Reading Novels

3. Description

57 3 Description Most novels contain passages of description. Quick or careless readers may be tempted to skip such passages, often because they seem to lack suspense or simply to be ornamental. But, as Philippe Hamon has pointed out, they can offer a different kind of pleasure to the reader and demand a different competence in reading. A methodical reading of a text must take good note of them.1 It is not always possible to make a cut-and-dried distinction between what is description and what is narrative at the level of a sentence or phrase. One might say that description is constantly implied in the novel, since at the most basic level of vocabulary some words are felt to be more descriptive than others (for example, “he walked to London” is more descriptive than just “he went to London”). We are concerned in this chapter, however , with analysis at the textual level, and with description as a mode of organization of text. As far as novelistic texts are concerned, in certain passages the narrative pauses, or is given a subsidiary role, and description becomes dominant. In the classic novel such passages are used to introduce a new setting or new character. In the modern novel such passages are often shorter and are more likely to be surrounded by or intermingled with narrative, but they are nonetheless usually present. We might say that prototypical description in novels is of landscape (urban or rural), people, or things. The gothic novel of the eighteenth century started a fashion for extensive descriptions of the exterior and interior of castles or large houses—and this continued in modified form into the twentieth century. (A variation in nineteenth-century realist reading novels 58 novels is the minute description of the interior of slum dwellings.) The city street and the workplace are typical places for realism to describe.2 Descriptions are not always of static scenes: we also find descriptions of processes—such as the arrival of a train. Pure description tends toward listing or taxonomy and thus lacks drama and suspense.3 It is easy to dismiss it as page-filling or, as G. H. Lewes called it, the “common and easy resource of novelists.”4 Certainly, there is no single way of judging what constitutes an adequate description. And there is no logically necessary closure to a description: more could always be added if the writer wished, or if the reader’s patience could be relied upon. Description may be provided in a novel directly by an authorial narrator , but is also typically associated with characters in certain roles: for example , travelers, walkers, voyagers in vehicles like trains or cars, voyeurs, or spies. Characters such as guides, witnesses, experts, friendly local inhabitants , and teachers are often used to introduce descriptions. For quick readers (that is, hasty and careless readers), the appearance of such characters and situations works as a kind of marker, signaling that they can skip on to the next bit of narrative without too much loss. Definitions and Characteristics Mieke Bal defines a description as “a textual fragment in which features are attributed to objects.”5 We do not have to be told the name of the object that is being described, we may even have to guess—but there will be an implicit denomination of some thing, and our sense of that thing then holds the developed description together. After the denomination, features are attributed to the thing in an expansion, or series of expansions . Literary descriptions may seem to be something that simply happens in a text, focused on the object that is to be described and without order or design, but in fact various operations are inevitably involved when a writer undertakes a description. There must be some form of découpage (that is, the thing described is cut off from its surroundings or distinguished from them by contrast); there must be some selection involved (not everything in the thing or scene can be described); and there will be some order in the description.6 We have seen already in relation to the incipit that it is worth trying to follow the movement of the focalizor in a text. Often, however, in a description this is more complex than a simple cameralike movement over description 59 what is to be described. Descriptions tend to move backward and forward referring to different classes of objects: we...