as The Man Who Laughs, but the version I found it in was called The Laughing Man.

They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced now; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason that some good folk cry out that the decline has come. We no longer know how to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the art of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear altogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their bellies and in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the moment and discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now, and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of the executioner.

the rapidity of the flash, and other circumstances

Sleepy and delirious with a head cold I've been reading Paul Muldoon's long poem Madoc with its puns, riddles, and historical, philosophical allusions, and always at least two things going on at once. In the section headed [Davy] he quotes one of Coleridge's footnotes to Lines Written at Shurton Bars --

In Sweden a very curious phenomenon has been observed on certain flowers, by M. Haggern, lecturer in natural history. One evening he perceived a faint flash of light repeatedly dart from a marigold. From the rapidity of the flash, and other circumstances, it may be conjectured that there is something of electricity in this phenomenon.

Shurton Bars is a reflection on marriage, and it is relevant to Madoc because Coleridge was preparing not only to marry but also to go on a journey that he never took, a trip to North America with Robert Southey. Madoc is a version of that imaginary trip. It opens with Coleridge being shot by Geckoes. In Shurton he addresses his fiancée, Sarah Fricker. "With eager speed I dart! -- / I seize you in the vacant air, / And fancy, with a husband's care / I press you to my heart!" The marigold comes a moment later: "'Tis said, in Summer's evening hour / Flashes the golden-colour'd flower / A fair electric flame: / And so shall flash my love-charg'd eye / When all the heart's big ecstasy / Shoots rapid through the flame!" -- science and literature uniting in one excited whirl of invention, invention and invention saying hello in different languages, as they do when Dickens has his Megalosaurus "forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill," or as George Eliot does in Middlemarch,* or when Thomas Hardy's Knight sees a trilobite "standing forth in low relief from the rock"; and George Steiner delivering a series of T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures in 1970 at the University of Kent, didn't see how any serious reader could avoid being also a mathematician. "The notion that one can exercise a rational literacy in the latter part of the twentieth century without a knowledge of calculus, without some preliminary access to topology or algebraic analysis, will soon seem a bizarre anachronism." This is reported in Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture. Steiner was sad to see that students in 1970 were not learning about the Ancient World, and that footnotes were becoming necessary where they had not been necessary before.

How is Pope's Essay on Man to register its delicate precision and sinew when each proposition reaches us, as it were, on stilts, at the top of a page crowded with elementary comment? What presence in personal delight can Endymion have when recent editions annotate "Venus" as signifying "pagan goddess of love"?

But Borges, delivering a different set of lectures a few years earlier at Harvard (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1967-1968), is intrigued by footnotes, and loves to follow them, he chases through dictionaries after words, he enjoys translations for their differences, and believes that not-knowing or half-knowing can turn a poem or book into a marvellous dream or riddle. The fact that he sees possibilities expanding where Steiner sees them closing and contracting makes him seem, to me anyway, wiser and more thoughtful than the other lecturer, more exploratory and adventurous, in spite of the fact that he doesn't appear to know topology or calculus or any maths at all; and I come away thinking that it is not always mastery of things that makes a person seem astute, but rather an advanced way of wondering about them.**

His answer to Steiner's rhetorical question about Endymion might be, "Because the student finds the lines beautiful," or "Because it is sonorous," which is the word he uses to praise a sonnet by "that too-forgotten Bolivian poet Ricardo Jaimes Freire." Freire's lines "do not mean anything, they are not meant to mean anything; and yet they stand. They stand as a thing of beauty."

Peregrina paloma imaginaria
Que enardeces los últimos amores
Alma de luz, de música y de flores
Peregrina paloma imaginaria

Meanwhile Virginia Woolf in her Diary has discovered items other than Endymion or dreams to worry about, and her juxtapositions of two things are not, like Muldoon's, fun. She is thinking about her servants in the kitchen.







* For example, at the start of chapter twenty-seven:

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable.

** Madoc is a poem for the Steiner-people rather than the Borges-people, since so many of its puns, etc, depend on the reader's familiarity with philosophers, writers, American history, and so on -- see, for example, here's the whole section named [Camus]:

[Camus]

June 16th, 1837. The Mandan villages are ravaged by smallpox.

The Plague says the reader. La Peste! Oh, that Muldoon.

