"Too Much Description!"

The Cry of Contemporary Readers

“We are three paragraphs in and the story hasn’t even started yet.” That’s what one of my students recently proclaimed aloud (in a tone of disgust). What did he mean by “the story hasn’t even started yet?” Surely, if you’re three paragraphs in, it has. The book he was referring to starts off like this:

A low hut built of turf roughly thatched with rushes and standing on the highest spot of some slightly raised ground. It was surrounded by a tangled growth of bushes and low trees, through which a narrow and winding path gave admission to the narrow space on which the hut stood. The ground sloped rapidly. Twenty yards from the house the trees ceased, and a rank vegetation of reeds and rushes took the place of the bushes, and the ground became soft and swampy. A little further pools of stagnant water appeared among the rushes, and the path abruptly stopped at the edge of a stagnant swamp, though the passage could be followed by the eye for some distance among the tall rushes. The hut, in fact, stood on a hummock in the midst of a wide swamp where the water sometimes deepened into lakes connected by sluggish streams.

On the open spaces of water herons stalked near the margin, and great flocks of wild-fowl dotted the surface. Other signs of life there were none, although a sharp eye might have detected light threads of smoke curling up here and there from spots where the ground rose somewhat above the general level. These slight elevations, however, were not visible to the eye, for the herbage here grew shorter than on the lower and wetter ground, and the land apparently stretched away for a vast distance in a dead flat—a rush-covered swamp, broken only here and there by patches of bushes and low trees.

The little hut was situated in the very heart of the fen country, now drained and cultivated, but in the year 870 untouched by the hand of man, the haunt of wild-fowl and human fugitives. At the door of the hut stood a lad some fourteen years old. His only garment was a short sleeveless tunic girded in at the waist, his arms and legs were bare; his head was uncovered, and his hair fell in masses on his shoulders. In his hand he held a short spear, and leaning against the wall of the hut close at hand was a bow and quiver of arrows. The lad looked at the sun, which was sinking towards the horizon.¹

That which the student found so repugnant was the description of the scene in which the story was to begin. Three whole paragraphs of description before you even get a bit of dialogue or any kind of action…utterly unbearable!

This student’s bold proclamation is hardly unique however. This complaint, or ones very similar to it, are extremely common today and not just among children, either. Adult readers often balk at the inclusion of any substantive description in a book. Modern (or should I say postmodern?) readers despise being told what anything looks like! But why is this? It has not always been so. That it has not always been so is evident to anyone who reads older books because those old books are full of description but people read them to pieces and passed them on to us today.

You think G. A. Henty is being long-winded in his description? Have you ever read Charles Dickens or Henry James or J. R. R. Tolkien? If not, then you haven’t seen description yet. But description didn’t used to bother people as it does today. I dare say, people even took pleasure in reading these descriptions. Authors enjoyed writing extensive descriptions of people, places, and things, and readers enjoyed soaking in those same descriptions and allowing authors to reconstruct mental images in their minds by sheer force of their powers of verbal construction. So what changed? And what, if anything, is to be done about this shift that has taken place?

I believe there are two major factors which have affected people’s ability to tolerate and enjoy description in storytelling, the first is technological and the second is philosophical.

The Technological Shift

It’s not all that hard to sift through popular literature and to identify when this shift started to take place. Gradual at first, but now almost complete, the literary world started to move away from detailed description in the 1950’s and 60’s. It is noteworthy that it was in the 1950’s when the television became a standard piece of equipment in most American homes, replacing the radio in many ways as the central technological device for news and entertainment.

Prior to the advent of television the radio was all the rage in the home. Though this may have competed against reading itself in some ways, storytelling still involved a lot of description. The scene had to be set by words because it could not be set by visual imagery. When a young boy listened to stories about the Lone Ranger on the radio, the storyteller had to describe the scene, what his cape looked like, the horse he rode upon, etc. Even sports commentators on the radio were master describers of what they saw before them on the field. The art of description is the art of recreation and implanting images in the mind through the use of words, and it was the only way to experience and “see” something you had never personally experienced…before the advent of movies and television.

