Appear at the break of dusk,
Vanish at the fall of dawn.
Throw shooting stars so fast they strike
Like spinning razor meteorites
Twinkling softly, sharply in the night.
Step
step
jump!
Over the wall in a single bound,
A leap of faith tried and tested
Night after moonless night.
Flying faster than a swirling hurricane
But quieter than a summer breeze,
Across the grass and disappear
Amongst the shadows on the wall.
Now wait
1
2
3
and up!
Climb like a gecko
Up to the window,
Hide in the shadow
And then if you know all's clear rush
Into the room,
Your lucky stars
At your fingertips.
Tick
Tock
Time
Is running through your fingers
As fast as you are
Slipping through the door
Sprinting down the hall
Jumping off the wall
To wall to wall to wall
And suddenly you're there,
And no one even notices.
Appear at the break of dusk,
Vanish at the fall of dawn.
Throw shooting stars so fast they strike
Like spinning razor meteorites
Twinkling softly, sharply in the night.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Concentration
A lens through which to see the world
And focus the light of knowledge upon the brain
Stimulating sparks across a single neuron,
A single circuit, a single mind,
Hoping to spark an illuminating fire,
A passion that strives every day and night
To discover that which is unknown,
To see what has never been seen.
The stronger and deeper the lens
The more focused the point of light,
But the more focused the lens
The narrower the scope and vision,
For breadth is not depth,
And depth is not breadth.
So perhaps instead we might try
A plethora of lenses,
Shaping a multifaceted diamond
Through which we might parse
Every color the world holds,
But the more spread the lenses,
The broader the point of light,
And the broader the focus,
The dimmer the passionate flame,
For depth is not breadth,
And breadth is not depth.
Over and over, and over again,
Perpetually pondering problems
Whose answers are only other inquiries
Yet to be seen or successfully solved:
The recursive howhy? of a child
Struggling to understand the world,
The eternal whoamI? of a mind
Struggling to understand itself.
And focus the light of knowledge upon the brain
Stimulating sparks across a single neuron,
A single circuit, a single mind,
Hoping to spark an illuminating fire,
A passion that strives every day and night
To discover that which is unknown,
To see what has never been seen.
The stronger and deeper the lens
The more focused the point of light,
But the more focused the lens
The narrower the scope and vision,
For breadth is not depth,
And depth is not breadth.
So perhaps instead we might try
A plethora of lenses,
Shaping a multifaceted diamond
Through which we might parse
Every color the world holds,
But the more spread the lenses,
The broader the point of light,
And the broader the focus,
The dimmer the passionate flame,
For depth is not breadth,
And breadth is not depth.
Over and over, and over again,
Perpetually pondering problems
Whose answers are only other inquiries
Yet to be seen or successfully solved:
The recursive howhy? of a child
Struggling to understand the world,
The eternal whoamI? of a mind
Struggling to understand itself.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Writing an Apple
Literary art is an art form. In both art, like visual art for example, and literary art, the goal is to depict, define, describe, capture, characterize. The subject, in general, is life: human life, not any other plant or animal life, because we happen to be interested in humanity. Well, humanity is complicated. Let’s start with something simpler. What if you wanted to draw, depict, paint, visually, on a canvas, an apple?
From one side, it looks like a red, vaguely truncated heart, with maybe a little brown stem on top with a green leaf attached. A stereotypical apple, the Platonic form of an apple, if you will. To get an even better picture, we can paint the apple from several angles, several dimensions, to get the whole apple, because only then can you appreciate the whole 3-D delicious perfection.
