TEXTURE THOUGHTS

I just reread Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451 and noticed an interesting correlation between one of Bradbury's justifications of books that "have quality" and a similar observation originated by Henry James and repeated, with some alterations, by Raymond Durgnat.  Here's the Bradbury quote:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”

Now, in my 2017 essay COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1, I linked to the James essay, but chose not to reprint the relevant section. That's because the James essay-- which *in theory* Bradbury might have read, though I find that unlikely-- wasn't as germane to my ongoing topic re: literary mythopoesis as Durgnat's reading of James, which I repeat below:

To the aesthetic of the "tale" academic culture has, by and large, turned a blind eye. As recently as my grammar school days, English masters instructed us all in the necessity for realistic and deep characterization, logically consistent behavior, penetrating studies of motive, and that proliferation of vivid detail suggested by Henry James' phrase, "density of specification." We were besought to insist upon the "texture of lived experience," and many of the exegeses we studied had strained to detect such "density" in such improbable places as folk ballads, or Chaucer's tale of Patient Griselda. Yet it was curious that, rich and complex as was the showpiece of the "complexity" school, HAMLET, each critic struggled to isolate its hero's "real" motives, to simplify, to synopsize, him into a figure almost as systematic and simple as another famous procrastinator, Li'l Abner. For, as Erich Auerbach remarked in his study of the development of European literary realism, "To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend."

l find it very interesting that both authors utilized the metaphor of "texture," almost certainly with an awareness of the word's similarity to "text." Durgnat correctly asserts that what most literary critics value is "the texture of lived experience." Bradbury extends the metaphor to the texture of human flesh, finding "pores" and "features" in good fiction. It's not hard to imagine what sort of authors Bradbury finds mediocre, since 451 is replete with examples of superficial art. He's not quite so pellucid regarding what sort of authors "rape [life] and leave her for the flies," but that seems a side-point since RB's future society doesn't want violent/transgressive art any more than thoughtful art.

There's some irony that Bradbury, a science fiction author (of sorts) comes very close to championing mimesis as a primary virtue for literature. Arguably in other sections of 451 Bradbury places more emphasis on the different propositions that different authors produce with their very different readings of "lived experience." Indeed, Montag's foe Captain Beatty expresses frustration that the books "don't agree with each other."

Durgnat's essay, probably written about ten years later, is more sophisticated. Durgnat shows an awareness that details, while important, don't yield meaning in themselves, or critics wouldn't feel the need to "synopsize" the motives of Hamlet, whose procrastinating nature Durgnat compares to Li'l Abner. In some ways Durgnat's essay loosely foresees a later generation's fascination with *tropes,* which in essence are summaries of literary plots and character actions. Bradbury certainly USES tropes in his fiction, but I doubt that he understood their significance as literary values.