Pilcrow

A passage from Adam Mars-Jones' Pilcrow:

My tongue was a rich source of games. I would tickle the roof of my mouth with its tip. It didn't quite make me burst out laughing, but it brought laughter to mind. Anybody who says that tickling yourself is impossible, and that the sensation depends on someone else doing it, hasn't tried tickling of this type. It's not perfect but it works, and that made it a precious game for me then.

Then I stuck my tongue out and started rotating it very slowly at full extension, feeling the wet trail I left on my chin or my cheeks or the groove above my lips as it slowly evaporated. I learned to touch my nose with my tongue, gradually improving its flexibility. I discovered for myself that the tongue is a muscle, by straining it. Then it was back to eye work for a while. When the speaking muscle had recovered, I would combine the eye-rollings and the tongue sweep, sometimes synchronising the movements, sometimes making them contrary, even contrapuntal. When Mum came into the room and surprised me while I was engrossed in my little theatre of grimaces, she was shocked. She thought I was having a seizure. A fit, on top of all her troubles. Even then I understood that they were her troubles.

(If you think this passage is a little too fraught with detail, remember that John, the narrator, is a four-year-old child with a disability that all-day confines him to a cradle. Also understand that John the at-least-eighteen-year-old is the actual narrator here, and speaks for his younger self.)

The passage to me represents a microcosm of all that is good about the stylistic novel. The qualification in the third sentence, for example ("but it brought laughter to mind") places within the sentence a recognizably infantile innocence, lending it a pleasant layer of feeling without which the sentence cannot -- devoid as it is of factual or character-related information -- stand. Reminded of John's humanity, we read the rest of the passage primed for any detail that might bring us closer to him; when he obliges us with the textural delights of the second paragraph (I don't know about you, but I actually went through each of the actions described there, discovering among other things that my tongue cannot in fact be persuaded to meet my nose) we are more than just satisfied; we discover a sympathy for our narrator's disability that is not directly engendered by any single idea in the passage. The latter is central to the magic of great prose, prose that consciously avoids the garish pitfalls of sentimentality while still achieving that rare combination of feeling and meaning through the selection and framing of character-specific detail.

(Specificity is of course the most intangible of qualities of the written word, and perhaps the most overlooked. As children, we find ourselves frustrated by the specific, by what is as opposed to what should be. A ten-year-old me cannot indulge my mud-eating propensities, because such a thing is generally unacceptable; never mind that I may have enjoyed the taste and texture of the peculiar red-clay endemic to my backyard in the wintertime. We internalize these rules (and accept them, if grudgingly) by our teens, and the most precocious of us are -- by the time we are fifteen or so -- already swathing the things we see around us in easy webs of generality. We begin to speak of "the world", of "life", and of "society"; surely, we say, these broad strokes we paint are in fact the only ones that our canvases can support. A state of mind that accepts such generalities can rarely set out to write anything that resembles literature. For example, an absolute that I have always cherished vis-a-vis the urban RSS supporter -- namely that he is a filthy specimen of humanity -- ensures that any attempt to include such a person as a character in my novel will be abortive at best. The adroit novelist understands that he would be best served by proceeding in the direction of the specific, understands that such a path -- however weighed down as it might be with the ambiguous, the finally inscrutable -- is the only one that may lead to meaning. (Of course, this paragraph is itself an extremely generic observation, and may itself be quite meaningless.)

At the other end of the spectrum is criticism, specifically novelistic criticism as seen in the context of the social. Any piece of criticism written for society cannot be held culpable for either its corpus of unspecific observations or its willingness to draw conclusions. What is the bigger picture? is the question that we ask, and the critic obliges by providing us, that is to say society, with his version of the bigger picture. The latter he achieves by cleverly producing specific examples that support his generic observations.

The insidious -- and to me rather disheartening -- truth about such criticism is that it cannot survive, and is indeed fundamentally meaningless without widespread social acceptance. A piece like Harold Bloom's rant on Harry Potter, for example, would have been completely ignored (and rightly so) if not for the fact that it was a socially approved critic writing about a commercially (and by proxy, socially) successful writer. As things stand the piece is regarded as snobbery by the bourgeois and `great' criticism by the elite. The question I would pose to Harold Bloom is this -- tell us why you didn't like Harry Potter (and no, piddling examples of repetitive phrases in the novel won't do) rather than compare it with James Thurber or Thomas Pynchon. Tell us what you felt. Of course, if the critic really told us what he felt, he wouldn't stop until he had written enough to populate a full-sized novel. And then we'd have others' criticism of his critique. The process seems never to end. :)
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PS: Brought Pilcrow down on a rather alarming specimen of cockroach yesterday; the novel's tome-like heaviness lent to my swing the clumsiness that attends the most satisfying of such occasions.