Though a common misconception and favorite mantra of jealous minimalists the world over, “Charles Dickens was” not “paid by the word.” Rather, he was paid by installment. He did have, however, one highly enviable up on Twenty First Century lexoslaves in that he was paid. Nevertheless, no matter how one might want to spin Dickens’s preternatural ability to describe at length any and all things as merely a by-the-word, middle-brow money laundering scam, the fact remains that the gentleman could indeed describe.
The Description is a lost art. And the Description has received this predicate nominative adjectival pejoration due to our unhealthy obsession with The Useful, The Economic, The Necessary. Why, when one failed poet in brown corduroy asks another yawning novelist on hiatus what his favorite epoch of literature is, does that same overweight adjunct professor always respond with “the Nineteenth Century?” The Nineteenth Century was the heyday of the novel—the heyday of Realism. And it is likely this truth that forces that same school-debt encumbered, part-time bike courier to reply with the century aforementioned.
Good Realist writers were/are concerned with (un)necessary detail. And it seems to be the unnecessary and not the necessary that reminds us of our world. Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, written in 1836, during only his twenty-fifth year on this earth, is not only a post-doctorate-level mirth-driven abdominal workout, but also an A-1 exercise in The Unnecessary.
So, how does one write The Unnecessary? First, gather together all of your friends who are fluent in Ancient Greek. Now, perform the same task for those who are fluent in Latin. Very good. Now that you are still alone and with quite a bit of free time on your hands, this could be a great time to ponder the fact that the average sentence length, as compared from the time of Shakespeare to today, has decreased over seventy-five percent, from over seventy words per sentence to under fifteen. A much-needed decrease in convoluted thinking, some might say. A woeful increase in small ideas, others would riposte. Either way, it remains true that we use fewer words than ever to describe our world.
In the olden days, before divorce and UberEATS, there was this thing called a Classical Education, whose interests were, briefly stated, to bestow onto its students a deep, rich, fulfilling connection with the roots of human civilization and a meaningful, unfractured perspective of the world. Sixteenth through Nineteenth Century students were ensconced in this education, and Charles Dickens was one of those lucky students, although he left formal schooling at eleven-years-old to work in a factory in order to amass the funds required to bail his father out of a debtors prison. Students of this time were well-versed in Ancient Greek and Latin, languages heavily reliant on the long sentence, or what is known to better people as hypotaxis.
Hypotaxis enjoys many long-since-forgotten philological entreaties. A well-constructed bout of hypotaxis is scintillatingly complex. You remember complexity. Although there is much historical and contemporary evidence for the contrary, we do sometimes listen to and trust in those who actually think. Whether it proves competent or incompetent, hypotaxis of a good variety gains the reader’s trust, as it verifies that the narrator or character has thought a goodish deal about what he is saying. Try to convince an editor today to publish an opening sentence like the opening sentence of The Pickwick Papers:
“The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.”
Immediate trust.
Hypotaxis is also inherently polite. Moreover, hypotaxis is sexy; we inherently like to strip away its layers of meaning and tease our mental faculties with its hidden parts.
Around 1900 or thereabouts, however, there came this newer and therefore, obviously, much better idea called a Progressive Education, which decided hypotaxis evil and the frenetic acquisition of office workers to be the most important pedagogical endeavor.
In a contemporary world thoroughly wanting in hypotaxis, it is simplicity itself to find the correlation between the loss of the long sentence and the loss of the lengthy description. Consider just one of the hundreds of painstakingly detailed passages in Dickens’s description of a debtors prison:
“It was getting dark; that is to say, a few gas jets were kindled in this place which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening, which had set in outside. As it was rather warm, some of the tenants of the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand, had set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them as he passed along, with great curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or playing at all-fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjoining room, some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, for the hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. In a third, a man, with his wife and a whole crowd of children, might be seen making up a scanty bed on the ground, or upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, the noise, and the beer, and the tobacco smoke, and the cards, all came over again in greater force than before.”
According to James Wood’s How Fiction Works, nineteenth-century Realism bolstered the birth of the unnecessary detail: “19th-century realism…creates such an abundance of detail…that it will always contain a certain superfluidity, a built-in redundancy, that it will carry more detail than it needs. In other words, fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail.” Dickens’s above passage is uncommon in today’s fiction because of its overabundance of detail. Of course, it paints a nineteenth-century picture, but it serves no ulterior motive but to describe for the reader the scene; it describes itself for itself; it enjoys the existence of itself for itself. The Detail is enough; it is its own end.
Let us turn to a man unafraid to let his pen run wild, the prince of petty himself, Oscar Wilde: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
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