However, apples aren’t really like this. There are so many problems here. First of all, this apple is ripe, at its prime, at its peak, but when you think about it, the majority of an apple’s life is not spent at its prime (since a peak is, by definition, one point in time or space), so the majority of the time we encounter apples, in real life, they do not look as delicious and perfect as this. Therefore, we add some blemishes and such to make it more realistic. We just said that it changes in time, so maybe to really capture the apple, we can add in that fourth dimension, time, perhaps using a succession of apple as it progresses through its existence. Finally, apples don’t even really exist like this, on a blank white canvas, anywhere but in our imaginations. How can this be the apple that you are going to eat if it does not exist on your table? To that end, we put it in its context, in a fruit bowl maybe, on a table. Part of the apple’s essence is related to these other things, like the person who’s going to eat it, and the other fruits in the fruit bowl, which itself becomes more aesthetically pleasing than the sum of its fruits of course. Now we proclaim that this, this is a realistic apple!
Yet perhaps, if the goal is to capture the essence of an apple, what we should paint is the inside of the apple, the inner workings. From this picture we have now, you can’t tell anything about the texture, the juiciness, the flavors, the sugars, the biological processes inside the apple. We should draw that instead. However, the chemistry and biology of an apple are horribly complicated, so we run into two problems. First, we have to discard our old canvas and think of a new way to describe the processes, because obviously we don’t have space on our canvas to focus on both. Second, even when we are just describing the inner workings of the apple, we still have to simplify them, because it really is complicated. We just show general mechanisms, and leave much out, because we have to focus on something.
Now, what does all this have to do with literature? Start again with that Platonic apple. It is idealized, romanticized. Think of Classical Romanticism, eighteenth, nineteenth century, pastoral life is perfect, it’s ideal, this is how life should be, you know? Maybe we don’t have flat characters; we might still paint them from multiple perspectives and show that they’re multidimensional and round, but they’re still idealistic.
Now think of the realists saying, “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. This may or may not be how life should be, but it is certainly now how life is.” First of all, life isn’t perfect, so we get the styles that often make people think realist and cynic are synonymous. We put in imperfections; life isn’t all that great after all, it’s just ordinary. We put in the context, the society and surroundings in which life lives, because if we don’t have that we aren’t really describing human life as it exists in the world. We then we put in development, because people change, opinions change, life changes. We get a plethora of bildungsromans, stories of learning, like Pip of Great Expectations and Eugene of Pére Goriot learning about how imperfect society is. This is realism, classical realism. You can call it social or physical or empirical realism, perhaps.
Then the Modernists step in: “What have you done? You spent so much energy and time focusing on what surrounds life that it’s like drawing the house in which a person lives in order to describe the person, as Woolf says. You’ve lost sight of the person here!” What matters is not the surface, the superficial society; what matters is the psychology of the individual. That is the essence of human life. That is what we ought to focus on. Unfortunately, the human mind is even more horribly complicated than an apple, and we can’t write every single thought that flits through the head. We can’t record every atom as it falls upon the mind, so we have to simplify and choose what to include to make it easy for our viewer, in this context our reader, to understand what on earth we’re saying. We have to come up with new modes and experiment, because psychology is a new field, humans are attracted to the superficial, and thus it takes considerable effort and creativity to look inside the mind. Then we can see how the experimental aspect of modernism emerges. Moreover, it’s easy, if you’re lost in the confines of one mind, to end up with solipsism, because you can only see other minds through yours. Suddenly the world seems an existentialist-lonely place. Fortunately, Woolf shows that it is possible to focus on other minds, as long as we link them together; in fact, we gain some insight about society through that interaction. Fantastic! Yet we still don’t have space or time to focus on both this inner psychology and the outside, the society, the physical realism.
The exception is shown by Tolstoy, who was somehow insightful and skillful enough to overlay the two, laying psychological realism over empirical realism to discuss the real world through the eyes of psychologically realistic individuals. That’s the best you can hope for, and even that’s not perfect, really. Tolstoy still has to simplify Anna and Levin’s thoughts are still simplified, just like modernists, and however much focus he puts on Russia, he loses in focus on Anna and Levin.
