Getting There, vs. There

From an appreciation of novelist (and biographer, etc.) Penelope Fitzgerald, by novelist (etc.) Julian Barnes, appearing in The Guardian in July:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in [Fitzgerald's] The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings.” The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.

(When I was writing technical books and columns, occasionally readers would knock me for spending too much time holding their hands — for failing, that is, to presume their subtlety and intelligence. Many of them didn’t want to learn about the technology step-by-step; they wanted a reference manual that didn’t talk about an answer before providing the answer itself. I agree. Sometimes, for some purposes, I myself want that sort of tech reference.)

From one perspective, most fiction plops us down in media res. Things have already happened; the author has decided, for some reason, that those earlier things don’t need to be discussed — or discussed yet, at any rate. An exception would be something like John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which covers its protagonist’s life from beginning (actually, from the moment of conception) to end.

But I think I understand the distinction Barnes is making.

If you’ve used Google Maps (or various other online mapping resources), you probably are familiar with the simple “map view.” This shows the roadways, place names, and various landmarks in the area as geometric objects — lines and shapes. When you want to get from Point A to Point B, without visual distraction, map view is the one you want.

But sometimes you’re not seeking directions. You want to know about a place, not caring particularly how to get there. That’s when you switch to “satellite view”: the grid of overhead photographs which show trees, water towers, buildings, parking lots, individual cars and trucks.

(There’s also the wishy-washy option, which I almost always choose: select satellite view, but check the box which says “Show labels” so you can see the street names and so on.)

Thought exercise: If you have to choose one or the other, what sort of fiction do you prefer to read? Map view, or satellite view? If you’re an author, what sort do you write?

Coincidentally, I came across a post on related matters from a few months ago on a blog about architecture, of all things, called BLDGBLOG (clever). The post is entitled The Architecture of Self-Measurement; the author winds up talking about revisiting buildings which resonate for us, but he begins by talking about a particular book which he loves. He re-reads it every couple of years, as he has since middle school, and always finds new things to like about it.

I bought a new copy of the same book yesterday on a whim from a bookstore near my office — and, being a person who underlines things, I found myself last night underlining totally different passages, little sentences here and there that had never struck me as even remotely interesting before, or meaningful, or really anything more than neutrally descriptive.

It occurred to me, then, that everyone should pick a book — a novel, a work of theory, poetry, biography, whatever — and re-read it every few years, but they should do this for the rest of their lives. It becomes an indirect kind of literary self-measurement: understanding where you are in life based upon how you react to a certain text.

So it’s not some weird sign of obsession, then, or awkward proof that you’ve been caught in a nostalgic rut. It’s more like running a marathon every few years: the same distance covered, huffing and puffing at a different age.

How do you measure up?

I think this is the difference between novels-as-maps and novels-as-satellite-photos. (And I think it’s why I prefer the latter over the former, as Julian Barnes apparently does.) If you’re focused on the route, you will miss just too many things — lovely things, ugly things, fascinating and horrifying things — going on even a block away. And to the extent that story is about writers and readers as much as about characters, all those people are being robbed of a chance to know something about themselves.

In short, a task (the business of living) will just flat-out suck without good directions. A life (and by extension, literature) will just suck with nothing but.