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Faulkner is a cascade of information and elaboration, Hemingway a trickle
of insinuation and understatement. Ultimately, both Hemingway and Faulkner
demand that readers conspire in creating meaning. We may not always think of
those two writers as belonging to the same party, but on this point they are pretty
unified. Is the narrator (or character) being truthful? Simple? Ironic? Sarcastic?
How much? What does that mean? You can see the work involved with “nice”
easily enough, where it may mean one of eleventy-three things or their opposite.
The decisions are just as demanding about a “grim-haggard-amazed” voice or
“victorious” dust. What do they sound like, look like?
This is where reading becomes an active element in creating meaning. Yes,
the writer puts the words on the page, but that’s only half the story. We’re not
passive receivers of information in this transaction. Rather, we take those words
and make something comprehensible of them, teasing out meanings, building up
associations, listening for echoes and innuendoes. We can’t do that without
writers, naturally. But they also can’t do it without us. This isn’t quite the tree￾falls-in-the-forest question. A novel without readers is still a novel. It has
meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range
of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meanings. Anyone who
has ever taught literature knows this. Book groups know it, too, whether the
individual members have considered it or not. If a novel could only have the
meaning that the author had imprinted on it, then all readers would passively
accept that meaning, or as much of it as they could process. There would be no
need for literature classes or discussion groups beyond simple remediation: for
those of you who missed the meaning, here’s what you weren’t clever enough to
grasp. That is sometimes the view of beginning literature students. They will
come to class and ask, in so many words, “But what does it mean?” as if it can
only mean one thing or as if my reading is the only authorized version of the
text. And of course there would be no scholarly journals or monographs
necessary in literary studies. Okay, so perhaps that’s not the worst outcome
you’ve ever heard, but you get the idea.
Want to play a game? From a single page of a single novel we get the
following phrases: “the daughter of that house had traversed a desert of sordid
misery”; “she herself was nothing of a sybarite”; “she elevated daintiness to a
religion; her interior shone with superfluous friction, with punctuality, with
winter roses”; “she assimilated all delicacies and absorbed all traditions.” Okay,
name that tune. What would you say about the writer of these phrases? From
some century not our own? From some planet not our own? We can be pretty
sure no one wrote those phrases after Hemingway, who murdered them. If I
came across them cold, I would probably guess the nineteenth century and
England. I would be wrong. Slightly. They are indeed from the same page (277
in my old Modern College Library edition) of Henry James’s The Bostonians.
James, of course, was an American, technically. He lived much of his adult life,
however, in Britain as an Englishman; there was a quarter of a century, from
1880 to 1905, during which he did not set foot in the United States. But
American nevertheless. James is, to my mind, unique, as much in his way as
Twain is in his. No one sounds quite like him, no one strings words together in
quite his way. Perhaps no one, even those with the benefit of Freud and Jung,
investigates the human psyche with quite the same subtlety, and no one does it
with such interestingly convoluted sentences. But even before the sentence level,
his word choice and phrasing, his diction, mark him out as a special case. You
need someone who is a better James scholar than I (not a great challenge) to tell
you what that special quality consists of, but I know it when I hear it. There’s a
kind of magic to the play of words in an author, in part because his or her diction
is not like anyone else’s. James’s magic is not Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s, nor
theirs Laurence Sterne’s nor Edna O’Brien’s. It’s always their own.
Sometimes the magic words are names. Here are two from a novel I’m pretty
sure you have not read: Veneering and Podsnap. Sound like a slightly demented
home and garden store, don’t they? Okay, class, name that writer. As I say,
you’ve probably not read this novel (which is not in the top six of his that might
be assigned for course study), but if you’ve read any of those six, you’ll get it.
You’re right. Again. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, even comes close to
the artful inventiveness of Dickensian naming practices. Names have an edge to
them. We talked about them just a moment ago as emblems of character, but they
have qualities of their own. Weight. Feel. Geometry. They’re sharp or boxy or
roly-poly. They’re evocative. You don’t need a description to envision Mr.
Pumblechook or Lady Dedlock; you only hope that when the descriptions come,
they match the expectations the names have set up. The novel that gives us the
Veneerings and Podsnap is Our Mutual Friend (1865), the last novel Dickens
completed. I first read it as the seventh and final novel in a course on his later,
“social” novels (we skipped A Tale of Two Cities as being too unlike the others),
so after mucking around the fens and the ruined mansion with Pip and the jail in
Little Dorritt and the miasma of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, when I
came upon “Podsnap,” I remember thinking, “of course he is.” It’s simply
perfect. Dickens’s names, like his characters, are generally a shade grotesque—
just a little deformed or a little outside the normal run of things. Dickens sounds
like himself in other ways, naturally, but he most resembles himself in those
hilarious, alarming, punning, suggestive names he slings around the necks of his
characters.