We Came Along with a Hammer

As I mentioned in my comment on the last post, I think maybe I give Tarkington more credit that Penny does. Indeed, reading The Magnificent Ambersons actually got me thinking about some of the advantages of the old-fashioned third-person omniscient style that Tarkington uses.
The vast majority of current novels of any genre are written in either first person or a very close third person. First person puts the reader behind the eyes of the main character; close third person leaves you sitting on his shoulder, near enough to get some sense of his thoughts but retaining a view of his world which is a bit broader and more capacious. The closeness is dead useful in evoking the reader’s sympathy, in giving them something big and bright and immediate, a whole personality, to be interested in as soon as they turn the first page. Writing in the old way, the 19th-century, distant, omniscient third, forces you to swoop down on the characters from above, as it were, and get to know them from the outside in. For instance, in an omniscient novel a character is generally introduced with a physical description — here’s Dickens, Chapter Four of A Tale of Two Cities:

“[A] gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets….Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat…”

Whereas in first or close third, you get their voice, their mind, first thing, and may well never learn what they’re wearing. Here’s Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye, satirizing the old way even as he embodies the new:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

All the David Copperfield kind of crap is exactly the crap Tarkington starts off with. Page one: “Major Ambseron had made a fortune in 1873….” and then for the rest of the chapter we get 13 closely-printed pages on the family, their town, their house, its decor, and the accordance of all of the above with the fashions of their times. We have to go four pages or so into the next chapter before George, our main character, is even born.

But that distant third does have one big advantage — it intersperses a full-fledged Narrator between reader and character. The Narrator may be as smart as he likes, may comment on politics or human nature or the foibles of his characters just as he wishes. (Dickens again: “Old Marley was dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadliest piece of ironmongery in the trade.” — A Christmas Carol.) In a close third you can’t do that — the narrator hews so closely to her character there that to have her observe something utterly unknowable to the character or declare something in opposition to the character’s beliefs and views would shock the reader right out of their suspension of disbelief — precisely because it means that the narrator has a personality quite distinct from that of the character, and thus creates distance between them.

So when you’re using first or close third you run into a technical problem: If, as a writer, you want a) to write in first person or close third and b) to use all your little writerly tricks, your grandest metaphors, your subtlest sarcasm, your freshest imagery, then c) your character must be just about as smart as you. You can’t create a character with an eight-grade education in close third and then write, say “the pause stretched into an Beckettian awkwardness.” Of course, that example is merely pompous; it’s entirely possible to restrict yourself to, say a child protagonist and still come up with fresh imagery and even subtle sarcasm. But it is a helluva lot more difficult — with every line you risk slipping into diction which will strike the reader as too high or too low. And so many writers don’t attempt it — instead they “write what they know,” and create characters much like themselves, who can plausibly be made to say all the things they would like to say. And this is why so many literary novels have writers and editors and college professors as protagonists, and in part why they are, frequently, so damn boring.

With that bit of distance that omniscience gives you, you can let the Narrator do all the fancy footwork while the characters stay wholly themselves; you’re free to be as grand or allusive as you want in order to bring across your meaning even if the character wouldn’t have used those exact words themselves.

Tarkington’s narrator, for instance, is just a little bit smarter than his characters — and Tarkington uses that to involve the reader in a little conspiracy with the narrator. For instance, George is, as bears frequent mentioning, a self-absorbed twat so wrapped up in his own little love affair he doesn’t notice the deep attraction between his mother and Eugene Morgan, his girlfriend’s father. But it’s pretty damn obvious to the reader. And so as this plot thread nears its climax the reader shares in the narrator’s godlike perspective on it all, sees that Morgan’s winding up to ask George’s mother to marry him, that George’s Aunt Fanny being slowly consumed by jealousy and frustration, that George’s loathing for Morgan growing more fixed — and thus perceives the coming crisis before the characters do. It’s quite fun, that feeling; it makes the reader feel wise and sorrowful, to watch a fate hurtle down upon the doomed.

That distance also allows you to have a truly unsympathetic main character, and still bear reading the book. Well, I’m saying that all declaratively as if it we a maxim of literature, when probably it’s a lot closer to a personal quirk. Most of the novels I’ve truly hated —hated enough to fling the book down in the middle of reading it, never to pick it up again — have been books where I couldn’t stand the main character. There’s plenty of books I love with flawed main characters, but this is an entirely different feeling than thinking the main character is a schmuck who probably deserves more than what’s likely to come to him. Yet while I certainly thought George was a schmuck, I never wanted to hurl Ambersons across the room, and that’s because I was neither in George’s head nor his vest pocket; I was watching him from afar, hanging out with a narrator who saw that he was a schmuck just as clearly as I did.