Erik's Reviews > Foreigner

Amused by the hubris of thinking that many of the greatest novelists of all time had a "fundamental misunderstanding of the medium."

The nature of the GR/internet platform means I must necessarily paint with broad strokes. There are exceptions, of course. If the novelist's intention is to explore neurotic psychology or to accomplish some didactic aim - which was not uncommon in the novel's formative years - it's hard to argue with a heavy usage of internal narration. Tolstoy's War and Peace comes to mind, though Tolstoy himself said it wasn't a novel. Regardless, I should have specified my claim is primarily about modern authors, particularly those who write sci-fi and fantasy, genres that rarely benefit from an exploration of neurotic psychology.

That said, there are plenty of classics/greats that wouldn't get published and wouldn't get read today, due in no small part to excess interiority. Thoreau's Walden comes to mind, a book that wasn't even popular when it was originally published and only survived through an influence campaign by his more eminent mentor Emerson.

There are many great books published today that "wouldn't get published" in the imaginations of those used to mainstream tastes.

Can you provide any evidence for that assertion?

You yourself have reviewed Greg Egan books, for example.

Right, Egan is a niche author who is not widely or critically considered great outside of that niche.

Like I said, there does exist niche cases in which heavy internal narration is the proper technique. (Edit: I do not believe this book, Foreigners, is among those niche cases)

Doesn't it further my point that a book need not be generally considered "great" to find a publisher?

I confess I don't follow how the fact that non-great books get published - which no one has ever disputed - advances any other argument you've put forth.

Perhaps you can answer a question related to your original comment:

Specifically which greatest novelists of all time do you believe would dispute my claim and which claim would they dispute: that good writing shows instead of tells or that excess internal dialogue is a form of telling?

"which no one has ever disputed"

You made the claim that many of the classics could not be published today, something that I don't see how you can hold to if you are not saying that the industry refuses to publish anything unorthodox or particular in style.

"Specifically which greatest novelists of all time do you believe would dispute my claim and which claim would they dispute: that good writing shows instead of tells or that excess internal dialogue is a form of telling?"

Woolf. Joyce. Eliot. McCarthy. Proust. Dumas, Melville, Vonnegut, Austen, Hugo, Ursula LeGuin, Tolkien, Pynchon, and Dickens are rather tell-y writers. Gabriel Marquez has been described as "utterly demolishing" show, don't tell by writing 100 Years of Solitude. Or consider Lolita, where Humbert tells the reader his sexual preferences through direct explication.

I thought it obvious I wasn't making a literal claim that classics could not get published in modern times. Rather, I was suggesting that they would struggle to find a modern audience of size, which I consider a fairly uncontroversial claim.

I wouldn't say I'm confident enough with all those writers' works to make a judgment one way or another. Woolf, sure, she's a teller, and I find her writing tedious and pointless as a result. But some of the others are amusing. Dumas a tell-y writer? Tolkien? LeGuin? If you believe that, then you're conflating exposition with telling.

But that's not how I was taught show vs tell, that's not how I teach it, and I can't imagine anyone with any real experience in the writing field would ever claim that exposition isn't essential.

Rather, a better way to phrase Show Vs Tell is "Don't write out the subtext" or even more simply, "Allow readers to draw their own conclusions."

I tried to find who you quoted "utterly demolishing" from, but could not. I did find someone who wrote about this same topic and gave this example of telling from GGM's 100 Years:

"Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty five."

Exposition, yes. Telling, no. Here's the version of that which tells:

"Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all because he's an incompetent commander, with a terrible mind for strategy. A promiscuous man with no real marital loyalty, he had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated by his enemies one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty five, much to the Colonel's great sadness."

Terrible writing. That's telling. And if you think that great novelists write like that, you simply don't know what you're talking about.

"For a while after that, “camera eye” and its dramatized scenes dominated. Then One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel with no dialogue or fully dramatized scenes, a tale told by a teller, was published and celebrated. “Show don’t tell” completely failed to account for its greatness, and there was a paradigm breakdown in that failure, and now we live in more open-minded times."

Kim Stanley Robinson in "Wonderbook" by Jeff VanderMeer

Your example is artificially flawed. An actual example of telling, written by a capable author, would read:

"Colonel Aureliano Buendia was a poor soldier, with little military talent in sight. In his personal affairs, he was lascivious towards women, but bore great sorrow towards the simultaneous deaths of his sons."

I don't know about you, but this is a perfectly normal thing to write about a side character who appears for twenty pages. Many minor officers from the pages of Shelby Foote, Rick Atkinson, and other tellers of military history are rendered with such brevity. "Show don't tell" is for things you want the reader to mull over and engage intellectually with, not things you simply want to be known to the reader ASAP.

So... telling is acceptable for small portions and minor characters in the book. And that if the author wants the reader to engage with their story, they should skew towards showing rather than telling.

Yep.

Trying too rigorously to categorize specific sentences in a piece of writing as “telling” and “showing” is a fool’s errand. Every meaningful statement tells one message, and helps to show another. There’s no binary choice between the two as a writer but a great many options of level of granularity and directness. The quote you posted, for example, is not “showing” by clear objective qualia, but because of the personal expectations you have for its level of detail.

Edit: deleted original response. The discussion began and continued as needlessly contentious.

Here's what it boils down to: If you define show vs tell as description vs exposition, then it's a shit rule. As best as I can tell, we both agree on this claim.

End of discussion - further comments in that vein will be deleted. Good day to you, Lewis.