Levels of Reality

Dear Friend,

I very much appreciate your quick response, and I’m pleased you want us to continue exploring the anatomy of the novel. It’s good to know, too, that you don’t have too many objections to my presentation of the spatial and temporal points of view.

I’m afraid, however, that the point of view we’re about to explore won’t be so easily explained, though it is just as important as the ones we’ve already discussed; we are venturing now into a much more nebulous realm than that of space or time. But let’s not waste time on introductory remarks.

To begin with what is easiest—a general definition—let’s say that the point of view in terms of level of reality is the relationship between the level, or plane, of reality on which the narrator situates himself to narrate the novel and the plane of reality on which the story takes place. As with space and time, the planes occupied by the narrator and by the story may coincide or they may be different, and it is their relationship that determines the kind of fiction that is produced.

I can imagine your first objection. “It may be easy to establish the three possible spatial points of view—the narrator within the narrative, outside of it, or in an uncertain location—and the temporal points of view, too, given the conventional division of time into present, past, and future, but aren’t we faced with a boundless infinity when we consider reality?” That may be true. In theory, reality can be divided and subdivided into a boundless number of planes, giving rise to infinite points of view in fictional realities. But, my friend, don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by that dizzying possibility. Fortunately, when we move from theory to practice (here, too, is an example of two sharply distinct planes), we find that fiction only really negotiates a limited number of levels and that, as a result, we may identify the most common expressions of the point of view in terms of level of reality (I don’t like this formulation either, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything better) without presuming to cover all of them.

Perhaps the most distinct and clearly opposed of the options are the “real” world and the “fantastic” world. (I use quotation marks to emphasize the relativity of these concepts, though without such terms we wouldn’t be able to understand one another, and perhaps wouldn’t even be able to use language.) I’m sure that although you may not like it much (I don’t either), you’ll agree that we should call real or realist (as opposed to fantastic) all persons, things, or occurrences that we are able to recognize and define through our own experience of the world, and call everything else fantastic. The notion of the fantastic, then, covers a whole range of levels: the magic, the miraculous, the legendary, the mythical, et cetera.

Now that we are provisionally in agreement, I can tell you that this juxtaposition of the real and the fantastic is one of the associations of opposed or identical planes that may occur in a novel between narrator and narrative. And to make it clearer for you, let’s move on to a concrete example, making use once again of Augusto Monterroso’s brief masterpiece “The Dinosaur.”

“When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”

What is the point of view in terms of level of reality in this story? You’ll agree that the narrative is situated in the plane of the fantastic, since in the real world you and I inhabit it is improbable that prehistoric animals that appeared in our dreams—or in our nightmares—would turn up in an objective reality and that we would encounter them in the flesh at the foot of our beds when we opened our eyes. It’s clear, then, that the level of reality of the narrative is an imaginary or fantastic reality. Is the narrator (omniscient and impersonal) situated on the same plane? I’d venture to say that he is not, that he establishes himself instead on a real or realist plane—in other words, one that is essentially opposite and contrary to that of the narrative. How do I know this? By the tiniest but most unmistakable of indications, a signal or hint that the careful narrator gives the reader as he tells his pared-down tale: the adverb still. The word doesn’t just define an objective temporal circumstance indicating a miraculous occurrence (the passage of the dinosaur from a dreamworld to objective reality). It is also a call to attention, a display of surprise or astonishment at the remarkable event. Monterroso’s still is flanked by invisible exclamation points and implicitly urges us to be surprised by the amazing thing that has happened. (“Notice, all of you, what is going on: the dinosaur is still there, when it’s obvious that it shouldn’t be, since in true reality things like this don’t happen; they are only possible in a fantastic reality.”) This is how we know the narrator is narrating from an objective reality; if he weren’t, he wouldn’t induce us through the knowing use of an amphibious adverb to take note of the transition of the dinosaur from dream to life, from the imaginary to the tangible.

