A memory at the drawer
In the household novel used throughout this book, three siblings in a British town are dealing with the shop their father kept and the ledger he wrote in for eleven years, and about a quarter of the way through the book Elena opens the register drawer. The drawer comes free on the third try, and the smell that meets her is fresh biro ink in a till she believes nobody has opened since March (The Transition, Chapter 5). Imagine a draft in which, at that sentence, the narrative leaves her. It goes back to the afternoon she was twelve, when her father had a key to the shop cut for her, threaded it onto a ring and told her to keep it safe. The scene runs to two pages. It has the light through the front window, the bell over the door, the cold of the new key in her palm and her father’s thumb hooked into his cuff while he talked, and every detail in it is accurate and well observed. Then a blank line, and the draft resumes: She lifted the ledger out of the drawer.
The writer’s first readers say they skimmed the key, and cannot say why, because nothing in the passage is badly written. What has gone wrong is a matter of accounting.
At the moment the drawer opens, the reader is holding a question, who has been in this drawer since March?, and the question is at its sharpest. The departure suspends it without answering it. It then asks the reader to build a second situation from nothing: a younger Elena, a younger father, the shop in another decade, with different ages and different people present, while the first situation stays live in memory. And it asks her to file the new material against the old, since past material means something only in relation to the present it bears on. All three operations cost attention before the past has delivered anything. The draft never repays the cost. The reader had not asked where Elena’s key came from, so the scene answers no question she was carrying; it is far back and brief, so the whole vanished context is built for one afternoon’s use and then thrown away; and when the narrative comes back to the drawer, nothing in the present is different for its having been away.
Compressed to a clause, the material survives. The key she had carried since she was twelve costs the reader nothing and tells her as much. Better still, the book already has the right place for it: the doorway in which Dov hands Elena a new key because their mother has changed the locks, and the old one, held since she was twelve, no longer fits (The Dialogue Exchange, Chapter 3). There, the history of the key is not an interruption but the measure of what has been taken from her, and it needs no scene at all.
The claim
The chapter’s argument can be put as a debt.
Every cutaway starts in debt. Leaving the present spends the attention the reader was paying to an open question, and the past must repay it by changing the present before the narrative returns. Being interesting in itself does not repay it.
A cutaway, here, is any passage that leaves the present for an earlier point in the story; the term is borrowed from film editing, where a cutaway is a shot that leaves the main action and comes back to it. The claim is harsh on purpose, and three qualifications make it usable. The debt is positional: the same material at a calmer point in the present may cost almost nothing, so the first remedy for a failing flashback is usually to move it, not to rewrite it. The debt can be paid in advance: a reader who has been made to wonder about the past receives the cutaway as an answer rather than an interruption. And the claim assumes that the present carries the book’s engine. For a substantial tradition of fiction, from Proust and Faulkner to Ishiguro and Morrison, in which the past is the subject and the present is a way of approaching it, the account runs the other way, and the coda says how.
The chapter ends where the household novel’s own cutaway is revised: Nadia, two-thirds of the way through the book, with her hand in the pocket of her father’s coat.
See also: The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1), whose account of the scene applies in full to a dramatised flashback; the Reference introduction, with the asymmetry between forward and backward movement and the claim’s limits set out at length.