The literary critic, James Wood, strikes a fine balance in his book, How Fiction Works. Although it could, the book never strays into the purely theoretical (unlike I. A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism which I looked at last week) or the mechanical (unlike Jack Hodgins’ A Passion For Narrative which serves as a manual for writers). Nor does it stray in the other direction either by assuming a patronizing tone or by gushing without substance. Instead, Wood offers a highly readable account of the fundamental elements of fiction writing, most notably the novel, and using illustrations from Don Quixote to Infinite Jest, he tracks a four hundred year arc that shows us where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
Wood also guides us on a conversation about what these elements mean. They are not arbitrary inventions. They have evolved in conversation with the culture they seek to engage. That engagement has meaning beyond mere diversion.
I don’t offer a book review here. The book was published two years ago so there are plenty of reviews already available online. Instead, I offer a recommendation (if you love books, this is a delightful read) and a few supplementary observations which I will extend over a couple posts.
Narration
Wood opens his discussion on narrative (how the story gets told in the first place) and narrative point of view (who owns the telling) by pointing out that the “house of fiction” has only two functional doors – first and third person singular narratives. While Wood goes to great lengths to illustrate the subtleties possible with a third person singular narrative – e.g. the rise of free indirect speech – he tends to neglect the first person, as if it’s an ugly step sister. The third person suggests meanings of political and theological import; it prompts us to ruminate on the nature of authority and of god. The first person suggests what? Navel-gazing? Self-absorption? Narcissism?
To be fair, Wood does defend the first person from the unfair charge that it is an unreliable voice and he cites novels like Jane Eyre, Remains of the Day and even Lolita to bolster his defense. However, there are sufficient numbers of works to warrant a separate discussion about the nature and meaning and lurking subtleties of a first person narrative. These are not mere aberrations in an ocean of third person narratives.
“Call me Ishmael!” This famous opening line of Melville’s Moby Dick introduces an almost mythic voice which nevertheless declares itself thoroughly embedded in the first person singular. Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple would be inconceivable without a first person narrative. Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) use the first person to take us inside minds that don’t work like yours or mine. Think of other novelists who use the first person singular narrator to tell their story:
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
Barney’s Version, by Mordecai Richler
Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Cohen
Childhood, by Andre Alexis
Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels
A Casual Brutality, by Neil Bissoondath
Authors don’t choose the first person singular because it’s convenient. Do they? Their choice is a storytelling strategy and it means something. No one commits to spend two years of their life writing a five hundred page novel without making a few decisions beforehand and satisfying themselves that their decisions make sense. I could be wrong. Maybe some authors make their decisions at the casino. Maybe that’s how Mordecai Richler arrived at the name Barney.
While it’s easy to dispatch the facile view that a first person narrator is inherently unreliable, there is a competing view that is much stickier: what I call the “first person testimonial” voice. It supposes the narrator is inherently reliable because he is telling his own story as a first-hand witness. Experience confers authority. This is the voice of the survivor, the voice of endurance, the voice of the oppressed. We romanticize suffering and compensate for our guilt (at not sharing in the suffering or at being complicit in it) by conferring a privilege on the voice that speaks from the experience of suffering.
But there’s a catch. We’re talking here about fiction. This privilege is a sleight-of-hand for the sake of verisimilitude. The story doesn’t gain its authority from its source (because the source isn’t real); it gains its authority from the fact that it seems real. Celie’s story isn’t factual; Celie is a character created by Alice Walker; but we trust Celie’s voice because she has endured the very things we would expect someone like Celie to have endured.
Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur
I am forever astonished at the coincidences in my reading life. I’ll stumble over something – a word, a phrase, an allusion, a quote, a reference, a string, a thread, a strand – that draws me back into something wildly different I was reading only the day before. I don’t believe in coincidences, really; I think it’s inevitable that correspondences and linkages will happen all the time. That’s how reading and writing work. The world of books is a great web far more intricate than any web we’ve witnessed emerging from the internets.
So I read about “Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur”, itself a strand in the web, stretching from a 19th century author, by some accounts the father of realism, to a 21st century critic. Wood describes the flaneur as a kind of narrator – “the loafer, usually a young man, who walks the streets with no great urgency, seeing, looking, reflecting.” He offers John Updike’s Ahmad from Terrorist as an example.
But only the week before, I had read Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (another fine first person singular narrative). There, the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, recounts a story of Flaubert’s visit to Egypt in December, 1849. Perhaps tired of young boys in bath houses, Flaubert joined his traveling companions and two Arab guides for a climb up the great pyramid at Giza. As the sun rose to shine on the top stone, there Flaubert discovered a business card: Humbert, Frotteur.
The account includes an overt reference to the hero/narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita, but the interesting word is frotteur. Literally, a frotteur is a polisher, but it also refers to a sexual perversion; a frotteur finds gratification from rubbing against people in crowds.
You may ask; what has a frotteur to do with a flaneur? Well, in my Freudian universe of coincidence-by-association, the two are intimately linked. We might say they rub together in close quarters. Both begin with the letter “f” and end with the letters “eur.” Both refer to movement through crowds. Where one becomes the source of narrative, the other leads to climax. Their connection couldn’t be more obvious.
The fact is: I don’t believe in the flaneur. I think James Wood is naive to suppose the flaneur is ever possible. Maybe I’m corrupt, but I believe that sooner or later a narrator who poses as a flaneur will start to rub up against things, will try to jostle characters together in ways that move the story from narration to perversion.
You can read part II of this post here.