A faceless
gatekeeper greets me, “Thank you for submitting to the Literary
Country Club. We appreciate your interest and we’ll get back to
you shortly.”
“Excuse me,” I say, “I’m just trying to visit.”
“Are you on our list?”
“I didn’t know there was a list.”
“We can check. You might be surprised. What’s your name?”
“First Person Present.”
“Oh, dear!”
“What’s that mean?”
“We were hoping you were at least First Person Past. We’ve got
a few of those here like Telltale Heart and To Kill a Mockingbird.
We don’t have many First Persons Present.”
“Are House of Sand and Fog or Fight Club members?”
“Yes that’s true. It happens sometimes, but Fight Club we only
let in for a fund raiser. Chuck’s not an actual member. Movie
rights might be a big deal in the outside world, but not to us.
We don’t let James Franco in on general principle.”
“Ouch.”
“It could be worse. You could be Second Person. We always tell
them, ‘You who?’”
“What kind of country club is this anyway? I don’t see a golf
course, tennis courts, or a swimming pool.”
“We’re a literary country club. Mostly the members sit around,
talk, drink, take drugs, have inappropriate-furtive sex. God forbid
that anything active happen around here. Every now and then, they
draw and develop characters, but even then it stays inconclusive.
Our members don’t like to spell things out. We’re very refined.
”
“Sounds like Chekhov.”
“Exactly.”
I scratch my underarms then spit on the sidewalk. “Is there any
way I can just look around?”
“Sure, if you change your narrative voice. For instance, if you
were Omniscient, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”
“I see.”
I pull at my shirt sleeves.
“We find first person present trendy. You call attention to yourself.
Even when it works, it has to be unreliable. This is a very respectable
club. You might want to try the Mystery Writers Rackets Club.
We hear they accept present tense narrators. Also there’s a club
for writing erotica, they take all comers.”
I make a face. The gatekeeper continues, “Don’t you go stir crazy
having to be cooped up in that voice alone? If it’s any consolation,
Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore didn’t get in either, even with
a referral from John Updike.”
“Well, sorry to have wasted your time.”
“We appreciate your interest in our club. We wish you luck finding
a home for your narrative voice and with any of your non-writing
endeavors.”
“Hey, wait a second! Did you even read my application last month?”
“Honestly, we didn’t have to. The first line told us all we needed
to know.”
First person present (FPF for First Person Flashlight to minimize
confusion with FPP used for First Person Past) is the most intimate
narrative option.
Like first person past, you’re directly in the narrator’s head.
Unlike first person past, you’re also in the narrator’s body,
not just his/her mind/memory. Because of this, it often has the
trance-like quality of an altered state of consciousness. Meditation
is, after all, a trance state where one gets into the moment by
focusing the mind on the physical sensation of “Now.” First person
present reproduces a similar level of focus and awareness.
The directness of FPF often gives it the quality of feeling primary
and simple. This is why first person present works well with narrators
who happen to be children, mentally or emotionally unstable adults,
or not especially aware. It’s also a voice frequently used in
diaries and journals. “Stardate 2011, a series of subplots are
attacking the Enterprise. I am unable to resolve them. Starfleet
Academy’s MFA program didn’t prepare us for this. I am turning
into Scott Bakula.”
In third person, you can create scenes with any combination of
characters at any time. As we discussed, in first person past
[see “The I-Story, An Owner’s Manual”], a writer can create narrative
complexity by developing a kind of dialogue between what Sue William
Silverman calls the “voice of experience” and the “voice of innocence”
and what I call the “Me Mirror.” In FPF, the narrator is physically
present in every real-time scene and we only get his or her side
of the events. There are cheats that remedy this. For example,
the narrator can overhear other people talking, find notes, see
a journal, have a dream, or visit a fortune teller. These are
just temporary solutions though. The writer is still stuck with
this one-eyed perspective. So how do we get first person present
into the complex and layered world of the country club?
Ever heard of negative space? We writers often forget that we
don’t hold the monopoly on “perspective” or “point of view.” In
fact, we didn’t invent the notion. In the visual arts, perspective
is the business of making a flat surface appear to have the sort
of depth that we get from viewing the world with two eyes (stereoscopic
vision). At least that was the case before the movie Avatar 3D-ed
its way into cineplexes near you. Now that movie audiences can
see in 3D, I’m hoping they’ll develop the technology to do the
same when the same people vote for a Congressperson.
While one can create perspective by drawing a series of lines
that converge to a single point or set of points, artists often
use shading to render dimensionality. Instead of drawing with
the point of the pencil tip, you use the edges to suggest rather
than define your shapes. Look at the wear pattern on an amateur’s
pencil or brush compared to an artist’s some time.
In her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards
argues that drawing in this fashion will appear more fluid and
organic than the use of precise-on-the-point lines. She also makes
the fascinating argument that as children grow older and more
verbal, they lose the capacity to see the world as it is. Instead,
they start coding visual images in much the way they learn the
alphabet by coding the broad range of sounds in the world into
letters. For example, a house becomes a rectangle with a triangle
on the top and bodies become stick figures with circles for heads.
