Call me Ishmael.
Mar. 7th, 2006 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI should be working on Chapter 2 of The Mirador, or on one of the two short stories that have complete drafts, or on this article I promised to write.
But I'm not.
I'm sitting here getting my ass kicked all over the map in Civ IV and thinking about first-person point of view. Why you do it and how you do it and what the heck is it for anyway?
This is what we might call first-order cat vacuuming (well, except for the Civ IV part), because the issue of first person is something that has been kicking my ass all over the map in writing The Mirador. Because--and I warn y'all about this right now, so there won't be any nasty surprises--I switch narrators. A secondary character in The Virtu is one of the narrators of The Mirador; Felix gets to take a break, at least from a narrating perspective. (And then in Summerdown, I'll switch again and poor Mildmay can sit down and shut up, while Felix gets back in the spotlight, but we aren't even there yet and that's a half-procastinatory anxiety for another day.)
But switching narrators, especially after all the blood I've sweated over getting Felix & Mildmay right, is hard, and it's throwing into sharp relief what it is a first person narrator does.
Now, it used to be, way back in the day when Daniel Defoe was the hot thing in authors, that first person was an attempt to give a narrative credibility and verisimilitude. It was supposed to be an eye-witness account of the "No shit, there I was" variety. This is no longer true, except in certain specific subgenres that I'm not going to talk about because, frankly, I'm not interested in them. Nowadays, when you pick up a novel or flip to a short story and find that it's in first person, you don't think that might mean that Huck Finn or Bertie Wooster or Adrian Mole is or ever has been a real person. It just means that the author has made certain choices about storytelling.
And sometimes those choices have to do with the flavor of an eye-witness or survivor account. Stephen King's novella The Mist uses it for that reason. So does, in a very different way, The Left Hand of Darkness. The Left Hand of Darkness, though, also uses its first person narrators to talk about subjectivity and truth-telling, and this, I think, is one thing that the first-person narrator does extremely well, if you let it.
A sidebar: not all authors choose first-person for the kind of thematic and philosophical reasons I'm discussing. Some authors choose it because their genre dictates it or because they feel comfortable with it or because they took off their tinfoil hat and this is what the voices told them to do. I don't think, back when I started writing Mélusine, I was thinking about any of these things either. As Edgar Degas once said, Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do.
Where was I?
Oh, yes. Subjectivity.
Making the choice of a first-person narrator means that there are certain things you can and cannot do, and most of them have to do, one way or another, with the narrator as character. (Which, yes, can also happen in omni, but rather differently.) The first-person narrator/protagonist is both agent of and witness to the events of their story, and that means that you never get to simply recount, This is what happened. (Even if that is the first line of The Mist. It's a lie. Because we're writers, remember? Lying is what we do.) The divide between author and character has to be constant and sharp, because you always have to remember that you aren't the one telling the story. Third-person ironically allows the author to be much closer to the narrative, because you don't have to filter the story through this other voice. (Voice in third-person has its own pitfalls, but that is not what this post is about.) The first-person narrator is not a mouthpiece for the author; if anything, it's the other way around. Because to get the value of a first-person narrator, you have to think about what that character would say, what they'd feel, how they'd react. What kind of details they notice--and it may not be the same details you would notice in the same situation. And if you want to get a particular piece of information to the reader, you have to think through the reasons that this particular character would mention it. Motiveless exposition is bad in first person, because it's obvious and because it breaks the very delicate balance of the fiction.
Which is not to say you can't have exposition in first person--P. G. Wodehouse does it beautifully. But the exposition has to be in character. First-person is like acting; you don't get to set the character down for a paragraph while you get the backstory sorted out. If they say something, it has to be for their reasons.
But that's also what makes it fun and what makes it an infinitely fascinating storytelling technique. Because you always have that question of the narrator's reliability to play with. Even a first person narrator who's trying to be truthful may not be reliable; their truth-telling abilities are limited to what they know and how they interpret what they see. Huck Finn is a devastatingly truthful narrator, but he's not reliable. Part of Twain's point, in fact, is the ways in which Huck can't be a reliable narrator, because his perspective is limited and warped. And Twain shows us this through Huck.
