Producing Totality

 "We were like figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together."

—Saul Bellow, Dangling Man

Recently, detail is in decay, as seen in Elif Batuman's ("Short Story and Novel"; "Get a Real Degree"1) and James Wood's (How Fiction Works2) precise anatomies of contemporary writing. The masters (Tolstoy for Batuman, Flaubert and Saul Bellow for Wood), are set alongside underwhelming examples of recent descriptive writing in order to prove the inferiority of the latter in each case: "She was twenty-nine, but still went home every evening to her mom's ground-floor apartment in Queens, which doubled by day as a yoga studio"3 and "Graves had been sick for three days when, on the long, straight highway between Mazar and Kunduz, a dark blue truck coming toward them shed its rear wheel in a spray of orange-yellow sparks."4 These sentences, particularly (unfairly, even?) juxtaposed to Tolstoy's "swarm-life of man," somehow fail to make themselves relevant. They contain specificities but they do not seem to describe the world.

Batuman and Wood are being conservative. Plagued by arbitrary description and above all by a fatal self-consciousness, contemporary fiction isn't bad in their view as much as it is formulaic, and the smoking gun is the use of detail. At any rate, as capable as their conservativism might be of observing decline, it really offers us no way out and no explanatory mechanism. We can look at these writers' own novels as practical demonstrations of this fact. How could Wood, after running through all challengers with his sword, end up producing a line like: "the mouse-grey tubular walker, a marvel of engineering, as strong as a weight lifter but as light as the bones of a very old lady, with wheels on the front and two splayed yellow tennis balls stuck on the back legs" 5? I see no reason to distinguish this from the failure of detail that Wood attacks.

Thus we might productively ask ourselves whether the problem is technical — writers are somehow missing the right details — or whether there is something that has changed about reality itself.

Anyone who has been trained to read critically in the modern era cannot help but hang on to small details, the little remainders upon which so much of a text's effect hinges. Some details play a narrative role, but many do not have such a clear purpose. One account, that of Barthes, which begins with the detail of a barometer hanging on the wall, readers may be familiar with. Pursuing the question of the "futile" detail within realism, Barthes follows the development of description as a purely aesthetic form in classical rhetoric towards the realism perfected in Flaubert, in which, he argues, details "say nothing but this: we are the real."6

The realist techniques of modernity began to harness the detail to the composition of specificity, all the while subordinating it to larger social discourses previously associated with history rather than literature. Details were often indications of class membership, as with Germinal's bread-and-butter sandwiches (the briquet), Emma Bovary's furniture or the lining of Odette's clothes. More recently, in 20^th century literature, we see the emergence of the commodity as a new kind of detail (in Joyce, for example: "What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete."7) and the detail's height of generic efficacy flourishes in earnest alongside the commodity in works like Lolita ("all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac's Courts"8). The key development is a historical one: the rise of mass culture, and thereby the increased production of commodities and group memberships which were both recognizable and distinct, which could then rely on the detail not merely for verisimilitude but for a kind of social commentary or representativeness. A small detail in this sense is a symbol; it represents the attitude and habitus of a particular class and in so doing contributes to the sense of totality of an artwork.9

We can see an almost stylistically ideal example of this in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus: "For an instant Brenda reminded me of the pug-nosed little bastards from Montclair who come down to the library during vacations and while I stamp out their books, they stand around tugging their elephantine scarves until they hang to their ankles, hinting all the while at 'Boston' and 'New Haven.'"10 Although Roth himself considered his first published work a bit precious and formulaic, these details condense exactly the themes of the novella: the division between Neil Klugman and those on the other side, and a kind of concealment that conceals nothing.

To present a salient case study, the strongest of Saul Bellow's descriptive writing — which Wood takes as his model — drew its power not merely from the well of Bellow's own talent, but from the particular reference point of certain forms of midcentury mass economic life and the ways in which the struggle to describe these settings in a subjective way mirrors Bellow's characters' striving to express their inner life. The domestic setting in Bellow, for example, is never — and can never any longer be — simply a depiction of a home or family (as Tolstoy might have it) which naturally takes center stage as if by right. It is shadowed in all cases by the larger population of which it forms merely one part; in George Oppen's language, "a part / Of an infinite series."11 It is Bellow who begins his first four novels in a boarding-house, in a subway car, in the street knocking on a door, and in the lobby of an apartment building, Bellow whose characters are ineluctably tied to others, for good or ill, and whose ties are always half-consciously illuminated by the world of objects they inhabit, objects supremely indifferent to the subjective life-process and the individual life. Thus, the shadow of the particular detail in Bellow's writing, with all its expansiveness, is the concomitant universalizing expansion of Fordist mass production.