We can’t paint everything in one picture; we can’t write everything in one book. If we focus on everything we have no focus, because focus implies some kind of specialization, some specificity. However, we still find that neither realism nor modernism is inherently superior. The first painter, with the Platonic apple, might come along again and say that “We’ve become so caught up in the real world that we’ve lost sight of the quintessence of human life! Can you imagine what state we’d be in if Pythagoras had never tried thinking about idealized triangles, and had stuck to imperfect real-world ones?” The realist reply is that “No, we want to describe life as it really is, we want to capture authentic life, and yes, that means imperfections, that means we deal with just shadows of idealized life.” The modernist says “Sure, but remember what’s important is not this superficial physical realism but the psychological realism, the mind. That’s where human life really is.”
They’re just different foci on looking at the same object, Life. It’s not that we’ve made progress from one to the other. Like Woolf says, we just move in circles on the same plain. You can say the relationship between realism and modernism is that realism is, in general, empirical realism while modernism is psychological realism, as well as the authors can manage, because the mind is a difficult thing to read as well as a terrible thing to waste. Moreover, while it may be impossible to account for all of them in one work, one painting, or one book, we can read and study these different ways of describing and understanding human life on so many levels, and learn different insights from each style. Even if every work fails to capture life completely, we are thankfully not limited to choosing only one.
From one side, it looks like a red, vaguely truncated heart, with maybe a little brown stem on top with a green leaf attached. A stereotypical apple, the Platonic form of an apple, if you will. To get an even better picture, we can paint the apple from several angles, several dimensions, to get the whole apple, because only then can you appreciate the whole 3-D delicious perfection.
However, apples aren’t really like this. There are so many problems here. First of all, this apple is ripe, at its prime, at its peak, but when you think about it, the majority of an apple’s life is not spent at its prime (since a peak is, by definition, one point in time or space), so the majority of the time we encounter apples, in real life, they do not look as delicious and perfect as this. Therefore, we add some blemishes and such to make it more realistic. We just said that it changes in time, so maybe to really capture the apple, we can add in that fourth dimension, time, perhaps using a succession of apple as it progresses through its existence. Finally, apples don’t even really exist like this, on a blank white canvas, anywhere but in our imaginations. How can this be the apple that you are going to eat if it does not exist on your table? To that end, we put it in its context, in a fruit bowl maybe, on a table. Part of the apple’s essence is related to these other things, like the person who’s going to eat it, and the other fruits in the fruit bowl, which itself becomes more aesthetically pleasing than the sum of its fruits of course. Now we proclaim that this, this is a realistic apple!
Yet perhaps, if the goal is to capture the essence of an apple, what we should paint is the inside of the apple, the inner workings. From this picture we have now, you can’t tell anything about the texture, the juiciness, the flavors, the sugars, the biological processes inside the apple. We should draw that instead. However, the chemistry and biology of an apple are horribly complicated, so we run into two problems. First, we have to discard our old canvas and think of a new way to describe the processes, because obviously we don’t have space on our canvas to focus on both. Second, even when we are just describing the inner workings of the apple, we still have to simplify them, because it really is complicated. We just show general mechanisms, and leave much out, because we have to focus on something.
Now, what does all this have to do with literature? Start again with that Platonic apple. It is idealized, romanticized. Think of Classical Romanticism, eighteenth, nineteenth century, pastoral life is perfect, it’s ideal, this is how life should be, you know? Maybe we don’t have flat characters; we might still paint them from multiple perspectives and show that they’re multidimensional and round, but they’re still idealistic.
Now think of the realists saying, “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. This may or may not be how life should be, but it is certainly now how life is.” First of all, life isn’t perfect, so we get the styles that often make people think realist and cynic are synonymous. We put in imperfections; life isn’t all that great after all, it’s just ordinary. We put in the context, the society and surroundings in which life lives, because if we don’t have that we aren’t really describing human life as it exists in the world. We then we put in development, because people change, opinions change, life changes. We get a plethora of bildungsromans, stories of learning, like Pip of Great Expectations and Eugene of Pére Goriot learning about how imperfect society is. This is realism, classical realism. You can call it social or physical or empirical realism, perhaps.