And yet, I think I'm wrong about that Steiner-people, Borges-people split, because Borges' dreaminess, aside from the dreaminess that he describes as a recognition of "beauty" in a poem like Freire's, is the dreaminess of erudition, of the footnote as the entrance to a labyrinth, a Narnian wardrobe door leading to other Narnian wardrobe doors, of an artificial infinity, the infinity of literature, and you could argue that Muldoon's poem points back and forth in that way, one bit of knowledge leading to another. And yet, again, and yet, is there something stage-managed about this poem, in the fact that the reader is ushered very insistently through these wardrobe doors -- there's no other way to make sense of it, you have to jump -- which seems to be the Steiner approach -- one must know Venus -- not the Borges approach -- which could be summed up as: one loves what one sees, and may proceed further into it if one wishes, and look up the old Norse meaning of the word dreary ("the word 'dreary' meant 'bloodstained'"), and whatever else you like, with no coercion?

let someone half-turn her head and say, "A fine evening"

Spring has come to country Arizona. The sun is warm and the ground squirrels are out, undulating across the bare earth like large fast caterpillars, although they have only four legs each; half-caterpillars then. "We rambled to a pretty stream," wrote George Eliot in her journal in 1834, "and there sat watching a caterpillar. When it had been cut in two the fore-part set to work to devour the other half. In the afternoon we had a two hours' walk in the pine woods. They are sublime." There's one squirrel around the side of the house who likes to climb trees. I go out there with my human noise and mass and this ripe grey piece of fruit slides out of the branches and runs into a burrow.

Indeed, if we want to describe a summer evening, the way to do it is to set people talking in a room with their backs to the window, and then, as they talk about something else, let someone half-turn her head and say, "A fine evening" when (if they have been talking about the right things) the summer evening is visible to anyone who reads the page, and is for ever remembered as of quite exceptional beauty.

What would "the right things" be, I wondered, when I read this passage in Woolf's review of Kipling's published Notebooks. What dialogue could be so calibrated, and so perfect, that it would send you away imagining for ever an evening of quite exceptional beauty? I have an idea that if I came across line like that in a book, I would pay no attention to the appearance of the evening, in fact I would barely pay attention to the fact of there being an evening at all; I would think of the character (a continuation of the thoughts I would have been having up to that moment, as Woolf's imaginary book is a book about people), and of the conversation this character was having with other characters, and how her, "A fine evening," fitted into that conversation, and what the author might want her to imply. "A fine evening," might mean, "I am uncomfortable. We should change the subject," or, "I hate you and I'd rather look out the window than listen to you," or, "Isn't it melancholy, we're all so sad, and yet the sun shines, the leaves rustle, all of nature is satisfied," or something else, but when did an author ever put, "A fine evening," into a conversation because they wanted the reader to picture a fine evening?

But it's possible that they do, all the time, and that every time a character in a book says, "It's raining," or notices tree branches swaying, as Colm Tóibín recommended,* the author is really wanting us to do nothing more than admire the rain or the view, which we can't see, a tease, and all of this is the silent revenge of the world of authors on the world of readers, the authors back there behind the curtain, laughing: "And all this time they thought we were being subtle! They fell for it!" One author tries to break ranks and tell the rest of us about this outrageous fraud -- "No, hoi!" say the rest. "No dobbing! Shh!" And they pull that author back by the elbow.







* In an interview with John Preston

Tóibín proceeds to demonstrate what makes him such a good writer – and also, you suspect, an inspiring teacher. “For instance, you could write a sentence like: 'He hated his mother more in that moment than he had ever hated her before.’ But, alternatively, you could say: 'When his mother turned away from him, he looked out and he noticed that the branches of the tree were swaying. He held his eyes on it for a moment, and when he looked back she was staring at him.’ See? It doesn’t really matter who hates who anymore, but something has occurred. There’s something there that makes the reader shiver. All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realise that a plain sentence can actually do so much."

While we were in Portland I finished Tóibín's The Master, a book with an absolute surfeit of people staring subtly at views. "He was interested in the desk and the papers and the books. He went to the window and looked at the view."

The Journals of George Eliot were edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson and published in 2000 by the Cambridge University Press. Harris, if you want to know some trivia, was also the editor of Dearest Munx: the Letters of Christina Stead and William Blake. She teaches at the University of Sydney.

dimly she conceived herself

(A warning: I am about to give away parts of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and one little bit of Dickens' David Copperfield)

Reading one of the Gwendolyn chapters in Daniel Deronda I came across this description of that young middle-class woman's state of mind after her family's fortunes have suddenly dipped: "dimly she conceived herself getting amongst vulgar people who would treat her with rude familiarity -- odious men whose grins and smirks would not be seen through the strong grating of polite society." In other words, she thinks she is going to turn into Henny Pollit, who is the creation of Christina Stead. She is going to swap creators, she will exchange gods, she will be described in new language. "But for Henny there was a wonderful particular world ... this inferno."

