“Who is speaking in this paragraph?” asks the scholar Erich Auerbach —suspiciously, bemusedly—in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. When I read these words ten years ago, in a Starbucks in Kuala Lumpur, about halfway through my four-hour lunch break from a job at a small consulting firm, I almost sighed with gratitude. Here was the kind of scholarly move the aspiring fiction writer loves: extremely close analysis of a novel’s pipes and wires. Auerbach was about to explain Virginia Woolf’s narrative point of view in To the Lighthouse, a milestone in my private quest to understand how fiction works. He had only taken 530 pages to get there.
But the question, as it turns out, endearingly, is an honest one. Auerbach has no idea who or what is speaking in the paragraph he excerpts, in which Mrs. Ramsay hems a brown stocking for her son James while musing about her dusty house, the dying father of one of her maids, the nature of beauty, the lightkeeper’s son, and the books she hasn’t read. The narrative voice is mysterious; Woolf seems to have “abdicated” her powers of omniscience to a “nameless spirit…capable of penetrating the depths of a soul.” It’s not the stream of consciousness made famous by Ulysses or the brand of interior monologue that Dickens or Zola might have used. Woolf refuses to say anything her characters wouldn’t say themselves, offering no opinion, judgment, ruling, or diagnosis. Yet somehow, through this narrative refraction, she ennobles them, as Cézanne’s delicate brushstroke gives an ordinary apple its shine. Auerbach seems baffled by this. Aren’t these her creations, after all? Can’t she interpret them? Why does she seem to hover like a twinkling in their consciousness? In the margin of my copy, I wrote: Is she their guardian angel?
This was a childish notion I’d been hauling around ever since we analyzed The Giver and A Wrinkle in Time in middle school. I knew there was an author, of course. But who was this strange narrator, who knew everything about Jonas and Meg? “Third person limited” seemed unequal to the magic. In college, I had similar doubts. I knew that Eliot’s Middlemarch and Tolstoy’s War and Peace were “omniscient” to an important degree, but I’d always thought the quality of omniscience mattered most, that the attitude of the authors toward their characters made the difference between a great book and a so-so one. Point of view wasn’t just a literary device; it was an ethical and possibly even theological quandary.
Even “first person” could be spooky in unique ways. In Augustine’s Confessions, the reader is either addressed as God or eavesdropping on someone’s prayer—an awkward setup, either way. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, there’s the question of how, if the poet walked through hell and up into paradise, he’s telling us this story at all. How is this being told? I asked in class, feeling ridiculous. Is he dead? Has he returned from the dead? Is he talking to us from heaven? Later, when I read Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful novel Housekeeping, the narrator’s revelation at the end of the book was so powerful I canceled my dinner plans in order to reread the last twenty pages in privacy. How was this effect achieved? Where did Robinson find that voice? Who, in the end, was speaking to me?
Back then, I considered myself a Christian Existentialist, for I had read my Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel and believed The Moviegoer was a more complete work of art than The Catcher in the Rye. I wondered why the New Atheists didn’t object to novels on the same epistemological grounds they objected to religion. I defended George Eliot from her hater Friedrich Nietzsche. Still, I wasn’t much of a scholar. I had no interest in symbol or theme, and I didn’t care about Christ figures or biblical allusions. To the extent that reading fiction was a spiritual experience, it was all about the quality of the narrative voice. That was the indispensable technology of fiction, the primary skill I needed to learn before I could quit my office job and devote myself to writing. It’s why I was there in a Starbucks with that crumbling European tome, speculating again about the “guardian angel” point of view.
Eventually I would read James Wood’s How Fiction Works and learn a more appropriate phrase: “free indirect style.” Under the spell of this narrative technique, Wood notes, the reader “inhabits omniscience and partiality at once.” This account was helpful from a critical perspective, but the apprentice writer coiled within my breast remained unsatisfied. Doesn’t it all depend on how an author moves or modulates between these two perspectives? And wouldn’t that modulation be informed by the authors’ relationships to the characters they’re writing about?
I began to see that lurking within the top hat of point of view was the rabbit of fictional character. Why do authors invent them, and why do we fall in love with them? In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf argues plainly that the purpose of writing fiction is just that—“to express character,” not to preach doctrines or impart ideologies. I agreed with this wholeheartedly. But what does it mean to express character? And whose character? The author’s own? The author’s second cousin’s? Is the goal to capture a personality? Investigate a particular cog in the socioeconomic machine? Lay bare a human soul? Every other question I had about fiction and theology led back to the problem of character.
Pondering this at my work station later that afternoon, I established that fictional characters are in fact real in some way. Here I departed from William Gass, who argues that people in novels shouldn’t be viewed as human beings. For Gass, they are metaphysical blips, musical notes, and neologisms. Of course, it’s easy to see what he means: “Dalloway” is a word on a page and three beats in a sentence’s rhythm. But I think he overstates his case, and I know my disagreement stems from a latent Catholic desire to believe that every person, real or imagined, has a unique soul.
