author versus character

F.R. Leavis has written of Joseph Conrad’s adjectival insistence—his “inscrutable” darknesses, “profound” stillnesses, “mournful” glooms-- a habit that often denied the references of his fiction, the nouns, a sense of gradation. Despite that habit, of course, Conrad, who had migrated across languages from his native Polish, through French, and finally to English, created some of the great modern works of English literature. But it was despite that habit.

Even more enfeebling in fiction, and perhaps more common, is a tendency that might be labeled circumstantial insistence. We can see that tendency, for instance, in a writer like Stephen Crane, who, though he wrote one of the first powerful American novels of war, The Red Badge of Courage, weakened his novels of the Bowery (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother) through an overly zealous exercise of that tendency. In the very first chapter of Maggie there are four physical assaults. Moreover, assaults proliferate relentlessly, hardly a chapter passing without one or the threat of one. Nor is it enough for a boy’s father to appropriate and drink down a can of beer the boy is fetching for a neighbor; he must hit the kid on the head with the emptied can—lest we miss the point. Brutality, these events compulsively declare, is a condition of life in the slums. So be it. But the zeal, the insistence, with which these events are staged move them toward caricature, toward the laughable instead of the grim.

Whenever a reader’s responses are forcefully attracted to the act of writing, they are attracted away from the actions of the writing, and especially from the characters.