A Kernel on the Challenges Facing Knowing Perspectives
and what makes fiction worthwhile (part 2)
This is a continuation of a previous kernel on plot about the dissonance I feel between what I’m told is needed in modern literature and what I want from it.
In How Fiction Works, James Wood says, “Authorial omniscience, people assume, has had its day.” He then quotes W. G. Sebald to further support his point, “fiction writing which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself is a form of imposture…Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable.” This struggle with the narratorial voice, and particularly a knowing voice or authorial omniscience, resurfaced as I read this interview with Rachel Cusk. In it, Cusk says that the role of character in novel writing is outdated and that she rejects the narratorial voice, both concerns of perspective.
The archetype of objective, authorial omniscience is Tolstoy. He glides into different character’s heads and very matter of factly observes how they exist in relation to the people and world around them before gliding out and maybe making an observation about how all the people in the room are. On the opposite side you would have a narrator that is finding out information alongside the reader or even a few steps behind the reader.
Cusk’s rejection of character as an essential element of fiction, as I see it, is tied with the pressure to find a new entry point into objective perspective if a writer insists on a sense of objectivity. She rejects character, whether a character is narrator or not, because of homogeneity in environments, communication methods, and experiences in the world of today. The particularities of a human life meld into what she sees as the lateral reality of life—everyone moving in and out of the same phases. To clarify how Cusk’s attempts at objectivity come to life, consider her Outline trilogy. In it, Cusk presents a narrator, Faye, who is rather passive. Faye reveals little about herself, except that she is a British novelist and has a family. The novel is then a series of vignettes often starring monologues from other people, roughly seen through her perspective, with little insight into what she thinks or feels. She is a blank page or a roving eye.
Here, in the lateral or linear view of human experience, I spy the televisual reality pressing in on our understanding of character. By this I mean that the televisual reality reorders character to be primarily concerned with external occurrences moving along a timeline (ergo the homogeneity and linearity of life). Cusk’s rejection of the narratorial voice started with her dislike toward the pretense a writer has to put on for readers and how self-exposing that felt. Writing became confronting the unbelievable or difficult task of an objective narrator or having a reader believe the narrator as objective. Here I see a confluence between the problems confronted by omniscient narrators and objective narrators as often in traditional literature objectivity was conveyed through omniscience, though there can be narrators, such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, who are by no means omniscient but do give a sense of objectivity as an outsider looking in.
Besides believability, Cusk expressed concern over readers who imbue more into narrators than is actually there, such as the personal perspective of the writer. So the objective narrator and omniscient narrator face two concerns: that they are unbelievable in their role and that they are understood incorrectly and falsely ascribe views to a writer. These issues started to feel so inherent to having a narrator exist at all that Cusk dispensed with the presence of a traditional narrator who speaks in a knowing voice or of whom we know much of anything about from her Outline trilogy.
So how to solve falsely ascribed views of a narrator to a writer? And how to make objectivity or omniscience believable or real?
Separating Writer and Narrator
While the relationship between the views of writers, narrators, and their characters has always been a point of fascination in literature, it has grown so great as to push up against the very basic elements of fiction. After such a close read of Cusk and a few years into reading fiction more seriously myself, I understand and agree with the pressures and concerns over where a narrator is standing in relation to a story and what effect that has on our readers. I confess that as a reader I have encountered books where I think I’ve accurately assessed the writer’s view of the world and have been tempted to dismiss a book because of it. Why do we think this pressure for the reduction in the role of the narrator or the reduction of the writer exists?
It possibly has to do with the growing televisual reality in literature and the temptation toward the simplification that to be seen is to be known. When we see someone, we gather basic physical facts, we are like detectives putting together the pieces of this person. Like in life, it is easy to reduce the people we encounter in books. When a reader reduces a narrator or a writer (or even a character) or feels that they are knowable, then it allows for dismissiveness. Ah, I detected an angle! That is where this writer is coming from! Write them off.
“The problem for me,” as Cusk puts it in her Paris Review interview, “was that the ‘setup’ for the fictional situation takes you straight into the politics of identity and the difficulty of establishing enough of a shared basis for identity for the objective disclosure of information to become possible.” In light of my belief that literature is losing ground in terms of voice, consciousness, and rich interiority in favor of plot and visual elements, these pressures put on narration feel related.
