Literature, as it is mostly written and read, is largely ostensive.
To illustrate what I mean by this statement I will turn to something I reference all the time, both for fun and to make serious points: the 2006 video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. In Oblivion, your character can walk around town and overhear rumours and snatches of irreverent conversation from townspeople. Those pieces of conversation are repetitive because it’s a video game from 2006.
But the conversations you overhear in Oblivion are not the actual conversations you, the player, are supposed to imagine are occurring in the game’s world. The silly statements about mud crabs and elvish trading boycotts aren’t actually what’s being said in any given conversation – they are ciphers for ‘local wildlife news’ or ‘international political news’. They’re a synecdoche – a piece of something that refers to the whole of it. As the player you’re meant to imagine ‘anything of the same type’ in their place.
This is more difficult to conceive of in the context of a video game because it’s a visual experience, so you naturally assume that anything you observe is exactly what it appears to be. It’s a leap of logic to assume that the mud crab talk is a synecdoche for ‘a bit of light conversation’, with all the variety light conversations have for us in reality, because, well, it’s right there: you’ve just seen Toutius Sextius literally say he saw a mud crab the other day, so he must have seen a mud crab.
What makes Oblivion in particular ridiculous to us is that we play it and take it purely at face value in that way. We take it all as if what is presented is what is true, and assume these characters really do say exactly the same phrases, with exactly the same voices. Everyone in Cyrodiil has the same brain, and every single Imperial guard sounds exactly like Wes Johnson. But when you imagine ‘the world behind the world’, that which the developers tried to express but had to resort to synecdoche, it’s a much richer game. Incidentally, this is how children play games – and why they have so much fun with games that appear repetitive. Maybe they don’t know quite what they imagine – but their idea of the game world is always bigger than an adult who takes it for what it literally is. This applies to the real world also.
The same is true of films. We take films to be exactly what they depict. By definition and nature they are exactly, and only, what they appear to be – so they are naturally assumed to require less imagination to consume than what books require. Their psychology is non-existent – any attempt to portray the mind is ineffective, because a film has only visuals. And many films really do require less effort to watch than books need to be read, because their makers think purely visually and seek to represent nothing more than the surface appearance of reality. I’ll turn to literature in a few paragraphs.
The only reason the developers didn’t program the infinite variety of real conversation into Oblivion was that the year was 2006 and the technology wasn’t advanced enough. Presumably, now that large-language models can generate infinite text to a theme, some higher-budget open-world games like Oblivion was once considered to be might feature AI-generated rumours and conversations, with repetition only where it makes sense. Games will lose something on that day. But this is a digression.
Prose obviously doesn’t have a visual element that corresponds to the thing it’s describing. It’s purely abstraction. It is trite to say every word in every language is a metaphor. The word ‘car’ stands for a car but is not a car. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. That’s why you read a book and imagine a movie in your own head, and your movie is different from anyone else’s, because your version of ‘car’ is different, because you are different (cf Platonic idealism). This is simple stuff. Therefore we naturally read stories by filling in visual details.
So we approach visual media like games one way, and we approach written media a different way. We assume books require greater imaginative faculty, that what is described in them can be a cipher for something we imagine (if a car isn’t described, it can be any car), but we assume it is literally true that Toutius Sextius actually saw a mud crab the other day. (We have the ability to imagine that he said anything else, but we won’t even be naturally led to do that after AI generates all his dialogue. Games which use AI for that sort of thing will be perfectly literal, totally representative of their reality, and what they give you will be the sum total of what you get, and the medium of the video game will then be complete, having achieved perfect realism. At that point everyone will move on – not just because AI will reduce new work in the medium to a slurry of repetition, but because there will be nothing left to do in games. Cf a famous conversation with Jean Renoir on youtube – search for parle de son art.)
But what happens if you reverse the approaches?
First, how do you do that?
We’ve tried it with visual media above. You do it by assuming Toutius has not actually seen a mud crab. He has some other trivial experience to share but this wasn’t coded into the game, so you imagine it in the mud crab’s place. Fine. The world is bigger and you are a child again, etc. But how do you do that with literature in the other direction?
By assuming nothing exists outside of the text. But how do you do that?
Text gives you nothing but examples. Because all text is abstract; all text is ostensive. (Now the reader asks: what did he mean by this?)
He meant you can’t help imagining your own car. You add details where none are in the text. Because the text describes ‘a Sunday morning marketplace’ and you imagine the crowds of people, the stalls, the wares, the musician, the families, the performers, the noise, the carpark. But the text says nothing more than ‘a Sunday morning marketplace’.
Sometimes the text provides details: it describes the crowd generally, it points out some of the specific stalls, it tells you about a local performer and his instrument. You aren’t left to imagine everything. Some is particularised. But it is ostensive – because it’s not being used, most of the time, to make a point about those specific things. They are elements in a wider thematic picture. They are replaceable synecdoche, things of an appropriate type. They exist so the characters being written about can be at a real marketplace on a Sunday. Sometimes it is important that a market stall is specifically selling loukoumades because the protagonist hates loukoumades and that informs his interactions with another principal character present and makes a substantive difference to what’s happening.
But you might try reading the book without adding anything into it other than what is in the text. Try reading it in the least imaginative way possible. Assume if something isn’t described, it doesn’t exist. Suddenly, almost every novel you read is about a totally bizarre dreamworld where the universe is tiny and crazy and only partially exists, and that only in the form perceived by one person (I’ll return to this point).
