This is a great post-- I found myself thinking about it last night, as I was working on fanfic scene (becoming conscious of my own descriptive choices), and again this morning while I was driving to a Drs's appt.
One thing that struck me about your observations is a general shift in stylistic conventions, one which I'm not certain is really related to film. And that's the shift away from the omniscient narrator. I haven't read much Dickens, but I've read a lot of Dostoyevsky and Wilkie Collins who I think will work as well for these purposes, since they both feature the same Victorian style of description you're talking about. The kind of descriptive tangents they make are enabled by the fact that the narrative voice is not limited in time, space, knowledge or to the point of view of a single character. When American lit (both popular and literary) moved to favoring third-person (and to a much lesser degree first-person)-limited, the scope of descriptions changed. They became limited to the knowledge, experience and voice of the pov character. In third-person pov, the author can only describe what the character knows, what the character perceives, and what the character would attend to. Take three different 3rd-p-limited pov characters into the same Mcdonald's at the same moment and they will in all likelihood describe entirely different scenes-- one might fixate entirely on the shrill noise created by a birthday party of small children, another might dwell on the generic vacuity of the corporate decor, another might cheerfully attend to the brightness of the lighting and the cleanness of the floor, while a fourth may focus entirely on the breasts of the cashier.
Which is not to say that limited pov equals spare description. I'm thinking of a couple popular novels I've read recently-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and well, a whole bunch of mysteries by Jonathan Kellerman. while keeping to 3rd p limited, both authors paint detailed and vibrant sensory pictures. (Stephenson's image of a leather executive chair swallowing the buttocks of the pov character like a soft, buttery calfskin catcher's mitt may stay with me for the rest of my natural.) Kellerman, on the other hand, takes some flack from readers sometimes for the thickness of his descriptions. In particular, people often complain the detail to which his pov character observes peoples appearances (down to the shade of eyeliner). I think these complaints are pretty minor-- but they also illustrate the descriptive dilemma of 3rd person limited, because to the degree to which Kellerman's decriptions jar, they jar in part because a straight male psychologist is noting minute details of women's jewelry, make-up, and clothing that seem inconsistent with (stereotyped, at least) expectations of what a straight male professional would know about and pay attention to.
On the other hand, it's interesting to note that critics have praised Kellerman's richly described style as "cinematic." ;-)
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A random thought on thick description
Date: 2006-12-15 09:48 pm (UTC)One thing that struck me about your observations is a general shift in stylistic conventions, one which I'm not certain is really related to film. And that's the shift away from the omniscient narrator. I haven't read much Dickens, but I've read a lot of Dostoyevsky and Wilkie Collins who I think will work as well for these purposes, since they both feature the same Victorian style of description you're talking about. The kind of descriptive tangents they make are enabled by the fact that the narrative voice is not limited in time, space, knowledge or to the point of view of a single character. When American lit (both popular and literary) moved to favoring third-person (and to a much lesser degree first-person)-limited, the scope of descriptions changed. They became limited to the knowledge, experience and voice of the pov character. In third-person pov, the author can only describe what the character knows, what the character perceives, and what the character would attend to. Take three different 3rd-p-limited pov characters into the same Mcdonald's at the same moment and they will in all likelihood describe entirely different scenes-- one might fixate entirely on the shrill noise created by a birthday party of small children, another might dwell on the generic vacuity of the corporate decor, another might cheerfully attend to the brightness of the lighting and the cleanness of the floor, while a fourth may focus entirely on the breasts of the cashier.
Which is not to say that limited pov equals spare description. I'm thinking of a couple popular novels I've read recently-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and well, a whole bunch of mysteries by Jonathan Kellerman. while keeping to 3rd p limited, both authors paint detailed and vibrant sensory pictures. (Stephenson's image of a leather executive chair swallowing the buttocks of the pov character like a soft, buttery calfskin catcher's mitt may stay with me for the rest of my natural.) Kellerman, on the other hand, takes some flack from readers sometimes for the thickness of his descriptions. In particular, people often complain the detail to which his pov character observes peoples appearances (down to the shade of eyeliner). I think these complaints are pretty minor-- but they also illustrate the descriptive dilemma of 3rd person limited, because to the degree to which Kellerman's decriptions jar, they jar in part because a straight male psychologist is noting minute details of women's jewelry, make-up, and clothing that seem inconsistent with (stereotyped, at least) expectations of what a straight male professional would know about and pay attention to.
On the other hand, it's interesting to note that critics have praised Kellerman's richly described style as "cinematic." ;-)