I have here, therefore, the point of view in terms of level of reality of “The Dinosaur”: it belongs to a narrator who, situated in a real world, relates a fantastic occurrence. Can you recall other, similar examples of this point of view? What happens, for example, in Henry James’s long story, or short novel, The Turn of the Screw? Bly, the grim country house that serves as the setting of the tale, is haunted by ghosts, which appear to two poor children and their governess; it is the governess’s testimony—transmitted to us by another narrator-character—that is the source of all the information we are given. As a result, there is no doubt that the story takes place—as far as theme and plot are concerned—on a fantastic plane. And on what plane is the narrator situated? Things begin to get a little complicated, as always with Henry James, who was a magician greatly skilled in the combination and manipulation of points of view, which means that his stories always radiate a subtle ambiguity and lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Remember that in the story there are two narrators, not one (or are there three, if we include the invisible and omniscient narrator who always precedes the narrator-character?). There is an unnamed primary or principal narrator who informs us that he has heard his friend Douglas read a story aloud written by the very governess who tells us the ghost story. That first narrator is plainly situated on a “real” or “realist” plane in order to relate the fantastic tale, which perplexes and amazes him as much as it does the reader. Then, too, it is clear that the other narrator, the second-level narrator, the governess who “sees” the ghosts, is not on the same plane of reality but inhabits a fantastic plane unlike the world we know from personal experience, where the dead return to earth to “grieve” in the houses they inhabited when they were alive and to torment the new inhabitants. So far we could say that this story’s point of view in terms of level of reality involves a narration of fantastic events featuring two narrators, one situated on a realist or objective plane and the other—the governess—narrating from a fantastic perspective. But when we examine the story even more carefully, we perceive a new complication in this point of view. Most likely, the governess hasn’t seen the famous ghosts but only believes she has seen them or has imagined them. If this interpretation is correct (in other words, if the reader chooses it as the correct interpretation)—and it has been advanced by a number of critics—it transforms The Turn of the Screw into a realist tale, though one narrated from a plane of pure subjectivity (that of hysteria or neurosis) of a repressed spinster who is probably naturally inclined to see things that are not and have never been part of the real world. The critics who propose this interpretation of The Turn of the Screw read it as realist fiction, since the real world also encompasses a subjective plane, home to visions, illusions, and fantasies. It is not the story’s content but the subtlety of its telling that makes it seem fantastic; its point of view in terms of level of reality is the pure subjectivity of a psychologically unbalanced person who sees things that don’t exist and mistakes her fears and fantasies for objective reality.

So we have here two examples of point of view in which there is a relationship between the real and the fantastic; this opposition is the kind of radical contradiction that characterizes the literary genre we call fantastic (into which we lump, I repeat, texts that differ quite significantly from one another). If we set out to examine this point of view in the writings of the most distinguished authors of fantastic literature of our time (Borges, Cortázar, Calvino, Rulfo, Pierre de Mandiargues, Kafka, García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, to supply a quick list) we would discover that the matching up of these two separate universes—the real and the unreal or the fantastic, as they are embodied or represented by the narrator and the narrative—leads to an infinity of gradations and variations, to the point that it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the originality of a writer of fantastic literature depends above all on the way in which the point of view in terms of level of reality is manifested in his fiction.

Now, the opposition of planes that we have observed so far—the real and the unreal, the realist and the fantastic—is a fundamental opposition between different kinds of universes. But real or realist fiction also consists of separate planes—although each of them may exist and be recognizable to us through our objective experience of the world—and realist writers are able, as a result, to take advantage of many options regarding the level of reality in the fictions they invent.

Perhaps the most obvious discontinuity within the bounds of a realist universe is between the objective world—of things, events, and people existing in and of themselves—and the subjective, interior world of emotions, feelings, fantasies, dreams, and the psychological motivations of much behavior. If you make an effort, you will immediately be able to dredge up the names of a good many writers who fit—according to this arbitrary system of classification—into the category of objective writers, and others who may be called subjective writers, depending on whether their fictional worlds tend to be principally or exclusively situated on one or the other of those two sides of reality. Isn’t it obvious that Hemingway would be grouped with the objectives and Faulkner with the subjectives? That Virginia Woolf figures among the latter and Graham Greene among the former? But I know, don’t worry: we are in agreement that the objective-subjective dichotomy is too general and that writers grouped into either of these two broad, generic classes may be very different from one another. (And of course we agree that it is always the individual case that matters in literature, since generic models can never tell us what we would like to know about the particular nature of a certain novel.)