... in the streetcar was 'a dirty shrimp of a man with a fishy expression who purposely leaned over me and pressed my bust, and a common vulgar woman beside him, an ogress, big as a hippopotamus, with her bottom sticking out, who grinned like a shark and tried to give him the eye,' and how this wonderful adventure went on for hours, always with new characters of new horror ... all these wonderful creatures, who swarmed in the streets, stores, and restaurants of Washington, ogling, leering, pulling, pushing, stinking, over-scented, screaming and boasting, turning pale at a black look from Henny, ducking and diving, dodging and returning, were the only creatures that Henny ever saw.

The young Henny was daintily kept, like the young Gwendolyn, but then she married Samuel Pollit and became bitter and endlessly theatrical, every movement a piece of theatre, even the ordinary act of closing and opening her eyes or of leaning on a table, "a commonplace habit which looked very theatrical in Henny." Unmarried Gwendolyn takes part in amateur theatrical tableaux, dressing in a sheet and pretending to be the statue of Hermione at the end of A Winter's Tale, but when you regard her as a performer you see that her real talent lies in drawing attention to herself in social settings.

Going on a little I discovered that it was not Gwendolyn's fear of odious men that was the foretaste of the future but her performance as the statue. After the family calamity she marries an aristocrat named Grandcourt who imposes his will upon her; he wants her to be calm and controlled, unchanging and supremely ornamental. There is no leering, pushing pulling, stinking, in Grandcourt's world, nothing is over-scented, no one screams or boasts, everything is mild and decorous -- it is a hell for her, but the opposite of the one she imagined. Grandcourt is so fond of continuity that he withstands his own death on page seven hundred and fifty-eight and strides forward through time to install himself in a different book under the name of Gilbert Osmond. He is American now, but it is him, it is his revenant. He finds another Gwendolyn, who, like the first one, does not recognise him for what he is. He recognises her, even though she is now Isabel Archer. It is possible that before Gwendolyn he had another woman in another century and that both of their roles are perpetual.

There is another figure of stasis in Deronda besides Grandcourt. Her name is Mirah, a young Jewish woman who is in the book because Eliot wanted to convince her Victorian-era readers that not all Jews were, as the stereotype had it, vulgar, greedy, cunning, and venal. Some of them were far less interesting than that, and Mirah is one of the uninteresting ones. She is a Victorian Heroine. Her hair is beautiful and her profile is beautiful and and her eyes are beautiful and her singing is beautiful and her playing of the piano is beautiful, and everyone loves her and the hero loves her and the hero's friend loves her and her brother loves her and she loves all of them and so full of love is she that she wishes her horrible father would come back into her life so that she could love him too, which he does, and talks her out of everything she's got in about five minutes, which is wonderful and endearing of him although the author expects you to disapprove.

A saintly character like Mirah never changes. Only her circumstances change. All she can do to alter herself is die. She is made out of some adamantine material; she is not the iron that Ruskin admired because it was capable of rusting but the steel he hated because it would not breathe. (And yet he wanted to marry a woman like her.) Never worn down or worn in, she can only be destroyed. Writers who place the roots of modern science fiction in the 1800s will mention Frankenstein and Jules Verne, but as far as I know they have never addressed the most public of all Victorian science-fiction constructions, the perpetual woman. "O Agnes," says David Copperfield, to his own particular example, "O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!" In Woman and the Demon: the Life of a Victorian Myth, Nina Auerbach makes Agnes into a talisman. "Agnes is to David as he is to his own novel. Her right to orchestrate his death comes from her magical role as maker and shaper of his life" And I think of Fiorinda in E.R. Eddison's A Fish Dinner in Memison, who causes the whole terrestrial globe to be built and then pops it with a hair-pin, finishing the book. "With a nearly noiseless puff it burst." So the Victorian era of Deronda turned into the Edwardian and exploded against World War I.

Managed by a slightly different author, Agnes Wickfield could have been terrifying. From the first time I read the book I've thought that Uriah Heep had a lucky escape.

'What I am, you have made me, Agnes. You should know best.'

'I made you, Trotwood?'

'Yes! Agnes, my dear girl!' I said, bending over her. 'I tried to tell you, when we met today, something that has been in my thoughts since Dora died. You remember, when you came down to me in our little room - pointing upward, Agnes?'

'Oh, Trotwood!' she returned, her eyes filled with tears. 'So loving, so confiding, and so young! Can I ever forget?'

'As you were then, my sister, I have often thought since, you have ever been to me. Ever pointing upward, Agnes; ever leading me to something better; ever directing me to higher things!'

"[A]s magic objects," writes Auerbach, such heroines "exude a power beyond the human."

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.