Connect with Joe on Facebook 3. Who’s Driving?
Characters. Plays and movies have them, but what are they? If you look at a script or screenplay you see lines of dialogue, maybe with some specific details sketched in for casting or visualization purposes. The assumption of the form is that whatever we need to know about the character will be revealed by what he or she does and says. Just like in real life!
And that’s where the buzzer sounds, indicating a fatal misstep. In real life, where you spend lots of time “off-screen,” “off-stage,” there’s no way to comprise what you do when others aren’t around. Without a camera or an audience, you really are alone when you’re alone. And then what? If you talk to the walls, enact dialogues, mime or lip-synch, it doesn’t matter. No one’s watching, no one knows or cares, except . . .
We used to say “your conscience” (by which we meant that God is listening and watching, and cares), but more likely in our oh-so-secular age we’d say “your consciousness.” By which we mean: the “you” that always goes around with you, your inner voice, or higher thought, or shadowy self, or composite of what you know and remember, or internalized recorder. Whatever we imagine “consciousness” to be, we know we are who we are because of it. Without it, well, it’s time for the medications.
So if the basis for drama is a character—the protagonist—faced with the otherness of an antagonist, it’s easy to see why dialogue is its driving force: get two characters talking and you’ll get the story, but how will we know what they really think? Even a soliloquy is an enactment.
Greek drama added the chorus, whose songs and dancing communicated the view of the spectator or onlooker, maybe sometimes the creator; in any case, the view of someone not in the drama but trying to make sense of it—a task that was also dramatically compelling. But narrative brought something more radical: the view from inside the characters, a view that the characters might not want to express or might not be able to even if they wanted to. In narrative we call this shifting consciousness point of view and it comes by way of the narrator. The narrator is the guarantor of consciousness, a point of view that knows what characters think and do when no one’s watching.
But the narrator is also a performance, a gathering of words for effect, a voice, a line of thought. And what the narrator thinks primarily, in fictional narrative, is the idea of as if. The narrator speaks to us as if we believe what he says, as if the characters are exactly as he presents them, as if everything he tells us is all we need to know. We can say that this as if is the starting point of all fiction—it’s there in theater and film too, though only implied. In narrative, this idea, as a telling, can take on very distinctive qualities, or it can be rather generic, but it is the required animating presence, the very substance of the tale.
The importance of the narrator has become less stressed as narrative has tried its best to become more like seeing is believing arts such as drama and especially film. But back when the narrator’s role was consolidated in the nineteenth-century European novel, it was a considerable feat for it meant that consciousness could be taken for granted, that the way humans read the world could be made particular and general at the same time.
Let’s not downplay the narratives of other times and places, there is much that can be said about other eras and the style of story-telling they adopted, and we can’t overlook the fact that this “consolidated consciousness” was that of a reasonably literate, somewhat comfortable, both inquistive and acquisitive intellect educated in Europe and its offshoots, with all the baggage that comes with that. But because this consciousness saw itself as standing on the shoulders of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the scholars of the Renaissance, and the intellects of the Enlightenment, it could claim a certain dominant form of knowledge. Which is to say it recognized itself by what it knew—its ontology was bound up with its epistemology, if you like. From “I think, therefore I am” it arrived at “I am what I am because I know what I know.” And fictional narrative, the novel, was the form by which to see and show what was thought and known by people much like us, i.e., educated Europeans.
Which is to say, getting back to characters, that the novel was also radical in its conception of who could be its protagonist: anyone. And anyone needn’t be “everyman.” Anyone could be uniquely odd or all-too-familiar, all that was required was that this person be knowable by a story told about him or her. And what we got to know, it was generally agreed, was the person’s character, not simply as factual qualities (where born, when, of what parentage, etc.) but as an ethos, a way of being in and interacting with the world and other people in it.
Ethos, the revelation of character, became the driving force of fiction and maybe still is. But, to my mind, if you would really read narrative, you also have to think about the ethos of the narrator because that’s what provides the driving force. –Donald Brown, 12/7/2010
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting point about how the narrator’s role has lessened in our time due especially to film, the fact that many of us in our fiction are either trying to imitate film or writing our fiction in the hope that it will get picked up and made into a film and thus the big bucks and fame etc. To respond particularly to your last paragraph, I’m sitting here wondering how to think about the ethos of a narrator who has maybe vaporized, in our time. Of course you can read a lot of novels, particularly literary types, performed in the first person but I’m guessing you’d respond that this contemporary first person is a character and not really a narrator, not in the sense you’re using it in your essay.
