Making a car appear in the mind

 

      Milton Avery (1885–1965) Edge of the Forest

In this earlier post I listed some idea about enargia, the rhetorical term for describing something so exactly that it conjures the thing into existence.... it evokes the brightness of being.  There were examples from Updike and Shakespeare.  

Here's George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain on Tolstoy's "factual" prose.

A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those "laws of fiction" we'e been seeking. "The car was dented and red" makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: "The dented red car slowly left the parking low." Notice how little we doubt that statement, the spontaneous, involuntary buy-in that makes us forget that there is no car and no parking lot.

    But to say that the story is nearly all facts doesn't mean that Tolstoy is a minimalist. He has a gift for making sentences that, staying within factuality, convey a bounty of information and make a rich, detailed, almost overfull world.

    Consider the difference between "The maid carried the samovar to the table" and Tolstoy's version: "After flicking with her apron the top of the samovar which was now boiling over, she carried it with an effort to the table, raised it, and set it down with a thud."

    That apron flick, the woman carrying the samovar "with an effort," the thud as she sets it down, the fact that she's carrying it below the level of the table (she "raised it" before she could "set it down" ) are all acts embroidered into the basic action "woman carries samovar to table." Although they don't make a more particular person (anyone could find a samovar heavy), they make a more particular action. The samovar is heavier and hotter than if she'd just "carried the samovar to the table."

This also reminds me of John Berger writing about the artist Morandi who drew a "Place where a thing is just coming into being."  

I'm thinking about the difference in representation and "bringing into being".