On Criticizing an Author's Vision

What if we don't like a story's narrative style? What if we find it... offensive??

Salvadore Dali, The Persistance of Memory, 1931, MoMA, New York, NY (Dali’s painting is often misinterpreted to be about the theory of relativity. Dali was actually inspired by watching cambert cheese melting in the sun.)

Happy weekend, everyone! It continues to be a weather-full week where I live in Southwest Virginia. I’m ready for spring.

I started writing this week’s essay thinking I would continue on last week’s discussion of the missing omniscient narrator from contemporary literature.

Instead, what came out was a different kind of beast. I do hope to pick up the omniscient narrator discussion, soon. Particularly as we get closer to our second podcast discussion of War and Peace.

Anyway. On to today’s essay…

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We’ve been talking a lot about narrative lately. Why?

Because I find it fascinating.

Also, because narrative is directly linked to vision. Vision is of the utmost importance.

In reading both contemporary and classic literature (by which I mean stories written prior to the early to mid-20th century) we are exposed to a wide range of narrative styles. These narrative styles are shaped by an authorial vision for that work. Authorial vision can’t help but be influenced and shaped by the author’s unique vision of life. This vision of life can’t help but be shaped by the multitude of influences upon it: time, place, ethnicity, family, culture, society, economics, personal temperament…. you get the idea.

All this vision is filtered through the story’s narrative: who’s telling the story, and how it’s being told. To make matters more complicating, all of this vision making is happening at different levels of cognition:

• Some of that vision is being disseminated strategically by the author: his or her unique “vision” for the book in our hands. Two examples of this would be: 1) Min Jin Lee saying that her “agenda” for writing Pachinko (all her Korean centered novels) is “to change you. To make you Korean”, by which she means make you see that we are all more alike than different; or 2) Maryse Condé saying in her story telling, she is always trying to get closer to the Truth. (While both these are examples of overarching authorial visions, each author applied her overarching story-telling vision to those individual works we’ve read—are reading—here on R&W)

• Oftentimes, this strategic authorial vision doesn’t begin that way at all. It starts out as questions (obsessions?) the author has about a particular subject matter, ideologies, truth claims, relationship, etc. Writing the story is her way of interrogating the thing that has captured her attention and won’t let go. Only through the writing of the story does the author discover what her unique vision is, and then through the process of editing, refines that vision into something strategic and unified and palpable to us, readers.

• Finally, there’s always some amount of vision being filtered through the story that is subconscious on the author’s part. It’s like the saying about fish and culture: Just as fish don’t know they’re wet, we can’t comprehend much our own “wetness” from cultural waters in which we swim.

Here’s the crazy thing: all that Vision is being filtered through to us!

With every story we read, we take some amount of authorial vision into ourselves: consciously and subconsciously; in great and small ways, depending on our own unique, vision-viewing selves. What we do with it—I think—is a matter of great importance.

So, what are we supposed to do with all this vision as it comes to us through the power of different narrative perspectives, styles and strategies? What if we don’t like the author’s vision? What if it even offends us?

I’d like to offer three, quite purposefully broad, suggestions:

1. Be generous: extravagant and withholding judgement

2. Be curious: about the story and yourself

3. Be constructive: it’s not about you.

I was recently part of a book discussion where many participants expressed offense and outrage at the book’s multiple narrators—all written in the first person p.o.v.—which included narratives by characters (remember, in 1st person) of a different ethnicity and socioeconomic background (poor, Dominican) than the author’s own (white, presumably upper-middle class). In addition to the outrage over what people saw as ethnic or cultural appropriation on the author’s part, was the story line itself which included (but was not limited to) a white, privileged couple ultimately playing a significant and positive role in a poor, Dominican girl’s life. Not without much struggle, pain, mistakes, and suffering, mind you… but still. They did. This was seen as bad—reprehensible, even.

The discussion began with an indictment against the author’s vision that guided her narrative strategy. It never moved beyond this.

What should have led our discussion was a generous—meaning judgement-free (for now) and ample—examination of the novel itself. In this greater, generous discussion, we should have placed particular emphasis on the novel’s narrative style, seeing that the problem people had with the novel were essentially issues of narrative and vision. Even if we had started with the indictment mentioned above—because we are human beings after all—we should have noted it, then shelved it up high and far away until the greater discussion was had.

We should have led our generous discussion with curiosity. We should have raised a multitude of questions about the “whys” and “hows” of the author’s narrative strategy. One of the most important questions we should have asked was: whose story is this??

Included in this generous and curious examination, we should have asked questions about how the story would have changed if the author had chosen a different narrative strategy. What if we received the story only through the eyes of the girl? Or, her mother? Or, the privileged white woman? What if the author had used the old-fashioned omniscient p.o.v.?? How do any of these changes in narrative style change the essence of the story itself? Whose story is it now??

Also included in our examination should have been questions of personal interrogation: Do I relate to these characters on a human level (beyond race, color, creed)? Do I see myself in them? If so, how? At what points? If not, why not? If there are aspects of this narrative that bother me, what is it about me and my vision—my beliefs, life experiences (or lack thereof), etc.—that might be contributing to my unease??

Once a generous and curious investigation of the novel and of ourselves had taken place, then we could have had a constructive discussion of the author’s vision. This constructive discussion may very well have included criticisms, whether of narrative style, strategy, or, ultimately, the author’s vision guiding it.

But, maybe those former indictments and personal outrages would seem flimsy in light of all our good examining. Maybe we would have developed a more nuanced, complex understanding of the novel. Maybe we would come to appreciate the author’s vision, even if her strategy still makes us uncomfortable. Because, maybe that uncomfortableness has more to do with our own selves and visions, rather than the author’s.

Lest you think I’m anti-criticism, I’m not. Criticism is a good and productive tool. It’s a healthy part of growth. As long as it is rooted in a properly generous and curious examination of the work and one’s self. Without this, any good criticism that could be offered devolves into personal offense and (self) righteous anger. And you can’t go anywhere with that. It shuts down all the avenues that make healthy, constructive criticism leading to growth, possible.

Which, sadly—on a small scale—is kinda what happened in my book discussion group.

But, it doesn’t have to be this way! We can do better. We need to do better. Our discussions, even about matters as seemingly ephemeral and esoteric as a story’s narrative style, can be life-giving.

After all, part of the answer to the question: Whose story is it? is: Yours. Ours.