Let’s take a look at some specific works, then. Have you read Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet? I don’t believe it’s a masterpiece, but it is a very interesting novel, perhaps Robbe-Grillet’s best, and one of the best produced by the movement that briefly caused a stir on the French literary scene in the sixties, le nouveau roman. Robbe-Grillet was its standard-bearer and theoretician; in his book of essays For a, New Novel, he explains that his intention is to purge the novel of all psychologizing and, beyond that, of all subjectivity and introspection; he intends to focus on the exterior, physical surface of an objectivized world, whose reality resides in things that are “resistant, stubborn, present in the moment, irreducible.” In adhering to this (very limiting) theory, Robbe-Grillet wrote some incredibly dull books, if you’ll allow me the discourtesy, but also some texts whose undeniable interest resides in what we might call his technical dexterity. For example, Jealousy. The title isn’t very objective—quite a paradox!—since in French it means both “window blind” and “jealousy,” an amphibiology that disappears in Spanish [and English—Tr.]. The novel is, I’ll venture to say, the description of an icy, objective stare, and the anonymous and invisible human behind the stare is presumably a jealous husband spying on his wife. The novelty (the action, you might call it, if you were making a joke) of the work isn’t its plot, since nothing happens, or, more accurately, nothing worth remembering happens; there is only the tireless, distrustful, insomniac stare with which the woman is besieged. She is entirely defined by the point of view in terms of level of reality. It’s a realist story (since there’s nothing in it that doesn’t correspond to our experience of the world), told by a narrator outside the narrative world but so close to the observer-character that we sometimes tend to confuse their voices. The novel keeps so rigorously to a single level of reality that the effect is sensory; the narrative evokes a pair of reddened eyes that are always observing, watching, missing nothing about the person they are monitoring or her surroundings, and thus it can only capture (and transmit) an exterior, sensory, physical, and visual impression of the world, a world that is all surface—a plastic reality—without emotional, psychological, or psychic depth. This point of view is quite original. Of all the possible planes or levels of reality, Robbe-Grillet confines himself to one—the visual—to tell us a story that, for that very reason, seems to take place exclusively on a plane of total objectivity.

It’s clear that the plane or level of reality that Robbe-Grillet’s novels (especially Jealousy) inhabit is different from that generally occupied by the works of Virginia Woolf, another of the great revolutionaries of the modern novel. Woolf wrote a fantastic novel, of course—Orlando—in which we witness the impossible transformation of a man into a woman, but her other novels may be called realist, because they are lacking in similar marvels. Their “marvel” is the delicate and finely grained texture of the “reality” they portray. This is due to Woolf’s refined and subtle style, its ethereal lightness, and its great power to suggest and evoke. On what plane of reality does one of her most original novels, Mrs. Dalloway, take place, for example? On that of human deeds and behavior, as in Hemingway’s stories? No—on an interior and subjective plane, on the plane of feelings and emotions imprinted on the human spirit by life experience, in the intangible but demonstrable reality in which we register what takes place around us, what we see and do, and either rejoice in it or lament it, are moved or frustrated by it, and finally judge it. This level-of-reality point of view is another proof of Virginia Woolf’s originality; she managed, thanks to her prose and the lovely, keen perspective from which she described her fictional world, to spiritualize all reality, dematerialize it, infuse it with soul. Exactly the opposite of a Robbe-Grillet, who developed a narrative technique with the aim of objectifying reality and described everything contained in it—including sentiments and emotions—as if they were things.

Through these few examples, I hope that you’ve come to the same conclusion I came to some time ago regarding point of view in terms of level of reality: that the originality of the novelist often resides in it. In other words, by uncovering (or throwing into relief, at least) one aspect or function of life or human experience previously overlooked, ignored, or suppressed in fiction and resurgent now as the dominant feature, the novelist grants us a pristine, refreshing, unfamiliar vision of life. Isn’t this what happens in the work of a Proust or a Joyce? For the former, what is important is not what goes on in the real world but the way memory retains and reproduces lived experience, the way the human mind works to rescue and order the past; you couldn’t ask for a more subjective reality than that in which the episodes and characters develop and evolve in In Search of Lost Time. And, speaking of Joyce, wasn’t Ulysses a cataclysmic innovation? In it, reality is “represented” by the very motion of human consciousness as it notices, critiques, judges worthy, treasures or discards, and reacts emotionally and intellectually to the experiences lived through. By privileging planes or levels of reality once ignored or barely noted over more conventional planes, certain writers expand our understanding of human existence, not just quantitatively but in a qualitative sense too. Through writers like Virginia Woolf or Joyce or Kafka or Proust, we can say that our intellect has been enriched, as has our ability to identify—from within the infinite vertigo of planes or levels of reality—the mechanisms of memory, the absurd, the flow of consciousness, the subtleties of emotion and perception that we used to disregard and have a simplistic or stereotyped idea of.

