Ch 5: The fifth chapter is situated in contemporary times, centered on two recent novels that involve detailed description of the battlegrounds of the First World War. Jean Rouaud’s Les champs d’honneur and Jean Echenoz’s 14 feature two lyrical or quasi-lyrical passages relating the experience of trench warfare. I read these on the background of the tradition of lamentation, exemplified by a late medieval allegory on the English-French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Rouaud allows a – once again ironic – lyric recovery to his protagonist who is transported back from the front to spend his last days in Tours. His writing recovers, also, a connection to layers of cultural tradition, allowing a rhetoric of praise independent of nationalist heroism. Echenoz touches at the end of these functions of the lyric, in a turn to a perspective entirely determined by ordinary life, here and now.

Starting with the observation that the word translation has its etymological roots, as does metaphor, in notions of space, this chapter attempts to revivify the relevance of the notion of space in translation, by relating it to the space that typically is occupied by textual editors. It takes the example principally of Samuel Beckett: looking at examples from his own translation practice as well as his attitudes towards that practice; looking at the work of scholarly editing that went into the four-volume edition of his letters; and questioning the role of the editor who has traditionally been seen as ideally invisible and authoritative. The various stages that go into the making of such an edition – transcription, translation, selection, annotation – are revealed to be reluctant to conform to the notional ideal of the editor’s transparency.

Knowing when to stop: define your parameters. ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ – take no small detail of everyday life for granted. Start broad and shallow; later go deep and narrow. The big story and the little story – keeping the balance right. Keeping research unobtrusive. Historical fiction: checklist of areas for initial research and suggested sources.

‘We’re not looking for historical truth but for fictive plausibility, on terms the writer must establish with the reader. A better question than ""Is this true?"" is “Have I made this seem plausible?”’

Although doodling is a break from putting words on the page, it is not necessarily a pause from writing, because the process includes reflection. This chapter explores the ways doodling and writing may have intertwined for Conrad, who – like his characters Blunt, Razumov and Stevie – doodled; in the Shadow-Line holograph there are 109 doodles. By moving his doodles from the margins of the manuscript to the center of discussion, a visual portrait emerges of an artist for whom “procrastination” and productivity worked in delayed symbiosis.

The Conradian fauna range from the albatross to the yearling and contain more than 150 different species of nonhuman animal. Despite the biodiversity, it is easy to overlook Conrad’s animals because they most frequently appear in metaphors and similes: at first sight, they lack agency, physical presence and independent meaning. But contrary to an articulated evaluative ideal of animal studies, Conrad’s animal metaphors invite reflection on human–animal relations, and demonstrate that an author can write attentively, sympathetically and thoughtfully on animals, despite primarily mentioning them in metaphors. The unreality effect, which I argue unites Conrad’s unconventional animal metaphors, confronts the reader to question the reality of the fictional construct. The unconventional sayings that produce this unreality effect all say: we have the appearance of a marginal, incidental detail but we are one of the most complicated structures in the text.

Chapter 7 explores voices at the margin of society in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. To the extent this novel on seafaring is autobiographical, it also explores Conrad himself as a marginal subject. The novel is one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a class of people frequently considered to be marginal: a multinational group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh and deadly conditions, executing their menial jobs heroically (with notable exceptions). To move from the margin to the center, take up the pen and write a compelling story about this life for the middle-class literary establishment – first published in the conservative W. E. Henley’s The New Review in 1897 – is the part of Conrad’s achievement I focus on in this chapter. The chapter explores how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor – like the heroism of serving coffee, which the novel discusses.

The difference between literary language and flowery prose. Checking adjectives and adverbs are really doing a job. Detail implies significance: description needs a reason. Description should produce an effect rather than draw attention to itself as an effect. Why clichés endure – and why we should beware them. Metaphors and similes – keeping them real. The debate over modifiers. Muscular verbs. All description comes from a particular standpoint. Describing place. When detail is relevant and how much is too much. Chekhov’s gun. Telling details. Showing instead of telling.

‘We all know, deep in our egotistical little hearts, when we have written something that has no function in the text other than to show off what good writers we think we are. We have at this point stopped communicating with the reader and are being self-indulgent: we have stopped doing our job and are doing something else.’

This chapter discusses a grammar of realism that calls upon a variety of prose effects, including the management of time effects and the presence of abundant or telling detail, to show what is at stake in realist writing and how much happens in the prose despite its alleged retreat from artifice. Although realism has found itself assailed periodically, often for its artifice, this chapter testifies to the enduring value of realist prose while offering insights into its evolution.

Chapter 5 turns to cognitive depth, another aspect of our thinking that is regularly reflected in the way we formulate our thoughts. On the one hand, we can think things through, and formulate them in language, in much detail, or we can remain on the surface, sticking to the mere essentials. A focus on granularity patterns in linguistic analysis therefore provides insights into the speaker’s conceptualisations relative to a situation context, aspects attended to in depth, and diversity between individuals and types of situations. On the other hand, we can be more or less certain about what we describe, reflecting our expertise or the uncertainty of the subject matter itself. Variability in certainty adds a dimension of reliability to the speaker’s contribution, which is decisive for assessing the status of relevant concepts. Both aspects, granularity and certainty, work together, as experts will often be able to look into things in much more depth than novices – but on the other hand they don’t always need to, as they quickly recognise patterns that they’ve come across before.

Chapter 3 examines the formal realism of “reverent natural history,” describing the formal properties of natural histories in ways that we have assumed were the sole province of the realist novel’s descriptive operations. The focus is on P. H.Gosse’s seashore trilogy, including A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, The Aquarium, and Tenby. These formal properties include: the prevalence of detail that the inductive process and theological orientation that the texts encourage; the quality of dilation as a function of reverence; and how detail, dilation, and minuteness are formal and thematic attributes of these natural histories, which reflect a religiosity that goes beyond the overt references to design arguments. The chapter’s second half focuses on two natural environments of the seashore naturalist: the aquarium and the tide-pool. These environments are read as literary figures, as heightened sites of metonymic display.