Ras: Third-Person Pitfalls

“The choice of point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions.” David Lodge in The Art of Fiction

So true. In my last post I discussed the first-person point of view in the hands of a master, that old devil Nabokov. The most common point of view today, however, is third person with limited omniscience. That is, the story is told through a filter of thought generated by the mind of a she or he character.

The 19th century novelist Henry James pioneered this technique, which is also called central consciousness. James was reacting against the artificiality of earlier novelists like Anthony Trollope, whose narrators assumed a godlike, omniscient point of view. A Trollopian narrator floats above the story, making magisterial comments on the plot and characters and reading the mind of any character when it suits the author’s purpose.

The limited third person point of view is so common these days that for readers it feels natural, almost invisible. That’s good. But the technique has its pitfalls.

Consider the opening of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Everlasting Story of Nory.

“Eleanor Winslow was a nine-year-old girl from America with straight brown bangs and brown eyes. She was interested in dentistry or being a paper engineer when she grew up. A paper engineer is an artist who designs pop-up books and pop-up greeting cards, which are extremely important to have easily available in stores because they make people happier in their lives.”

The limited consciousness here is Nory’s. Baker is one of our more clever contemporary novelists; he likes to play with literary form and some of his experiments (The Mezzanine) are quite enchanting. This is a convincing impersonation of what would a novel written by a nine-year-old girl would sound like. The book reads as if it’s school essay written by Nory.

Note how these three sentences all turn on a form of the verb to be, a mark of the unsophisticated writer that quickly becomes monotonous. They also glaringly lack periodicity – the arrangement of words within a sentence for maximum effect that introductory composition courses seek to teach. Nory just spews out the thoughts as they occur to her in what feels like rough-draft form. And there is the grade-school clunkiness of Nory’s prose embodied beautifully in the phrase about pop-ups, “which are extremely important to have easily available in stores because they make people happier in their lives.” This kind of moronic simplicity of thought is funny but deadly in large doses.

Have you ever had to listen to a little kid tell a story? “And then the tyrannosaurus rex chased the brontosaurus through the swamp and then he caught him and then he grabbed him by the neck and threw him down and then he bit into his neck and the blood spurted….” It gets boring pretty quickly and that’s the problem with Nory as a narrator. The 226-page novel feels as if it is indeed everlasting. It gives me no pleasure to bash Baker, a writer I admire, but I confess to  getting no further than midway through the fourth chapter of this book. A fundamental paradox of art is in play: If you choose a naïve, unsophisticated central consciousness, you need to make the character both plausible and interesting, no easy task.

Here’s another limited third-person narrator. This is the mind of Simon Camish, a British lawyer who is one of two protagonists of Margaret Drabble’s novel The Needle’s Eye. The occasion is a dinner party at which Simon meets Rose Vassiliou, an heiress who years back had been made a ward of the court to delay a marriage her family objected to.

“Simon was speculating about wardship, and the possibility of family relations so bad that such dire acts of legal aggression could take place within them, and penal clauses in industrial relations bills, and the relations of law and goodwill, when the door-bell rang, and Nick, only just able to conceal his extreme relief, abandoned him a moment too hastily to answer it: and when Nick reascended the stairs with well-heralded Rose, his first thought upon seeing her was a sudden treacherous recollection of a remark that had been bandied about at the time of her wardship – that it was easy enough to see what the man in question was after because it was certainly not her beauty. He had remembered the remark because such remarks always obscurely pained him, making him more aware of his own lack of beauty: having a moral and sophisticated mind, he would endlessly discuss to himself the problem of whether the pain caused by such casual remarks about others was true sympathy, or really a transferred sympathy that was at its dark heart masochistic.”

We learn a lot about Simon in those two sentences. True, his run-on stream of consciousness sounds like the little kid telling a dinosaur tale, Drabble’s way of mimicking an adult’s thought process realistically. But we also see that he is a great qualifier of his own thoughts and acutely sensitive to social nuance. On the one hand, he has a fine opinion of himself – “having a moral and sophisticated mind” is his own self-image, not the author’s assessment – and yet is sensitive t
o his own flaws. His question of whether his aversion to unflattering remarks about a woman’s appearance is “true sympathy” or a form of masochism is vintage Simon – a man who is always dissatisfied, always questioning his own intuitions, always socially insecure.

Over the course of the novel’s 427 pages Simon’s nattering can become tiresome, but I kept going because Simon as a character presents contradictions and complexities that suggest the blooming, buzzing confusion inside most human beings. Simon has the capacity for surprising the reader and so we read on. That’s the nub. It’s a far, far better thing for your narrative point of view to err on the side of complexity than simplicity. As Henry James put it, “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”