Describing, with Mark Twain and Alain Robbe-Grillet

Wallas drops his token into the slot and presses a button. With a pleasant hum of its electric motor, the entire column of plates begins to descend; in the empty compartment at the bottom appears, then halts, the plate whose owner he has become. He removes it and the napkin that accompanies it and sets them both down on a free table. After having performed the same operation to obtain a slice of the same toast, accompanied this time by cheese, and once again for a glass of beer, he begins to cut up his meal into little cubes.

—Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers

Literary description, not of abstract but of physical things, especially the appearances of things, takes time. It takes a lot of words. Why do it? Because the market for novels is bigger than for short stories and poems? Because some physical description is necessary, not to say desirable, to build character and structure? True enough. But, to be purists for a moment, if one asked after the unique characteristics of prose fiction writing, then physical description—especially that of the appearances of things—will not come up. Photography is the medium of choice here, a fact long accepted by painters. A camera could have reproduced the food automat described with so many words in Robbe-Grillet’s 1953 novel immediately and vividly. A camera, however, has great difficulty in capturing thoughts and making them vivid. This is what prose fiction is for. And in order to elucidate a character’s thought on a thing seen, that thing must be described somehow. But Robbe-Grillet does not tell us what Wallas thinks or feels about the automat. He tells us only, “he begins to cut up his meal into little cubes,” then continues:

 

A quarter tomato that is quite faultless, cut up by the machine into a perfectly symmetrical fruit.

The peripheral flesh, compact, homogenous, and a splendid chemical red, is of an even thickness between a strip of gleaming skin and the hollow where the yellow, graduated seeds appear in a row, kept in place by a thin layer of greenish jelly along a swelling of the heart. This heart, of a slightly grainy, faint pink, begins—toward the inner hollow—with a cluster of white veins, one of which extends toward the seeds—somewhat uncertainly.

Above, a scarcely perceptible accident has occurred: a corner of the skin, stripped back from the flesh for a fraction of an inch, is slightly raised.

From there the author takes us to the next table where three men, eating “replicas” of Wallas’s meal, have a conversation. What’s the point? Why is the description of the tomato so conspicuous?—as if it exists for its own sake, is the point somehow (apart, of course, from the beauty of the language).

What could that point be? We notice first that Robbe-Grillet has chosen the thing to be described very carefully. In 1953 the method of dispensing food here described was a novelty. Whether or not the writer had a presentiment of its significance in our culture is not the question so much as how the manner of the automat’s description fits the tone and form of the novel as a whole. Units of information are dispensed in what seems a mechanical and certainly a repetitive way. Wallas himself takes on the character of the automat, cutting his meal into “little cubes.” After a while it becomes apparent that by looking carefully at the differences in these units one gains a unique pleasure through the effort, and that only by looking closely—reading with attention—can one see in Wallas, or any of the other details, what marks off their uniqueness, the way close examination of the tomato slice reveals the “barely perceptible accident” in its “faultless” appearance. Therefore the description of the automat, and in particular its focus on the tomato, is a cipher for perceiving and reading the novel as a whole.

I had shut the door to. Then I turned around, and there he was....

            He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fishbelly white. As for his clothes—just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor—an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.

 I stood a-looking at him; he sat there a-looking at me, with his chair tilted back a little. I set the candle down. I noticed the window was up; so he had clumb in by the shed. He kept a-looking me all over. By and by he says:

“Starchy clothes—very. You think you’re a good deal of a big-bug, don’t you?”

“Maybe I am, maybe I aint,” I says.”

—Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Dressed in a red T-shirt and baggy underpants, he is seated in the center of his playpen with his back to the fireplace, facing the inner front door (a glass door covered with Venetian blinds and opening into a little front hall full of boots and umbrellas). To his right looms the piano, to his left stands the little oval table before the empty couch, over which one can see the top of the mahogany bookcase and the row of balusters disappearing diagonally into the ceiling. The narrow rugless passage between the couch and staircase leads to the open doorway of the vast invisible kitchen behind Edwin, where Mrs. Mulhouse is making clinking and whooshing noises. I am seated between the playpen and the piano on the dark brown rug with its dark green leaves, facing Edwin’s right profile.

—Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mulhouse

Millhauser’s description goes on thus for another page until the sounds Edwin is making are described:   

Edwin grins suddenly, catching my attention. The sound leaps from the box [record player] to him, changing with his grin from nnnn to eeeee. The eeeee grows louder and switches to a giggling kkkkk; bits of saliva appear at the edges of Edwin’s lips; he clenches and unclenches his little fists. He is tuning up for a sound fest....

The description continues thus for another page until, the eleven year old narrator tells us, “the astute reader does not need to be told that Edwin has just composed his first poem.” The joke is that an eleven year old is using adult language to describe a perfectly ordinary child, whom he perceives—though he hasn’t told us exactly why yet—to be a genius. The detailed descriptions are examples of his powers of observation. Twain’s approach to a narration by a child of about the same age is quite different. Using his uneducated and immature language, Huck nevertheless conveys to us an admirable common sense and what we would call street smarts. Of the two it is tempting to say the latter—Twain’s—has much less to work with. Yet Huck Finn comes alive as a complex being, whereas Jeffrey Cartwright never seems to emerge from behind the language he is using. If Jeffrey Cartwright were describing Huck’s Pap, he would tell us which ankle was resting on which knee, what the color of his rags were, and on which side of his body the window was. But these kinds of details, while appearing exact, have the opposite effect in the imagination of the reader. When one has to pause to visualize the exact position of the bodies and their relation to everything in Millhauser’s text, one is already there experiencing the scene in Twain. The difference is one of immediacy and palpability.

In describing, only what is essential to the story or feel of the piece is desirable. In Robbe-Grillet it might be extensive. In Twain it might be as simple as, “his clothes—just rags, that was all.” No amount of description of these rags is going to help. It would only deter from the tone of disregard made clear by one simple sentence. In Millhauser, establishing Jeffrey Cartwright’s power of observation does not need to be labored, or could be demonstrated in ways other than testing the reader’s tolerance for long descriptive passages that, in the end, please only those who like to know that the mirror the butler happened to be standing in front of, as he did the deed in his argyle socks, was hung in a gold frame.