Show, Don’t Tell? Or Show and Tell? Perspectives on Prose Fiction

Here are two passages from highly regarded works of fiction—both of which describe a young woman’s experiences listening to an older man:

Helen tried to meet her father in the trackless territories of his delirium. She sat with him and listened as he talked without interruption. Sometimes she asked a question, more as proof that she was listening than to get a proper answer. Her efforts to understand him were sincere, and based on the hope that if she could find any shred of sense, any thread, she would be able to hold on to it and lead her father out of his maze. Yet her attempts always met the same end: Leopold’s thoughts curved and curled on themselves, forming a circle that Helen was unable to enter, and he was unable to leave. As if to prove the possibility of physical movement, she was compelled to go on long walks after experiencing this mental claustrophobia.

Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton’s “affable archangel;” and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.

The first passage is from the first section (“Bonds”) of Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 novel, Trust (page 44 in the Riverhead Books paperback edition); the second is from Chapter 3 of George Eliot’s 1871 Middlemarch.

I want to focus primarily on what the two passages have in common, but let me briefly touch first on the nuanced ways in which they differ. In the Diaz passage the narrative voice is distanced. Much as what we are told of the psyches of both characters rings true, there is nothing that shows us the workings of Helen’s mind from the inside (or, for that matter, that shows us the workings of her father's mind from the inside). But the extended metaphor of the maze works very neatly—and overall, this is a fine passage of exposition, telling us in straightforward fashion of a pattern of interaction between Helen and her father. Compared to Diaz’s extended use of the maze image, Eliot’s use of the labyrinth is quite loose (though there are obvious similarities). Like the Diaz passage, the Eliot passage seems to be telling us in straightforward fashion about the psyches of a young woman listener and an older male who does most of the talking. But for much of this Eliot does not quite tell it ‘straight’; she uses what has come to be known as free indirect style. In other words, what we are given is not the direct assessment of an objective narrator telling us of “the scope of his great work,” but rather the shared sense of Dorothea and of Casaubon as to the scope of the “great work.” (Eliot does not write “it seemed to Dorothea that he had been as instructive as Milton’s affable archangel…”; the clause “it seemed to Dorothea that” is merely implied, giving the reader a more direct experience of what is happening in Dorothea’s mind.)

There are, then, interesting differences between the two passages. But the similarities are at least as interesting. Neither the Eliot nor the Diaz passage gives us any dialogue, any concrete “scene.” They are passages of exposition, dealing in generalizations; we are told of the characters’ impressions being formed, rather than shown specific examples. To deal in generalizations in this way—to summarize for the reader the way in which a character behaves, and even to summarize a character's inner nature—has long been considered an old-fashioned way of telling a story, a very "Victorian" approach. Eliot, indeed (often regarded as the greatest Victorian novelist) is arguably the most accomplished practitioner of this way of writing fiction. When, to pick another example, she tells us about Rosamond's nature, the psychological commentary crackles brilliantly into a fiery fury:

Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman.... Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide. She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clue to fact, why, they were not intended in that light—they were among her elegant accomplishments, intended to please. (Middlemarch, Chapter 27)

Like those of Eliot, the passages of exposition in Diaz's prose are capable of throwing off heat and light in equal measure, and again and again (especially in the first of the book's four parts, presented as a novel “by Harold Vanner”—the book's structure offers readers more of a postmodern puzzle than a Victorian one) we are given Victorian-style commentary on the characters that crackles with a flame almost as intense as that of Eliot's summing-up of Rosamond's nature:

During this time, Mrs. Brevort was exuberant in her grief, exploring all the social possibilities of mourning. She found unsuspected radiance in the deepest shades of black and made sure to surround herself with particularly plaintive and misty-eyed friends so that she could highlight her arrogant form of sorrow, which she called "dignified." It is not unlikely that she felt genuine pain under the somewhat farcical spectacle of bereavement she put up for her circle. Some people, under certain circumstances, hide their true emotions under exaggeration and hyperbole, not realizing their amplified caricature reveals the exact measure of the feelings it was meant to conceal. (page 122)

In reviewing Trust in the New York Times, Michael Gorra (to my mind, among the most astute literary critics alive today) has remarked on Diaz’s tendency to “report on his characters’ inner lives instead of dramatizing them,” to give us lives “more often in summary than in scenes.” In other words, Diaz is doing very much what George Eliot is famous for doing--and doing the exact opposite of what generations of creative writing students have been told they must do. Since the early twentieth century, aspiring writers of fiction have been told show, don’t tell. And since the early twentieth century most highly regarded fiction writers have very largely followed that advice.

Of course, there are a great many ways of showing rather than telling. Minimalism is perhaps the most famous; Hemingway does almost no telling at all, and doesn’t show the reader all that much, either. (His view was that, as a writer, you “could omit anything if you knew that … the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”) But there are many other ways of showing, not telling. Roddy Doyle’s style—influenced by Joyce, no doubt—entails showing almost entirely through dialogue. (Doyle’s style reminds us that one can write fiction made up of scenes that “show” without, in a physical sense, showing anything—without including any physical description whatsoever). One can show rather than tell with the intensely offbeat interiority of Joyce Carol Oates (where scenes often take place entirely within the mind of the protagonist). One can show rather than tell as James Baldwin often does, with everything written in the first person. One can show rather than tell as Alice Munro often does, with variable-time sequencing (zooming in to see and hear the details of scenes that define a life in all its normality, all its strangeness, zooming out for bird’s-eye views extending over continents, over decades). One can show rather than tell as Atwood often does, in biting scenes that sardonically flip the world inside out. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has its own principles of showing—principles that demand a good deal of inference on the part of the reader, but that tell the reader very little. The narrators in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go may seem to tell us a good deal, but their telling is in itself a sort of showing—as is perhaps the case to a large extent with any work of fiction featuring a narrator possessed for whatever reason of limited understanding. (The narrative approach of such novels might be regarded as an interesting sort of halfway house between showing and telling.)

This is to single out only a very few individual authors and works.* One might add, as a group, the long list of late twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction writers who tell their stories entirely in the present tense. (Arguably, to use the present tense throughout a novel is to enforce the rule of show, don’t tell.)

Is show, don’t tell nearing the end of its long run? Has the tide finally begun to turn? I suspect that may indeed be the case; Diaz is not the only distinguished fiction writer these days to be doing at least as much telling as showing. And the Pulitzer surely says something about the way the wind may be blowing.

Nineteenth-century fiction writers typically leaned a good deal more towards tell than have twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century fiction writers. Victorian novelists told their readers a great deal—as did the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. But they also showed a great deal; Tolstoy and George Eliot may be famous for telling rather than showing in certain passages, but they were both also immensely talented with dialogue, and with “scenes.” In short, they struck a balance between show and tell. If the pendulum is beginning now to swing back towards more exposition, and away from any presumption that everything must be presented through “scenes,” that to my mind augers well for the fiction of the twenty-first century.

*It strikes me as I review the list presented here that it includes no fiction writers from outside the Anglo-North American tradition. And it strikes me further that the generalizations I’m making here may not apply to writers outside that tradition. Do novels such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things follow the show, don’t tell principle? Far less, I suspect, than do most twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century novels in the Anglo-American tradition.