As a fan of Francis Spufford’s novel Golden Hill, I was thrilled to see it featured in BBC’s Book Club podcast. I enjoyed the episode, and now I want to reread the book, or maybe read Spufford’s new novel.
But what I want to talk about here is one particular thing Spufford said on that show in regard to a plot point that he revealed slowly throughout the book. A caller said that she gradually had a sense of what was going on, but it didn’t happen all at once, and Spufford said he was glad, that his goal had been for the readers to be “semi-bamboozled” so that they feel some unease at first but are willing to just keep reading to find out what’s going on.
I really liked this idea of semi-bamboozlement, and it relates to something we’ve talked about before (see also here). Ultimately, no fictional world can be completely coherent. The real world is overdetermined, and if you look at it too carefully the seams will be apparent. So semi-bamboozlement is kind of the default state when reading fiction. Beyond that are the usual challenges of maintaining that balance between expectation and surprise that has been much discussed by theorists of fiction and drama.
P.S. Elsewhere on the show, Spufford said, “Writing is a bit more like cookery and a bit less like science,” when talking about the way in which revision involves putting things in and taking them out and moving them around until all the flavors are balanced. I guess I should say “flavours.” I don’t remember the exact quote, and unfortunately the podcast seems to have no transcript. Anyway, I had two reactions to this remark from Spufford about writing and cookery:
1. I agree. Writing really is like that! It’s kind of like solving a puzzle or drawing a picture, where you add something in one place and that upsets the balance and then something else needs to be changed, and then something else, and so on.
2. I’d also say that science itself is “a bit more like cookery and a bit less like science” according to Spufford’s definition. Or, I should say, the way scientists do science is more similar to what non-scientists think cookery is like and quite a bit different from what non-scientists think science is like.
I wonder if the way writers do writing is more similar to what non-writers think cookery is like and quite a bit different from what non-writers think writing is like.
And that makes me wonder if the way cooks do cookery is more similar to what non-cooks think science is like and quite a bit different from what non-cooks think cookery is like.
Maybe the difference is that just about everybody does a bit of writing (texting is writing too!), and many people do some cookery, but only a small percentage of people do science. I think that serious writing and serious cookery aren’t so different from casual writing and casual cookery—but I also suspect that casual writers and cooks don’t always have such a clear sense of their processes in doing these activities.
“2. I’d also say that science itself is “a bit more like cookery and a bit less like science” according to Spufford’s definition. ”
Ha! That was my first thought on reading Spufford’s definition.
I greatly appreciate your occasional digression into literature. Keep reading, and keep letting us know about interesting stuff. Thanks.
> only a small percentage of people do science
Well if we accept Susan Haack’s definition of science as everyday inquiry with helps, most people do it more often than they think. Unfortunately the marketing of science tries to make is seem so much more than most could ever do.
Also at key point in science, vagueness is essential to moving forward to eventual clarity – demanding clarity before that as most journal reviewers do – is the problem.
Happy Thanksgiving from the North.
Keith said, “Also at key point in science, vagueness is essential to moving forward to eventual clarity – demanding clarity before that as most journal reviewers do – is the problem.”
+1 Brings to mind my (now former) primary care physician who asked, ‘What exactly …?” a lot. How the heck do you describe what your leg feels like when it’s never felt like that before, or when it feels different ways at different times and under different circumstances? Situations like this are why we have vague terms like “gimpy,” “dysfunctional,” “weird,” “abnormal”, etc.
Keeping the reader thinking and wondering is what keeps them engaged rather than bored. So Andrew, what do you think the role of “semi-bamboozlement” ought to be in nonfiction, at least nonfiction that (like some forms of good history writing) aim to be entertaining as well as purely informative? I ask somewhat self-interestedly, as an academic trying to write a book of entertaining and informative history, and as a writer who values keeping my readers curious. But academic-historian readers/reviewers keep telling me to explain everything both earlier and in more detail, which is just deadly to enjoyment.
David:
I’m glad you asked! I’ve posted on this topic before:
Real suspense and fake suspense
The mystery of mysteries
Treasure Island
I’ve thought about this a lot regarding science communication. I find that suspense can work in an oral presentation, but in a written document I prefer to avoid suspense: it can be annoying to read a paper where the abstract says, “In this paper, we will compare methods A and B . . .” and then you have to read thru the damn paper to find out what they found.
