The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (34 page)

David Copperfield’s experiences and emotions are very close indeed to those of Charles Dickens, but David Copperfield isn’t Charles Dickens. However closely Dickens “identified with” his character, as we glibly and freudianly say, there was no confusion in Dickens’s mind as to who was who. The distance between them, the difference of point of view, is crucial.

David fictionally lives what Charles factually experienced, and suffers what Charles suffered; but David doesn’t know what Charles knows. He can’t see his life from a distance, from a vantage point of time, thought, and feeling, as Charles can. Charles learned a great deal about himself, and so let us learn a great deal about ourselves, through
taking
David’s point of view, but if he had
confused
his point of view with David’s, he and we would have learned nothing. We’d never have got out of the blacking factory.

Another interesting example:
Huckleberry Finn
. What Mark Twain achieves, with great skill and at tremendous risk, all the way through the book, is an invisible but immense ironic distance between his point of view and Huck’s. Huck tells the story. Every word of it is in his voice, from his point of view. Mark is silent. Mark’s point of view, particularly as regards slavery and the character Jim, is never stated. It is discernible
only in the
story itself
and the
characters
—Jim’s character, above all. Jim is the only real adult in the book, a kind, warm, strong, patient man, with a delicate and powerful sense of morality. Huck might grow up into that kind of man, given a chance. But Huck at this point is an ignorant, prejudiced kid who doesn’t know right from wrong (though once, when it really matters, he guesses right). In the tension between that kid’s voice and Mark Twain’s silence lies much of the power of the book. We have to understand—as soon as we’re old enough to read this way—that what the book really says lies in that silence.

Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, is going to grow up to be at best a smart entrepreneur, at worst a shyster; his imagination has no ethical ballast at all. The last chapters of
Huckleberry Finn
are tedious and hateful whenever that manipulative, unfeeling imagination takes over, controlling Huck and Jim and the story.

Toni Morrison has shown that the jail Tom puts Jim into, the tortures he invents for him, and Huck’s uncomfortable but helpless collusion, represent the betrayal of Emancipation during Reconstruction. Freed slaves did find themselves with no freedom at all, and whites accustomed to consider blacks as inferior inevitably colluded in that perpetuation of evil. Seen thus, the long, painful ending makes sense, and the book makes a moral whole. But it was a risk to take, both morally and aesthetically, and it succeeds only partially, perhaps because Mark Twain overidentified with Tom. He loved writing about smart-alecky, go-for-broke manipulators (not only Tom but the King and Duke), and so Huck, and Jim, and we the readers, all have to sit and watch them strut their second-rate stuff. Mark Twain kept his loving distance from Huck perfectly, never breaking the tender irony. But wanting Tom for that final bitter plot twist, he brought him in, indulged him, lost his distance from him—and the book lost its balance.

Though the author may pretend otherwise, the author’s point of view is larger than the character’s and includes knowledge the character lacks. This means that the character, existing only in the author’s knowledge, may be known as we cannot ever know any actual person;
and such insight may reveal insights and durable truths relevant to our own lives.

To fuse author and character—to limit the character’s behavior to what the author approves of doing, or the character’s opinions to the author’s opinions, and so forth—is to lose that chance of revelation.

The author’s tone may be cold or passionately concerned; it may be detached or judgmental; the difference of the author’s point of view from the character’s may be obvious or concealed; but the difference must exist. In the space provided by that difference, discovery, change, learning, action, tragedy, fulfillment take place—the story takes place.

UNQUESTIONED ASSUMPTIONS

A piece put together for this book, from notes for workshops and talks to writers during the nineties.

“Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère . . .” et ma soeur . . .

This essay is the somewhat grouchy result of years of reading stories—workshop manuscripts and printed books—that include me, the reader, in a group I don’t belong to and don’t want to belong to.

You’re just like me, you’re one of us, the writer tells me. And I want to shout, I’m not! You don’t know who I am!

We writers of fiction don’t know who reads us. We can make some limited assumptions about our readers only if we write for a publication with a restricted readership such as a campus literary periodical or a magazine with a specific religious or commercial affiliation, or in a strictly coded genre such as the Regency romance. And even then it’s unwise to assume that your readers think the way you do about anything—race, sex, religion, politics, youth, age, oysters, dogs, dirt, Mozart—
anything
.

The unquestioned assumption, the mistake of thinking we all think alike, is less often made by writers who belong to a minority or oppressed social group. They know all too clearly the difference between
“us” and “them.” The confusion of “us” with “everybody” is most tempting to people who are members of one or more of the privileged or dominant groups in their society or in an isolated or sheltered social environment such as a college, or a white American neighborhood, or a newspaper editorial staff.

The premise is:
everybody’s like me and we all think alike.

Its corollary is:
people who don’t think like me don’t matter.

The supposed phenomenon of “political correctness”—a conspiracy by bleeding-heart liberals to keep us ordinary folks from talking the normal ordinary just-folks down-home way and calling a spade a spade—exhibits the corollary as an article of belief, invoked to defend various bigotries.

