Lovers, Parents, &
Disappearing Narrators

44}

TOO CLOSE FOR CLARITY: CHARACTERS
BASED ON LOVERS & PARENTS

Another hazard of working autobiographically: It robs the writer of one of his most valuable tools—perspective.

Take a story where the author is describing his own father. It’s unlikely that he’ll be able to convey his father’s character with clarity, much less objectivity.

For most of us, to obtain the necessary level of objectivity, either we must separate ourselves from our subjects, or they must separate themselves from us—death, of course, being the ultimate divider.

As always there are exceptions. Alexander Trocchi²⁰ wrote beautifully about his father during his father’s lifetime; so did Joyce. But interestingly, both authors did so from a great distance of miles: Joyce from Zurich (with his father still in Dublin), and Trocchi from a gravel scow in New York harbor (with his father in Glasgow). In both cases, the son’s feelings were sufficiently mixed to allow for a ruthlessly unsentimental portrayal.

For the rest of us mortals, our lovers and parents are the hardest people in the world to have perspective on. While living they are too huge in our lives: Our feelings toward them are too complex, tangled in a web of guilt, shame, anger, obligation, pity, terror, and what have you, enmeshed in judgment and sentiment.

When a lover or a parent leaves us for good (or we leave them), it changes everything. The passage of time allows us to see and understand much more, and to be fairer as well as funnier in our evaluations—and also more rigorous.

To gain perspective on characters based on living people is much harder than doing so for imagined characters, and may demand the kind of distance provided only by time or death.

45}DISAPPEARING & INVISIBLE NARRATORS

A final problem posed by vestigial autobiography is the disappearing or invisible first-person narrator. Assuming this “I” to be herself, the autobiographical author abdicates her responsibility to create a character for her.

Fiction writers ought never to confuse “I” with the person holding the pen. The person holding the pen exists; the “I” on paper needs to be created from scratch, using words.

The problem occurs especially with travel and adventure stories, where the author assumes that exotic settings, ordeals, and rituals (capturing dolphins in the wild, trekking to the top of le Grand Piton, partaking in Koukeri fertility rites) negate the need for characters; the narrator’s role is reduced to that of a tour guide.

What does a narrator need? The same things that evoke the personalities of any of our characters: actions, gestures, dialogue, description²¹ —and attitude. A narrator’s attitude may be sarcastic or ironic, or deadpan, or earnest, or bitter, or nostalgic, or wistful: It doesn’t matter, as long as he has an attitude.

Our characters, including our narrators, exist only after we have made them out of words. As William Carlos Williams said of Rebecca West (taking her to task for calling Joyce’s writing “gibberish”):

She has not yet learned—though she professes to know the difference between art and life—the sentimental and the nonsentimental— that writing is made of words [italics mine].

In memoir, experiences and meanings are supplied by memory; in fiction, by imagination. Any conflation of fiction and memoir will likely produce something confusing, like a movie projected onto a painting.

Perhaps in your own autobiographical fiction you’ll succeed in honoring both memory and imagination, as Proust did. But given the odds, you’d be wise to commit to one form or the other— fiction or memoir—and avoid insulting both.

1 Thus no less a writer than Shakespeare is said to have derived at least the cruder elements of his Hamlet (1599) from The Spanish Tragedy (1582–1592), by Thomas Kyd.

2 “ People can have the Model T in any colour, so long as it’s black.”—Henry Ford.

3 Unlike the short story, the novel—because it requires the reader’s investment of time and attention—usually requires at least one character that readers can identify with—a hero or heroine. A short story carries no such obligation. In The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor goes as far as to state that the short story “has never had a hero.” We look upon the characters in short fiction as we do worms and other insects in a terrarium, as objects not of identification, but of curiosity.

4 In evidence I offer Goldfinger, the movie, vs. Goldfinger, the novel.

5 In defense of Ernst Blofeld, Rosa Kleb, and other Bondian archvillains, they do have roles to play, and good ones, too, in genre fiction. But not in works of serious literature.

6 And in those cases we’re not dealing with recognizable humans, but with monsters.

7 Other examples of successful novels with unreliable narrators: Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Thomas Bernard’s The Loser, and, most recently, Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, narrated by a psychiatrist who may suffer from Capgras syndrome (a bizarre mental condition whose victims believe that their lovers or friends have been replaced by imposters).

8 For a discussion of word choices that contribute to the sense of generalization or routine, see Meditation # 132.

9 As anyone who has gone to art school will tell you, nothing is less sexy than a figure-drawing session.

10 It’s no accident that much of the best YA fiction also appeals to adults. It is for young people only in so far as its subject and characters are ones that young people are inclined to identify with.

11 Not long ago a field guide to birds of the northeastern United States mis-identified a species of bird as indigent to Massachussetts. Asked to account for the error, the author claimed that such a bird was mentioned in an Updike novel set in that state, and—since Updike was known to be fastidious in his details—he took the bird to be factual. Updike reminded this reader that he was a fiction writer. “I’m precise,” he said, “but I’m not always accurate.” This nicely illustrates what I mean by authenticating detail.

12 See Meditations # 16–18.

13 Distinguishing plot from story, E.M. Forster gives this example: “The King died and then the Queen died is a story. The King died, and then the Queen died of grief is a plot.” Though it serves to illustrate the concept of plot, the Queen’s death by grief is a sentimentally motivated action and therefore melodramatic. In real life who dies purely of a broken heart? Not even Theo van Gogh, brother of the famous painter—who died, legend has it, “of grief” six months after his brother’s suicide. In fact the brothers were as united by syphilis as by fraternal devotion. Both carried the disease; it’s probably what drove Vincent mad. And though grief may have hastened Theo’s death, the Treponema pallidum spirochete is what finally killed him.

14 For one of the best death scenes in literature read Stoner, by John Williams.

15 To have this mentally challenged character actually be guilty of murder would break a cardinal rule of sentimentality, which requires adherence to the expectations created by the prior versions of a similar story.

16 From his novel Sick Friends.

17 Despite Shelley’s best efforts to imbue her book with authenticity, a majority of reviewers rejected its fantastic premise. One review called it “a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity.”

18 Women especially are turned off by Miller—wrongly, I think, for they take his crude, blustering bravado at face value, while failing to see the vulnerable romanticist it masks.

19 The examples above, you’ll note, are all by men. The impulse to shameless autobiography has claimed far fewer women. Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816) chronicles her affair with Lord Byron; Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar relates a young woman’s mental breakdown. When women write about themselves, as did Colette and Anaïs Nin, they tend to use more subterfuge and discretion. Nin does so even in her supposedly “private” diaries— where her “frank” descriptions are aimed mostly outward at others while she reserves the role of objective observer for herself.

20 A Scottish novelist (1925–1984) whose novel, Cain’s Book, is a forgotten masterpiece.

21 In describing their own physical features, narrators typically resort to reflecting surfaces: hence the proliferation of mirrors in first-person stories.