Through a glass darkly
More again on fiction and why we get so involved in it. There are further posts by Richard at Castrovalva and Dale at Faith in Honest Doubt, twice.
I said something in a comment on Fiction and Unreality yesterday that came back into my head this morning (hours and hours ago, and I’ve done many things and been many places since then; it seems like a lifetime ago) and suggested part of an answer to the original question (why we get so involved in stories and with the characters in them).
…of course the thing that makes (good) novels so engrossing is that in fact we know far more about the point of view characters than we do about real people. That’s the magic of the omniscient narrator. Austen can just tell us what Lizzy is thinking, and because it’s a novel, what she tells us is true. We know what’s in Lizzy’s head in a way we can’t ever know what’s in anyone else’s head in reality – we know it as beyond a doubt, as plain fact.
That’s it you see – if we are told what Gilgamesh or Achilles or Murasaki or Lizzy was thinking, then it is so, which is never ever true of real people. We know what is in their heads in a way we never know what is in anyone’s head except our own. That means we know fictional characters the way we know ourselves, and not the way we know other people; we are intimate with and close to fictional characters in a way that we can’t be with real people. We may or may not like them, but we know them.
That’s only part of it, because we know only one or a few central characters that way, and because in some fiction we don’t know any that way, and because it doesn’t apply to dramatic characters (unless we accept the convention that soliloquizers never lie, but then not all dramas have soliloquies), and because there are other reasons anyway. But I think it is part of it, and it’s interesting to keep in mind when reading fiction.
Getting back to Peter Cave’s linkage with erotic love, that could be one reason that works – one feature of being in love is having at least the feeling of knowing the other as well as one knows oneself, or almost as well. Parents of small children probably know their children’s minds as well as their own, because small children mostly don’t conceal or lie about what’s in their minds. Of course this means their minds aren’t worth knowing all that well (except to their parents) – it’s either sad or inevitable or both that as our boringness decreases our urge to conceal what’s interesting increases. The less we’re able to know, the more there is to know. The more transparent we are, the less there is to see through the glass. I could go on this way all night.
Could if I didn’t have other things to do, that is.
Shoot, OB, the one thing small children [in good health, and good mood] are never is BORING….. Exhausting, frustrating, and quite often annoying, but never just plain ol’ boring. Unless you’re not really paying attention…
We really don’t know fictional characters in the same way as we know ourselves or even as well as we can know other people. A narrator can tell us what is going on in the mind of character X, but that is all we can know about character X: character X has no more thoughts except the ones that the author chooses to reveal to us.
We imagine that character X has other thoughts or other emotions or that Hamlet is doing or thinking something when he is not on stage. Fictional characters are one-dimensional (that’s not the right word): they only exist when they exist in the text and their only qualities and thoughts are those which appear in the text. On the other hand, you can ask another person what she is thinking; she can answer honestly and you can get to know her thinking process.
Heh, sorry, Dave – I did make an exception for their parents. What I had in mind was the way small children tend to go on and on about something; I figure the lack of a censor which makes them reliable narrators also tends to make them tedious narrators.
amos – Well, true, but the point was an epistemic one. We know a lot more about ourselves, but it’s the certainty that’s the same. Other (real) people’s accounts of what they’re thinking lacks that certainty.
(That’s not to say we understand ourselves, but then neither do fictional characters; that’s often the point about them.)
Sorry OB but to my mind it’s only valid for a small portion of our literature.
Achilles, to take your example, is certainly one of the most boring character of the Iliad. A one man wrecking machine whose only dilemma, between a glorious death and a long life, reveals no depth of character. The man is as flotsam for the events and the people around him, choosing to go home after the taking of Briseis, then to fight and wreck vengeance on Hector when Patrocles dies only to change is mind again after Priam’s embassy.
The other characters, now, don’t get much in the way of exposition and are much more interesting for that. Homer sometimes show us what they feel, as an observer at the time could have inferred, by how they react and the emotions they show but there is no description of their internal life. All moments of indecision as shown as dialogues, Odysseus and Athena, the old Nestor at the councils of the Achaeans for instance.
It’s actually a feature of most early literary works that their authors are often very reticent when it comes to feelings and emotions. Look at the Sagas, Njall’s saga is a long and bleak succession of murders and vengeance and the only “emotional” part I can recall is when the old woman in a fit of prophesy cries and beats a dry bush with a stick outside of Njall’s house, bush which will later be used to burn him and his wife.
It doesn’t mean that all inner life is absent, only that it is not really depicted and very often the story is all the more effective for that.
A lot of modern fiction too is built around this, this incapacity of knowing, this refusal to let us know. Even Proust’s narrator makes no real claim to our affections while he dissects his previous and inner lifes. He leaves this claim for others like Swann or Albertine.