Bellow himself addresses this question quite early. The following monologue from the protagonist and narrator of Dangling Man — Joseph, a man waiting to be drafted into the army — establishes this:

I could see a long way from this third-floor height. Not far off there were chimneys, their smoke a lighter gray than the gray of the sky; and, straight before me, ranges of poor dwellings, warehouses, billboards, culverts, electric signs blankly burning, parked cars and moving cars, and the occasional bare plan of a tree. These I surveyed, pressing my forehead on the glass. It was my painful obligation to look and to submit to myself the invariable question: Where was there a particle of what, elsewhere, or in the past, had spoken in man's favour? There could be no doubt that these billboards, streets, tracks, houses, ugly and blind, were related to interior life. And yet, I told myself, there had to be a doubt. There were human lives organized around these ways and houses, and that they, the houses, say, were the analogue, that what men created they also were, through some transcendent means, I could not bring myself to concede. There must be a difference, a quality that eluded me, somehow, a difference between things and persons and even between acts and persons. Otherwise the people who lived here were actually a reflection of the things they lived among.12

If you hear Marx in this, you are not alone, even if we are not accustomed to putting materialism in the same sentence with Bellow. Dangling Man, Bellow's first novel, is also his most Marxist. The Jewish intellectual milieu centered around The Partisan Review had just emerged from its Trotskyist period of the late 1930s, and the novel has this as a submerged theme (for example in Joseph's Communist past as "Comrade Joe").13 The passage above both goes against and with Marx: it is a critique of vulgar economic determinism, but it also registers the cause of alienation, in accordance with Marxist humanism, as the confusion of (mass-produced) things and people, which originates from the industrial mode of commodity-production.

Throughout his career, notably but not exclusively in his early work, Bellow's details carry the pulse of mass production, from Wood's favorite example, from Herzog, of a wrecking ball ("The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors."14), or the unbelievably gorgeous passages describing the Staten Island ferry in The Victim: "On the water the air was cooler, but on the Staten Island side the great tarnished green sheds were sweltering, the acres of cement widely spattered with sunlight. The disembarking crowd spread through them, going toward the line of buses that waited at the curb with threshing motors, in a shimmer of fumes." Despite the alienating qualities of mass-produced life, it is precisely the fact that goods and services are standardized that allows a particularity — a detail — to relate to something beyond the particular; in other words, to take on not merely a symbolic function but a representative one, which recognizes the object's role in mediating social and economic life, what Marxist thinkers might call "the real abstraction."15

It is precisely the critical technique of abstraction that serves as the virtuosic second step in Bellow's metaphors. Take this, from The Victim: "The waiter brought his meal, an omelette in a chipped, blackened enamel dish with tomato sauce hardened on the rim, a salad, and some canned apricots . . . The coffee was sweet and thick; he swallowed even the sediment."16 The skill here with which Bellow knits together the particularity of the detail and the impersonality of the commodity can be seen in the scientific, abstract register of "sediment" (rather than "grounds," for instance). Sediment is a singular that is also a plural. Just like with "some canned apricots," a vague reference which nevertheless conjures a vivid referent for the reader, the quantity is, because imprecise, possibly part of an infinity. It suggests the scale of production — a geological scale — besides the homogeneity of canned goods.17

In other words, what is missing from Batuman's and Wood's discussion of detail is the second half of the equation, not merely the thing described but the implicit abstract role that it plays. And this latter part is dependent on social and economic organization.

As of the present, the detail's ability to serve as reference to a totality is in decline. Bellow could write, for example, "Her lips are painted in the shape that has become the universal device of sensuality for all women, from the barely mature to the very old,"18 with all the power of a "universal device" — and shows awareness of it as a recent development ("has become"). By the 1980s, in Atwood's Bluebeard's Egg, lipstick is seen to change color with changes in fashion ("Women's lips are paler again. They wax and wane, from season to season."19); by now lipstick is known through branding — MAC or Nars or Chanel — each subvariety competing with the others for primacy. If the descriptive power of a detail relies on its ability to relate, and relate to, broader experience, the fragmentation into smaller and more frequently changed consumer constituencies (as well as accelerated division of labor) means that fewer details truly possess this power to represent the real abstraction in social life. The unselfconsciousness of Bellow, the sense of grace with which he describes the built environment, is simply an irrelevant effect in a world where no single brand or product can stake a claim to that environment and stand at the center of consumer experience.

