I want to say a few more words about the senses in literature. So much can be accomplished through visceral detail. Consider the first paragraph of Anton Chekhov’s “The Beauties”:
I remember, when I was a high-school boy in the fifth or sixth class, I was driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshoe Kryepkoe in the Don region to Rostov-on-the-Don. It was a sultry, languidly dreary day of August. Our eyes were glued together, and our mouths were parched from the heat and dry burning wind which drove clouds of dust to meet us; one did not want to look or speak or think, and when our drowsy driver, a Little Russian called Karpo, swung his whip at the horses and lashed me on the cap, I did not protest or utter a sound, but only, rousing myself from half-slumber, gazed mildly and dejectedly into the distance to see whether there was a village visible through the dust.
The paragraph goes on to describe their Armenian host at the village where they stopped, but the opening salvo establishes the misery of the conditions. The entire story is rich in sensory detail; they make the story what it is—a masterpiece of the short story form.
This may be an odd departure from the norm for someone who is discussing fiction technique, but I’ll next use a quotation from the medieval Chinese poet Tu Fu. In medieval China, prominent poets were honored with government posts, and this is how they throve. But Tu Fu had taken the wrong side in civil war—the losing side—and government preferment was not open to him. In the following poem, Tu Fu has reached old age, a time of physical debility, when he is hit with sudden disaster as high winds destroy his roof and he can no longer, on his own, repair the thatched roof of his house. And he is too poor to replace the thatching and hire someone to do the work. Here is Tu Fu:
In the high autumn skies of September
the wind cried out in rage,
Tearing off in whirls from my rooftop
three plies of thatch.
The thatch flew across the river,
was strewn on the floodplain,
The high stalks tangled in tips
of tall forest trees,
The low ones swirled in gusts across ground
and sunk into mud puddles.
The children from the village to the south
made a fool of me, impotent with age,
Without compunction plundered what was mine
before my very eyes,
Brazenly took armfuls of thatch,
ran off into the bamboo,
And I screamed lips dry and throat raw,
but no use.
Then I made my way home, leaning on staff,
sighing to myself.
A moment later the wind calmed down,
clouds turned dark as ink,
The autumn sky rolling and overcast,
blacker towards sunset,
And our cotton quilts were years old
and cold as iron,
My little boy slept poorly,
kicked rips in them.
Above the bed the roof leaked,
no place was dry,
And the raindrops ran down like strings,
without a break.
I have lived through upheavals and ruin
and have seldom slept very well,
But have no idea how I shall pass
this night of soaking.
As surely as Chekhov, Tu Fu makes his story come to life through visceral detail. One is there with Tu Fu in the impotent calamity of his old age. He goes on to wish for a huge house where many poor people could live. If he had that, he says, he could accept “the ruin of my own little hut and death by freezing.”
My last quotation is from the first paragraph of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum”:
I was sick—sick unto the death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution—perhaps from its association in fancy with the buzz of a mill-wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white—whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words—and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness—of immoveable resolution—of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate, were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded.
Poe goes on in this fashion, weaving in the remainder of the paragraph a nightmare vision culminating in the words: “Then silence, and stillness, and night were the universe.” The narrator has fainted.
Poe’s sensory details are more abstract than those of Chekhov or Tu Fu, but they are sensory nonetheless, and no less visceral. My point in all three of these examples is that the senses can play a powerful role in reifying story—in making a narrative grip the reader as it spins itself out. I don’t think the importance of sensory detail can be overstated. The writer who fails to take full advantage of the senses neglects the most powerful tool for lifting a story from the featureless into a fully realized narrative style. All of which is to say that an eye for detail cannot fail to inform your fiction with the breath of life.
I have a Master’s Degree in English Literature After 1660 from The University of South Carolina and while there studied creative writing under George Garrett and James Dickey. I turned rather belatedly to fiction writing as a serious occupation but have made progress of late. In 2017 I had two short stories published, and so far this year I have had one story accepted. I am married, with five children and seven grandchildren.