That, I think, is the best use of first-person: to tell a story that author and reader know is partial--both incomplete and biased. And to use that to show the reader the parts of the story the first-person narrator can't tell.
But I'm not.
I'm sitting here getting my ass kicked all over the map in Civ IV and thinking about first-person point of view. Why you do it and how you do it and what the heck is it for anyway?
This is what we might call first-order cat vacuuming (well, except for the Civ IV part), because the issue of first person is something that has been kicking my ass all over the map in writing The Mirador. Because--and I warn y'all about this right now, so there won't be any nasty surprises--I switch narrators. A secondary character in The Virtu is one of the narrators of The Mirador; Felix gets to take a break, at least from a narrating perspective. (And then in Summerdown, I'll switch again and poor Mildmay can sit down and shut up, while Felix gets back in the spotlight, but we aren't even there yet and that's a half-procastinatory anxiety for another day.)
But switching narrators, especially after all the blood I've sweated over getting Felix & Mildmay right, is hard, and it's throwing into sharp relief what it is a first person narrator does.
Now, it used to be, way back in the day when Daniel Defoe was the hot thing in authors, that first person was an attempt to give a narrative credibility and verisimilitude. It was supposed to be an eye-witness account of the "No shit, there I was" variety. This is no longer true, except in certain specific subgenres that I'm not going to talk about because, frankly, I'm not interested in them. Nowadays, when you pick up a novel or flip to a short story and find that it's in first person, you don't think that might mean that Huck Finn or Bertie Wooster or Adrian Mole is or ever has been a real person. It just means that the author has made certain choices about storytelling.
And sometimes those choices have to do with the flavor of an eye-witness or survivor account. Stephen King's novella The Mist uses it for that reason. So does, in a very different way, The Left Hand of Darkness. The Left Hand of Darkness, though, also uses its first person narrators to talk about subjectivity and truth-telling, and this, I think, is one thing that the first-person narrator does extremely well, if you let it.
A sidebar: not all authors choose first-person for the kind of thematic and philosophical reasons I'm discussing. Some authors choose it because their genre dictates it or because they feel comfortable with it or because they took off their tinfoil hat and this is what the voices told them to do. I don't think, back when I started writing Mélusine, I was thinking about any of these things either. As Edgar Degas once said, Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do.
Where was I?
Oh, yes. Subjectivity.
Making the choice of a first-person narrator means that there are certain things you can and cannot do, and most of them have to do, one way or another, with the narrator as character. (Which, yes, can also happen in omni, but rather differently.) The first-person narrator/protagonist is both agent of and witness to the events of their story, and that means that you never get to simply recount, This is what happened. (Even if that is the first line of The Mist. It's a lie. Because we're writers, remember? Lying is what we do.) The divide between author and character has to be constant and sharp, because you always have to remember that you aren't the one telling the story. Third-person ironically allows the author to be much closer to the narrative, because you don't have to filter the story through this other voice. (Voice in third-person has its own pitfalls, but that is not what this post is about.) The first-person narrator is not a mouthpiece for the author; if anything, it's the other way around. Because to get the value of a first-person narrator, you have to think about what that character would say, what they'd feel, how they'd react. What kind of details they notice--and it may not be the same details you would notice in the same situation. And if you want to get a particular piece of information to the reader, you have to think through the reasons that this particular character would mention it. Motiveless exposition is bad in first person, because it's obvious and because it breaks the very delicate balance of the fiction.
Which is not to say you can't have exposition in first person--P. G. Wodehouse does it beautifully. But the exposition has to be in character. First-person is like acting; you don't get to set the character down for a paragraph while you get the backstory sorted out. If they say something, it has to be for their reasons.
But that's also what makes it fun and what makes it an infinitely fascinating storytelling technique. Because you always have that question of the narrator's reliability to play with. Even a first person narrator who's trying to be truthful may not be reliable; their truth-telling abilities are limited to what they know and how they interpret what they see. Huck Finn is a devastatingly truthful narrator, but he's not reliable. Part of Twain's point, in fact, is the ways in which Huck can't be a reliable narrator, because his perspective is limited and warped. And Twain shows us this through Huck.
That, I think, is the best use of first-person: to tell a story that author and reader know is partial--both incomplete and biased. And to use that to show the reader the parts of the story the first-person narrator can't tell.
