Specific Judgements
Although you may believe that you don’t judge, everyone judges what they encounter.
Bucharest, 2016
In the opening sentences of Rebecca West’s The Birds Fall Down, a picture begins to emerge:
One afternoon, in an early summer of this century, when Laura Rowan was just eighteen, she sat, embroidering a handkerchief, on the steps leading down from the terrace of her father’s house to the gardens communally owned by the residents in Radnage Square. She liked embroidery. It was a solitary pastime and nobody bothered to interfere with it.
A few brushstrokes start to coat the canvas: we’re in summer, during a particular afternoon, and we have eighteen-year-old Laura Rowan at her father’s house, a slight whiff of wealth in the background. What comes next? A behavior, embroidery, and perhaps a clue about what it portends.
From these opening sentences, could you begin to make some assumptions? Is Laura Rowan reserved? What about her father? Does her desire for solitude provide insight about her family?
Hearing about her interest in embroidery, a reader’s mind, without fail, starts to categorize. Laura belongs in the category of embroider—with all the connotations and associations and conclusions it evokes. And with that Rebecca West dances along an intriguing, dangerous line, one which every writer faces at the creation of character: the tension between the general and the specific.
As a reader acquires new details about Laura in the passage above, the categories are polished, and what’s general is distilled into a more specific picture. To first describe a character demands something tangible, a detail for the reader to grasp, but literature only becomes literature in the specific. A character who is a mere “type” lands flat on the page.
Although you may believe that you don’t judge, everyone judges what they encounter. As a reader—and simply as a participant in life—you’re a judgement machine, forever striving to catalog, organize, and refine. To pretend otherwise is, at best, a lie; usually it’s more akin to a lack of introspection.
You can note the polish of narrowing categories in Rebecca West’s nonfiction too, especially in the incomparable Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, where the descriptions are continuously refined. Many of her passages begin with plain observations—a stereotype, an expectation—but are soon sharpened, focused on the minute, the individual, in what might be called the literary.
Without that necessary sharpening, we’re lost in the immature world of mere classification—a world of groups that don’t contain any individuals. A bad conversation, in fact, never leaves this first step of group classification. Consider being quizzed on broad categories: What authors do you read? What’s your favorite type of music? What about movies? Any one of these questions is perhaps somewhat close to fine, but in rapid-fire the prosaic goal is transparent, and the real question is much closer to: Tell me what category I should put you in?
Children still have messy and inchoate categories, so those are perfectly acceptable questions for them; they’re struggling to figure out how to orient themselves in a reasonably complicated world. In adults, however, most people expect a little more maturity, a more refined conversational style, which is exactly what we should demand of writers.
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