Another way of putting this is that characters aren’t the “galley slaves” that Nabokov claimed they were for him. Fools, wretches, delinquents, sure—but certainly not slaves. When I think of Nabokov’s own books, I smile to recall the hapless Pnin and the maniac Charles Kinbote, who express the exile’s melancholy with comedy and pathos and imperishable delight. Such characters may be permutations of Nabokov himself, but they also have an identity and a fate all their own. (They transcend the author’s chessboard, so to speak, when they move into the reader’s mind.) More palatable to me was Flaubert’s famous dictum that “the author in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” But this was the same man who wrote “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” An interesting paradox, I thought. What was the Christian Existentialist party line on all of this? Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling was a possible exhibit here, given its aim of understanding Abraham’s anxiety as the author of a novel might. At the very least, I could see that it was easier to play God, if that meant dooming your creations to advance the plot, than it was to play Christ, which involved sustained and often thankless imaginative compassion. Perhaps my guardian-angel point of view could split the difference, at least in terms of narrative tone, combining the father’s irony with the son’s loving-kindness. If God was love (as I thought I’d learned from Gabriel Marcel) instead of an all-knowing scold, then the best way to emulate him as a writer of realist fiction was to love one’s characters and attempt to understand them. I wrote that in my notebook during a lengthy staff meeting.
Around this time, the culture was bearish on literary realism, including the whole idea of spending time with fictional characters. Autofiction was on the rise, along with the personal essay, and of course we were now in the age of social media, unfortunately. What bothered me about these trends—especially social media—was the emergence of a point of view I would call “false omniscience.” Opinion, judgment, and diagnosis reigned online, and even in print. Authors were more forensic in their thinking, less inquisitive. In fiction, I couldn’t help but notice the bleak allegorical math: plug in character X to deliver message Y. We were sociological data points, the implicit premise went, not souls. Some were happy to jettison the idea of character altogether in favor of the perceived authenticity of memoir. Others—including my colleagues—relied on self-help and “ideas” books. If an author wanted to say something, why not say it directly? Why hide the message behind the mask of fictional character?
Meanwhile, I was having close to the opposite experience. The characters I encountered in novels taught me about the world. Norman Rush’s characters had ideas about development, cultural anthropology, love, Milton, bodily maintenance, and the history of Botswana. Yiyun Li’s stories captured the post-Mao era in China better than all the economists and China-watchers and pundits. Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw were documenting a new strain of toxic entrepreneurism with How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Five Star Billionaire. I read for pleasure and edification, but I was also looking for models and trying to identify what made the books I liked so good. Very often, it came down to voice and point of view. Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered keeps a warm hand on the shoulder of its characters for five hundred pages. Andrea Barrett’s affection for the scientists she writes about enlivens their discoveries with an intimacy I couldn’t find in popular history books. Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, a novel about a slave ship, bears witness, comprehensively, to the horrors of the industry that made the city of Liverpool. Edward P. Jones’s stories render the lives of Black Washingtonians so meticulously that I had to revise my own emotional map of the nation’s capital. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke does a similar thing for the Vietnam War, which I didn’t think was possible, having seen all the movies. One of my favorite moments from this year of furious reading was a quiet scene from A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s epic novel of post-partition India. Dina, a young woman, meets her future husband, Rustom, at a concert in the city, and we watch their delicate courtship from the point of view of the audience, as if we were seated beside them. The narrator gently teases some of these concertgoers, who fall asleep or applaud at the wrong mo-ment or insist on wearing ridiculous ties (“The knots ranged in size from microscopic to a bulky samosa”). And then, as part of the audience, we witness Dina and Rustom fall in love within three pages. They walk outside the concert hall. It’s raining. (“The drizzle hissed in the trees.”) Dina’s umbrella is broken, and we hold our breath, waiting to see if Rustom will offer his raincoat. It’s a scene of such extraordinary tenderness I could hardly believe that Mistry was able to pull it off. Another advertisement, I thought, for the guardian-angel point of view. When I read that scene, I felt like God, in love with all humanity.
Unfortunately, I only felt this way when reading literature. Most of my time was spent in a fog of despair about the Zeitgeist—the “digital humanities,” the ubiquitous LinkedIn humblebrag, the total cultural triumph of an MBA ideology—as well as my own inability to find a clear purpose in life beyond the stacks of a library. My job was extremely easy (I wrote business case studies), but I loathed myself for doing it. When I wasn’t immersed in a novel, I was irritable and filled with dread. I wrote furious satires in the mode of Waugh and Muriel Spark, assuming that that was a viable Catholic exercise in moral disgust.
As a reader, though, I wanted more, so I read the stories of Chekhov. “I believe in particular people,” Chekhov writes in one of his notebooks, dismissing God and history as subjects for his fiction. “I see salvation only in particular personalities, scattered throughout the whole of Russia.” I was starting to see the health benefits of loving one’s creations. But what about evil? What about sin? How was I supposed to ignore the idiocies of the culture and the fools who propagated them? Charles Baxter, in Burning Down the House, calls this “the Chekhov Problem”:
What does one do, do actively, with one’s honest revulsion and disgust with the cruelties, lies, and deceptions of middle-class life? Chekhov’s response to this problem—this is a gross oversimplification —is to show that, hidden under the outward mimes of character there lies the substance of real character, a kind of essence. Something genuine sooner or later will show itself; all we need to do is wait, observe, and hold on to those moments when they arrive.
