Scale, Part Two

I'm still thinking about scale. The more I think about it, the more I think that representing shifts in scale is how a lot of great art achieves its effects.

There are, of course, other ways of defamiliarizing something: one can dislocate an object from its expected context, one can warp or disproportion it so that it has to be relearned or reimagined. But scale remains crucial somehow.

In my last post, I tried to think through the process of magnifying and/or miniaturizing of everyday objects and how this defamiliarizes them. Hence, of course, aestheticizes them.

I think this is true of verbal art as well. For poetry or prose, for realist or non-realist writing--all of it involves some distortion of scale. And again, I think this is done either through the microscope or the telescope.

In epic, for instance, everything is simplified and therefore amplified.

Achilles has no complicated inner life: "Sing, Goddess, the Rage of Achilles," the poem begins. It is ironically the flatness (in Forster's much abused terms) of the characters that gives the narrative its depth. The battle of injured merit against implacable authority needs to have everything else stripped away.

Otherwise, it would just be a whiny warrior and a crappy king.

There is a moment in Book 18 when Achilles mourns Patroclus, his friend who died fighting in Achilles' stead and he reflects on his refusal to fight: "I sat by my ships, a useless burden on the earth." In a man represented as possessing the full range of human emotion, this would be a poignant line. From Achilles, it is tragic.

This is true, I think, for other genres. What makes a thriller, say, interesting is that only the exciting bits of people's lives make it to the plane of representation.

How often, for instance, does Jack Bauer say, "Hold on a minute, I've really got to pee."*

Subtler emotional effects, as well, depend on being magnified by being isolated.

But the minaiturization is interesting, too. Think about Ulysses or anything by Henry James. Time is slowed down--the very act of thinking or of perceiving is defamiliarized by being recorded in minute detail. We think much faster than we can read Joyce writing thinking (say that 10 times fast) (or think it ten times s l o w l y).

And we notice detail much faster than James depicts perception. Time is distorted, ordinary objects are made numinous by the scrutiny and meanings given to them. The proportion is wrong, which is why we keep reading.

Well, not me. I can't stand Henry James. But you know what I mean.

*Of course, examples abound of what I'll call the "large scale" works attending to the small scale. Madame Bovary or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold are two example that pop immediately to mind as works that play vigorously with both scales. As, too, does James. It should also be noted that I haven't the foggiest idea of what I'm babbling about.