God or the Devil: Which occupies the details?

     I'll admit that Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer is a challenging piece for me to comment on. In some weird amalgamation of objectivity and subjectivity, Prose crafts arguments that strike me as somewhat impenetrable. Despite the fact that she often backtracks and tells us (or her prior students) to disregard whatever rule she has just established, she is never wrong. In her discussion of Anton Chekhov's short stories, she often feels that she has led her students astray by making some broad generalization about storytelling, only to see Mr. Chekhov has done just the opposite with magnificent results. But was her advice really wrong?

     I'd venture to say no. First of all, I for one am no Anton Chekhov. The fact that he has gotten away with flagrant disobedience of the accepted rules of storytelling does not automatically guarantee that I will be half as successful in my own attempts. If I'm not mistaken, we discussed this idea in the second week of class with regard to grammar. Dickens crafted a splendid run-on stream of sentence fragments in the introduction of A Tale of Two Cities. Your typical composition teacher might advise against such an act because A) you are not Charles Dickens, and B) you might not be able to achieve clarity with such an artistic measure. That is not to say that one is right or wrong in the artistic (not grammatical) sense, but rather that one clearly works better for you.

     It is because of this extreme subjectivity that I generally find it easier to focus on one paragraph, one claim, or one offhand remark. In this case, a quotation on p. 196 caught my attention and refused to let it go. After recounting the anecdote about the "true-life stories" writing workshop, Prose ends the segment by quoting her friend as saying, "Trust me on this...God really is in the details." She goes on to suggest that "if God is in the details, we all must on some deep level believe that the truth is in there, too."

      The colloquial phrase "God is in the details" struck me as odd, though it took me a day or two to figure out why. Think what you will, but I have always heard a different version of the saying: "The Devil is in the details." Believing that I had simply misheard the expression, I looked it up online. According to Wikipedia, (all hail) the original phrase supposedly goes like this: "God is in the detail." Though I don't have a second source on this, I also read that this version is attributed to Flaubert: "The good God is in the detail."

     Ironically, the difference between these variations really is in the detail. Still, I think that it is a perfect demonstration of Prose's point. The original phrase, "God is in the detail," refers to a single detail, or perhaps the complexity inherent in a single object. (I.E.: The detail in that ancient Roman archway is truly magnificent.) Prose tells us that "[B]ad liars pile on the facts and figures, the corroborating evidence, the improbable digressions ending in blind alleys, while good...liars know that it's the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story..." God (and/or truth) then resides in that single tell-tale gesture, comment or revelation. He doesn't feel the need to convince us--it is up to us to notice that detail and take it to heart. My own version of the same colloquialism, "The Devil in the details," is equally apt. Since we are naturally less likely to believe him, the Devil (theoretically) would have to pull out the big guns in order to gain our trust.

      Following this logic, writers that rely on that single crucial detail are aware of the truth inherent in their work. They would love for you to believe it and to come along for the ride, but they won't (as Prose suggests) stoop to salesmanship.