I considered Chekhov’s response wise and worthy of emulation. He, too, was an advocate of the guardian-angel point of view.
And so, it seemed, was E. M. Forster:
The specialty of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man does not talk to himself quite truly—not even to himself; the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable, they lose their native quality.
There was something obscurely Christian in this, embarrassing as it was to admit for a satirist-in-training who would rank Decline and Fall over The Seven Storey Mountain. Dismayingly, I could even hear an echo of G. K. Chesterton: “we ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.” I knew that I was as much of a hypocrite as every one of my col-leagues. We were cosmopolitan liberals, expats, “global citizens,” meliorists. I knew that I was a man who didn’t “talk to himself quite truly.” But I also knew that we were not entirely co- opted by the awful system in which we lived. And I sensed that if I learned the craft, fiction might be the realm in which these particles of the genuine could be made briefly visible.
Still, where did they come from, these characters in my notebook? In “Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Brown,” Woolf argues that fiction writers obsess over human character—mannerisms, speech patterns, charm, comic obliviousness—beyond what’s strictly necessary to navigate their social lives. Freud says it’s a combination of wish fulfillment and daydream: “He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously.” For Adam Phillips, these “phantasies” are often linked to the many paths we never took, which we spend most of our mental life dwelling on and longing for. All of this applied to me: the eavesdropping, the daydreaming, and certainly the compulsive reassessments of my life choices. One of the questions I had was whether writing about a character was more like method acting, where you use “affective memory,” or Ignatian contemplation, an exercise that requires you to imagine yourself into the sweat and donkey shit of a gospel scene (or, in my case, the room within the multiverse in which I became a diplomat or a lawyer). Either way, the trick was that you had to be the character and the spirit above the character, the twinkling in her consciousness, the angel on his shoulder. The skill involved was modulating the narrative’s “psychic distance,” a term that I and everyone else learned from John Gardner. It’s how you reveal the most intimate details of a character’s life, including the vast inner life as well as the broader context. The writer Nicholson Baker has a charming way of putting this. In an essay called “I Said to Myself,” he teases Tolstoy’s narrative voice for doing the kind of ennobling thought-translation Woolf was up to:
Did Tolstoy believe his characters really said this sort of thing to themselves? I can’t believe it, any more than Shakespeare believed that people make life-or-death decisions in blank verse, with one hand on their chest and the other held out sideways. I believe that if I were able to tap Tolstoy on the shoulder and ask him why he had written these particular lives this way, he would say to me, “Well, I was trying to record what my characters would have told me if I had been able to tap them on the shoulder and ask them at that instant what words were in them.”
In my own attempts at fiction, I discovered there could be long delays between the tap and the answer, but that usually it was worth being patient with one’s characters, approaching them with more curiosity than suspicion. Weariness and cynicism were not kept at arm’s length—they were sitting in my lap—but the stories slowly came along, and the lines between my characters and myself began to blur, as can happen in communities of fellowship, real or imagined. During colleagues’ presentations, I would find myself jotting down the corniest words of encouragement. “When they have learned to love their neighbors as themselves,” C. S. Lewis writes in his novel The Screwtape Letters, “they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors.”
After I finally quit my job, I spent some time in Penang, where I found, in the hostel’s book exchange, Shirley Hazzard’s collection of stories People in Glass Houses. It’s about a group of employees at “the Organization”—a fictionalized version of the U.N., where Hazzard worked as a typist in the 1950s—and it’s miraculous. In the opening story, Algie, one of the Organization’s translators, a poet and scholar especially ill-suited for life as a bureaucrat, is being forced to retire, and his swift departure is deeply felt by his co-worker Lidia. The narrative voice is deliciously ironic, almost Olympian:
Oceans and rivers with their simple and traditional associations of purification and continuity are excellent things to have outside office windows, and in this case helped in some measure to express that much misrepresented, highly commendable, and largely unachieved thing—the aim of the Organization.
But it warms up considerably in the presence of Algie and Lidia, whose affection for each other slyly animates the story. (“She would have liked to make him some show of solidarity but could only offer him a peppermint, which he refused.”) Here was the perfect combination of satire and pathos. Hazzard could be as wickedly incisive as she pleased, just as long as she paid close, loving attention to the characters whose souls were her subject. The plot was extremely simple, but I held my breath at every scene, they were all so exquisitely written. When I finished the story, I wasn’t myself. I felt like a nameless spirit.
Of course, there’s no salvation in a story or a novel. Characters can’t change their lives or make themselves any happier. They can only be revealed to us through the artistry of point of view and the magic of narration. And yet, closing the book, I really did sigh with gratitude. Could I learn to write a story like that? I thought about my colleagues, and I realized I would miss them, as Lidia misses Algie, her arbitrary companion. I wrote half a story, which I carried around for five years. I didn’t have an ending, or even a middle, but it was a decent start.
Drew Calvert lives in Southern California. His short stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.
