What I’m reading

The Gathering by Anne Enright.

This is a story about the Hegarty family, narrated by one of the nine Hegarty children, Veronica. It might be more accurate to say that it is a story about Veronica.

It has a sort of A/B plot going on between present and past. In the present, Veronica returns to her family home after brother, Liam, has drowned in Brighton. She goes about handling the gory details and ‘gathering’ her surviving siblings back home in Dublin. In the past, she tells a story about her grandparents, and about a period at which she lived with them – some traumatic incident happened then, she tells us, but is very evasive as to what (she eventually tells us what, about halfway through the novel):

‘I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event.... I don’t even know what name to put on it.’

I read The Gathering as part of some research into POV and tense. A friend recommended it to me after I said I was looking for novels which use some combination of first-person + past tense and third-person + present tense to create a fugue-ish feeling within memories. Probably, that sounds needlessly particular.

The Gathering has been useful, research-wise, I suppose. Enright does a great job of creating a sort of dreamscape out memory. This is in part to do with present tense usage, but also with particular attention to sensory detail, and the unreliability of memory. Veronica is constantly telling us that she cannot be sure about this or that, whether it really happened to her or her brother or her sister – and whether, after all, it matters. Also, it won the Booker in ’07 so take from that what you will.

This said, I’ve struggled to totally immerse myself in the narrative, to dip into the mode of ‘Deep Reading’ – which I’ve recently learnt via the work of Nicholas Carr and Marianne Wolf – is an actual neurological state.

Something I’ve noticed

I think, in part, my struggle to achieve the desired immersion with The Gathering has been to do with POV. While the book has a named narrator, who, about half the time, is writing in the ‘I,’ the sections about Veronica’s grandparents are effectively related in the third person. Charlie did this, Ada did that. As soon as Veronica starts talking about them, rather than herself, I lose interest. I think this was happening to me with Flashlight, too.

Now, obviously it would be ridiculous to say that first person is better or worse than third person – both POVs have their own strengths, flaws, challenges – but I do think that, I, as an individual reader, am currently struggling with reading anything in the third person. It seems like there’s an extra step between me and the novel, another surface to be surmounted.

I find this funny because, until I did my MA a few years ago – and was exposed to books written sometime this century; I subscribed to the pretension that the only things worth reading were written between 1890 and 1930 – almost everything I read was in the third person and I resolutely preferred it.

But I don’t think this is just me. It’s been noted by many people in many places that contemporary literature is dominated by first person narratives. One explanation I’ve heard is that, post-post-enlightenment, readers find it a hard sell that any consciousness could be omniscient.

That’s a good explanation about the decline of novels in third person omniscient, yes, but why should there be fewer novels in close-third, say?

Question I’m thinking about

Is the predominance of first person narrative primarily an empathy problem?

It’s been theorised at many points, that art – and in particular, reading fiction – can help to develop increased empathy. (Although, I seem to remember reading a study which argued that reading results in increased cognitive empathy – i.e, being able to imagine what another person is feeling – but not felt empathy). This, presumably, is because reading a novel exposes us to the life experiences and perspectives of a person who is not us, and unlike other art forms, requires us to actually inhabit this other person’s thoughts.

But when we read a novel in the third person, there is a barrier, or at least an intermediary, between us and this other person. (Or, there is always an intermediary, except in third person we are very aware of it).

In third, we do not hear a character directly telling their story, or their direct thoughts about their story, but have to imagine these things through the narrator. There is an extra little leap of suspension of disbelief. It’s the difference between caring about a story a friend tells us about themselves, and caring about a story they tell us about a person we’ve never met. We simply have to try harder to imagine, and therefore empathise with, this other person. It’s a bit like how film has a baseline reality effect because we can see actual real people on the screen – in first person, there is a (ostensible) real person writing in the I.

But why has this jump become harder to make than it used to be? (If, indeed, it has).

In part, there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that we’re more likely to read what we’re used to, and we’re now more used to 1st person. But why are we more used to first person?

Hedley Twidle has argued in one of his journal articles that the South African literary market is dominated by non-fiction because there is basically too much ‘reality’ in South Africa. If the world around us is all-consuming in its drama, it is more difficult to imagine alternative realities.

This is an old-ish journal article, and I think the claim is now easily generalisable to the broader world – what with wars and diseases and certain presidents and so on. Except, viewed another way, it is reality itself which is increasingly un-compelling, as Knausgaard argues at a few places in In the Land of the Cyclops – we’ve seen the same images of bombs and shacks and dead people so many times that they’ve lost their reality effect.

It’s almost as if, for fiction to ‘work’ in the contemporary landscape – for it ‘to draw us in,’ as people say – we demand that it feels ‘realer’ than reality.

How can we make leaps of empathy and imagination when the world is getting in everywhere, how can we believe anything that isn’t resolutely real? Knausgaard explains in Inadvertent, and in several other places, that he experienced a loss of faith in fiction-as-a-form, and that the form he chose for My Struggle aspired in, large part, to that of the diary. This decision, as he explains much more eloquently, is bound up with a whole bunch of other things, many of which are to do with the increasingly dominant question of (in)authenticity, as prompted by the digital. (David Shield’s Reality Hunger seems to be pretty much the bible on that last issue).

‘We live in the image of the world rather than in the world itself,’ says Knausgaard in ‘Idiots of the Cosmos.’ I take from this that, more than ever, we want our characters to convince us utterly of their immediate, felt, flawed reality from the first line; to be able to believe in their lives more than we believe in our own.

The closing lines of ‘Idiots of the Cosmos’ read:

‘So what can we do?
I can’t speak for you, only for myself, I can’t change the world, only the way I perceive it, so the only thing I can do, is to relocalise myself. Being a writer, that means questioning my place, to not look away, but to write about what’s here, and also to look up, towards the light of the universe, amid the faint rushing of the waves, the cessation of my crunching footsteps in the snow a tiny shock of silence – to sense myself tremble. That tremble is the soul’s reply to a question it is unaccustomed to addressing. Where am I now?
I am here.’

Something to aspire to, anyway.

See you in two weeks!

Blake