Week 8:

Online Lecture for Point of View II.

Point of View is the most important tool of the Writer. 

Point of View II.

So much has been written about the First Person Point of View!!  In high school, teachers often tell students not to use "I."  That might be good advice for formal, academic writing (but not anymore, really).  However, the caveat not to use First Person has a long and well-earned history.  Teachers of writing are wary of First Person because they believe it encourages *bad writing.*  But how would that be so?  Well, in some ways, using "I" does allow a student to assume that the only thing he needs to supply is his "own opinion."  And, in expository writing, the author needs to give good support examples and data - one's unexamined outpourings are not necessarily worthwhile.  

But most of the warnings against using "I" are based on evaluations of expository, non-fiction, informational writing.  For a fiction writer, on the other hand, the First Person Point of View is invaluable.  

Fiction, after all, is not a formal argument, but rather an imaginative sharing of experience - and since most of us experience everything we know as a First Person, the I  form is a natural, perhaps the most natural, method of storytelling.  However, even in fiction, writers need to carefully consider how the "I" voice actually works in an imaginative work.  Far too often, an Author imagines that it is all right to just write what one thinks, as one thinks it.  In actuality, the real Author is NEVER the Narrator, even though the whole project of First Person fiction is to create that illusion!!  It helps to visualize the Author sitting in a chair, writing or typing the story.  Clearly, that individual, both in time and in space, is not really the Narrator, since, first, writing the story or the book takes days, weeks, whatever, and the Narrator's time frame is always different.  We first want to note that the Author and the Narrator will have a different experience of Time.  If your First Person writing seems like it is coming from the Author in the chair, you have, in an important sense, not really created a Narrator.

Thinking of the Author in the Chair and the Narrator embodied in the time frame of the story is the first step in getting the Author persona separate in your mind from the Narrator persona.  We might imagine that much of the fiction we have read SEEMS like it is the direct, unfiltered expression of an "I" Author.  However, this is really not so. 

Fiction, from the beginning, has positioned itself as a "real, true" story.  All of the early novels purported to be "true stories."  Robinson Crusoe, for instance, was widely advertised to be the "discovered" diary of Robinson, himself.  And, while readers might well have believed that illusion for a time, it wasn't long before they knew it was all really written by Defoe - a man who had never been in a shipwreck or in the South Sea islands!  Nonetheless, the effect of the narrative depends on our willing suspension of disbelief - we don't enjoy that fiction unless we allow ourselves to imagine Robinson really on the island, the goats and the footprint - all of it, especially the truthfulness of his First Person voice.  Authors have gone WAY out of their way to preserve the illusion of the "true" voice.  Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, gives the job of narration to a ship captain who is writing letters to his sister about his encounter with Dr. Frankenstein at the North Pole.  In this way, the Captain's evident belief in the unlikely events of the creation of the monster influence our acceptance of the story (the ship captain is reliable, steady, unprejudiced).

This fascination with the "true" story prevails today - we still love fiction that seems to be the direct, unadulterated "true story."  And every narration that uses the First Person is dedicated to establishing and maintaining that illusion.  But that ought not to confuse the Author!!  The Author needs to know that the hardest job is to create the illusion of spontaneity and immediacy.  In reality, all good stories are carefully shaped and edited - they rarely arise from the moment of the Author's own emotion or immediate concerns.  Joseph Conrad, whom you read earlier, seemed to have had a lag of about ten years between the real events of his life and the fiction that emerged from it.  [I am not saying we don't draw on our own lives and experiences for our stories - of course we do.  Conrad did.  But to the extent that he was creating a "fictional entertainment," he created Marlow to tell the story - and Marlow is different from Conrad, even though the "sensibility" of both is evident in the fictional construct.]

This is complicated stuff, and even seasoned writers have trouble with the division between the Author Persona and the Narrator.  But if you look at works that you like, and you try to extract the Narrator from the Author, you will see that they are always different.  

One way to extend your understanding of this concept is to consider another important aspect.  The "I" Point of View does not always have to resemble the real Author at all.  Much fine writing involves the creation of specialized "voices" or Points of View.  These "I" Points of View further limit an already limited pronoun case so that the "authenticity" of the Narrator can be clearly established.  There are several different categories of "limited" Narrator forms in First Person.  Briefly, these may include

The Unreliable Narrator

The Naive Narrator

The Impaired Narrator

The Deluded Narrator

The Detective Narrator

The Manic Narrator

In your reading for this week,  you have two different kinds of "I" Narrators to analyze - and these constitute a good start at trying to see the difference between the Author and the Narrator.  In Poe's Cask of Amontillado the narrative begins with:  "The thousand injuries of Fortunado I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." 

Ok - first, we know that the "I" who is speaking here is not Poe, himself.  Poe was destitute much of his life and never owned a wine cellar, for example, nor a palazzo.  Nor is the character portrait really Poe: Poe did some violence in his life - but mostly to himself.  The unnamed Narrator is a man of great wealth, exquisite taste, faultless planning, and steely resolve.  Poe would have loved to have had these characteristics, no doubt, but the information we have on his life suggests that he did not.  

But DO we see the Author persona here?  Yes, but it is read through the language, not through the narration, and it is well hidden.  Notice that the name of the enemy is Fortunado.  Fortunado is Italian for Fortune.  If I were looking for the Author persona, I might note that it is not unreasonable to suppose that, for Poe, the enemy is fortune itself.  Poe might well have wished to take all his evil fortune and imprison it somewhere underground!!  If we were students of Poe, as well, we would note that Poe's stories often involve being buried alive in one way or another - and that Poe, himself, felt ignored, buried in a sense.  There is no question, either, that the surface level story does not represent the drives or emotions of Poe.  He might have felt that fortune was an enemy that could not be placated, but he would not have condoned the actions of the unnamed Narrator in killing a real human being and then gloating about it.  We might call this an instance of The Manic Narrator.

The second example from your reading is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper.  Here we have the example of an Unreliable Narrator.  At the beginning of the story, the Narrator tells us that she and her husband, John, have secured "ancestral halls" for a summer's vacation.  We believe her, and we are ready to hear about this lovely interlude.  Ha!  By the end of the story, we see that the Narrator is actually confined to some sort of institution, and is, in fact, creeping about on all fours, having torn all the wallpaper from the walls.  Yes, totally bonkers.  At the level of the story, we have a voice that starts out reasonable and seemingly reliable - only to find, as the details pile up, that the voice is one of madness.  But the Author is something else again.  In real life, Gilman did have an episode of mental instability - and her doctors recommended "confinement" and a strict avoidance of reading and writing (this was the old days when women were considered "mad" anyway for wanting to write!!).  However, Gilman was never certifiably insane like this creature, she merely had a vision of what it might be like to be so frustrated that one left one's reason behind.  The Authorial persona does want to tell us a great deal, however, that the Unreliable Narrator can only hint at - the misguided over solicitousness of the husband, the sense of confinement within a prison, the endless surveillance that accompanies a woman who somehow refuses to "know her place."  Thus, we have a story that is one thing in the surface Narration and quite another in the sense of "reading" the Author.

In a very real way, the Art of Writing consists in structuring the Narrator persona so that it can tell the story.  In First Person, the Author persona is largely invisible {note that in Third Person Omniscient we can see more of the Author persona in the Omniscient voice}.  The "I" point of view needs to be seamless, appearing to be a faithful representation of the character - it is only in the language, juxtaposition, and sequencing that the hand of the Author appears!

Again, complicated stuff, but once you start to look for these two elements, you will see how carefully the Author works to create a First Person Narrator who can tell the story, but is NOT the Author!!!

Next week, on to Multiple Narrators!!!