Arrogance is usually ignorant. It can be innocent. Children’s ignorance of how others think and feel has to be forgiven, while it’s being corrected. Many adults in communities isolated by geography or poverty have known only people like themselves, of their own community, creed, values, assumptions, and so on.

But these days, no
writer
can legitimately claim either ignorance or innocence as a defense of prejudice or bigotry in their writing.

How does anybody know anything about other people’s minds and feelings? Through experience, yes, but fiction writers get and handle a great part of their experience through their imagination, and pass it on to their readers entirely through the same channel. Knowledge concerning the enormous differences among people is there for any reader, no matter how isolated and protected. And a writer who doesn’t read is inexcusable.

Even on television you can see that people are different. Sometimes.

I’ll talk about four common varieties of the Unquestioned Assumption and explore a fifth one in more detail.

1. W
E
’
RE
ALL MEN
.

This assumption turns up in fiction in endless ways: in the belief, borne out by the entire substance of the book, that what men do is of universal interest, while women’s occupations are trivial, so that men are the proper focus of story, women peripheral to it; in women being observed only as they relate to men, and their conversation reported only as it relates to men; in vivid descriptions of the bodies and faces of sexually attractive young women, but not of men or older women; in presuming the reader will welcome misogynistic statements; in pretending the pronoun
he
includes both genders; and so on.

This assumption went almost unquestioned in literature until fairly recently. It’s still fiercely upheld as legitimate by reactionary and misogynist writers and critics, and is still defended by people who feel that to question it is to question the authority of great writers who accepted it in good faith. It should by now be unnecessary to say that such defensiveness is unnecessary. But alas, the
New York Times
and many academic bastions and bulwarks are still staunchly protecting us from the rabid hordes of man-eating bra-burners out to diminish Shakespeare and demonise Melville. How long will it be, I wonder, before these brave defenders notice that feminist criticism has vastly enriched our reading of such authors, by bringing to an area of darkness and denial the mild, honest illumination of cultural relativism and historical awareness?

2. W
E
’
RE ALL WHITE
.

This assumption is implied far, far too often in fiction by the author’s mentioning the skin color only of nonwhite characters. This is to imply unmistakably that white is normal, anything else is abnormal. Other. Not Us.

Like misogyny, actual racial contempt and hatred, often expressed with appalling brutality and self-righteousness, is so frequent in older fiction as to be inescapable. There the reader can only handle it with—
again—historical awareness, which asks for tolerance, though it may or may not lead to forgiveness.

3. W
E
’
RE ALL STRAIGHT
.

—“of course.” All sexual attraction, any sexual activity in the story, is heterosexual—of course. This Unquestioned Assumption applies to most naive fiction, even now, whether the naivete is deliberate or not.

Straightness as dominant in-group may also be implied by the nudge-and-snigger. A negatively stereotyped fag or dyke is presented by the author with a verbal wink, an invitation to more or less hateful laughter from the reader.

4. W
E
’
RE ALL
C
HRISTIAN
.

Writers who have not noticed that Christianity is not the universal religion of humankind, or who believe that it is the only valid religion of humankind, are likely to take it for granted that the reader will automatically and appropriately respond to Christian imagery and vocabulary (the virgin mother, sin, salvation, and so on). Such writers take a free ride on the cross. In fifteenth-century Europe, this assumption was forgivable. In modern fiction it is, at best, unwise.

A particularly silly sub–in-group is made up of Catholic or ex-Catholic writers convinced that all readers went to parochial school and are obsessed, one way or another, with nuns.

Much more frightening than these are the writers whose description of non-Christian characters exhibits their conviction that outside Christianity there is no spirituality and no morality. Special grace extended to the occasional good Jew or honest unbeliever merely includes that individual in the Christian exclusivity. Monotheistic bigotry beats all.

The fifth group that assumes itself to be universal deserves special examination because it’s not often talked about in the context of fiction. The assumption that
we’re all young
is a complex one. Our experience of age changes as our age changes—constantly. And age-prejudice runs both ways. Some people carry their in-group right through life: when they’re young they despise anybody over thirty, when they’re middleaged they dismiss the young and the old, when they’re old they hate kids. Eighty years of prejudice.

Men, whites, straights, and Christians are privileged groups in American society; they have power. Youth is not a power group. But it is a privileged or dominant one in college, in fashion, film, popular music, sports, and the advertising that sets so many norms for us. The tendency at present is to adulate youth without respecting it and sentimentalise old age while despising it.

And to segregate both. In most social situations and at work, including educational work, adults, except for a few designated as caretakers or teachers, are kept segregated from children. The interests of the young and the interests of adults are supposed to be entirely different. Nothing but “the family” is left as a meeting ground, and though politicians, preachers, and pundits prate about “the family,” few seem to want to look at what it consists of. Many contemporary families consist of one adult and one child, a subminimal social group, with a single-generation age spread. Divorce and remarriage can create large semidispersed families, but even children with a slew of parents, step-parents, and step-siblings often don’t know anybody over fifty. Many older people, by choice or perforce, have no contact with children at all.