2. A Slice of Life
Reality is a complex place, for all intents and purposes infinitely so. Representations on the other hand are necessarily finite. There’s only so many hours in the day to observe things, and only so much time to draw, paint, sculpt, film, or write down those observations. You can’t just keep adding detail indefinitely, and any attempt to do so would result in something strange rather than something realistic.
Nevertheless, certain forms of representation can at least give the impression that they embody total reality. Although they make for a weird team, there’s a distinct connection between Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Monet’s water lilies, Rodin’s The Kiss, and Coronation Street. Although methods vary, they’re all designed to make you believe that what you are witnessing is living reality, other realities. Some hot and sweaty, others crisp and fragrant. You could almost be there.
Clearly this isn’t true of all representations. However much beauty and anguish you might see in a Van Gough chair, you wouldn’t want to sit on one. Similarly, while Picasso’s figures can exhibit deep humanity, there’s little chance of mistaking them for real humans, there in the room with you, thank heavens.
With visual representations one of the key tools is perspective. Unlike Picasso’s demoiselles, Whistler’s mother is perfectly proportioned. The legs of her chair are in all the right places and her shadow falls just where it would. You could be Whistler, standing at his easel, and the two-dimensional geometry falling on your retina would be much the same. You could be there, and it feels like it too.
It’s part of what you might call the ‘photo-ishness’ of certain paintings. Like a photograph, Whistler’s mother does a jolly good two-dimensional impersonation of our three-dimensional world, as it falls upon our eyes. Indeed, if David Hockney is right about the use of camera obscurers in renaissance painting, it makes perfect sense that these forms should work on us in similar, and quite unprecedented ways.
Another key ingredient of photo-ishness is the filling in, the shading or colouring of a two dimensional image. Here again, the more natural looking paintings are the ones that resemble photographs, the ones where brightness and colour are distributed much as they might be in a photograph. Impressionist painting is a clear case. Little dapple here, little splat there, just like in a photo. Clearly these painters and thinkers learnt from the new medium. Impressionism might well be called ‘painting in the light of photography’.
Like accurate geometry, accurate filling-in is an effective way to make a flat, still image spring to life. A canvas coloured and shaded in sympathy with the world is more likely to instil a feeling of looking at the world.
Although words and paint convey meaning in very different ways, when it comes to inducing a sense of reality the starting point is the same. As with a painting there’s no possible way to transcribe the totality of a scene in words. The best you can do is choose snippets, those which best coax the reader to fill in the rest of the detail, or at least convince the reader that the rest of the detail is present, just unseen.
Like great portrait painters, great fiction writers are people with a skill for picking the right metonyms, ones that encourage the reader to project their own sense of reality onto the text. Like fine painters, they can spot those aspects of reality that will be most evocative. How is another matter. Inspiration is always going to be enigmatic, even for the inspired. Nevertheless there are some long-established fictional devices that give some indication of what can be achieved.
The first is so common and so logical it’s often included in style guides for budding writers: Long before product placement, fiction writers were using brand names, real and fictional, to boost the realism of their work.
Makes sense. Use the term 'metal polish' in a fiction and it conjures little in the mind of the reader – but call it Brasso and it springs to life. Brasso gives the reader a chance to visualise a real product they’ve handled, or seen on a shelf. Even if you’ve never heard of Brasso it still sounds a likely metal polish, in a loud tin, one you might see under a neighbour’s sink. Likewise, don’t say vinegar, say Sarson’s. If you remind people of a bottle they’ve actually seen and handled, they’re more likely to smell it on fictional chips and feel it running down fictional sleeves.
Again, it works because it rings true. In truth there are no generic products, everything is made by someone. The Rovers Return is the only pub where customers ask for a packet of their ‘usual cigars’. Like it or not, we now think brands where we once thought things. Using brand-names helps fictions to feel real, because brands have become such a large part of our reality.
Another reliable realism activator is the small inessential exception to life’s norm. A well chosen unlikelihood can breath life into empty space. I remember a Norman Mailer story in which a man momentarily focuses on a “surprisingly well drawn nude lady” on a wooden panel in the gents. No more is said, but it's very effective. Truth is, badly drawn nude ladies are ten a penny. Good erotic graffiti is a rarity, it really stands out from the crowd.
Occasionally truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes we do glimpse beauty in the strangest of places. The unusual is all part and parcel of reality, less common than the usual, but still significant. Fictions stand a better chance of feeling like reality if they occasionally tip their cap to the unusual.
Lastly, it pays to keep certain aspects of a fiction quite jagged and messy-looking if you want to strike a realist chord – beginning or ending a chapter mid-dialogue, perhaps, or even mid-narrative. Again the reasoning is quite sensible. No moment of our conscious lives does have a precise beginning, let alone a tidy end. Sentences really do come at us from out of the blue. Conversations chop and change as our lives proceed. There is no Once upon a time or Happily ever after in this life. No surprise, stories which eschew such conventions are more likely to ring true.
Fictions come alive by seeming like reality, and reality comes at us in flashes, slices. Reality is products on shelves, scrawled images, broken sentences, all competing for our attention. Believable fictions are those which manage to evoke something of this sensory onslaught. Stories seem real when they come at us like that, because life comes at us like that.
Next thrilling installment in progress.....