All these examples demonstrate the very broad spectrum of shadings that may differentiate one realist author from another. The same is true of the writers of fantastic fiction, of course. Though this letter is in danger of running longer than it should, I’d like to examine the level of reality that predominates in The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier.

If we try to situate this novel in either the realist or the fantastic camp, there’s no doubt that it should be assigned to the latter: in the story that Carpentier tells—which has much in common with the story of the real-life Haitian Henri Christophe, the builder of the celebrated Citadelle—extraordinary things take place, inconceivable in the world we know through firsthand experience. But no one who has read Carpentier’s lovely tale will be content to see it classified simply as fantastic literature. Its fantastic passages are not as explicit and obvious as parts of stories by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, the Robert Louis Stevenson of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Jorge Luis Borges, whose fiction flagrantly breaks with reality. In The Kingdom of This World, the unusual occurrences seem unusual because of their proximity to real life, to history—it so happens that the book very closely mirrors episodes and characters from Haitian history—and because they contaminate realist happenings. How can this be? It is possible because the narrative of Carpentier’s novel is grounded in a plane of unreality associated with myth or legend; in this plane, “real” historical acts or characters undergo an “unreal” transformation when acted upon by faith or beliefs that give the fantastic text a kind of objective legitimacy. Myths explicate reality in terms of particular religious or philosophical convictions; all myths possess, besides their imaginary or fantastic element, an objective historical context. This determines their place in a subjective group consciousness that pretends to impose (and often succeeds in imposing) itself on reality, in the same way that a fantastic planet is superimposed on the real world by the members of a secret society in Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The incredible technical achievement of The Kingdom of This World is the point of view in terms of level of reality that Carpentier creates. The story often unfolds on a mythical or legendary plane—the first level of fantastic literature or the last of realism—and is narrated by an impersonal narrator who, though he doesn’t establish himself entirely on that same level, comes very close to it, brushing up against it, so that the distance he maintains from his material is small enough to almost make us live inside the myths and legends of his story and yet unequivocal enough to make us realize that what we are being told is not objective reality but rather a reality undone by the credulity of a town that has not given up magic, witchcraft, or irrational practices, although on the outside it seems to have embraced the rationalism of the colonizers from whom it is emancipated.

We could go on forever trying to identify original and unusual points of view in the world of fiction, but I think that these examples are more than enough to show how various the relationship between the narrative and the narrator can be and how a discussion of levels of reality allows us to speak—if we’re inclined to classify and catalog, which I’m not and I hope you’re not either—of realist and fantastic novels, mythical and religious novels, psychological and lyrical novels, action-driven and analytical novels, philosophical and historical novels, surrealist and experimental novels, et cetera, et cetera. (The establishment of systems of classification is an insatiable vice.)

It’s not important to know exactly where the novel we analyze fits on a series of pedantic and innumerable charts. What’s important is to notice that in every novel there is a spatial point of view, a temporal point of view, and a level-of-reality point of view; to understand that the three are essentially independent of and different from one another, though their boundaries are often unclear; and to realize that the way the three points of view mesh and harmonize lends the novel the internal coherence that determines its power of persuasion. This ability to persuade us of “truth,” “authenticity,” and “sincerity” never comes from the novel’s resemblance to or association with the real world we readers inhabit. It comes exclusively from the novel’s own being, from the words in which it is written and from the writer’s manipulation of space, time, and level of reality. If the words and the structure of a novel are efficient, and appropriate to the story that the novel intends to make persuasive, that means that its text is perfectly balanced. Theme, style, and points of view are so perfectly harmonized and the reader is so hypnotized and absorbed by what is being told that he completely forgets the way it is being told and is under the impression that technique and form have nothing to do with it, that life itself animates the work’s characters, landscapes, and events, which seem to the reader nothing less than reality incarnate, life in print. This is the great triumph of technical skill in novel writing: the achievement of invisibility, the ability to endow a story with color, drama, subtlety, beauty, and suggestive power so effectively that no reader even notices the story exists; under the spell of its craftsmanship, he feels that he is not reading but rather living a fiction that, for a while at least and as far as he is concerned, supplants life.

Fondly,