Then the Modernists step in: “What have you done? You spent so much energy and time focusing on what surrounds life that it’s like drawing the house in which a person lives in order to describe the person, as Woolf says. You’ve lost sight of the person here!” What matters is not the surface, the superficial society; what matters is the psychology of the individual. That is the essence of human life. That is what we ought to focus on. Unfortunately, the human mind is even more horribly complicated than an apple, and we can’t write every single thought that flits through the head. We can’t record every atom as it falls upon the mind, so we have to simplify and choose what to include to make it easy for our viewer, in this context our reader, to understand what on earth we’re saying. We have to come up with new modes and experiment, because psychology is a new field, humans are attracted to the superficial, and thus it takes considerable effort and creativity to look inside the mind. Then we can see how the experimental aspect of modernism emerges. Moreover, it’s easy, if you’re lost in the confines of one mind, to end up with solipsism, because you can only see other minds through yours. Suddenly the world seems an existentialist-lonely place. Fortunately, Woolf shows that it is possible to focus on other minds, as long as we link them together; in fact, we gain some insight about society through that interaction. Fantastic! Yet we still don’t have space or time to focus on both this inner psychology and the outside, the society, the physical realism.
The exception is shown by Tolstoy, who was somehow insightful and skillful enough to overlay the two, laying psychological realism over empirical realism to discuss the real world through the eyes of psychologically realistic individuals. That’s the best you can hope for, and even that’s not perfect, really. Tolstoy still has to simplify Anna and Levin’s thoughts are still simplified, just like modernists, and however much focus he puts on Russia, he loses in focus on Anna and Levin.
We can’t paint everything in one picture; we can’t write everything in one book. If we focus on everything we have no focus, because focus implies some kind of specialization, some specificity. However, we still find that neither realism nor modernism is inherently superior. The first painter, with the Platonic apple, might come along again and say that “We’ve become so caught up in the real world that we’ve lost sight of the quintessence of human life! Can you imagine what state we’d be in if Pythagoras had never tried thinking about idealized triangles, and had stuck to imperfect real-world ones?” The realist reply is that “No, we want to describe life as it really is, we want to capture authentic life, and yes, that means imperfections, that means we deal with just shadows of idealized life.” The modernist says “Sure, but remember what’s important is not this superficial physical realism but the psychological realism, the mind. That’s where human life really is.”
They’re just different foci on looking at the same object, Life. It’s not that we’ve made progress from one to the other. Like Woolf says, we just move in circles on the same plain. You can say the relationship between realism and modernism is that realism is, in general, empirical realism while modernism is psychological realism, as well as the authors can manage, because the mind is a difficult thing to read as well as a terrible thing to waste. Moreover, while it may be impossible to account for all of them in one work, one painting, or one book, we can read and study these different ways of describing and understanding human life on so many levels, and learn different insights from each style. Even if every work fails to capture life completely, we are thankfully not limited to choosing only one.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Falling out of Autumn
How the wind whistles a brisk serenade!
How it stands before the traveler,
Soft but frigid, intangible and unyielding!
An unbreakable wall upon the path,
Casting skeleton trees upon the earth,
Stripping to dark bones,
To dark bones.
The blades burn bright as they fall from the sky,
Twisting around the wind’s serpentine path
Point by point, like a starry night,
Raining upon the windswept earth,
Like rain falling down,
Falling down.
How it stands before the traveler,
Soft but frigid, intangible and unyielding!
An unbreakable wall upon the path,
Casting skeleton trees upon the earth,
Stripping to dark bones,
To dark bones.
The blades burn bright as they fall from the sky,
Twisting around the wind’s serpentine path
Point by point, like a starry night,
Raining upon the windswept earth,
Like rain falling down,
Falling down.
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Questions
Why do you always wonder, and
Why do you always doubt?
Why do you want an answer, and
Why do you seek it out?
Why not just blindly follow
Any quest that God may give?
Why not assume that there is
Just no other way to live?
Why must you always speculate
Upon the ifs and coulds?
Why must you second-guess the path
You’ve taken through the woods?
Why question your beliefs about
The world and how it works?
Why open each Pandora’s box
In which a lesson lurks?
Why eat the apple on that tree?
Why hear the snake’s sweet hiss?
Why would you ever want to learn
If ignorance is bliss?
But how can you just walk along
Without taking a look?
How can you wander round the world
But never read a book?
How will you ever write if you
Will never learn to read?
If you can’t learn from past mistakes
Then how will you succeed?
How can you find what you don’t have
If you don’t wish to learn?
Aren’t creation and invention
Fires that you should let burn?
Is it not pride to think that you
Know all there is to know?
Why don’t you want a better world
In which your child can grow?
So why not be a skeptic then,
And why not think and doubt?
If you never ask a question,
How on earth will you find out?
Why do you always doubt?
Why do you want an answer, and
Why do you seek it out?
Why not just blindly follow
Any quest that God may give?
Why not assume that there is
Just no other way to live?
Why must you always speculate
Upon the ifs and coulds?
Why must you second-guess the path
You’ve taken through the woods?
Why question your beliefs about
The world and how it works?
Why open each Pandora’s box
In which a lesson lurks?
Why eat the apple on that tree?
Why hear the snake’s sweet hiss?
Why would you ever want to learn
If ignorance is bliss?
But how can you just walk along
Without taking a look?
How can you wander round the world
But never read a book?
How will you ever write if you
Will never learn to read?
If you can’t learn from past mistakes
Then how will you succeed?
How can you find what you don’t have
If you don’t wish to learn?
Aren’t creation and invention
Fires that you should let burn?
Is it not pride to think that you
Know all there is to know?
Why don’t you want a better world
In which your child can grow?
So why not be a skeptic then,
And why not think and doubt?
If you never ask a question,
How on earth will you find out?
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Perspective and Content
Lukacs states that "the problem of perspective in literature is directly related to the principle of selection." Fair enough. If we look at a book written from a certain individual's perspective then the selection of content we find in the novel is derived from that perspective. So then what options are there?
1) The perspective of an individual, a first person, looking at the world through his or her eyes.
2) The perspective of an omniscient (or even non-omniscient, now that I think of it) narrator who arbitrarily focuses our attention on some fragment of the life story of an individual or a few individuals.
3) The perspectives of many characters, superimposed upon one another.
These are all the perspectives that come to mind at the moment. Clearly not an exhaustive list. The question now arises of how to select, based on each of these criteria, the content, and what intent each of these best suits, with the overriding goal being, presumably to describe "life."
1) The perspective of an individual, a first person, looking at the world through his or her eyes.
a) One option is a traditional (non-modern) narration of a straightforward story, what Ford would no doubt term an overly idealistic and optimistic storyteller, who dictates the story of the narrator's life or another's but focuses on the events and characters rather than his or her own thoughts. Often the narrator's character ends up remaining static by virtue of the author's faculties being concentrated on the story, but this can be overcome through care.
b) The other extreme is what Lukacs describes in Joyce, and what we've seen in Ford: a first person perspective whose content is the individual's thoughts and "impressions," however chaotic they may be. This has the opposite effect of (a), and the story often ends up being rather static while the individual is developed. However, as Lukacs points out, there is a great risk of the character ending up static as well, for attempting to create a panorama of a person's thoughts is much easier when the person isn't changing (in much the same was as a moving target is harder to hit). It could certainly be argued that Dowell, of A Good Soldier, ends up fairly static, as our estimation of him from the beginning to the end of the novel remains fairly constant, if clarified and assured after several confirmations and hints of passivity and unreliability.
Which of these two options is the better? I would argue that the modernist approach (b) is more successful, if harder to execute satisfactorily, because if the purpose of a first person narrative is to paint "life" from the point of view of a single individual with a distinct personality, then attempting to peek into that character's thoughts and emotions as realistically as possible is likely superior than merely dictating his or her perception of the events of the story. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as it presents a challenge), telling another’s thoughts is even harder than telling another’s superficial view of events, and the dangers of a static story and a static person are heavy, though I think not insurmountable. Stream of consciousness often flows fast, and it’s easy to get lost in the rapids.
2) The perspective of an omniscient (or even non-omniscient, now that I think of it) narrator who arbitrarily focuses our attention on some fragment of the life story of an individual or a few individuals.
a) Any story is a fragment (sometimes the whole) of the life of one or more individuals. The first option, then, is to tell the story much as an biography, simply a dictation of the events that happened, straight facts that are hard to misinterpret and question as not objectively real.
b) The other extreme is to focus as much as possible on the emotions and thoughts of the story’s characters, the advantage of omniscience being the relative ease (compared to first person narration) to make several round characters rather than just one. Of course in reality, all individuals are round, but it is difficult to impossible to make every character in a story round, because the author simply doesn’t have time. In first person it’s very easy to make just the one narrator round, but very difficult to keep all the other characters from being flat as paper, because there is only one blind perspective to see from.
c) The final option is to strike some in-between, to tell the story but to interject the character’s thoughts whenever appropriate (though I am conscious of the vagueness there).
I would discount (a) out of hand simply because all the characters almost inevitably end up flat and boring, let alone realistic. Between (b) and (c) there is a hard choice to be made. The first is appealing for the same reasons that the latter option was preferable in the first person narration, but the question that inevitably arises is that if the author cares to take so much effort in describing thought and emotion, why not go the whole way and focus on a single individual’s internal perspective completely? The answer, of course, is the ability to look at many minds at once, and the question of specificity and focus versus range and breadth is a difficult, if not impossible, one to answer.
I believe an excellent example of the success of (b) might be Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though perhaps it lies somewhere between (b) and (c). Certainly he succeeds in painting the lives of several characters in intimate, round detail, to the extent that our perceptions and opinions of his main characters are actually malleable over time in the strictest sense (do we admire Anna or despise her?). This is an extremely tricky feat to pull off, which is really the whole problem of creating round characters in the first place. In real life, we have an intriguing paradox: on the one hand, our opinions of people are not static—as we continue to interact with them, we may appreciate them more or less, for various aspects of their persona; on the other hand, we are quick to form generalizations and place people into categories. Yet the excitability of a professor in class, for example, may not be a defining trait throughout his life. We simply have a very limited lens through which to view other people unless we interact with them often, in a variety of contexts. The fact that Tolstoy manages to overcome this, without a first person narration, for multiple characters, is awe-inspiring. And he is assuredly a realist rather than a modernist—but perhaps a realist of not only external but also internal complexity.
3) The perspectives of many characters, superimposed upon one another.
We basically have the same options as (1), but multiplied by however many characters there are. We could tell a story from person A’s interior thoughts but person B’s simple view of events, and so on and so forth. This is almost what I saw in The Dew Breaker, although admittedly that was a mixed third person/first person narration-almost a mix of all 3 of the perspectives I’ve listed. I think the value of having multiple perspectives is that with skill, a web of interactions and interdependencies (so like real life) can be drawn amongst the various characters, and that ultimately grants an awesome insight into the human being as zoon politikon, as Lukacs puts it. Society really is an integral part of what separates humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom, for a host of reasons including innovation, culture, and synergy. This facet of human life, then, is perhaps best depicted from multiple lenses, multiple perspectives. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf does an admirable job of not only employing stream of consciousness as more than a mere stylistic technique but also jumping from one character’s perspective to another, with intricate threads linking them all.
So what do you think is the best perspective from which to depict life, and given that perspective, what content should be put in it?
Reference:
George Lukács' "The Ideology of Modernism" in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle.
Books/authors mentioned:
Mrs. Dalloway/Virginia Woolf
The Dew Breaker/Edwidge Danticat
Anna Karenina/Leo Tolstoy
The Good Soldier/Ford Madox Ford
1) The perspective of an individual, a first person, looking at the world through his or her eyes.
2) The perspective of an omniscient (or even non-omniscient, now that I think of it) narrator who arbitrarily focuses our attention on some fragment of the life story of an individual or a few individuals.
3) The perspectives of many characters, superimposed upon one another.
These are all the perspectives that come to mind at the moment. Clearly not an exhaustive list. The question now arises of how to select, based on each of these criteria, the content, and what intent each of these best suits, with the overriding goal being, presumably to describe "life."
1) The perspective of an individual, a first person, looking at the world through his or her eyes.
a) One option is a traditional (non-modern) narration of a straightforward story, what Ford would no doubt term an overly idealistic and optimistic storyteller, who dictates the story of the narrator's life or another's but focuses on the events and characters rather than his or her own thoughts. Often the narrator's character ends up remaining static by virtue of the author's faculties being concentrated on the story, but this can be overcome through care.
b) The other extreme is what Lukacs describes in Joyce, and what we've seen in Ford: a first person perspective whose content is the individual's thoughts and "impressions," however chaotic they may be. This has the opposite effect of (a), and the story often ends up being rather static while the individual is developed. However, as Lukacs points out, there is a great risk of the character ending up static as well, for attempting to create a panorama of a person's thoughts is much easier when the person isn't changing (in much the same was as a moving target is harder to hit). It could certainly be argued that Dowell, of A Good Soldier, ends up fairly static, as our estimation of him from the beginning to the end of the novel remains fairly constant, if clarified and assured after several confirmations and hints of passivity and unreliability.
Which of these two options is the better? I would argue that the modernist approach (b) is more successful, if harder to execute satisfactorily, because if the purpose of a first person narrative is to paint "life" from the point of view of a single individual with a distinct personality, then attempting to peek into that character's thoughts and emotions as realistically as possible is likely superior than merely dictating his or her perception of the events of the story. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as it presents a challenge), telling another’s thoughts is even harder than telling another’s superficial view of events, and the dangers of a static story and a static person are heavy, though I think not insurmountable. Stream of consciousness often flows fast, and it’s easy to get lost in the rapids.
2) The perspective of an omniscient (or even non-omniscient, now that I think of it) narrator who arbitrarily focuses our attention on some fragment of the life story of an individual or a few individuals.
a) Any story is a fragment (sometimes the whole) of the life of one or more individuals. The first option, then, is to tell the story much as an biography, simply a dictation of the events that happened, straight facts that are hard to misinterpret and question as not objectively real.
b) The other extreme is to focus as much as possible on the emotions and thoughts of the story’s characters, the advantage of omniscience being the relative ease (compared to first person narration) to make several round characters rather than just one. Of course in reality, all individuals are round, but it is difficult to impossible to make every character in a story round, because the author simply doesn’t have time. In first person it’s very easy to make just the one narrator round, but very difficult to keep all the other characters from being flat as paper, because there is only one blind perspective to see from.
c) The final option is to strike some in-between, to tell the story but to interject the character’s thoughts whenever appropriate (though I am conscious of the vagueness there).
I would discount (a) out of hand simply because all the characters almost inevitably end up flat and boring, let alone realistic. Between (b) and (c) there is a hard choice to be made. The first is appealing for the same reasons that the latter option was preferable in the first person narration, but the question that inevitably arises is that if the author cares to take so much effort in describing thought and emotion, why not go the whole way and focus on a single individual’s internal perspective completely? The answer, of course, is the ability to look at many minds at once, and the question of specificity and focus versus range and breadth is a difficult, if not impossible, one to answer.
