A small discovery

[fpb]

I suppose that what I am about to say will come as no surprise to anyone else, but to me it was.

Let me start from the fact that, as a writer, I am almost wholly self-taught. I have never been to a single creative writing class, and all I know about writing comes from criticism from friends and other readers, and from my fondness for the great literary critics of the past - Longinus, Dr.Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Benedetto Croce, A.C.Bradley, G.K.Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, Walther Benjamin, to name a few. What is more, my experience begins with comics, a medium which shares with cinema the presumption of an objective or largely objective camera eye.

I have, therefore, been both annoyed and bewildered by the frequent critical squelches I received from betas and other readers, to do with Point Of View. I could not understand why a narrative or description that seemed to me to cover points clearly and in the necessary detail should be condemned because of (the details of the fault not even explained) POV. And not only was it strange to me, but nobody even bothered to explain it. POV was called in to condemn whole items on the assumption that failures in it should be as obvious as mistakes in elementary grammar.

As so often in cases of this kind, what was needed was to understand a whole set of different categories. This came to me all of a sudden, going over the notes of a (this needs to be said) particularly intelligent and careful beta. It occurred to me that this person regarded the so-called omniscient narrator as suspect from the word go, and took it for granted that any narrative must be done from a particular point of view, that is, that any narrative must be - understand, not may be, must be - subjective, slanted, and unreliable.

This was where I simply did not think the same way. To me, once I realized what the beta was assuming, it immediately sounded as nonsense. And that is not to criticize that beta, who, as I said, is a highly intelligent person, most of whose suggestions were very useful. No, it is a criticism of the whole culture. Not only did it conflict with the way I wanted to write, which is largely from an impersonal if not omniscient position, it also condemned the vast majority of the literature of mankind. Most cultures and most of our own history have assumed that a story should be told from an impersonal point of view. Indeed, it condemns whole genres such as epic and theatre to utter impotence. A theatre writer has only his characters and the stage to deal with: while any character may be shown with his or her foibles and slants clearly visible, unless the writer him/herself assumes an impersonal position with respect to his/her narrative, you could have no narrative at all. How does anyone stage a Hamlet that implies the unreliability, not of this or that character, but of the whole narrative structure? Perhaps here we have the root of so many indigestible and irrelevant modern stagings of classics. And as for the epic, imagine what a damned nuisance it would be to have to spend twelve or twenty-four books of narrative verse trying to determine whose POV is being taken and how that is slanted and unreliable. I think that anyone who starts reading Homer or the Mahabharata assumes an impersonal narrator as a matter of course; if they didn't, I very much doubt whether they could read more than a few verses. And above all, they would miss the point of everything they read.

Narrative with a personal accent, narrative built from a definite POV, is a highly useful device, and I hope I can handle it no worse than most; but POV raised to a fundamental and inevitable constructive principle of the whole art of narration, seems to me no more than a piece of intellectual dictatorship - of that "dictatorship of relativism" that the Pope, himself no mean artist with words, warned against. Far from enlarging the range and depth of literary art, it narrows it. It demands an extra layer of attention from writer and reader all the time, and that for no good reason.

Worst of all, it seems to me an intrusion of an omniscient-narrator of a peculiarly poisonous and arrogant stripe. If I, like Trollope or even Tolstoy, simply start out by saying, "it was this way, and this way, and then this happened," I think that the stupidest reader will not forget that this is, after all, my narrative, and the way I see things. But if my narrative - which never ceases to be my narrative - starts from the presumption that I can, as narrator, catch the different accents, mentalities and views of all my characters, and write from their point of view rather than mine, then I am exercising the most appaling presumption and tyranny over both my characters and my readers. I am assuming that I am impartial enough to hear each of their voices exactly as they are, and to transmit them to the readers without the interference of myself as "omniscient narrator." In other words, I claim to be omniscient enough to be twenty, forty, a hundred narrators. The truth, of course, is that I never once cease to be myself.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I was surprised, when I began falling into writing circles in LJ, at how many rules people apply to their writing that I had not even thought of--for instance, that a novel must start with a bang and keep up at a very fast pace. Many of my LJ friends and acquaintances (those are people whose comments I like to read in other people's journals but whom I haven't friended yet...) who write seem to spend a lot of time trying to make their writing faster and more action packed.

I think you can disregard advice about point of view; you're writing with different assumptions. Some readers may not like an omniscient narrator, but then again, if they read on, they may get drawn in. And if they don't, that's fine; there's plenty of fiction with non-omniscient narrators out there for them to enjoy.

I like limited points of view sometimes. In War and Peace, when Natasha is seeing an opera for the first time, her naive point of view is hilarious. I also like it when the (omniscient or otherwise) narrator turns to talk to you sometimes, like, for instance, in Terry Pratchett novels. Oh, there are lots of ways to tell a good story...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Hear hear. For a totally shameless display, read the opening pages of Trollope's Doctor Thorne - a dozen or more pages of continuous narrative in Trollope's own voice, including addresses to his readers!

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

for instance, that a novel must start with a bang and keep up at a very fast pace.

It's a semi-abitrary rule. Publishers know that slow-paced, slow-start novels don't sell well. I think the idea is that many book readers pick up a volume and decide whether they want to read it or not based on the first few pages. Many good novels are slow starts, but they'd be difficult to sell in the modern market.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It is perhaps worth noticing that both Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring start quite quietly.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Not my favorite part of either book. I also prefer Jane Austen's snappy beginning to Pride and Prejudice (as opposed to, say, Mansfield Park). You said you were influenced by comic books; I was influenced by film. The James Bondesque opening sequence is sort of stuck in my mind, even though it doesn't really work for books.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

All I was saying is that if we talk commercial success, here are the two most successful books since the Sherlock Holmes stories (many of which also start slowly, funnily or quirkily) starting without any of the conventional devices. And nobody would accuse Professor Tolkien and Mrs.Rowling of producing unsaleable work.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Well, in a world where most books are not successes, most authors would rather compromise a little and produce something that they know will sell rather than risk not getting published at all. I think it's a valid choice - and I do wish that more publishers would take risks.

There are some slow books I like. Les Miserables, for instance. The rambling is half the point!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sure, I understand the publishing exegencies (even if I can't spell that word w/out a dictionary and am too lazy to reach over and get a dictionary...). If you want to become a commercial success, it makes sense to try--insofar as you can without making yourself miserable--to write what people want to publish (and what people want to read, of course). The thing is, even if you do write exactly the sort of thing that people want to publish, there are SOOOO many would-be writers out there that you just may not be lucky enough to be picked to be published. So you shouldn't bother changing the way you write **too** much--certainly not to the degree that you feel like a sellout--all with the aim of getting published, since it may not happen anyway.