Visual representation is brute. I do not necessarily mean to communicate that it is all bad. The ethics of any given visual representation varies piece by piece. What I mean to say is that visual representation is immediate, it strikes the sense without intermediary, it communicates many things all at once, and the receiver is entirely passive in the reception. Looking at a visual representation of a story or scene requires far less mental power than listening to or reading a story.² A scene or setting that would take many words to adequately describe and communicate and rebuild in the mind of a reader or hearer, takes less than a second to strike the mind of the one looking at it himself.

One can, of course, stop and ponder and appreciate and pontificate upon what one sees, but too often we are merely passive receivers without reflection. The visual tends to be accepted without reflection or further inquiry. Now that this has become the dominant medium for storytelling, the mind of the average reader is suffering from atrophy, and finds it very difficult, and even oppressive, to take in description, to think about it, and to imagine it for themselves. “Why can’t we just watch the movie instead?”

I am personally a fan of many movies and television shows, but the sad fact is that our over-exposure to these mediums have weakened our minds and made us unable to “lift” the descriptions in many great books. This is one reason why the contemporary reader cannot bear “too much description” in the books they read. In fact it is why people are reading less and less in general. It taxes their mental powers too much because they have become weak with a steady diet of junk food for the mind while sitting on the mental couch.

The Philosophical Shift

Another significant factor in the contemporary reader’s war against description is philosophical rather than technological. The philosophy of postmodernism, in which all truth is relative, subjective, and completely in the dependent upon the observer (as opposed to truth being objective and external to the observer), has taken deep root in society. I’ll spare you (this time) my long rant on the connection between the mess we find ourselves in now and philosophical nominalism, but suffice it to say we are finding ourselves at the latter end of a slippery slope (not all slippery slopes are fallacies) that began with Nominalism, carried over into Naturalism, which produced Postmodernism, and which when full grown begets Nihilism. The postmodern mind, let alone the nihilistic mind, hates to have any external concept forced upon them.

Postmodernism is about defining one’s own “truth” and not being beholden to anyone else’s “truth.” The very nature of description in literature is about recreating and implanting an objective thing, the thing the author made, into the mind of the reader. Whether the author is relaying what he saw when he fought in World War 1, or whether he is describing what an Ent looks and sounds like in Fanghorn forest, he is external to the reader and he has an objective concept which he is trying to place in the reader’s mind. Such a notion of humbly receiving someone else’s “truth” is offensive to the mind steeped in the boiling waters of postmodern thought.

The postmodern reader eschews description because it strips him of his perceived right to be the creator of all things in his own head. He simply cannot stomach the idea of accepting something as the case which he did not make for himself. As a result modern writers who want to sell books are told to leave details to a bare minimum so that the reader can create the scenes and characters after his own image and imagination. No one cares what the author thinks the character looks like or what world he wants to make, just give us the bare bones of activity (and maybe throw in some wildly inappropriate sexual activity among 12-13 year olds), that is what sells.

The classic novelist, as well as the authors of ancient and medieval epic poems, don’t cater to that nonsense. They unfold worlds either as they were known to them or as they made them to be for their story and they expected the reader and hearer to receive, humbly, what they created or related. This is simply unpalatable to the postmodernist, to receive something as such without being able to manipulate it to his or her own pleasure, to his or her own “truth.” So, the modern reader simply, more often than not, declines.

So what? Some people would be quite content to leave the matter alone because the people are happy with this new way of storytelling. Others see this as simply the inevitable evolution (or devolution) of man, to oppose it would be like punching a rhino (it’ll only hurt you and just make the beast mad). However, classical educators should know better than to capitulate to either of these notions.

