Throwing your characters under the omnibus
And/or: Making time for your reader
This week I have been involved in what I believe are (very nearly) the final edits of a historical thriller. The book involves numerous points of view, and a very tight timeline - or, more specifically, a very tight timeline for the characters.
My extremely perceptive and helpful editor has gently pointed out that perhaps, particularly at the beginning of the book, I was making my reader slightly dizzy and disoriented by the way in which the narrative was switching from viewpoint to viewpoint to viewpoint. She is quite right, and that is something I am assiduously addressing.
It got me thinking, though, about some rather more abstract considerations which lie at the heart of fiction-writing. The novel, in the Western tradition at least, deals in the thoughts and behaviours of characters, with the implication that these are illustrative of the thoughts and behaviours of ‘real people’ - and with the further assumption, implicit or overt, that learning how others think and behave will help us understand ourselves, other people, and society at large.
This suggests, on the surface at least, that the notion of subjective experience, and thus of point of view, is unproblematic, and that a novel provides, so to speak, subjectivity for everyone (as in the title of this piece - subject from sub jacere: to throw under, and omnibus meaning: for everyone… a weak pun, but mine own).
But notions of subjectivity are very far from unproblematic - and here I draw again, gratefully and unashamedly on the wonderful Dictionary of Untranslatables. On pages 1078 to 1091 (yes, it is a massive book - how could it be otherwise?) the authors provide a superb exploration of “Subject, Subjectivity and Subjection”.
The article opens with two translations from a passage by Nietzsche, one in French, the other in English. I quote here from the English translation (by R.J. Holindale) for three reasons. Firstly I think it’s an amazing piece of writing, which throws a witty but unforgiving light onto the notion of a ‘subject’, of an ‘I’; secondly, I think it’s a brilliantly clear translation - as far as my faltering German allows me to judge; and thirdly, I am at this point more interested in what Nietzsche is saying than in the thorny problems of translation.
It’s not short, but it is worth it:
Philosophers are given to speaking of the will as if it were the best-known thing in the world… A man who wills - commands something in himself which obeys or which he believes obeys. But now observe the strangest thing of all about the will - about this so complex thing for which people have only one word: insomuch as in the given circumstance we at the same time command and obey, and the side which obeys knows the sensations of constraint, compulsion, pressure, resistance, motions which usually begin immediately after the act of will; insomuch as, on the other hand, we are in the habit of disregarding and deceiving ourselves over this duality by means of the synthetic concept of “I”; so a whole chain of erroneous conclusions and consequently of false evaluations of the will itself has become attached to the will as such. Because in the great majority of cases willing takes place only where the effect of the command, that is to say obedience, was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the sensation, as if it were a necessity of effect. Enough: he who wills believes with a tolerable degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one… “Freedom of will” - if the expression for that complex condition of pleasure of the person who wills, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the command - who as such also enjoys the triumph over resistance involved but thinks it was his will itself which overcame these resistances. He who wills adds in this way the sensations of pleasure of the successful executive agents, the serviceable “under-wills” or under souls - “for our body is only a social structure composed of many souls” - to his sensations of pleasure as commander. L’effet, c’est moi: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth.
So to be a subject is to be a self which both commands itself and obeys itself - and enjoys the perks and pleasures of feeling they’re in the driving seat, while the ‘under-wills’ quietly do their stuff, making the ‘commonwealth’ of the “I” feel properly comfy.
Where does that leave us as fiction writers, both in terms of the selves we create for our characters, and of the experience we provide for our readers? It may be that things are different in the world of ‘literary fiction’ - though I’m not sure I really believe that - but I am confident that in world of genre fiction in general, and specifically in the world of crime fiction, which is my particular paddling pool, there is a contract between reader and writer which is sacrosanct.
The reader is giving you their time and attention - in return you provide them with a ‘well-constructed and happy commonwealth’, in which your characters act coherently, becoming ‘successful executive agents’ who may provide pleasure for the reader, and perhaps, on a good day, with a following wind, some insight into aspects of the human condition.
And that means not making them dizzy or disoriented - so it’s back to the edits for me, then.