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In Fleming the digression, instead of resembling a passage from an encyclopaedia badly rendered, takes on a twofold shape: first, it is rarely a description of the unusualsuch as occurs in Salgari and in Vernebut a description of the already known; second, it occurs not as encyclopaedic information but as literary suggestion, displayed in order to get a sort of literary promotion. Let us examine these two points, because they reveal the secret of Fleming's stylistic technique. |
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Fleming does not describe the Sequoia that the reader has never had a chance to see. He describes a game of canasta, an ordinary motor car, the control panel of an airplane, a railway carriage, the menu of a restaurant, the box of a brand of cigarettes available at any tobacconist's. Fleming describes in a few words an assault on Fort Knox because he knows that none of his readers will ever have occasion to rob Fort Knox; he expands in explaining the gusto with which a steering wheel or a golf club can be gripped because these are acts that each of us has accomplished, may accomplish, or would like to accomplish. Fleming takes time to convey the familiar with photographic accuracy because it is with the familiar that he can solicit our capacity for identification. We identify not with the one who steals an atom bomb but with the one who steers a luxurious motor launch; not with the one who explodes a rocket but with the one who accomplishes a lengthy ski descent; not with the one who smuggles diamonds but with the one who orders a dinner in a restaurant in Paris. Our credulity is solicited, blandished, directed to the region of possible and desirable things. Here the narration is realistic, the attention to detail intense; for the rest, so far as the unlikely is concerned, a few pages and an implicit wink of the eye suffice. No one has to believe them. |
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And, again, the pleasure of reading is given not by the incredible and the unknown but by the obvious and the usual. It is undeniable that Fleming, in exploiting the obvious, uses a verbal strategy of a rare kind, but this strategy makes us fond of redundancy, not of information. The language performs the same function as do the plots. The greatest pleasure arises not from excitement but from relief. |
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The minute descriptions constitute, not encyclopaedic information, but literary evocation. Indubitably, if an underwater swimmer swims towards his death and I glimpse above him a milky and calm sea and vague shapes of phosphorescent fish which skim by him, his act is inscribed within the framework of an ambiguous and eternal indifferent Nature which evokes a kind of profound and moral conflict. Usually Journalism, when a diver is devoured by a shark, says that, and it is enough. If someone embellishes this death with three pages of description of coral, is not that Literature? |
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This techniquesometimes identified as Midcult or as Kitschhere finds one of its most efficacious manifestationswe might say the least irritating, as a result of the ease and skill with which its operation is |
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