Free The Way the World Works: Essays by Nicholson Baker

died within him.” The director, on the other hand, must have the actor sit on the floor and look desolate while the camera moves in—in movie code, the fact that the person is sitting on the floor signals that a low point has been reached, a point so low that even the comfort of a chair is unwelcome. Or a movie will have the despairer suddenly become enraged, which is more filmable: he sweeps some figurines off of a shelf and then, after this release, sinks to the floor. Or the hopeless person will bounce a ball expressionlessly against a garage door, or toss acorns into the river: the moviegoer translates this mechanically repeated activity as “the numbness that follows despair.” The music helps a lot, too.
    How clumsy, how broad, how expensive these cinematographic sign-systems seem, when compared to the dental trays full of pryers and pickers and angled mirrors that are the fiction writer’s rightful inheritance. Any mind Tolstoy wants to enter, he enters. It costs him nothing but a drop of ink. In fact, merely by using indirect thought-reportage, Tolstoy can enter two minds at the same time:
    But for all that, as is often the way with men who have chosen different callings, though in discussion each of them might justify the other’s career, at heart he despised it. Each believed that the life he himself led was the only real life and the life led by his friend was nothing but an illusion.
    All the camera angles in the world couldn’t help you here.
    And yet Tolstoy wasn’t content merely to offer indirect thoughts. He was one of our very best introspectors, alert to uncatalogably fine gradations of moral compromise and motivic ambiguity, and sometimes he wanted us to overhear mental states rather than to read secondary paraphrases of them. So he has his characters think, “We shall see,” or “Oh dear!” or “Where was I?” or “Can it really be true?” Sometimes their inner voices are quite chatty:
    ‘If this is the case,’ he said to himself, ‘I ought to think it over and make up my mind, and not let myself be carried away like a boy by the impulse of the moment.’
    Sometimes they are jealously chatty:
    ‘I cannot be made unhappy because a despicable woman has committed a crime. I merely have to find the best way out of the painful situation in which she has placed me. And find it I shall,’ he said to himself, his face growing darker and darker.
    Did Tolstoy believe that his characters really said this sort of thing to themselves? I can’t believe that he believed it, any more than Shakespeare believed that people make life-or-death decisions in blank verse, with one hand on their chest and the other held out sideways. I believe that if I were able to tap Tolstoy on the shoulder and ask him why he had written these particular lines this way, he would say to me, “Well, I was trying to record what my characters would have told me if I had been able to tap them on the shoulder and ask them at that instant what words were in them.”
    Actually, though, Tolstoy would probably say to me, “I have no patience for questions of this kind. Leave me now to walk barefoot among the birches.”
    In any event, Tolstoy is, fortunately, not the only writer to understand that the reader’s bond of sympathy and intimacywith a character must be reinforced, goosed slightly, every so often, by a directly quoted brain-whisper. The character must say things that only we, and nobody else in the book, can hear. It doesn’t have to happen much.
    Some children’s writers do it well, and there’s pedagogy in this, perhaps: quoting thoughts is an efficient way of teaching how to match spoken language with invisible states of mind—it’s like holding up an apple you can’t see and saying “apple.” Masters of the ghost story, too, rely on the technique to create a quick shudder, as in this from M. R. James:
    ‘What should I do now,’ he thought, ‘if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply