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