Deep Inside

Recently Matt Cheney (and later Miriam Burstein) discussed the kind of narrative exposition pejoratively called the "infodump," in which "an author needs to convey a lot of information and does so by coming out and stating it. Telling vs. showing. Choosing efficiency over subtlety."

To me, Matt's most interesting musing on this point is this:

Does a foregrounding of psychology rather than action in a story reduce the challenges of exposition? If we're deep inside, for instance, Mrs. Dalloway's mind are we less concerned about expository lumps than if we're reading about Mrs. Dalloway's adventures in time and space? It could be that the tangential and associational writing associated with the representation of a mind undercuts the need or desire for straightforward exposition. But probably only if the setting and situation are ones that a general audience can be assumed to have some familiarity with. If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase. But would it look different as exposition because we're so deep inside Mrs. D's brain than it would were we following her from a more objective viewpoint?

Although Virginia Woolf's version of "psychological realism" needs to be taken as a special case--it's so pure an attempt to stay within the flow of her character's stream of thought--I would argue that most expository passages in modern fiction do in fact take place as part of the "foregrounding of psychology." We may not always be as "deep" into a character's consciousness as we are in Mrs. Dalloway, but in most ordinary "literary fiction" (by which I mean literary fiction that adopts established strategies and techniques as the markers of "craft") we are certainly at the very least being oriented to the world in which the characters move as it is inflected through their awareness of it. If anything, this makes information-laden passages of exposition, however brief, even more conspicuous and artificial: fiction in which external rather than internal realism is the goal surely has a good excuse for resorting to the infodump, since providing information is a large part of its job, but psychological realism, in theory at least, is restricted to the kind of "information" a character him/herself would regard as such. In this context, the infodump seems like the author's intrusion on what has otherwise been set up as the character's "space."

Matt is certainly correct in maintaining that "If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase." In fact, this very feature of much science fiction has made it difficult for me to enjoy it as much as I'd like, given my admiration for the intelligent commentary on the genre provided by critics such as Matt Cheney. I've found that the problem extends even to what are generally considered the greatest SF writers. Take, for example, this brief passage from Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning's homeopape's weather-syndrome readings of the previous day.

The key glacier, Ol' Skintop, had retreated 4.62 Grables during the last twenty-four-hour period. And the temperature, at noon in New York, had exceeded the previous day's by 1.46 Wagners. In addition the humidity, as the oceans evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on, and toward what? Hnatt pushed the 'pape away, and picked up the mail which had been delivered before dawn. . .it had been some time since mailmen had crept out in daylight hours.

This bit of exposition doesn't necessarily originate from "deep inside" Richard Knatt's mind, but it does arise from his specific consideration of the "homeopape" and the information it conveys--information that is surely intended for the reader's edification as much as Richard's. We need to know that he lives in a world of homeopapes and Grables and Selkirks, and that the oceans are evaporating. And when Richard pushes the 'pape aside and takes up his mail, we are clearly to accept as his own rumination that "it had been some time since mailmen crept out in daylight hours."

Unfortunately, I am unable to read this whole passage, providing such specific details about a wholly nonexistent world, without finding it just a little bit silly. I don't think it's because I can't accept such imaginary worlds per se, as I frequently like SF movies, including some made from Dick novels, perfectly well. There's something about evoking such worlds in prose, burdening that prose with exotic information, that makes reading this kind of SF a chore. Indeed, a passage such as this one more or less defeats me:

Shortly, he was aboard a thermosealed interbuilding commute car, on his way to downtown New York City and P. P. Layouts, the great synthetic-cement building from which Perky Pat and all the units of her miniature world originated. The doll, he reflected, which had conquered man as man at the same time had conquered the planets of the Sol system. Perky Pat, the obsession of the colonists. What a commentary on colonial life. . .what more did one need to know about those unfortunates who, under the selective service laws of the UN, had been kicked off Earth, required to begin new, alien lives on Mars or Venus, or Ganymede or wherever else the UN bureaucrats happened to imagine they could be deposited. . .and after a fashion survive.

Probably even partisans of Philip Dick's work would concede that he is not a particularly notable stylist. From what I can tell, story in a Dick novel is more or less all. I don't necessarily have a problem with that approach (and there are SF novelists--China Mieville, for example--who could be called stylists), but the stories he tells are indeed crammed with "information," and relating this information in such an otherwise unadorned prose style only makes the limitations of this style more evident. Dick's approach also underscores the extent to which even pulp or genre fiction has absorbed the conventions of what I'm calling psychological realism. One might say that Dick attempts to portray an unreal world by realistically depicting his characters' response to living in that world. The "infodump" remains a perhaps unavoidable limitation of such an effort, one that may even call into question the aesthetic integrity of the effort in the first place.

Comments

[Christian]

I've had the same problem with many sf writers, but it's probably worth pointing out that, for example, Infinite Jest, is full of the same kind of "infodumps" (and if you're not allowing points for style) it's no more justifiable.