The long, rambling, stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom (I know that G. Tingey was referring to the poem and not Joyce’s Ulysses but poetry is something else, exploration for the most part and not creation as in fiction) reveals a lot about her (and her private habits if I remember correctly) but it hides a lot too. It’s a few flashes of brilliance and revelations in a lot of darkness and I tend to think it’s the darkness that’s important.
(It’s our capacity to identify ourselves with its characters that allows us to get involved in a novel; not us knowing about them but them leaving us enough “wriggle room” for us to put ourselves in their place, to fit ourselves inside their head, some open space between the motivations and feelings the author has already placed there.)
Ultimately (since I am well into my pedantic and pompous stride, I’ll carry on if you don’t mind!) for both fictional characters and real people it is maybe not the knowing that is important but the discovering. Being granted not a total overview and understanding, but a rare glimpse of something inside another head which, more often than not, allows us to fool ourselves a tiny bit longer (damnit! pompous AND cynical!). So yeah, the darkness is important because the unknown defines the other; otherwise it would be Narcissus all over again.
That may be why it is sometimes so easy to fall both for manipulative people (Swann again!) and great writers.
PS: I started thinking you were contradicting yourself in your last para., but I realize now that, no after all, I was just being dim… And it took me, what? 500 or 600 words? I am going back to bed!
I see OB’s point, but knowing what’s in someone’s mind and feeling “intimate or close” are two different things. When an author says X felt such and such, that makes it true. But there can still be a lot of distance and obscurity. Actually, ironic distance is something I particularly like. An example from recent memory–Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. A character can be really interesting even though a big mystery is built up about what lurks within (e.g. the woman in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach).
With kids you both know what the other feels/thinks and feel close. As to whether kids are boring…one of the amazing facts is just how much more interesting your own kids are than anyone else’s. There’s an astonishing difference!
Well, granted, it only applies to a small part of literature; I admit that. But then I said it was partial. But then some literature is more engrossing than other literature, and I’m guessing that one variable is that feeling of knowing the character or characters.
OB: I’m not sure what you mean when you talk about knowing someone. In your answer to me, you distinguish (I think) between knowing and understanding. I see a difference between knowing data about someone (I not speaking about knowing someone in the sense of having made their acquaintance: connaitre in French or conocer in Spanish) and understanding that person. Now, the data we have about fictional characters is certain: it would be ridiculous for Tolstoy to lie about his characters. We know what Anna Karenina thought because Tolstoy faithfully communicates what the fictional character, Anna, thinks. We also know what we think insofar as we are conscious of our thought. I am certain that I am thinking of this sentence right now. Whether I understand myself is another issue. I may understand another much more clearly than I understand myself or let’s say that a good therapist understands me more than I understand myself: that’s why I pay her. Now, can one understand a fictional character? I guess so, but only insofar as one imagines that that fictional character is a real person about who we have certain data.
Interesting, Amos, how the fictional characters in your post, ‘who’ are only in fact words on a page, ‘come to life’ even without your willing it…
“Tolstoy faithfully communicates what the fictional character, Anna, thinks”. Not literally he doesn’t, he tells you what he wants you to know about the piece of writing he is doing… It is, as you say, a work of imagination on the reader’s part, but perhaps an even more fundamental one than you are allowing.
Incidentally, one should appreciate that ‘factual’ persons appearing in books are subject to exactly the same processes – in claiming to grasp something of the nature of an historical individual by approaching them through texts, we are no less imposing our imagination on the perceptual world than by embracing ‘knowledge’ of Lizzy Bennett or Anna Karenina…
I’m late to this particular party, but I felt I should throw in my tuppence worth as someone who has expended considerable energy on writing (probably rather bad) fiction.
The first thought I had was that, so many times, when writing, I’ve run into the difficulty that I feel that even I don’t feel like I really ‘know’ my characters’ minds for certain. Usually the more central the character, the less of a problem this is. Sometimes, I find myself thinking “but would he/she *really* do that?” And the answer I can end up reaching is “I don’t know” – which leaves me wondering how well I know my own fictional creations sometimes.
To some extent, its a ridiculous thing to say, because the character exists only in my head. Whether anyone reading what I put on the page then has in their head a character largely similar to, or completely different from, the one in my head, is a question that has bothered me for some time as a writer. You never know whether your words accurately capture what you have in your head. It might be my limitations as a writer, but I often end up feeling some of the richness and detail may be missing.
The character exists only in your head, but characters are notorious for running away from their authors. John Fowles has a lovely passage about that in The French Lt’s Woman.