A good writer is a subtle writer, as far as I can say. The height of craft comes when the meaningful bits of the story express themselves subtlely, sometimes beneath detection. So how is meaning made in a written piece of work? Subtlely. With super-advanced word-play, double meanings, suggestions of ideas and a form that hides the meaning at the service of the story. (We’re talking “classical” writing here – more like Tolstoy than Joyce.)
For a long time, I’ve had difficulty watching movies as well as being part of the audience of any art on display, including reading books. For me, the movies do it the best and the worst, and a close second is books. I refuse to get involved in movies I see. I stay away from the identification with whatever main character there is on the silver screen because I don’t want to feel used. That’s right. I don’t want to be the puppet of the director’s amusement. I refuse to let the film involve me too much. I don’t also like having to fill in the gaps where the movie strays from the proverbial tracks so to speak. Acting in scenes irks me. If the actor is poor, then it’s hard for me to follow the scene and forgive the litany of woeful sloppiness’s in such bad scenes. I figure – I’m paying them to entertain me. Let them do their job! I don’t want to lift a finger to help them with their little movie. I refuse! Also, I don’t want my mind screwed with. I don’t want to ‘identify’ with some actor in a role on the screen. My participation is reserved for films I like, which are rare. In comes in the form of forgiveness for the film’s peccadillos.
Does the same go for books? Absolutely, but reading is more difficult than movie – even despite the fact that the same dude/dudette is responsible for everything in the book! Everything! So, if dialogue is weak, he/she might redeem themselves in the form of kick-ass characterizations or beautiful descriptions. But, also, my attention isn’t held every long unless the book is stone cold, especially a subtle writer, as mentioned above. I’ll tell you one thing – Elmore Leonard is pretty much as good as Ernest Hemingway in my books, better than Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hellmett anyday and anyway. But however great they are, they don’t approach the work of Lev Tolstoy.
I think, I feel, I should express here what I think of a passage of really great writing, to show you what I mean (assuming you’re interested!) What I’d like to do is illustrate why Tolstoy is such a good writer. “Anna Karenina”, then. The first paragraph on the first page of the book starts like this:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.An epigram starts things off; the mind fairly reeling, as the statement leaves one a little confused. First off, we also find the house full of confusion. Why both? Is there a connection? Yes! The state of the house is the state of the reader’s mind right then. Even for the rest of the paragraph, Tolstoy keeps the activity reeling along, Tolstoy neatly elaborating on the initial epigram, about “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We are bombarded with details, a flurry of activity, the wild and stranded unhappy family living in the midst of its unhappiness.
And the details keep arriving, and we find ourselves convinced of the negative side of the epigram. Man and woman pairs come up, and through this pairedness they all represent the husband and wife, from different angles, as it were. In fact it ends on a pair, a coachman and a kitchen-maid. The pairedness of the kitchen-maid and coachman carries over, reiterates the “marriage problem” - infidelity – and we remember the initial mention of the marriage problem and the problems it carries, from the house workers to the Oblonskys.
But there is also the need to move on, here nearing the end of the paragraph. To move on from the epigram, and the epigrammatic first paragraph, to move on to the prose rest of the novel - as sounded in - “ the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her.” Prominent for me here is the fact that she is a “housekeeper”, which connotes “house” immediately, which brings to mind the problems of the Oblonskys. We shift the house now from the details of the problems besetting the house, to a “new situation”, and this calls for a shift in perspective in the story, but not too radical a change - there is a English governess who brings to mind, in her station alone, the French governess, with whom the husband Oblonsky had his affair. This resonance between governesses carries into the mention of the quarrel with the housekeeper (connoting “house”) The governess has a problem with the house (again the French, by association, problems with the house as it is). And the governess is looking for a new position. It is fairly safe to assume Tolstoy is dragging the French Governess out of the limelight, to some extent even out of most of the novel. We bring back the focus to husband and wife Oblonsky, and being a female leaving the house, then we must expect a male counterpart, “the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time”. And then those glancing meanings are picked up and added to by the pair of the last sentence “the kitchen-maid and the coachman had given warning”. The stress of the sentence hangs on the last sentence there and it carries a lot of strength, like an amber traffic light. A warning to forget what you’ve heard, to have been informed through the purist grapevine channels. It also, not as much as a red light, so to speak, but does signal an ending, and puts one’s mind to rest over the whole preceding paragraph. We are moving on, we are turning away, we feel the strings pulling our limbs but we slacken backwards at the lightest loosening of line - -we are in the proverbial hands of a Master, and we will trust ourselves in his Hands.
