I was rereading Lord of the Rings the other day and was struck by how real it felt. I mean, sure, it’s fiction, there’s no such thing as trolls etc., but it just had this feeling of “thick description,” the sense that it was describing something important events in a real place.
In contrast, take a book like Golden Hill, which I absolutely loved . . . it doesn’t feel “real,” whatever that means. Golden Hill seems more like a beautiful confection, a delightful clockwork mechanism, a Spielbergian tour de force. I enjoyed reading it more than I enjoyed reading Lord of the Rings, but it didn’t seem like it was really happening in the same way. It didn’t have the sonority.
I say that even though Golden Hill is evidently well-researched, and New York in the 1750s really is real in a way that Middle-Earth could never be that way. Also, each of the characters in Golden Hill felt like real people, whereas none of the characters in Lord of the Rings felt real at all. OK, Gandalf maybe, but that’s it.
Remember that phrase from Marianne Moore, “imaginary gardens with real toads”? Lord of the Rings is kind of the opposite: a real garden with imaginary toads.
So my question is, What makes a story seem real? Why does Lord of the Rings, for all its flaws, feel real, while Golden Hill does not? I could go through some examples:
– From Here to Eternity: Seems real. Dude opened up a vein with that one.
– anything by Norman Mailer: Does not seem real.
– The Young Lions: Seems real, despite its staginess.
– Philip K. Dick: Seems real (paradoxically so), and the characters’ actions and emotions seem real, but very few of the main characters seem real. His protagonists never seem real, but some of the supporting characters can attain the sense of reality.
– Rabbit, Run: Seems real (sorry!).
– anything by Philip Roth: Does not seem real. Even though so much of it is autobiographical.
– John O’Hara: I hate to say it, but his books seem real too.
– George V. Higgins: Seems real.
– Elmore Leonard: Does not seem real.
I’m not saying that “seems real” is necessarily desirable. Great Expectations is a confection, I’d argue the greatest ever written—it does not seem real in the way that David Copperfield seems real, but who cares, it’s not supposed to. I doubt that anything George Bernard Shaw ever wrote feels real, and that’s fine. The thing with Lord of the Rings is just kinda funny because that book is a conscious throwback to those old non-realistic Norse sagas, and I think that, paradoxically, it gets some of its sense of realism from its artlessness. Not that artlessness is required for realism; see Updike above. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Richard Ford, or many others.
As a guy with aphantasia, LotR Fellowship of the Ring was one of the most boring books I ever tried to read. I think I made myself finish it but never ever picked up any of the rest. Also my son and I watched the movies (I had seen them before, in the theater) got through the first two, then halfway through the third we just gave up. Too boring.
Give me a Raymond Chandler novel any day.
First I heard of Aphantasia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
When looking at studies that claim to find an “objective” measure, the individual-level data looks more like about half the population is undiagnosed:
Fig 2a: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945217303581
Fig 2B: https://elifesciences.org/articles/72484
My guess there are different interpretations of the word “see” when describing mental visualization, but also around 10% of people who are much *better* (to the point of qualitatively) than average at this. Ie, looks more like the hyperphantasics are special.
Daniel –
How is that “diagnosed?” It feels inherently subjective.
That’s interesting – even if self diagnosed it can be useful to understand these things that can help you make sense of stuff in one’s life. I’ve noticed that the approach to science you have commented on here involves making mathematical predictive models (I hope I’ve got that right), something that doesn’t come easily to me. I find it difficult to engage with a subject if I can’t visualise it and have been drawn to those aspects in science – understanding protein structures and the like.
Those basic psycho/physiological aspects of how we interact with the world can have large effects on the directions we go in life and are def worth exploring at a personal level.
I have met one of the authors listed: James Jones who wrote, “From Here to Eternity.” It was in Paris in the early 1960s and he was drunk. I also met in NYC a few years before, one of the authors not on Andrew’s list who was quite famous on the Left but he then shifted well to the Right: John dos Passos, author of the monumental USA trilogy. He too was drunk. In between, I have chatted with William F. Buckley in Madison, Wisconsin and he was not drunk, thus ruining any generalization I was coming to.
Dos Passos is an interesting case. I don’t know a whole lot about his politics but it’s my impression that later in life he wasn’t so much right wing as anti-power-mongering, and he saw the left, more or less worldwide, as trying to gain unrestrained power. FDR had acted somewhat like Trump is acting now — not in the direction of his policies, of course, but in his tactics. FDR pretty much did what he wanted with no restraint from a compliant Congress and Supreme Court, and then WWII gave the government the justification to exercise other anti-freedom powers (including imprisoning large numbers of Americans without trial). Meanwhile Stalin wasn’t making communism look very appealing to lovers of freedom. In other words, I don’t think Dos Passos supported Goldwater etc. because he loved their ideology, but because he saw them as the only valid counterweight to abuses of power by the likes of FDR and LBJ.
