[email protected] wrote:
> And yet George Orwell (an excellent reader) wrote (I paraphrase): "The
> signal mark of Charles Dickens's genius was the unnecessary touch."
Barzun made a comment (in Use and Abuse of Art, I think) about the growing
habit in modern literature for increasingly detailed descriptions of scenes,
etc. He argued that this superfluity of details ("granularity," as they say
these days) was meant to impart a sense of verisimilitude, accuracy, and
persuasiveness to the story, but ended up detracting from it. (I can't
remember the full argument nor can I find it readily. It might be in Science,
The Glorious Entertainment.)
By contrast, the New Testament parables are the polar opposite, the merest
sketches of a narrative with barely the sense of character, and thus are the
more memorable. Similarly, Athenian tragedies consisted of two or three actors
with masks and a chorus of commenators; the plays were more declaimed stories
with homilies than enacted narratives.
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Michael Brady
