Aches & Cream
November 04, 2010
I go back and forth between first and third person. I instinctively write in the first because it accommodates my prose accent and my errors, and I enjoy the romantic folly of a narrator who has no idea what's really going on. (Stanley Kubrick said something about the only true romantics being criminals and insane people. Knowing Stan he probably lifted the quote from someone else; anyway, I'm taking it.) Currently however I'm older than the person / people I'm writing / writing about so I find myself naturally slipping into the third. I need the distance. Nicholson Baker talks about that here:
Q: Why is it that so many educated, intelligent readers can't tell the difference between the writer and his or her protagonist, and confuse viewpoints expressed with the viewpoints of the author?Full interview is here. Photo: Ian Dalziel.
NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, they're right, in a sense, to be confused like that. There was this whole tradition of new criticism that swept across the 20th century. The poem was kept utterly distinct from the writer's life. Biographical considerations were kept out completely. That's complete crap. Of course the fact that Coleridge had a laudanum habit is germane to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. So, to a certain extent, readers are right. Readers are right when they read a book like Lolita and think "Well, Nabokov must have had a thing for little girls." How could he have written 300-some pages with lovingly obsessive descriptions about downy hair on Lolita's arm, if it wasn't something that really got to him? You can take that a little too far. What Nabokov was doing was maybe taking one tiny chip of himself and then putting it under the highest powered microscope that he had and then subjecting it to many different strange sidelights and coming up with a whole book. To make an equal sign between that tiny chip and how he was as a person is a mistake. The Mezzanine is about 87 per cent myself. Room Temperature is a little bit more. But The Fermata is purely fictional and not like me at all.