But: I might be wrong. I have these vague notions and I’m not even sure where I got them. Probably from some literary review I read thirty years ago, I dunno.
Phil –
It should be noted that Goldwater stated that the SCOTUS ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was an abuse of power. I’d say it’s usually pretty hard to draw a line between abuses of power and politics.
Also, there’s famously the “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…”
One man’s” abuse of power…”
Andrew could you give some examples with women authors?
Why?
Because we are looking for the underlying reason that some literary works feel “real” and others do not. Professor Gellman may not agree, but “The Age of Innocence “ and “Out of Africa “ feel real to me.
Since I have grabbed the podium, maybe we should add more categories to the real/not real dichotomy. Surreal like “The Left Hand of Darkness” which is transparently not real but contains deep truths that are realer than a mere factual transcription.
It makes sense that “Out of Africa” seems real: it’s a memoir.
Jeff:
I’m a big fan of Meg Wolitzer. Her books seem real to me in the same way that George V. Higgins’s seem real. The House of Mirth seems real. Anne Tyler’s books are fun but they don’t seem quite real to me, even though I’m sure they feel real to the author. Agatha Christie . . . not real but of course that’s on purpose. Jane Smiley is more of a novelist of ideas than of people: her characters and scenarios don’t seem real to me, just as this book I read by James Meek seemed more schematic than real.
Whatcha talkin’ ’bout Willis?
Foucault’s Pendulum? That is far and away the most “real” feeling work of fiction I have ever read. I almost put it down a few dozen pages in but once I got hooked oh man, I had to marathon read it to the end! I haven’t read any of Eco’s other books but that book was a masterpiece. LOTR and the hobbit also felt real for me on the first reading but in the second reading i noticed inconsistencies that made it feel more like paper. Perhaps the same thing would happen if I read Foucault’s Pendulum again.
For me the “real” feel of a novel comes mostly from the characters and the story. The setting isn’t relevant. I’m not much into fiction but most historical novels I have read have too much historical emphasis and too little storyline and character emphasis.
A key element in a great story, truth or fiction, is how real the tension feels at the critical moments of the story. For the most intense fiction I have ever felt from any art form, I gotta turn to Quentin Tarantino: 1) The scene in Pulp Fiction where they give Uma Thurman the addrenalin shot; and 2) the scene in Inglorious Basterds where Mélanie Laurent, the Jewish woman who escaped the slaughter in the opening scene, is a waitress in a restaurant serving Christoph Waltz, the brutal Nazi muderer who slaughtered her family in the opening scene. Pulp fiction makes no pretense of being real and even though Inglorious Basterds has a real historical setting, everyone knows the story is fake. That doesn’t matter. It’s a great film and that particular scene is one of the greatest in the history of story telling.
What does “real” mean?
Faulkner’s “The sound and the fury” feels extremely real — as a depiction of the inner workings of the psyche.
Something like that to a more extreme end: Beckett. His books feel extremely _real_ to me: they might be — in some strange way — the realest depictions of our world! More real than realist books! I mean in the sense that they capture the mystery and unsolvablesness of our existence and on the other hand the fleeting and arbitrary nature of our sensations.
Maybe this is too obvious to be “right,” but your mention of “thick description” makes me think that what you’re noticing, at least in part, is all of the literary “scaffolding” Tolkien built up around the story LoTR.
I’m not totally sure of the ratio, but there must be *ten times* as much stuff in the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Lost Tales, etc. etc. as there is in LoTR itself. Much of that just ends up as passing references and vague allusions in LoTR, but he really “worked out” what the legends and history and unmentioned or barely mentioned (in LoTR) parts of the world were supposed to look like with a degree of completeness and comprehensiveness that strikes me as basically unique. I’m not 100% sure of this, but it seems pretty clear that the idea of developing a made up language for your fantasy / sci-fi novel started with him (or at least was popularized by him).
The idea of “thick description,” as I understand it, is that in describing one thing, you’re supposed to draw out its connections to a whole network of other ideas, relations, customs, etc. I guess from that perspective, given the sheer volume of “background material” Tolkien wrote, to me, it feels like it would be hard to think of works that should feel more “real.”