I believe an excellent example of the success of (b) might be Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though perhaps it lies somewhere between (b) and (c). Certainly he succeeds in painting the lives of several characters in intimate, round detail, to the extent that our perceptions and opinions of his main characters are actually malleable over time in the strictest sense (do we admire Anna or despise her?). This is an extremely tricky feat to pull off, which is really the whole problem of creating round characters in the first place. In real life, we have an intriguing paradox: on the one hand, our opinions of people are not static—as we continue to interact with them, we may appreciate them more or less, for various aspects of their persona; on the other hand, we are quick to form generalizations and place people into categories. Yet the excitability of a professor in class, for example, may not be a defining trait throughout his life. We simply have a very limited lens through which to view other people unless we interact with them often, in a variety of contexts. The fact that Tolstoy manages to overcome this, without a first person narration, for multiple characters, is awe-inspiring. And he is assuredly a realist rather than a modernist—but perhaps a realist of not only external but also internal complexity.
3) The perspectives of many characters, superimposed upon one another.
We basically have the same options as (1), but multiplied by however many characters there are. We could tell a story from person A’s interior thoughts but person B’s simple view of events, and so on and so forth. This is almost what I saw in The Dew Breaker, although admittedly that was a mixed third person/first person narration-almost a mix of all 3 of the perspectives I’ve listed. I think the value of having multiple perspectives is that with skill, a web of interactions and interdependencies (so like real life) can be drawn amongst the various characters, and that ultimately grants an awesome insight into the human being as zoon politikon, as Lukacs puts it. Society really is an integral part of what separates humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom, for a host of reasons including innovation, culture, and synergy. This facet of human life, then, is perhaps best depicted from multiple lenses, multiple perspectives. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf does an admirable job of not only employing stream of consciousness as more than a mere stylistic technique but also jumping from one character’s perspective to another, with intricate threads linking them all.
So what do you think is the best perspective from which to depict life, and given that perspective, what content should be put in it?
Reference:
George Lukács' "The Ideology of Modernism" in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle.
Books/authors mentioned:
Mrs. Dalloway/Virginia Woolf
The Dew Breaker/Edwidge Danticat
Anna Karenina/Leo Tolstoy
The Good Soldier/Ford Madox Ford
Friday, September 17, 2010
The Jewel of Life
The fall of fire
Speckles every twilight
With swirling, sparkling stars,
Golden diamonds twinkling in the sky.
It lights up the ground and leaves the land
Rich as black onyx with hidden silver veins.
The fall of rain
Paints every surface
With a glassy, glossy glaze,
That grows into a coat of imperial jade.
It raises topaz towers anointed with emerald
With the ease of a sweet spring's susurrus.
The fall of sunlight
Blesses every shadow
With an effervescent efflorescence
Of opal and amethyst, ruby and sapphire.
It bestows a lustrous brilliance on the Earth,
More precious than a world of gems and jewels.
Speckles every twilight
With swirling, sparkling stars,
Golden diamonds twinkling in the sky.
It lights up the ground and leaves the land
Rich as black onyx with hidden silver veins.
The fall of rain
Paints every surface
With a glassy, glossy glaze,
That grows into a coat of imperial jade.
It raises topaz towers anointed with emerald
With the ease of a sweet spring's susurrus.
The fall of sunlight
Blesses every shadow
With an effervescent efflorescence
Of opal and amethyst, ruby and sapphire.
It bestows a lustrous brilliance on the Earth,
More precious than a world of gems and jewels.
Escape to Reality
Smoky snakes and twilight spiders
Sliding, stalking, crawling, walking
Up a hollowed strangler
Figure out of time
With no escape
The last light
Is only fire
Burning
Blazing
So learn
To fly away
Let snakes be
Dragons, and spiders
Dragonflies swooping out
Into the frigid air above the flames
Above the sea, above the clouds
Above Olympus, for our flight, our wings
Are true and sincere, stretching over the sky.
Sliding, stalking, crawling, walking
Up a hollowed strangler
Figure out of time
With no escape
The last light
Is only fire
Burning
Blazing
So learn
To fly away
Let snakes be
Dragons, and spiders
Dragonflies swooping out
Into the frigid air above the flames
Above the sea, above the clouds
Above Olympus, for our flight, our wings
Are true and sincere, stretching over the sky.
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