Detail's failure to articulate meaning in the post-industrial era can be seen, for example, in a 2014 Valentine's Day essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, titled "On the Kinds of Love We Fall Into."20 Description undergirds the title, which tries to refer to (or rather, I claim, generate) a familiar sense of sociality — note its use of "kinds" to reference genera of experience, which "we" are supposed to know intimately: "Soon, we were Facebook friends in the way two people can be without really knowing one another"; "an archly hip sort of southern girl who loves to cook for us despite possessing the skepticism toward me of a lover's roommate." "The way," "the skepticism," "the kinds;" note how many times the author chooses a definite article, trying not just to describe but to reference an order of social life, in a failed attempt to will totality into being. Specific details are produced, no doubt, but the order itself is missing. That verisimilitude has now become a problem helps explain why the genres that have risen in the past several decades do not rely on a sense of plausibility, whether "hysterical realism" or memoir — after all, memoir does not have to be convincingly descriptive or relatable in the manner of realist fiction, the fact that it was lived is testament enough.21

If Fordist mass-production first enabled Bellow to trace a concomitant movement in metaphor from a concrete to an abstract: "Our windows, with their glowing shades, set two orange rectangles, trade-marks of warmth and comfort, against the downpour and the dark,"22 our present economic situation imperils the use of the detail as reference to a totality in this way. Detail, for one, cannot really serve as a refuge from abstraction. Gavin Walker's useful corrective, reminding us that "capital paradoxically is always mobilizing something like 'heterogeneity in homogeneity,' it is always mobilizing this external element of resistance as an essential building block of its own operation,"23 might equally apply to the proliferation of detail as part of the contemporary production process, which is entirely saturated with the principles of modernist composition. One lively example occurs in the four shapes of Chicken McNuggets, deliberately made to evoke a diverse but not overly chaotic sense of individuality (four shapes, rather than three or five).

We can see that the precise chasm which Bellow navigates, the subjective cut that the living self creates in reality, has been recruited and taken up into the commodity itself. A recent commentary on this phenomenon, also from McDonalds, can be found here:

https://twitter.com/fljbieber/status/1063868145629188096?lang=en

To return to canned goods, despite a certain striking similarity with Warhol's prints, what differs is the relative structure of subjectivity in each period. The Campbell's Soup cans24 offer a commentary on the depersonalization of production in mass society, whereas here we see, essentially, a "subject." The texture of the Hash Brown is precisely the abstract texture of detail itself, as contrasted with the smooth universal of its branded cardboard clothing. It is precisely its texture that allows the Hash Brown to take on a subjective role as the star of this photoshoot, posed as if it were a photogenic person. Just as, in realistic literature, the textured subject sticks out from the generic/branded social world, the Hash Brown duplicates this subjective depth in contrast to its generic, branded carton. The art of the photographer here has simply been to draw attention to the psychological implications of this corporate design, which probably originated out of the straightforward attempt to make the Hash Brown look like appetizing real food rather than a commodity.

I think this may go some way toward answering why recent writing has diverged so starkly — and indeed, must diverge — from the kind of verisimilitude found in Bellow, and why contemporary work seems to have a troubled relationship to the detail as a device.25 My enquiry introduces the failure of the detail in contemporary writing as more properly a question of the subject in capitalism. Rather than Bellow or even Flaubert, it seems to me that we find ourselves in the position of a much older set of writers, Shakespeare or Cervantes, say, for whom the natural world and everything in it were part of the radiant order of God's plan. When Falstaff states baldly, "I do remember him at Clement's Inn like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When a' was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife,"26 this is an example of a detail that demonstrates the Baroque attitude to the artist as one who can expand upon the preexisting aesthetic principles of life. Quite in contrast to the projects of naturalism and realism, which sought to incorporate what stood outside of aesthesis, we live in a world where nothing has not been deliberately created with the hand of the Almighty, where nothing in this sense stands outside.27 What art means in this context — the individual artist besides (or rather, within) the mightier aesthetic movement of capital itself — remains to be seen.

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Aimée Lê is a Vietnamese American writer and artist. She is an associate lecturer in creative writing at University of Exeter and an associate member of the Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre.

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References