Andrew wrote:
I think that serious writing and serious cookery aren’t so different from casual writing and casual cookery—but I also suspect that casual writers and cooks don’t always have such a clear sense of their processes in doing these activities.
My perception is quite different. I think that serious cookery is substantially different from casual cookery.
A casual cook just buys ingredients and puts them together according to the rules they were taught or the steps in a cookbook. A casual cook cannot tell you the difference between cake flour and bread flour or explain the cause of that difference.
I was once in the kitchen of a Michelin 3-star restaurant. They had a disk separator, other lab equipment, and I think a couple of the staff had masters degrees in chemistry. (I’m not sure about that.).
Casual cooks don’t own a copy of McGee or Modernist Cuisine—let alone have read them more than once. Brenner states that his copy of McGee is worn and claims that is the case for copies owned by chefs around the world.
Of course, like science, the casual-serious axis for cooking exists on a continuum—some people’s cooking doesn’t extend much further than making sandwiches and peeling bananas. Other devote their life to mastering cooking and extending the body of knowledge.
Brillat-Savarin supposedly said, “The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star.”
Bob76
Brenner source, Brenner et al., Science and Cooking, Norton, 2020 at p. xvii
Hunh, you mean not everyone has both the original and the revised edition of McGee?
Also my impression is that bakers are a different group, much more quantitative. If you don’t weigh your ingredients to 3 significant figures you’re not a baker.
Daniel! Good point on cooking and baking. Good baking requires precision both in weight and kind of ingredients as well as in process. There are many recipes that work. I think of them as attractors in some weird baking space; go away from the attractors and meh…
Plain old good cooking allows for many substitutions in ingredients and order of process methods. The only mantra I now follow is to prep all ingredients in advance, otherwise there is chaos.
The concepts of cooking, baking and beer making (CBB) though are well understood: it’s just biology, chemistry and physics.
In a sense, the world of CBB is a closed one: human beings making, serving, eating and enjoying within cultural rituals. It’s all about us as human beings. The world of science is open and ultimately incomprehensible. Just look at quantum mechanics, cosmology, and AI.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I don’t have an original edition of McGee.
Bob76
PS. I have two copies of the second edition. Does that give me partial credit?
Bob: I took a look at that McGee book once and found its style really irritating. I can’t remember exactly what about it bothered me, but I remembered being annoyed.
Daniel: For baking, 2 significant figures is just fine for me! If the recipe says 500 grams of flour, you’ll do just fine with 510. If the recipe says 8 grams of yeast . . . well, my scale only gives readings to the nearest 2 grams, and I haven’t seen any disasters arising from including 7 or 9 grams by accident. Eggs are not sized to 3 significant figures. Etc.
If we called them “serious science” and “casual science”, your same perception would apply. Undergrads doing casual science in physics or chem lab etc are following a recipe. If they stay in the discipline long enough, they eventually come to understand what serious science is. Likewise, I (a scientist) followed cooking recipes carefully, and only recently was able to move to the level of cooking that involves “that would be good to add”, “that seems like about the right amount”, “if I substitute this, it’ll better align with objectives”, etc.
Your description of “semi-bamboozlement” as the reader’s usual state of mind reminded me of a Sci-Fi story I read. There was a part where I thought, “from a real-world engineering perspective, that’d be weird”, and I sadly put it down to the author not really understanding what they were writing about. And then, a chapter later, an engineer-type character comes along, thinks “that’s weird”, and investigates. That was very satisfying!
Science by recipe is a lot like cooking by recipe: think of a tasty hypothesis, look up appropriate methods in the cookbook/literature, do an experiment/study/RCT (ideally with fresh ingredients/data), and if it didn’t burn (p<0.05), serve the hot knowledge to your peers.
“It is a curious thing that interest in the teaching of statistics in schools, colleges and universities has sprung up worldwide as an extension of mathematics teaching, because I certainly feel that the practice of statistics is no closer to mathematics than cooking is to chemistry.”
Terry Speed (1986) QUESTIONS, ANSWERS AND STATISTICS
Roger:
Interesting. When I knew Terry Speed at the University of California, he was a very nice guy, but he seemed to have trouble understanding applied statistics in areas other than his home turf of genetics. He liked the idea of applied statistics, but actual applied statistics was another story. I don’t think it helped that he was in a department surrounded by theoreticians, so pretty much the only people he talked with were biologists and theoretical statisticians.