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.

The Magnificent Ambersons, oddly, has got me thinking about the difference between tragedy and pathos. Wait, where are you all going? Come back!

Okay, so maybe it’s a pompous question. Let me rephrase: I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to feel bad for George. What I’m not sure about is whether I’m supposed to like him.

Ambersons was, as Penny mentioned, included on the Modern Library’s list of great novels of the century (squeaking in at the bottom, No. 100). And it concerns grand themes, as she said — the decline of a single wealthy family and an entire way of life. Normally that’d be the recipe for tragedy — the suffering and decline of the great and grand.

But George doesn’t seem very great at all. He seems like a jerk. When we’re first introduced to him, he’s a nine-year-old brat in ringlets, disrespectful, rude, and convinced the world revolves around him. The town hates him; so do we. The town longs for his come-uppance; so do we. By the end of the book, when he does get his, I did feel a bit sorry for the poor old bastard because Tarkington has him take in on the chin so stoically. (Which, in retrospect, I’m not quite sure is believable.) But we never really like him.

The thing is, I think Tarkington likes him the whole time. George hates the “riff raff” and modernity, and revels in his family’s stately manner and nouveau-feudal relationship to the rest of the town. At the same time, Tarkington’s own nostalgia for horses and quietude and small town life is amply on display throughout the book, along with its counterpoint, a distaste for the dirty, destructive, grasping city (filled to brimming with dirty, destructive, grasping immigrants). You see it in his objective, third person descriptions of the scenery —  Take this paragraph as a sample, from Chapter 28:

“These were bad times for Amberson Addition. This quarter, already old, lay within a mile of the centre of the town, but business moved in other directions; and the Addition’s share of Prosperity was only the smoke and dirt, with the bank credit left out. The owners of the original big houses sold them, or rented them to boarding-house keepers, and the tenants of the multitude of small houses moved “farther out” (where the smoke was thinner) or into apartment houses, which were built by dozens now. Cheaper tenants took their places, and the rents were lower and lower, and the houses shabbier and shabbier—for all these shabby houses, burning soft coal, did their best to help in the destruction of their own value. They helped to make the quarter so dingy and the air so foul to breathe that no one would live there who had money enough to get “farther out” where there were glimpses of ungrayed sky and breaths of cleaner winds. And with the coming of the new speed, “farther out” was now as close to business as the addition had been in the days of its prosperity. Distances had ceased to matter.”

That’s all dry, third person omniscience, which is to say it’s all Tarkington, not George. Yet by planting these same repugnance toward the new in the arrogant and privileged personage of G. “Magnificant” Amberson. as snot-nosed a little punk as ever lived, Tarkington gets to have his cake and eat it too, indulging a bit revanchist nostalgia while at the same time acknowledging and tut-tutting the blinkered, hidebound attitude that led to the extinction of Georgie and his ilk. He wants to turn the tables on the reader, and I think largely succeeds — we, like the townsfolk, despise George for the douche his is, but by the time George gets what’s coming to him he has become irrelevant to the town, and the irrelevance makes him pathetic to the reader. You can’t have a tragic catharsis without tragedy, and George is so small-time that he can’t be tragic — that is, deliberately, his flaw, his inability to recognize the degradation of his circumstances, his insistence on behaving as if he were a prince and this his kingdom, when really he’s clinging by the skin of his teeth to a position in the respectable middle class.

And that, I have decided, is the difference for me between pathos and tragedy. The tragic figure and his flaw stands in for all humanity, for all our weakness and pride and foolishness; he embodies us, and so when we see him destroyed we feel compassion, literally; we feel with him. But the pathetic figure stands only for himself; his flaw is his own and we do not share it, we are repulsed by it. And so when see him destroyed we feel bad for him, we pity him, but we don’t feel like what happened to him could happen to us. Even though in both cases, strictly speaking, the misfortune that befalls the character is their own fault.

The thing about this is, for a writer pathos is a weird thing to opt for. As Arthur Miller strove to prove, you don’t have to write about the epic to evoke the tragic; your characters don’t have to be high and mighty to bring forth profound emotion. But sometimes I got the feeling reading this book that Tarkington wasn’t really going for profound emotion. The vast majority of authors — especially when you’re writing the Great American Novel, the Big Picture, the Sprawling Canvas, the Titanic Yarn — are going for that. Hell, even if you’re writing a small, drawing-room novel, few days, a few characters, 60,000 words, most writers are hoping to leave the reader profoundly moved. (Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, is the supreme example of the opposite sublimation: he writes about the pathetic so well, with such clarity and precision, that it becomes tragic.)

But George never works like that: we don’t long to see him destroyed the way you want to see a great villan take it on the chin — dragged off stage in chains, howling. Rather, you want to see him pranked, humiliated, embarrassed, made to grow up, like some friend’s pest of a little brother. It is a petulant pleasure that we want to take, not a grim one. And so when he finally does take it on the chin — is forced to realize that he unjustly deprived his mother of happiness and love in the last years of her life, contributing to her early death, in order merely to serve his own pride —- you don’t feel particularly gratified. It’s learning that the neighbor kid, the one who egged your car every Halloween and seemed to throw a kegger every time his parents left the house for two hours together, got drunk and wrapped his dad’s car around a tree. You can’t say you’re surprised but you can’t say that that’s what you wanted, either; it’s a fate too grim to gloat over.

What do you think, Penny? Is George pathetic or tragic? Is the book? And which are they each meant to be?