"You are what you eat" might be be credible diagnostic information in the area of nutrition, but it also could apply to those elements of which in 1596, Francis Bacon wrote, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested". That chewing and sometimes regurgitating of reading material are what concerns me here.
I got this bit of advice in a graduate class — on research possibilities of all places. There was/is this kind of research called phenomenology where you spend considerable space introducing the reader to the environment of your subjects. The questions you are supposed to answer are ones such as:
Where do these subjects live?
What is imporant in their lives?
How educated are they?
What kind of work do they do?
And there were many more, all to situate the research in a particular social environment. The advice was this: Read Charles Dickens.
Really. Dickens was this master of character creation. He had so many memorable characters besides Ebeneezer Scrooge, and he portrayed them with an economy that every grad student should emulate so they can get on with the data. Even if you haven't read a lot of his novels, what do the people with names such as Tiny Tim, the Artful Dodger, Chuzzelwit, Mr Gradgrind conjure up? Dickens gave them descriptions to enlarge upon those snapshot terms.
Or consider his Sidney Carton of a most common name, one who indeed appeared to be of the common class. He could be everyman — capable but self-doubting, loving but unrequited in love. And at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, he is the individual who steps in and sacrifices himself, saying, "It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before". That was the potential of every man from Dickens.
Authors today will report that capturing character traits succinctly is their biggest challenge. Authors today are also told to give character sketches rather than long paragraphs detailing a host of traits and physical qualities. Jane Austin took her time. So did the Brontë girls. And I read that people are going back to the classics of Stevenson and Scott and other 19th century storytellers, which reports I will eventually wind back to.
I subscribe to London Review of Books, partly because I'm cheap frugal and believe that a good review will often clarify elements of an author's subject in a succinct manner such that the purchase of the original material becomes unnecessary. OK, originals cost a lot; reviews I can download.
Here's what one reviewer said about novelist, Anita Brookner and her character creation, emphasis mine.
Anita Brookner achieved many dislocations of selfhood, and may have become more and more like the people she dreamed into life. It’s a novelist’s fate, not so much that their characters are like them but that they become their characters.
and again:
Maud didn’t achieve the life she wanted in France and married an evasive Englishman, a kind and unsexy man who was always destined to do the right thing because he couldn’t do the essential thing, which was to make Maud love him. Maffy will never understand, but her mother married the wrong man, and all her life was unable to think of herself as an honourable person, not because she cheated on her husband, but because the man she really loved, a rake called David Tyler, did not love her back, and so she failed in exactly the same way as the man she settled for. These are the subtleties Brookner deals in, painful, tender and life-shaping …
Check that against your favourite author. Hemingway wanted to be his protagonists, and when encroaching old age threatened his vitality, he left — by his own gun, not like his hero, Francis in "The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber" who died by his wife's gun. Or, in more classical examples, did Chaucer become attached to his Wife of Bath? Shakespeare to his Falstaff? We're a ways away from phenomenology. Perhaps, but keep chewing.
Chairman Mao's Maxims were collected in a Little Red Book and some of them are instructive of the practice of characterization. He said, "Women hold up half the sky" and that would supposedly (for Western readers) be a call for equality of the sexes. Women should be treated as the one half of the human race that they are. Well, Mao may have characterized them that way, but infanticide of female foetuses with its modern equivalent of medical abortion has created a severe population imbalance in today's China.
But while I'm musing on Mao, I have to pontificate a bit on responses to another of his maxims. This one was designed to get writers to be succinct and thereby more forceful in their publications. He told them, "Open the door and see the mountain". In more direct language, "Get to the point."
I have had a number of students from Chinese families in English classes. I didn't always see digression and mere speculation in their essays any more than in the work of other second-generation Canadian English students, but other researchers had noted the feature of indirectness in such writing. Those researchers attributed vagueness in exposition to a Confucian model of rhetoric. One of them said it better than any summary I could generalize. Here's notes from my doctoral dissertation on Guanjun Cai with his doctoral thesis saying how Confucian progression in essay writing hampered students.
Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean students tend to be characterised as ‘poor writers’ because of the ‘indirectness, digressions, loosely-developed topics and lack of transitional signals in their writing’. These characteristics of writing are based on their different rhetorical conventions, … [with] mere repetition of Confucian sages and archaic poetic structures…
The point which he makes after his brief history lesson is that this oriental rhetorical pattern of writing seems strange to English teachers because it violates English cultural expectations for directness and unity…
A second rhetorical difference is the apparent indirectness of oriental languages. In the Confucian tradition, plainly expressing a personal view may be regarded as pompous; for example, writers in Chinese classics will usually paraphrase the sage’s ideas in the entire essay without ever specifically stating their agreement. The very quality of indirectness deplored by English instructors is considered a virtue by the Chinese.
When Asian ESL students use these traditional organizational patterns in their school essays, they depart from our linear code of the expository genre, and when they use them in essays in summative provincial examinations, there are unfortunate consequences.
Enough with the history lessons, already! What's happening today? People are going back to the classics is what's happening. Here's a couple of newsworthy pundits on this phenomenon.
Charlie Angus, our Canadian author, muscian, former MP and now an "elbows-up" podcast leader and speaker for "The Resistance" (to Trumpist America-facism) had this to say in part about reading "the classics".
From A Tale of Two Cities, I fell into David Copperfield. I was enthralled with the world of Peggotty, the Micawbers, Steerforth and Uriah Heep. They not only became real, but they made themselves at home in my imagination. They travel with me.
I then decided to try my hand at Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, with its long, drawn-out discussions of morality, justice, and faith. Not succinct. Not cut down. Entire chapters exploring questions of our responsibility to the world and each other.
…
Every generation comes of age with the arrogant belief that what came before was less enlightened and less aware than our own time. Dostoevsky and Dickens have forced me to do a major rethink.
…
Literacy rates are dropping like a stone. It was reported in 2024 that only 35% of American high school seniors were proficient enough to analyze the arguments in fictional themes.
I have talked with teachers and professors who say that, as their students lose the attention span to read a novel, they are losing the ability to process complex arguments.
From Canadian to American substacker we go to Michael Moore who has initiated a book club for these dark times in his nation's history. I was fascinated on studying his very first recommendation which was Thomas Paine's 1776 essay "Common Sense". It's a book-length essay, so be prepared to relax and "to process complex arguments".
Here's Moore's first set of books:
Short Attention Span Shelf
Common Sense by Thomas Paine (free digitally via this link)
The fiery pamphlet that helped convince ordinary people they could challenge an empire and build something better. Still feels remarkably current.
The World, Explained (Non-Fiction)
One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
I was moved by his devastating reckoning with the mass killing and displacement in Gaza and his take on the leaders, politicians, institutions and pundits who continue to enable or excuse it. You’ll never regret reading Omar’s words, nor will you ever forget them.
Great American Novel (Fiction)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
One of my favorite books, and arguably one of the funniest novels ever written. Beneath the absurdity is a biting satire about American culture, ego, and the people who think they’re smarter than everyone else.
Context for a Dark Time (Non-Fiction Essays)
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus (free digital version)
You go to a protest. You carry a sign. You speak out. But does any of it actually make a difference? Camus wrestles with the moral question of what ordinary people owe one another in the face of injustice.
Poetry, for those those Who Don’t Read Poetry
Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen
This book takes the language used to manipulate us, from advertisements to government doublespeak to fairy tales, and just tears it apart. Puns, slang, broken spelling. Mullen shows you how “proper” English is rigged to keep you from seeing what’s really going on.
I'm done writing for now and I'm going to take my own advice (and that of Angus and Moore) and do some more reading. The stack of books on the desk is getting dangerously high and Chris keeps adding his suggestions to the list. Next bedtime reading will be Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I want to digest the dialectic between sentient great ape teacher and human student regarding "How things came to be this way."