Being Mr. Kenny

Be warned: the first couple of lines of this post are covered in horrible sticky crap that looks like pretention. In fact it is not. What appears to be pretention is merely lack of writing skill.

Thank you. This has been a public message on behalf of Mark Kenny.

It occurred to me today that a novelist is a type of sculptor. Instead of working in clay, or bronze, or whatever, they create their sculptures right inside your head. Plot lines, metaphors, dialogue, these are all the long, arduous processes which take the medium, whatever is inside your head at the time, and form them into the sculpture: whatever is inside the author’s head at the time.

A novel is an attempt to communicate an idea, an opinion, an emotion, in a non-mental way. We can explain things using words as best we can. Textbooks are a good example of this: clear, concise words being used in a relatively dry manner to get an idea across as efficiently as possible.

But I think a novel is different because it gives us an example to directly encounter what the author is thinking. We don’t just read about an idea, we temporarily take up residence in a little world designed to reflect that idea, that point of view. It’s one thing to be told that injustice is wrong, it’s another to get to know characters and then watch them suffer under injustice. It brings the message home in a much more experiential way.

So that’s my view of novels. And now for the programming part…

I dabble in web programming and as a consequence my brain is a little more used to seeing things as a computer does. I am more familiar with the way they operate, and this permeates my thinking to a certain extent. For example, when I read Isaiah 55:11, in which God says that his word does not “return to [him] void” I giggle because it’s funny to think that God does not return void.

Geek jokes!

Computers approach things differently from humans, and this is obvious to anyone who has tried to install wireless networking. One of the things that computers do not do is learn. More precisely, they don’t “get used to things”. They approach every task as if it is the first time they have ever done it, pretty much. They may save settings and things like that, but from the computers point of view, it’s the first time they’ve seen those settings.

It’s like having no memory at all. Imagine you were given a list of things to do to accomplish a task. Imagine that you forget each item on the list as soon as you have done it. That’s very similar to how a computer program works. The instructions had better be pretty detailed, and able to deal with unexpected situations. For example, you could say, “At this stage you should be seeing this. If you are not, stop what you are doing, sit down, and cry for help.” That’s called error-detection.

If something unexpected happened and you didn’t check for it, you would carry on as normal until you actually physically couldn’t do it any more. Then you would still carry on trying to do it until a nice person came up and told you to start again. That’s called a crash.

And it’s this difference between humans and computers that makes novels similar to computer programs.

A sculptor has total control over the sculpture. She can choose the material, the tools, the shape, the amount of time she spends on it, etc. The finished piece of work is entirely her creation.

The novelist, however, doesn’t have that luxury. He must simply write the “instructions” for making his “mental sculpture” (i.e., the experience he once had and now wants you to had, or the view he holds that he wants you to be able to see) and hope for the best. His novel might be read by someone who doesn’t get all the references, or who doesn’t find all the jokes funny, or who has no appreciation for the language he is using. He is limited by the reader.

For example, I have lost count of the number of times I have said, “oh, she had brown hair!” or something similar, and had to track back to where that character was first described. I just finished reading Winter in Madrid by C. J. Sansom, and I regret to report that the characters Hoare, Hillgarth and Tollyhurst really weren’t all that well defined in my head. They were like the Three Persons of the Trinity, I had no idea where one ended and the other began. Or who they were, for that matter, and these weren’t minor characters, either! This is because I am a lazy and impatient reader. If it’s not making me laugh, or cry, or say “ooh, that’s deep”, I tend to read it quickly to get to the next good bit.

Authors, calm yourselves, it is a habit I am trying hard to remove!

Anyway, do you see my point? Like the computer program, the reader has no idea where he or she is going. Instead of being able to see the finished piece in front of them, the reader must build it in their head before they can really look at it. (Incidentally, why are sculptors female, authors male, but readers gender neutral? Political correctness, I fear, has had a hand in my pronoun choice.)