Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Although it is about the machinery of storytelling, How Fiction Works by James Wood is not limited to the novel. In the chapter on "Real and Literary Detail", Wood refers to a piece of history that has contemporary implications: the first-ever televised debate between two candidates for the White House, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Political legend has it that the "sinister" Nixon lost to the "cool" Kennedy in 1960, thanks to the medium. On this point, James Wood says that...

"People thought they knew what Richard Nixon looked like, until he was placed alongside the fairer Kennedy, and the television lights blazed. Then he looked different. Likewise, the married Anna Karenina meets Vronsky on the night train from Moscow to Petersburg. By morning, something important has changed, but is as yet not properly acknowledged by her. To evoke this, Tolstoy has Anna notice her husband, Karenin, in a new light. Karenin has come to meet Anna at the station, and the first thing she thinks is: 'Oh, mercy! Why have his ears become like that!' Her husband looks cold and imposing, but above all it is the ears that suddenly seem strange — 'his ears whose cartilages propped up the brim of his round hat of black felt.' "

It's all in the details, my friends. The three TV debates between McCain and Obama will be decisive. Future historians, with their eyes on the candidates' ears, will write, "People thought they knew what X looked like, until he was placed alongside Y, and the television lights blazed. Then he looked different." Once again, it's the medium, not the message, that counts.