Maybe it's because I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest at the same time that I'm trying to plan a fantasy(esque) novel, but it suddenly seems that very little fantasy truly embraces free indirect style.
Infinite Jest is a master class on the device of getting into the head and speech and thought-patterns of a character you're writing about in the third person (not to mention a master class in getting into the head and speech and thought-patterns of a character you're writing about in first person). It could also, arguably, taking place in the 'not-so-distant future', be classed in the science fiction category. In fact, Wikipedia classifies it as 'Hysterical realism, Satire, Tragicomedy, Postmodern, Science Fiction'. But Infinite Jest is a million things, whereas traditional fantasy tends to follow a much more limited path.
I have tried writing fantasy before, and always a worry starts to niggle and grow until I have to stop. If I'm writing something set in a different world, why would the characters, even if humanoid, interact like we do, eat like we do, walk/talk/fight like we do. Why would they speak English? There's nothing more jarring, for me, when reading a fantasy novel, to see a character (or even an omniscient narrator) say something like 'silent as the grave.' Would characters from another world really use phrases that we ourselves use? In my mind it's like Wittgenstein's notion that, should a lion suddenly discover the entire vocabulary of the human language, we still wouldn't understand it, so alien is its nature and social situation compared to ours.
All this is not to diminish Fantasy which tells a story using human words and expressions - it's still one of my favourite genres. It's just that when I try to do it, it grates on me until I give up.
Taking this up a level, the 'fantasy' I'm planning at the moment is set on a world entirely alien to our own - the native creatures are not humanoid, they have no concept of spoken language, they could not imagine what it would be to be human. The 'world' has no oceans or deserts or plains or trees or rivers or even minerals. And yet I need language to write about it - even more I need the English language to write about it. So how do I get around this? Do I embrace the omniscient, storytelling narrator, who can describe the world to the reader in language they can immediately grasp, or do I limit the narration to as true a form of free indirect style as is possible - create a new dialect, new idioms, limit my vocabulary to a certain number of words, as Niall Griffiths limited his vocabulary to around 700 different words whilst writing Runt. Aside from this, is it even possible to create a race completely devoid of human connotations which a human reader could nevertheless empathise with.
The contradiction of using language to describe a language-less 'species' would have its advantages - language is a brilliant thing, and to give it free range to describe something completely novel would be liberating. It would just feel inauthentic. Could a blend of the two work - a jump between omniscience and free indirect? Any ideas, anyone? Maybe I can write this as 'experimentally' as possible, and write a more traditional fantasy story alongside it as a sort of catharsis. Or maybe I should just stop planning and start writing?
Thinking in this way is planning, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, hysterical realism is not quite a genre but a recent coinage by James Wood while reviewing Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth' for contemporary novels like that one (and DFW's) and other 'big, ambitious novel" that pursues "vitality at all costs' and consequently 'knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being.'
His essay and Smith's reply are pertinent to your subject here.
Wood often distrusts - not always rightly - those fictions where the imprint of the writer matters more than the impact of the character.
Maybe this all relates back to Chekhov's advice never to use language alien to the story's protagonist.
Hilary Mantel has a nice line in Tudorbethan metaphors in her Wolf Hall novels in keeping with the period in which they are set, and the broken language of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker might appeal here too. William Golding's The Inheritors is also rather fine in this way.
But is there anything wrong with an author guiding and explaining things that his or her characters don't understand.
Wood dislike the know-it-all writer who filters and gilds the perceptions of his characters with a vocabulary they cannot claim so comfortably but, as a recent new yorker blog on cheever suggests,
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/cheevers-art-of-the-devastating-phrase.html
this high level of control might also satisfy in ways that mere fidelity does not.
After all, if it speaks and we cannot understand, surely someone must try to translate the lion.
Cheers Jim, that line about translating the lion has helped a surprising amount! Ready to start Chapter One now with that idea firmly in mind.
DeleteIt's interesting that you mention the Game of Thrones line..'as silent as the grave'. That jars with me too when I watch it!
ReplyDeleteI agree that it would be inauthentic to have alien characters to humanoid things...but to my mind it kind of links into what I said about translated fiction. At the end of the day, even if these cloud aliens do something that is completely impossible, even unthinkable or unimaginable to a human, something so un-human that is impossible to describe, we still need to 'rationalise' it with our own language...apply our own words to it.
There will always be a human tint to it, but experiment away! I'll look forward to reading what you come up with!