Living by Fiction (4 page)

Point of View

The twentieth-century development in fiction of a thoroughly limited point of view has been overemphasized, I think, especially in the light of more radical recent developments. One could argue that the use of a limited point of view is positively old-fashioned. When Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf used strictly limited points of view, they were moving the novel's arena into the mind and voice of individuals. This is consonant with the traditional virtues of depth, of rounded character, of emotional intimacy, and of sincerity. Nevertheless, you could also argue, and I shall, that the intimate voice of a narrator moves fiction a notch toward its own surface, and as such is new-fashioned indeed. Paradoxically, such an intimate, limited point of view actually distances us from the action.

It is, after all, the phenomenal world which is literature's subject, and a given character is but one of many phenomena. A character's limited consciousness and his obtrusive voice erect a veil between us and things and between us and the forgetfulness which is total immersion. Marlow's oldhandedness does not match our innocence of the horrifying particulars he relates. Hearing his
ironic voice may strengthen the severity of our judgment of events, but it does not deepen our experience of them. We are not meant to experience them. We are meant to contemplate them.

Marlow's interrupting voice also deepens our admiration for Conrad's narrative technique. That is, it is an artifice which intermittently calls attention to itself. So also,
a fortiori
, is the obtrusive and disjunctive surface treatment of Molly Bloom's maundering mind. It is an aesthetic experience, not an intimate one. Do we enter her world? her mind? or that section of
Ulysses?
A tour de force is, after all, a power play; we gasp, but we do not weep. Finally, a narrator's personality tinges his record of events and inclines us to skepticism. And skepticism is no traditional virtue; it is the beginning of the end, of the shattering of the world of things and its ultimate dispersal into bits from which to make worlds of mind.

When several voices take turns telling a story—a device common in Faulkner, most clearly seen in
As I Lay Dying
—their effect compared to that of a single voice is even more distancing. The use of such multiple voices inclines us to relativism with respect to fictional events on one hand and toward aesthetic appreciation with respect to the artwork on the other. And when these several voices each iterate the same event, like the blind men describing the elephant, in such a way that the flow of time halts while everybody steps off and looks around (
Light in August, The Sound and the Fury
), the effect is more distancing yet. For while we as audience walk round and round some fictional event, that event, while it acquires rondure and depth before our eyes, also becomes isolated. Cut off from the rush of time and the direct flow of unconsidered sense data, a given reiterated
event—say, Luster's loss of his quarter in
The Sound and the Fury
—becomes a fixed and immobile artistic or intellectual object. When we hear each of the blind men in turn, the hearsay elephant itself seems to us more and more remote. It becomes less an experienced event than an object of speculation. It becomes quite patently an element of fiction, a focal point of artistic structure.

And so these comparatively recent uses of limited points of view may in fact be contemporary modernist in their effects. They diminish our emotional involvement in the tale and draw attention to the teller. Those limited viewpoints which are very limited or obtrusive—those which are unintelligent, out of position, alien, grotesque, or fanatical—add to the work a layer of irony, like an oblique plane. When a tale's teller is an axolotl or a dinosaur or a breast, we scarcely enter his tale with wholehearted sympathy, although we may be drawn to the character himself. So works with such narrators (Cortázar, “Axolotl”; Calvino,
Cosmicomics
; Roth,
The Breast
) move us by paradox, as Cubist canvases do. Their odd voices and viewpoints deepen our involvement in what would traditionally be considered the works' more or less invisible
surface
, the tale's teller. Yet at the same time they flatten what would traditionally be the deep part of the work, the tale itself. And so by making the deep parts shallow and the shallow parts deep, they bring to the work an interesting and powerful set of tensions, like Cubist intersecting planes.

Similarly, limited points of view emphasize the isolation of individual consciousness. When that individual is grotesquely limited, they suggest the grotesquerie of any limited stance; they stress the bias and partiality of anyone's knowledge. By moving fiction's arena from the ma
terial world to consciousness itself, they stress modern
self
-consciousness, and suggest a world in which total and forgetful immersion in events is no longer possible.

Often, as in Coover's “The Babysitter” and in
As I Lay Dying
, the points of view collide, mingle, or switch. In these cases, the point of view is simply another aspect of narrative collage, and expresses its themes. Not only is the world in bits, but our senses are parceled out among us. We are forced to be skeptics and relativists. The number of narrators of a given event may be multiplied indefinitely. The world is that which cannot be known. The world is that which we each imagine. What, in “The Babysitter,” really happened? The world is caught in a crossfire between necessity and possibility; the world is the fabrication of a billion imaginations all inventing it at once.

Return to Narration

The intrusion of the author into his own book is part of narrative collage. The author pops in and interrupts his story's flow with confiding, ironic, or extravagant comment.

The device is not new. Trollope and Fielding insert themselves into their novels at regular intervals to warn, lecture, or praise their characters or their readers, or to disclaim any responsibility for characters' misbehavior, or otherwise to strike quondam attractive moral postures. Their intention is in part traditional, then; they seek to engage us in their works' moral depths, such as they are. And they seek, in lesser part, something of what Sterne sought: but Sterne was two centuries ahead of his time. They seek, that is, to slip us the wink. The novel is a
game or a joke shared between author and reader. When a writer like Barth speaks up in his fiction today, he returns to Sterne, he parodies the eighteenth-century novel, and he makes a virtue of his own self-consciousness. Barth parodies his self-consciousness too, brilliantly: he even celebrates the self-awareness of the writer whose chosen art is so developed and all its possibilities so known that he cannot enter into it forgetfully.

Now as in the eighteenth century, a novel's chapters may open with an authorial précis of their contents: this parodies not only the older usage, but also contemporary advertising copy. (Chapter 21 of Spanish writer Manuel Scorza's novel
Drums for Rancas
is headed “Where, Free of Charge, the Tireless Reader Will Watch Dr. Montenegro Grow Pale.” This sort of irony in contemporary fiction represents the neotenous and monotonous retention of adolescent humor into adult life.)

A writer may interrupt his narration not only with his voice but also with his disconcerting presence. Borges appears in his own work as a mythical intelligence. Nabokov graces his own novels as a figure—a figure at once majestic and ironic, the way Alfred Hitchcock appears in his own films. All these interruptions and cameo appearances celebrate the art of it all; they remind us that we are as it were in a theater, and that the narrative itself is a conscious and willed artifice.

Finally, if telling a good story engages readers, then it stands to reason that you can effectively
distance
readers by telling a bad story. Say what you will of
Finnegans Wake
, it is a lousy story. So are Beckett novels, most Robbe-Grillet novels, recent Stanislaw Lem novels, and countless short stories of which early Borges fictions are the type.

Certain of the most attractive elements of good storytelling—I mean what blurbs call rip-roaring good storytelling—have been taken over by films and popular fiction. We think of a “walloping” good story as having a little death in it, and possibly some elemental forces like fire or the sea, and likely some big battles, crossed romances, exotic settings, betrayals, switched babies, murders, fortune or treasure, international intrigue, escapes, missed letters, vows, or disguises. All this drama and action appeals to practically everybody; the very popular genres depend on it; literary novels now avoid it. The serious novelist takes pains to distinguish his work from trash. If popular films and popular novels have good stories, then literary novels shall not. If despite all your precautions your novel is epic in scale, if it embodies such quaint narrative virtues as enlargement and diversity of action, forcefulness of dramatic conflict, vivid spectacle, and heart-pounding suspense, someone will accuse you of writing with an eye toward a film sale. No one will like you anymore.

Even among the serious writers of traditional fiction, dramatic storytelling went out with World War I. I do not know if Freud made the difference, or the very grave and very colorless events of the century itself; but at some point, the poeple in novels stopped galloping all over the countryside and started brooding from chairs. Everything became psychological and interiorized. External conflict became internal tension. We swallowed the arena and can no longer watch the show. Internal battles lack color. You may search the novels of Virginia Woolf in vain for so much as a single horse.

Narration, then, in the name of purity, can go the way of character. It is optional. It is suspect: recently Richard
Lingeman, writing in
The New York Times
, accused the ending of a novel of being “plotty.” Narration is finally dispensable. “To tell a story,” Robbe-Grillet proclaims from his corner, “has become strictly impossible.” Of course, Robbe-Grillet is speaking from his own theory. Telling a story is not at all impossible if the writer wants to; but for contemporary modernist writers, it is getting increasingly impossible to want to. At any rate, there are forms of fiction in which no story is told at all. These are usually short stories whose specialized forms forbid both characters and narration. These specialized forms derive from nonfiction: the scholarly article, the idea in a journal, the field report, the critical essay, the book review. Such essay-like fictions are unlikely to engage deeply our senses or our hearts. But their attraction for the mind may be considerable.

The span of fiction's movement in this century has been narrower than that of painting, but the direction is the same: from depth to surface, from rondure to planes, from world to scheme, from observation to imagination, from story to theory, from society to individual, from emotion to mind. Literature as a whole has moved from contemplating cosmology—Dante—for the sake of God, to analyzing society—George Eliot—for the sake of man, to abstracting pattern itself—Nabokov—for the sake of art. At its purest, the new fiction parallels the scheme of, say, a Stevens lyric poem: in Nabokov's
Pale Fire
, fictional objects revolve about each other and only each other, and shed on each other and only each other a lovely and intellectual light.

In the contemporary modernist view, the work of art is above all a chunk in the hand. It is a self-lighted opacity, not a window and not a mirror. It is a painted sphere, not
a crystal ball. The reader, then, must not wholly enter such a work of fiction; if he enters it emotionally, he will be lost, and miss the work's surface, where the framework of its meaning as art is spread. So the contemporary modernist fiction writer deliberately flattens the depth elements of his art. He replaces emotional strengths with intellectual ones. He makes his characters into interesting objects. He flattens narrative space-time by breaking it into bits; he flattens his story by fragmenting its parts and juxtaposing disparate elements on the page. He writes in sections; he interrupts himself by a hundred devices. In so doing, he keeps his readers fully conscious at his work's surface. Finally, he may wish to distance readers so thoroughly that he dispenses with character and narration altogether.

 

In
The Voices of Silence
, André Malraux likens storytelling in literature to representation in painting. Telling a story and painting a likeness of a face or a tree are sure-fire crowd-pleasers. (And for the idea of crowd-pleasing Malraux displays a fine Gallic contempt, in which he illogically does not include either storytelling or representation themselves.) Malraux is correct. A good story and a good representation have wide appeal. But his is a cheap shot. The more interesting comparison between storytelling in literature and representation in painting is this: that each was considered for centuries the irreducible nub of its art, and is no longer.

Art About Art

Fiction has been redefining itself along theoretical lines. It has also been advancing its claim, throughout an increasing din from film, journalism, and advertising—not to mention the increasing din from the twentieth-century world at large—to be understood as art, as high
holy art. Fiction has helped advance the successful claim of all the arts to be worth their candles. It has asserted its own purity, its disdain of mere commercialism, and its structural kinship with its poor and above-reproach cousin, lyric poetry. And in doing all this it has been increasingly interested in the subject of its own artfulness. So, of course, has painting. The enormously increased concern shown by both painting and fiction with their own art as their own subject matter reflects the overall self-consciousness of man in this century, I think; more specifically, it also reflects the quest for purity of practice which is born of this self-consciousness.