Let me start this entry with a writing craft opinion: The most important function that detail serves in a story is to show us what, and how, the main character notices. This is equally true of first and third person; a fictional world is, or should, largely be constructed via an idiosyncratic sensory apparatus and mind. This is, of course, the way it works in real life as well. My wife’s nose is a finely tuned instrument, and she frequently picks out smells I never would have noticed; my hearing is both sensitive in detection and reaction (faint repetitive sounds that other people might ignore can drive me crazy). And then there’s particular aesthetic noticing, the particular things a person finds beautiful or noteworthy, as well as the ephemeral considerations of mood—the things I notice on a happy, calm day are very different from the things I notice when I’m sleep deprived or anxious; or perhaps they are largely the same things, but they can look and sound very different. (The happy, playful squirrel can easily become a flurry of repellent claws on bark depending on one’s evanescent emotional timbre.)
“In Love With Ariadne” is in many ways an unremarkable Trevor story. We have the usual components: a loner, a state of vague emotional turmoil, the achievement of a final unhappiness. The specifics here are: the isolated main character, Barney, who lost his mother when he was three, and who has come from a small town to postwar Dublin to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor; emotional turmoil in the form of Barney’s intense attraction to his lodging host’s strange daughter, Ariadne; and a final unhappiness as he learns Ariadne, following his mild advances, has moved into the same convent that was kind to her when her pedophilic father killed himself.
What stands out to me in this story is Trevor’s deft use of detail to delineate Barney’s mental and emotional state. The story, in fact, begins with details, a description of Barney playing in his father’s yard, that goes as following:
Images cluster, fragments make up the whole. The first of Barney’s memories is an upturned butter box—that particular shape, narrower at the bottom. It’s in a corner of the garden where the grass grows high, where there are poppies, and pinks among the stones that edge a flowerbed. A dog pants, its paws stretched out on the grass, its tongue trailing from its mouth…
These are a type of detail that James Wood calls off-duty details, and that I sometimes call passive details in my classes. That is, details that are essentially arbitrary, that serve no purpose in driving the narrative forward or characterizing the person noticing them. The butter box could be a wine bottle; the dog could be a cat. The story is larded with details like this, colors and descriptions of furniture and building exteriors. Consider, for instance, this depiction of the porters and their lodgings at the Dublin medical school Barney attends:
They wore black velvet jockey caps; one carried a mace on ceremonial occasions. They saw to it that bicycles were wheeled through the vast archway they guarded… In the archway itself, posters advertised dances and theatrical productions. Eminent visitors were announced. Societies’ account sheets were published. There were reports of missionary work in Africa.
Beyond this entrance, dark facades loomed around a cobbled square. Loops of chain protected tidily shorn lawns. The Chapel stared stolidly at the pillars of the Examination Hall. Gold numerals lightened the blue face of the Dining Hall clock. A campanile rose fussily.
Not only does none of this especially matter to the story, but it also tells us next to nothing about Barney. But is that true? One could argue that, in the undifferentiated banal fineness of the detail, it tells us a great deal: here is a man that, whether due to the early loss of his mother, the indifference of his upbringing, or in-built character, seems to notice everything with the dispassionate gaze of the doctor he is studying to become, yet sees nothing emotionally. The prose—one declarative sentence after another—perfectly mimics the flatness conveyed in the detail we’re given. Barney is a cipher, but his character nonetheless emerges through Trevor’s subtle, but brilliant use of detail.
The story continues in this mode until he encounters Ariadne. Then the details become important and focused, almost caressing. One night Barney comes home drunk and (creepily) opens the door to her room and enters, wishing only to observe her as she sleeps, until dawn. Love has focused Barney’s diffuse, dull attention. So it remains until Ariadne locks herself away, and he returns to his natural state. Tellingly, the memory of Ariadne that persists, for him, is a bus that passed him in the snow as he waits outside the convent, hoping for a glimpse of her. We leave him in the midst of his accrued memories, passive details that construct his passive character.
