"If we start to examine the general laws of perception," Viktor Shklovsky writes in "Art as Technique," "we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic."  So there we are, taking reality for granted, because familiarity breeds contempt. Our daily lives are composed of repeated and innumerable encounters with the world, such that our perceptive powers become dulled. Shklovsky calls this an "algebraic” method of thought, according to which the world comes to be perceived not as a world of objects but as an incomplete world of ciphers and outlines:

By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not even leave a first impression. . . . The process of "algebraization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature--a number, for example--or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.

So we’re not perceiving the true meaning of things.  We’re using a form of perceptual shorthand, which doesn’t do it full justice. We’re making a part of something stand in for the whole of it, something  Shklovsky doesn’t approve of. Now step forward Mr Writer, who’s going to free us from our perceptive chains.

Literature can restore our world of meaning to us. It "exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known", says Shklovsky.  So we need to rediscover the world through the artistic process of what he calls “defamiliarization” if we want to see the world anew.

I think we can all probably agree with Shklovsky up to this point. We can’t see familiar objects with a fresh pair of eyes every time we encounter it. Would that we could, but we haven’t the time, energy or maybe even the ability. So we have a partial appreciation of the meaning in our world. Art can restore that meaning back to100% of its potential, and we have the artist to thank for that -  when he’s on form, that is.

Now let’s leave the Formalists behind, and return to our Meaning Line.

There’s any number of ways the artist can help to defamiliarize us. But at one end of our line (the left) he’s choosing to re-cast the world in his own image, and on the right in it’s own image. So on the left he’s defamiliarizing and then re-familiarizing; on the right he’s simply defamiliarizing and allowing outside influences, including the reader, a greater say in this perceptual reconstruction. So on the left we tend to get more of the author, of structured intervention, form, rules and perspectives; on the right suggestion, essences, resonance,  and independence. The left is controlling, the right less so, or perhaps, as we’ll find out, controlling in less obvious ways.

And NOW, finally, we can look at those five principles of ordering, starting on the left, with Meaning as Order.

Form always makes one tacit statement - it says: I am a definite form of existence, I choose to have character and quality, I choose to be recognizable, I am  - everything considered - the best that could be done under the circumstances, and so superior to a blob.

Richard Poirier, critic, on the vision of Norman Mailer

“He [JMW Turner] seems to paint with tinted steam . . . so evanescent and so airy.”

John Constable, artist

So let’s start on the left with the ‘Me-ness’ of the artistic world - in other words, the writer as God. The Australian novelist and poet David Malouf is a good example of this tendency. Here he is seated at the far left of our line:

The writer always wants to be the creator of the world. He wants to be God in that way, in the way in which he can breathe out of his mouth, and all the world is there, all shiny and new, with the breath just condensing on it. We try to do that. Every time you offer a description in a novel or write a poem, what you are trying to do is present that landscape or that object, make it present, as if it were absolutely freshly made, for you and for the reader.

In that quote, Malouf’s unequivocally in charge. He will alert us to the ‘stoniness’ of stone, or make us see the meaning of a bevatron in a new and exciting way - his way.

You’re looking at the world as created (or more accurately, re-created) by the artist.

As readers we often refer to the writer’s ‘world’ if we detect a powerful vision at work, one that’s consistent and self-contained, whether it be Henry James’s Boston,  Milton’s Paradise or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. No one’s saying it has to be recognizable or familiar, only that there’s a controlling imagination that appears to define its boundaries and contents, with the writer as its sole owner and proprietor. That’s certainly true of Malouf, one of whose characters, Digger, is possessed of the same impulse to encompass everything he possibly can. In a recent interview, Malouf stated;

He’s . . . a person who in quite a priest-like way is dedicated to the preservation [itals mine] of everything — he says at one point that he doesn’t want a pin or a soul to get lost. He wants to hold it all in his head, a bit like God. . . the author’s a bit like that too.

To which you might wish to add , “Some authors are a lot like that.” Take  Ernest Hemingway, who was into “preservation” in a big way.

“I am trying”, Hemingway wrote to Mrs Paul Pfeiffer in 1933, “ to make a picture of the whole world - or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.” And here he is again in ‘Death in the Afternoon’; “A good writer should know as near everything as possible.” And again in ‘By-Line’, “If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge that he has and how conscientious he is.” In order for a writer to concoct a fiction, he must never write from a position of ignorance, so he must spend a lifetime observing and learning, storing up material for when he might need it, then express it as clearly and concisely as possible.

With an attitude like that, it’s not surprising to learn that Hemingway cut his teeth as a journalist. While working on the Kansas City ‘Star’, he credited his first editor Pete Wellington with changing his verbose high school writing style into clear, provocative English.

He also digested  “The Star Copy Style” sheet, a single, galley-sized page, which contained the 110 (!) rules governing Star prose. Hemingway later would recall the sheet as something “they gave you to study when you went to work and after that you were just as responsible for having learned it as after you've had the articles of war read to you.”

Hemingway would always remember the style sheet and its core admonition: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”

The “Copy Style” sheet was a bible, containing some eminently practical rules. Here’s some others:

·         Eliminate every superfluous word as ‘Funeral services will be at 2 o'clock Tuesday’, not ‘The funeral services will be held at the hour of 2 o'clock Tuesday’. Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant ones as splendid, gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc.

·         Don't say, ‘He had his leg cut off in an accident’. He wouldn't have had it done for anything.

·         He was ‘eager’ to go, not ‘anxious’ to go. You are anxious about a friend who is ill.

·         He died of heart disease, not heart failure -- everybody dies of heart failure.

Hemingway fashioned these dicta (with the later assistance of fellow writers Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein) into a creed he not only lived by, but almost fetishized, yet he only really thought he’d perfected these stylistic ambitions over thirty years later in his novella ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, the publication of which undoubtedly bagged him the award of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature; writing to his publisher Charles Scribner at the time he noted, “This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit [itals mine].”

Which not only perfectly encapsulates what I’ve been saying in the last few pages, but also is an excellent model for the writer who wants to be in complete control of his expression and, by extension, his meaning. A brief quote from ‘The Old Man and the Sea’  shows Hemingway was deadly serious about putting his theory of prose style into practice;

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.