A logical conclusion to televisual reality in literature is to decry all human experience as linear (operating always in reference to time) and homogeneous (a reduction of human experience to basic and cliché external categories without taking into account the complex internal machinations of people). Another logical conclusion is to viscerally feel the tension of a reader that wants to know where the narrator is at all times, but also the need to be convinced of something objective, subtle enough to make us believe, but clear enough not to feel untethered, obscure enough that it feels rich and dynamic and relevant to us, and particular enough that we feel the uniqueness of this human experience as opposed to any other.
But what if this setup, as Cusk refers to it, weren’t so linked to a visual or descriptive understanding of the person? Would the communication of a consciousness get washed away in the politics of identity and shared basis? I don’t think it would. There is an opportunity to not be dismissed by the reader by leaning into the strength of literature to form a complex, dynamic consciousness or narrator.
Omniscient and Objective Narrators are Alive and Well
So while I agree that there are pressures and concerns over omniscient and objective narrators and that they inevitably lead to reductionist consequences on character, I fully intend to carry on writing omniscient narrators and complex characters. However much I think about it I don’t get upset about the narratorial view so much as the pressures put upon it.
Why? Because of course the stories we write are subjective! Even if we take on the pretense of an omniscient narrator, we do not escape the basic reality that all of us exist only in our brains with our experiences and our beliefs. Isn’t the subjectivity of the process okay? That doesn’t make our attempts at writing objectivity or omniscience, or more to the point our attempts of finding objective truth any less valid and beautiful. We all know a writer doesn’t know everything. As Tara Isabella Burton said at a talk I attended hosted by the Cracks in Postmodernity podcast about the novel in this disenchanted age, “Novels are about the insufficiency of perspective.”
Junot Díaz elucidates this idea with something he said at the Writers on Writing panel, “Americans have a very antagonistic relationship with everything that points outward.” This is because, in my view, the strength of literature is to point inward, to maybe not set aside these identities but to make them so complex that a reader, even a televisual reader, cannot reduce the humans presented to them strictly to their appearance and the point on a timeline we are all subject to. This reminds me of how Tara Isabella Burton said she never uses a person in her books as a literary device, that they aren’t flat or utilitarian, that she gives them a fullness.
It is a challenge, but if the writer ceases to believe there is enough for a reader to empathize with, then why bother writing for any reader other than ourselves? This is the most elemental part of story. Cusk’s solution to this narratorial dilemma is to eliminate the author so that “Everything in the book could be witnessed, more or less, by a person innocent of hearing it or seeing it.” I can think of several books where the narrator or author was so loud and seemingly without intention that I wanted to reject the book simply because I knew what the writer wanted me to think. Outline succeeded in entirely removing or obscuring an agenda, as I perceived in my reader experience. But I hold out hope that it is possible to have an omniscient narrator, or any perspective, and still succeed in finding enough of a shared basis to not be dismissed by a reader or at least to be believable. Maybe this will mean less in-scene and more interiority. Certainly it will mean more listening, maybe more silence (a prerequisite for speech according to Kierkegaard). In the end it is a worthwhile endeavor to be subtle, even if you are trying to drive a political agenda home, because that is the only way to make use of fiction’s full range to impress different truths on the hearts of others.
My kernel of advice: Even if you fall short of true objectivity or omniscience, subtlety and care in your writing can still make a reader encounter and believe.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Natalia is making her way through several books, one of which is the nonfiction book about the birth of the right and the left called The Great Debate. However, her biggest source of inspiration came from a meetup with a fellow Tin House workshop member who also lives in NYC. The conversation was stimulating and it inspired Natalia to stick to her deadline of the end of summer for the first draft of her novel so she can trade work with this new writing friend.
Sarah is so grateful that her MFA program is finally on Spring Break. She is exhausted and is looking forward to spending the week recovering in bed with lots of good books, including Lauren Groff’s story collection Florida, Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book), a workshop-friend’s YA novel, and an advanced reader copy of Sheila Sundar’s Habitations (release date: April 2).
Neidy has started three different books this week. Having really enjoyed In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, Neidy pulled another memoir about a toxic queer relationship from her to-be-read pile, Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. She also began We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White and Tannery Bay by Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle. Neidy heard Dunn and Shinkle read from their book at the AWP conference and immediately purchased it. Although she’s only read the first two chapters, she is already obsessed with the narrative voice.
Shelby felt very productive and very overwhelmed this past week. She’s got a few upcoming reading deadlines (book club, novel critiques) that all seem to be overlapping, and she’s a slow reader. Shelby hopes to find time this week to breathe and recenter herself.