On the other hand, I don't mind infodumps so much when the info dumped isn't presented as common knowledge. That last line from the Dick excerpt, "it had been some time since mailmen had crept out in daylight hours," is particularly lame, whereas Borges can dump obscure info on me as long as he likes.

[Rodney Welch]

I agree that's pretty awkward writing on Dick's part. What gets me, though, is this same sort of infodump technique used in historical novels, especially first-person ones, where the narrator will stop to lecture his reader from the future on some fact of life that hasn't yet become archaic.

[Dan Green]

Rodney: Miriam comments on that in her post.

[Don Napoli]

You probably need to go to Dick's mainstream novels to get a sense of him as a stylist.

[Mortimer Shy]

In terms on establishing a point of view for his characters and maintaining it rigorously, even obsessively, Phillip Dick is a master. The fact that he isn't a stylist, and that his invented (prophetic) details are often absurd, and his characters trapped in unreasonable environments, show that maintains this point of view instinctively himself as an author. "Literary" authors are incapable of this innocence, and thus blocked from creating worlds so stunningly modern, or unheard of. Yet, with Dick the result is a picture of consciousness, that is recognizable to most readers. You have picked the wrong example--to me, he is the ONE science fiction writer who does maintain psychological point of view.

[Dan Green]

Actually, I think I emphasized that Dick does indeed "maintain a psychological point of view." This is part of the problem.

[Mortimer Shy]

No, you said he is an example of a genre too dependent on the "conventions psychological realism." That is completely different. Dick isn't in fact following conventions, but is inspired by images. Furthermore, he isn't a storyteller, either. All his books blend together, because they are all part of a description of a world, which is coherent, if crazy (like reality for many people). Point of view, as I said, is essential to an author like this, who is so original he clings to it like to his own vital consciousness, like his own religion. It is unreflected, even childishly so. Not at all an example of pyschological realism.

[Dan Green]

"Dick isn't in fact following conventions, but is inspired by images."

I have no idea what you're talking about. The passages I quoted are *extremely* conventional in their use of psychological realism. I take it that in the rest of your comment you're echoing the frequent descriptions of Dick as some kind of "visionary." Perhaps he is. I haven't been able to read as much of his work--because of the uninspired writing--as I would need to in order to reach a conclusion about this.

[marlyat2]

Here are two thoughts from this particular pipsqueak...

On historical fiction: if a writer considers the past as a 'place' where we can live via imagination, then most of these horrible problems of inserted fact and explanation will disappear. Many writers feel a great need to prove that they really are writing about the past. Many others are defeated by their need to use their research. Do the research, and don't over-research; then forget it.

On science fiction: Isn't this a similar issue? If one accepts that it is possible for a character to be as grounded in a fantastic landscape as in a realistic one, and then pursues that belief, don't many of these problems vanish? It then becomes a moving-through-space problem. A lot of fiction (and not just science fiction) attempts to move through story-space too quickly, to "set the stage" and "get things out of the way," instead of filtering "reality" through sensibility. We don't need to be clonked on the head by a bucket of information; we just need to enter a world and see what we can see, whether it's the other side of the mountain or the other side of time or the other side of the moon...

[R. J. Thomson]

Some writers have sent-up infodumps to great effect. Stewart Home, in 'Sixty Nine Things to Do with a Dead Princess':

We were filling in time until Alan could pick up his car from the garage. A side window had been smashed by a thief who'd stolen some booze that Alan had left on the back seat. I announced that I felt like the narrator in Tania Kindersley's novel 'Goodbye, Johnny Thunders'. Alan said he'd given up on the book at page 13 when the narrator described a man who'd shafted her as having politics to the left of Lenin. Alan thought that it was the job of novelists to deal with specifics not generalities. He'd wanted to know whether the shit in question was a Bordigist or a councilist, whether he favoured the politics of Rosa Luxemburg or Otto Rühle. Lenin had attacked the entire proletarian milieu in 'Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder' and Alan snorted that it simply wasn't good enough to say that someone's politics were to the left of a right-wing reactionary.

It goes on.

This, to my mind, is getting towards treating the novel itself as a psychological entity, rather than a character 'within' it. I don't know many other writers who go this far, but wouldn't mind being told of them.

[Dan Green]

There's no doubt that first-person narration alters our perception of both the infodump and of psychological realism. Information being provided directly by the subjective narrator has a different effect that information inserted by a third-person narrator. In some ways the third-person central consciousness approach, which is the strategy that produces what I'm calling psychological realism, is an attempt to split the difference between first-person and omniscient third-person narration. But the employment of a first-person narrator goes some way toward eliminating the kinds of problems I discuss in the post.

[Jimmy Beck]

Mama always said, "It ain't the heat, it's the Selkirks."

[Helen DeWitt]

The Man in the High Castle does do clever things with language. Dick imagines the West Coast after Japanese victory in WWII: Japanese has high prestige, so speakers of English alter their grammar to mimic the English usage of the victors.