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “real” — capturing the feel of a time/place, I suppose, or at least convincing the reader that the author has done so. You list George V. Higgins as an author who “seems real.” I made a note after finishing “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” that “…at least 80% of the book is dialog, with minimal description. We get a sense of events through conversation, and a lot relies on the mental pictures we’ve assembled from movies and TV, I think.” So: is it “real” because of the author, or because I know enough of the context that the dialog fits into my pre-existing mental picture.
I agree that Lord of the Rings feels “real.” I don’t have an opinion on “Golden Hill”
I’ve found too high a fraction of recent (~15 yrs) novels to be pretentious, which is perhaps related to not being “real” but rather over-thought.
This is a common topic discussed with Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. There’s many writing essays about how to do world-building, making it “feel real”. Key elements are e.g. making the characters act as ordinary people with ordinary concerns, even in the midst of an unreal setting. But inversely, you can’t have them act too culturally real in historical settings, because that’s very off-putting to modern readers (e.g. the amount of racism and sexism in some older stories is jarring to say the least). It’s often a mix of detail to add verisimilitude, and catering to expectations.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/964367-things-that-try-to-look-like-things-often-do-look
“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,” said Granny. “But I don’t hold with encouraging it.”
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
Seth:
Interesting. This reminds me of discussions of translation: you want the result to be readable in the target language, but you still want to preserve some of the feeling of the writing in the original language: it shouldn’t go down too smoothly. This can be a tough balance.
At least with Golden Hill, I think some of the “unreal” feel to it had to do with the framing of the novel (identity of narrator revealed in the final chapter, IIRC)
Red Plenty, also by Spufford, felt extremely “real” to me in capturing the workings of the system in the USSR but also the aspirations and motivations of those operating within the system at different points in time.
Ls:
Regarding Golden Hill: What you say may be part of the story, but my feeling came more from the feeling that the book was, like Great Expectations, a delicious confection. I’m reminded of an observation made by David Bordwell in his final book, that we often enjoy a good crime novel in part by appreciating the author’s care in setting up the scenario and the puzzle.
A different example of an excellent book that didn’t seem quite real to me is I Have Some Questions For You, by Rebecca Makkai, which I enjoyed and found thought-provoking but also, like Golden Hill and Great Expectations, had this feeling of being constructed, in contrast to, say, David Copperfield, which seemed to more organically flow from its premises.
The other thing I’d say is that sometimes a book can feel real, but I still don’t like it very much. I can appreciate the author’s skill but if I find the characters sufficiently unappealing or the situation sufficiently uninteresting, it can be hard for me to care.
Perhaps unfortunately too real right now: John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider(1975):
USA govt, sometime post-2005, has become effectively an arm of organized crime, controls most information, leaders have complete privacy to do whatever they want, most people have no privacy in resulting surveillance state, many worry (correctly) that powerful others have access to their data and can use it against them, but they cannot even find out what others know about them.
This applies even to senior executives at otherwise-privileged “hypercorporations”, of which the key one in story happens to be G2S, Ground-to-Space.
The book’s protagonist, a superstar hacker (with problems) is raised by a dark government agency, manages to create a computer worm* (with infinitely replicating tail, so unkillable) that allows him to rewrite his identity in the data-net and disappear. Of course, some of the computing is dated/unlikely, but when I bought the paperback in 1976, I laughed at the idea of infinitelty-replicating tail … and within a few weeks, encountered one…
Ken Thompson’s famous supply-chain Trojan horse described in his 1984 Turing Lecture.
We actually detected this thing, and a few weeks later I was in Computing Research terminal room at Bell Labs Murray Hill, overheard Ken talking with Robert Morris, SR (who consulted for the NSA, later was Chief Scientist there). They were chortling about Ken’s clever hack, then (must have been Ken) said ~Think we could put this over on the NSA?”…. Morris: ~”Better not, the NSA lacks a sense of humor.”
Of course, Robert Morris, Jr was famous for the later Internet worm that caused a lot of trouble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider * (I think this is origin of “worm” use in computing).
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358198.358210 Ken Thompson, Relfections on TrustingTrust, 1984
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris 1988 worm
https://www.amazon.com/Fancy-Bear-Goes-Phishing-Extraordinary/dp/0374601178 Scott Shapiro, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks (2023), good book, covers some of the above and others
Yeah, I have difficulty with what is meant by “real” in this context. Does it mean “convincing”, for example?
If so I’d put some of the novels of Patrick White in that category – reading those in my teens and 20’s was blown away at PW’s ability to get inside the individuals he portrayed and so was able to communicate some deep insights into human emotions. They seemed “real” to me but also convincing.