Anyone who tells a story is a narrator. There are distinctions between a first-person tale and third-person tale, and working out those distinctions can inspire a lot of analysis. But because I was drawing distinctions between drama/film and narrative, the main point is that a narrative has a consciousness. Granted, this can be approximated in film and in theater to some extent, but when it is it makes them seem a bit “novelistic.” In a novel, a first person teller just makes the ethos question more acute (and easier to see): we are concerned with the character of protagonist/teller at the same time. As to “vaporized” narrator of the economical third-person narrative mode: the ethos is still there, maybe even more so since it’s often a very limited viewpoint, something the 19th-century novel avoided through a performative generality.
I guess where I’m coming from is that with the degradation of language for its own sake which our time seems to excel at, that the so called ethos is correspondingly dropped from the equation, and all that’s left is the explicit, what’s denoted. For example, I sometimes think that an explanation for the enormous popularity of Shandy in its own time was the fact -aside from the outlandish situations themselves, which, anyhow, take a while to unfold, from the ‘performative’ point of view- that those Brits were being taught to use language in an entirely different way than what their education had prepared them for, though this difference emerged organically from their education, which probably made it doubly amazing to them. I guess my argument assumes that the ethos and the connotative are essentially intertwined.
If “the ethos and the connotative are intertwined” it’s because one connotation of anything, potentially, is its ethos, or call it the “ethical dimension.” In our day, even what you eat, wear, where live, and how, etc., all possesses this for us in a hyper aware way. Is it necessary for a narrator to bring that in, or can denotation do the job? That would mean that the consciousness of the reader, ethos as a set of governing assumptions, can be assumed without having to make as much of a claim by the narrating consciousness. Thus the “stripped down” version of narrative. But that type of narrative implies a definite ethos, which is why I dispute that there is anything purely denotative in a work of imaginative writing. It’s tricky enough to be denotative with language anyway, but in fiction it’s even more of a stretch. It could be argued that some writers try to fight against that position by trying to “remove” subjectivity, but I don’t buy it.
As to Shandy: the example is from before the period of “consolidated consciousness” I was initially talking about. If you want to go back before that period in which the novel became, so to speak, generic, you can find all sorts of variations. But it’s a mistake to think Sterne is playing against the generic novelistic consciousness that we are already familiar with long before we begin to write seriously; what he’s working with is much closer to epistolary writing and the persona he creates is manically entertaining. But the ethos of the performance is actually aimed against the kind of materialist (or, in context, empirical) suppositions that will be the basis of the realist or “consolidated” novel in the next century. Which is why Sterne can seem so suggestive to writers tired of that tradition.
I’d like to hear more about the ‘consolidated consciousness’ vs the ‘epistolary.’
It’s not too complicated, maybe even too obvious. I use the term “epistolary” because it’s written from the first person, as a letter is. And what constitutes the world and the consciousness describing the world is “the given.” In other words, a letter from someone to someone does not need to establish an imaginative world, a believable and plausible setting, milieu, etc., because the correspondents already agree on so much. Which is what Shandy plays with–the letter, the lecture, the sermon, using their conventions to account for experience as something more raucous, less decorous, than polite forms of discourse could countenance. And that makes it “novel” in the sense of the novelty of novel writing–surprising or alarming, in any case, extremely funny. But it’s funny because of the conventions for polite, personal, or learned or moral communication that it assumes and violates. But Sterne is no nihilist or radical; he firmly believes that social conventions are such as to adapt to any challenge, though it’s true that he challenges what might be called “generic knowledge” with the particular.
What I referred to as “consolidated consciousness” is simply the accepted manner of narrative discourse–not the conventions per se, but what makes the conventions conventional. In other words, conventions work well because we don’t bother to question them, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel everytime we get into our cars. Neither do we decide each day whether we will drive on the right or left side of the road, based on the whims of our subjective, individual moods. We accept the conventions. In art, conventions allow other things to get done. But what much of the critique offered by 20th century work, in a variety of disciplines, achieved was a questioning of conventions that in turn became conventional.
One might find a reason to go back to something like Shandy: I think you could even make a case that Beat writing, that Miller’s first person style, that the voice of Holden Caulfield, etc., are revisitings of the “epistolary” to get shut of the conventions of the novel (exploring unique, possibly neurotic consciousness at odds with “consolidated consciousness”–conceived as the viewpoint of the “man in the gray flannel suit,” etc.) and of the conventions of the “modernist critique”–that view of the avant-garde artist’s perspective as a rejection of communality in the name of artistic necessity. I think such performances are almost always interesting, whatever else they may be, but I think in our day there’s a tendency to create quirkily personable narrators as yet another convention.