I was listening to Ali Smith on Radio 4 today - what a terrific talker, wonderful energy and humour, not to mention speed of wit, charm and perceptiveness, massively well-informed, I could go on, maybe I should reasd one of her books!

She made a point about how most events in life have no significance, they just happen, but that every event in a book has total significance. And I suppose you could extend that and say every syllable in a (good) book has significance. And that set me musing on a crucial part of the writer's art -perhaps key- which is the ability to suspend disbelief in the reader: that the suspension is all about making all those highly siginificant events seem not significant, to make them feel just like normal stuff, like normal life. And it struck me that that is some trick if you can do it.

Am I making any sense?

Pete

Yes, total sense, and you're absolutely right (and so's Ali S.) Suspending disbelief is an extraordinarily sophisticated mental activity, when you think about it. What a very odd trade we do engage in, to be sure.

Emma

Going off at a slight tangent, I started reading 'the Accidental' last night...and to be totally honest I had to give up after a few pages.
It was late and I was tired, but the sentences....one was half a page long (no exaggeration). I'm not quite sure what the effect of this was supposed to be...it only reminded me of reading German and waiting, waiting for the verb to come right at the end so you could make sense of the whole.

Sammy

most events in life have no significance

I'm not sure about that at all. Does she mean they have no significance that she personally can't see at the time? It's a very sweeping statement, really, and such a relative thing to pin down like that. There are whole masses of people who would argue that every event is significant, and books and stories only reflect that. In fact, I do not see the two as seperate at all, but that's just me.

JB

I think at heart she meant there's no plan for the events, no higher intelligence carefully plotting them out. Of course life's events have significance for people but those significances aren't inherent in the events.

I think at heart she meant there's no plan for the events, no higher intelligence carefully plotting them out. Of course life's events have significance for people but those significances aren't inherent in the events.

Pete's right; in itself everything's random, but we assign significance to events that seem to fit or contradict a pattern. We then act with that seeming significance in mind, and so reinforce it. Fiction chooses to narrate the significant aspect of events, not their randomness, because we need to believe that life has some pattern and significance. To believe everything that happens is as random as the Brownian motion of atoms in a flask is more than the human spirit can bear.

Emma

It is certainly a fascinating viewpoint, but fortunately and unfortunately, a lot of people - in fact, probably the majority - do actually think there is a higher intelligence plotting things out. I'm not being argumentative, I just found her comments a little narrow considering, and reflective of her belief, but not the popular one.

JB

I heard this and I think she was making a point about the use of detail in a novel. She said something like 'if you drop a cup it doesn't mean anything but if you drop a cup in a novel it means something'. She wasn't making claims about higher powers and whether they existed, nor whether life events have meaning. She was talking about the things that most of us think of as trivial,everday, minor, and making the point that in a written text they have significance. I guess that's because of the way we read. If a writer includes details that don'tseem to have any significance readers are apt to complain about irrelevance.

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Naomi

Ah, that makes it clearer. Thank you. I'll stop ranting now.

JB

Well, Naomi's expressed it better than I did, so I'm glad it now makes sense. But I think what Smith said is in some ways about the absence of design in existence as contrasted with the design that goes into a novel. Utimately isn't it a theme that underpins almost all fiction? Because (as T.S.Eliot says in Four Quartets) 'Humankind cannot stand very much reality.'

Pete

It's fascinating to think about, whether it's relevant to Sarah Water's or not. Personally, and in a non-religious sense really, I don't undertand how people can fail to see a design in creation - the way everything depends upon something, the man upon the beast, the beast upon the bird, the bird upon the worm, the worm upon the earth, the earth upon the sun et cetera et cetera.

It's always struck me as far too neat to be random, actually, but therin lies the bone of contention in most scholarly and theological debate throughout history, and I don't think anyone has the answer - just differing shades of the question.

JB

What's neat about it?

It's all wonderfully messy I would say. Superbly and exhiliratingly random. Madly beautiful. Insanely, joyously, majestically arbitrary.

The shoe fits the foot, but not because it was designed to fit; it's because it's been worn into fitting. But boy does it look like a perfect fit.

And it's always a bit mis-shapen too, and unpredictable, and... bonkers.

You have to love that.

Pete

Two thoughts, with no particular connexion:

The strength - and weakness - of the human race is the tendency to generalise from the particular, and from that evolves the sense that an event has general significance beyond its particular self. The narrative impulse in the human race (from myths and folk tales onwards) exists at the interface between the particular and the general: we tell very particular stories that seem to have more general significance. As fiction develops as an art, the particular becomes more apparently dominant, and the general becomes less stated and more implied. At the furthest development of this (Joyce, say), everything is transmitted through the particular sensibility of a single character in a single world, and the general has to be sensed - or deduced - from that.

Chekov wrote in a letter (which I read once, and have never tracked down again, so I hope I'm remembering correctly) that human beings don't have huge arguments and heartbreaks and rows and passions... they have dinner. I think he's arguing that all these significant events - all the huge things that happen to us, and matter enormously to our lives - happen tacitly, implicitly within the seemingly small, banal, everyday things. That's certainly borne out in his fiction and his drama, and we could all take a lesson from it. He is a genius, and an extraordinarily modern genius at that.

Emma

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Goodness, it's years since I shed my habit of spelling 'connexion' with an 'x' because I worshipped Henry James, who does. Must be late.

Yes Pete, it's all too paradoxical to pin down, but I'll have a go with writing,a nd like everyone, fall short. Law, order, chaos, randomity - it's all so endless, pan-dimensional and multi-faceted that perhaps it's a bit pointless of me to describe how I see it or think it, as that is also, wonderfully, always in flux.

Emma - that's intriguing, but I agree. Life doesn't 'dramatise', it just happens. As writers, we have the benefit of seeing the track ahead (and behind, and well, in most directions), and that's rarely possible in real life. All we have is perception, that may or may not be conducive to reality, or someone else'd reality, or God's or whatever. My brain hurts a lot, as Bowie once sang.

JB