For one, there is a vast distance between momentary pleasure and genuine happiness. What pleases in the moment often leads to greater misery in the long run. The person shooting heroine into their veins is not really happy, no matter the momentary pleasure. This declination to engage well written stories makes for weak minds. A weakened mind can only lead to various forms of vice and enslavement of the soul. Virtue brings lasting happiness and it is almost always the path less trodden and that which requires more difficulty and exertion.

As to the other idea, that this kind thing is just inevitable and immutable, that we cannot pull back our people from this kind of lethargy of mind and arrogance of heart is just simply false. A people can be led to the truth, just as they can be led to foolishness. Educere, the Latin word from which we get the term “educate,” communicates the idea of “leading someone out.” As Plato’s allegory of the Cave in Republic communicates, it is a hard road out of ignorance, but it is possible. It is, further, the responsibility of those who are able to see the truth about something to do the hard work of leading others out into the light. That is, in fact, the job of educators, to lead people into the light of truth. The fact is, it matters that we have a generation of weak minded people who only want to feast on junk-food stories and mediums and believe private “truths.” We ought to see that as a problem and care to do something about it.

So, how? How do we do anything about the situation we find ourselves in? In one sense, the problem is not new. Education has always been about leading people out of ignorance and into knowledge, wisdom, and prudence. In the ancient and medieval world there was rampant ignorance about many things and wise teachers then faced similar difficulties to those now in shaping hearts to love what they ought and embrace the truth.

It is true, of course, that we are at a particular point in time in which we face unique challenges that our forefathers did not. We have the unique challenge of living in a society full of screens and visual media (something the men of old couldn’t have imagined). We also have the unique challenge of living in a post-modern (nihilistic leaning) time where people want to make their own truth and not accept truth from others. Even so, despite these new and unique challenges, the path forward is an old one.

We must simply expose hearts and minds to what is true, good, and beautiful and we must do so over and over again. We must trust that gourmet is better than fast food. We must trust that Oliver Twist is better than Captain Underpants. We must believe, and act like we believe, that The Lord of the Rings books are 10,000 times better than the movies (even though they aren’t too shabby). We must show students why this is true and love these literary masterpieces in front of them and alongside them.

One of the best things we can do to help students see the value of description is to ask them to write descriptions themselves. Recently I wrote on the exercise known as Description which is part of an ancient series of exercises known as the Progymnasmata. I am convinced that by helping students become great at description themselves that it will simultaneously give them an appreciation for it when they see other masters at work. In the same way one cannot completely appreciate a fine work of art until they have themselves applied brush strokes to canvas, so a person who has never tried to accurately describe something (real or imaginative) cannot really appreciate what another author is doing when painting an image in their mind with only words.

We have to take time with our students and ask them to reflect on those descriptions that they are reading and to really see them in their mind. They need to close their eyes and let those words paint the canvas, place themselves in the scene, before that person, or holding that object in their hand. We have to ask our students to craft with words the images that they would want others to see in their mind. What word choices will best carry across the exact image you desire to implant in the mind of your reader or hearer? It is as they grow in their own ability to see with their mind and to place images in the minds of others that their mental muscles will grow. They will appreciate, like a bodybuilder, that massive lift that Melville just did in describing that whale.

Possibly a book could have too much description, I suppose that’s not categorically impossible. Generally, however, that statement is tantamount to saying, “it’s too heavy, I can’t lift it” or “it’s too much work, can’t you just hand me the remote?” We owe it to our students and to our children not to let them be mental couch potatoes. We owe it to our nation not to let people be mentally arrogant enough to think that they are the masters of truth and can bend all stories to their own will, including the grand narrative of life itself. Being able and willing to receive description and narrative that is not your own is part and parcel with mental maturity. One can bring judgment to bear on description and narrative, of course, but not until one has been able to lift it and examine it carefully first.

1. Henty, G. A.. The Dragon and the Raven Illustrated . Kindle Edition.

2. I would acknowledge the point that one can develop being a more engaged viewer or looker upon visual mediums too. A piece of fine art is well worth more than a casual glance, but study and reflection.