So much is suddenly missing. If you eliminate the wider world implied by the text, you are reading a book in the way that most people interact with visual works. And the whole thing appears strange, because literature relies on the ostensive interpretation. Most people add details to books. You don’t read the background to a scene as being particular; as long as you get a few particular details you imagine or ignore the rest. Where do the characters get food from; if they’re human, why don’t they ever go to the toilet?
The best thing I took from Vladimir Nabokov – and I don’t feel much of an attachment to his work, but I greatly respect him for this – is that he always stressed particularity. In writing something he looked at exactly what that specific thing was. His characters and settings were not ciphers, synecdoches, or excuses to expound philosophical positions; they were particular, they were expertly extracted from reality and reconstituted in particular, living detail through the filter of his perception.
Anyway – I was talking about getting a few necessary details sufficient to make something particular and ignoring the rest. By doing that you force focus. It’s necessary to force focus in this way. Think of Chekhov’s gun. Only those things that move or that are exceptional are described; everything else is assumed present and normal. Forcing focus is the same as saying you express only what is ‘intended’, rather than what is incidental. Bad storytellers describe what is incidental and therefore irrelevant, general. They don’t look at the specifics, the particularities, of the thing being written about.
In brief, if you don’t write a detail, the reader will usually take it as read to make the text work realistically. So write only
(a) specific details
(b) which matter. (Which advance the point of the work.)
Many events that happen in longer novels are synecdochical. If you are writing a book about a student, you describe her attending class only once, if that, and only if that is important to who she is and what she does. You don’t need to describe it, if it isn’t important in itself, but it’s important to know she does it because it informs her character and her choices. Where you skip intervals of time, the reader implicitly understands that she’s been attending classes during the intervals. Unless something important happens in the classroom, you shouldn’t set a scene in one. In other words, only important events should be given scenes, or ‘made particular’ (shown) while those things that allow the scenes of particularity to stand up should be should be ‘general’, or synecdochical, or in other words ‘told’.
(This is why ‘show don’t tell’ alone is very foolish advice. You need to tell some things because you must show only that which you intend to show by making the work, and you need to tell some things to put what you are showing into context.)
That method in the last paragraph is how I wrote Constantine and Crow, by the way. Rote events are not described, and events that are novel experiences for characters, if they’re not specifically important, are described only once; their continuance is implied.
Finally we move to the title of this essay.
‘Ostensible’ refers to an example, or an abstraction, standing in for a definition or a thing itself. Example: we represent temperature by a number of degrees. So the number of degrees is ostensibly the temperature. But the feeling of heat or cold isn’t a number.
Similarly, we represent the totality of the human experience through a novel.
Every single word is an abstraction, as stated above. Words are not ‘real objects’. So every word is an ostensive phenomenon, a kind of rough Impressionistic reference to something real and otherwise incalculable.
Taken further: every story is nothing more than an ‘example of the whole’ of life. The entire difference between showing the actuality and showing the synecdoche of an event is the same as the difference between the particular and the general. This is what I mean when I say we represent the totality of the human experience through a novel. No novel has every event in it and every feeling in it. But the presence of any one of them, if truly expressed, acts in the ostensible tense, as a reference to the totality. If a symphony is the whole world, so is a novel.
Every sentence ever written was written in the ostensive tense. Any one thing described implies everything else that gives it its particular shape and shade. A perfect exploration of the feeling of grief also acts as a perfect exploration of the feeling of joy.
Consider Simone Weil’s gravity: when you rise above categorising an event as only ‘either’ good or bad. From above, it all looks the same, like an imposition on being (a heroic imposition, cf my notes on heroes), and the true alternative to ‘all things’ is ‘God’ or ‘void’.
Incidentally, if you adopt the material, literal view, rather than the abstract and synecdochical, in writing your work, you can create something very absurd very quickly, because you can’t write about any of the stuff you’d naturally ignore, and you’d naturally ignore a whole host of details that would make the story more normal. I have done zero analysis on this point, but suspect this is the great secret behind many an ersatz artist, and possibly everything I have just said is what they mean when they explain their method and recommend any of their disciples ‘ignore your preconceptions’ and other like statements.
I move now to a slightly different point.
All language occurs on the same plane.
Its not just that you can direct a movie in your head. Its that the world of a book has no visual aspect at all. It exists only as thought, only prose. It has no appearance. it is a landscape purely of mind. Its identity is formed by its narrator – not twisted or described by him, not “viewed according to” but “made” “as” and “by” his description. It is a psychological landscape with no connection to physical reality whatsoever, all the more if it is contained in a work of fiction.
Art is a device that magnifies reality, and books do that psychologically. (Music does it emotionally.)
This means when you write any work, the events described in that work can be connected by pure language, and don’t necessarily have to be situationally connected in a realistic way. You can transfer phrases, or you can echo a feeling across very different contexts, in the one text, and because it all exists only as words the connection is still strong, and has meaning. It’s metaphor: one part of the work develops and/or explains the other. Again I want to use my own book as an example.
Explained simply, generally: you can transfer a character’s actual identity in a book, change everything about them, but if one comparable aspect remains, they must be considered a continuous existence within the text – even if that comparable aspect is just a turn of phrase. Because the book is nothing but the words in it. It’s all written in the ostensive tense. So as long as one aspect of an entity remains consistent, it is the same entity.
verso folio 