I was also blown away by some of Nabokov’s more gentle writing (“Mary”, “Glory”, but also – less gentle – “Bend Sinister”, “Invitation to a Beheading”) but I wouldn’t have thought of these as seeming “real” (obv not BS and ItaB) partly because I didn’t relate easily to the circumstances and periods and also because Nabokov chose to make his writing “beautiful” (in those books) in his use of allusions and metaphors, and this was not so compatible with being “real” – they we’re convincing to me tho and I loved the bravado of his writing.
I’d say “convincing” comes out of the author’s desire to try to communicate something deeply extraordinary and heartfelt to the reader – I liked Wender’s and Tarkovsky’s films for that reason. Kazuo Ishiguro’s books have an unreal quality because he holds back from the reader who takes a while to realises s/he (and also a protagonist or two) has been misdirected from the true reality. Remains of the Day is set in a very realistic pre war and post war England but the protagonist (the butler) never understands his achingly sad delusions and it takes the reader quite a while to get this too – an awesome book IMO and totally convincing – but “real”??
In the “less-than-convincing” vein I’d maybe put Graham Greene – IMO the “themes” of his book are a little too intrusive and get in the way of his portrayals which seem a little stagey to me – v. good reads though.
I’m not sure “real” is important to me when it comes to reading novels, whereas “convincing” or “believable” IS important. e.g. is “Pic” by Jack Kerouak “real” because it is written in the voice of its main character? And how would one characterize William Golding’s “The Inheritors” written from the point of view of a Neanderthal group encountering early modern humans? Beautiful and very convincing but “real”?
If I was to go to the extreme of “unreality” in which the author (mostly) makes no effort to set his writing in some sort of coherent and believable progression of circumstances, John Buchan comes to mind – most of his novels were extraordinary tosh but very good reads nevertheless!
Sorry…I could go on for ages
Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes but the readers forced the author to reanimate him. That’s about as real as it gets.
While once a voracious reader of novels –I would feign sickness so I could stay home from school and read– I no longer enjoy them. Reading a novel is like climbing into a warm bath, but I long ago switched from baths to showers.
Yes, I have that – most of the novels that really wowed me I read in my teens and 20’s – and haven’t read so many novels since – I mostly read non-fiction books now or if I want a bit of escapism, reread easily digestible detective novels like Raymond Chandlers, or the Ian Rankin’s Rebus books or Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series.
And I have what is probably a literary luddite view that much of contemporary fiction isn’t what it was, but in reality that’s probably just a reflection of the impressionability of youth where quite a bit of what you experience seems amazing.
Lots of people have difficulty with the idea of “real”? I don’t! To me “real” means the *story* is convincing.
IMO fiction is like visual art and also like bogus science in that it creates the sense of “real” with illusion and perhaps reliance on people’s priors. In visual art, there are many techniques that create “real” only at a certain distance or scale, but up close they don’t look “real” at all. The most obvious example is a raster graphic with nothing but colored squares up close.
Bogus science and fiction use similar methods to generate “real”: they show you everything you need to know and nothing you don’t need to know to be convinced the story is “real”. Bogus science often does this by glossing over assumptions that are unlikely to be true but inherrent to the premis. Literary fiction achieves it through discription and dialog, which present only elements that are relevant to the successful culmination of the story. For example, in any “real” gropu of people or beings as far as we know, there would be a lot of bickering and jealousy behind backs. But we don’t see this in LOTR. In a sense Tolkien “hides” some realistic behavior to show us only what we want to see and contributes to the story. History is often writen in the same way. Authors don’t tell yuou everything, they tell you what you need to know to get their idea of what the story should be. For example, we rarely here about the deep divisions that erupted among the framers of the US constitution in the post-revolution era, but these had been simmering throughout the revolutionary period.
So in that sense a story is a story is a story, whether its communicated in a novel, as history, in a play, in a movie or even a research paper. The authors offer what you need to know to understand the story the way they understand and percieve it, and the more effective thhey are at playing on your beliefs and offering you just the right elements, the better the story.
I think with lotr, part of what makes it feel real for me is that it’s so story focused without explaining why everything is the way it is. If you’re reading lotr without having read silmarillion and some of the first/second age stuff, you don’t have much understanding of how everything got to this point, but you suspend disbelief, start making some assumptions and trusting in Gandalf.
And even though Tolkien has explicitly said he wasn’t going for allegory, the slow pace and buildup with high intensity moments interspersed sort of mimics what war is like.