Children are taught to “alphabetize” the visual world and too
often no one ever helps them learn to “see.” (If you find this
right brain-left brain stuff interesting, you may also want to
check out Gabrielle Lusser Rico’s Writing the Natural Way.)
We writers forget that words suffer from simplification through
symbol, aka coding, even worse than drawings do because fiction
is imprisoned by language itself. Paradoxically, fiction is arguably
the art of recovering primary feeling and structure through the
same symbol mechanism that we normally use to abstract experiences.
For example the pain of the passing of a close family member becomes,
“Mom died last night.” The fiction writer uses words to restore
dimension to the generic “Mom died” by expanding it back to something
personal, resonant, and complex.
In order to overcome this, adult art students have to unlearn
the habit of over-coding the visual world. Drawing objects upside
down and backwards is one Edwards technique. (It also works for
writers. Try reversing the order of your scenes and see if the
progression still makes sense.)
Drawing negative space is another technique. Rather than trying
to draw the chair, the student is instructed to draw the space
around the chair, essentially everything he sees that isn’t the
chair.
My psychologist friend, Barry, will tell you that this is sometimes
referred to as figure-ground reversal. Of course, he’ll bill you
to tell you that, so it’s better that you get it from me.
A more dimensional-alive image of the chair results, because
the exercise has turned off the side of the brain that alphabetizes,
verbalizes, analyzes and effectively deadens the visual experience.
When the side of the brain that sees rather than interprets has
taken over, the drawing student recovers some of its “primary”
vibrancy. For those who didn’t come here for a drawing lesson,
remember that FPF is the most primary or direct narrative voice.
The single greatest limitation of FPF, the very limited or “single-line”
narrative POV is also its greatest asset. The omniscient narrator
gets to see the entire room, everyone in it, their thoughts, their
past, present, and future. There is virtually no available negative
narrative space for our see-all know-all narrator. The first person
present narrator is a flashlight beam inside a darkened room.
You can point it at any given spot, but the extreme intimacy or
on-point quality of the first person present narrator means that
you’re leaving the rest of the room in shadows. If the writer
draws with the shadows on the edges of the beam (the negative
space) instead of that one beam of narrative light itself (the
point of the pencil), first person present can pick up depth and
complexity that some assume is only available through third person.
The skilled first person present story often is more about what
the narrator doesn’t say or explain (the sub-text) than what the
narrator articulates.
I’ve chosen four first person present stories to discuss how
this is done.
1) Ring Lardner’s “Haircut”
2) Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”
3) Bev Akerman’s “Pie”
4) Pam Houston’s “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had”
I love these stories. They all also happen to be online. It makes
it easier for you to argue with me and I hope you will.
Ring Lardner, known by many primarily as a sportswriter, was
a profound influence on Hemingway, who used the pseudonym “Ring
Lardner Jr.” early in his career. Hemingway’s trademark became
the use of simple sentences written the way Americans actually
spoke in stories where much of the critical information and emotion
is implied rather than explicit (see “The Hills Like White Elephants”).
Hemingway’s style is analogous to the pianist Thelonius Monk whose
music made the pauses between the notes sing and Steve McQueen’s
motionless-silent approach to acting in front of a camera. Notably,
all three artists are often praised for developing styles that
were deeply, even uniquely American. Lardner’s “Haircut” (1925)
is their artistic haplotype.
The story is an uninterrupted monologue delivered by “Whitey”
(aka Dick), a small town barber, to a captive audience, an out-of-town
customer. Little to nothing happens in the first person present
frame of the story. No one else speaks. There is no description
of the barbershop itself and there is no physical description
of either character. The tale that emerges from the flashlight
beam of “Whitey’s” small talk is a story within the story. The
inner story is technically told in first person past and it’s
about small town justice. Whitey tells his customer about Jim,
the town jokester, who is also revealed to be the town bully and
drunk. It’s just that Whitey appears to be completely unaware
of the latter. He presents the story as an explanation of why
the town isn’t as fun as it used to be. The reader never sees
the reaction of Whitey’s listener. The reader also never gets
any clues about whether Whitey’s professed admiration for Jim
is on the level. Among other things, we find out that Whitey’s
been one of Jim’s victims too.
The inner-story, if told directly without Whitey’s first person
present frame, would be over-sentimental with Jim as the black-hatted
villain and the Doctor, the character who actually commits a crime,
as the white knight who protects the innocents whom Jim has preyed
on. To me, the genius of Lardner’s story is the way he makes the
town the main character of the story instead of either the Doctor
or Jim. Whitey’s “obtuseness”, the negative space around his words
gives Haircut its texture. Lardner’s first person present narrator
doesn’t seem to get the significance of his story and the narrative
choice reveals an entire community (there are a lot of characters
in that story within the story, btw) where the deepest feelings
never get expressed directly in words. Instead Jim, his pal Hod,
and by implication, Whitey the barber, do virtually all the talking
in the story while the rest of the town stays silent, suffering,
and seething. Jim’s oppressed wife, for instance, appears only
briefly, yet the reader feels deep sympathy for her in a way that
Lardner might not manage had she been described with any level
of physical detail or been given something to say or do.
The message is quite similar to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio, but Lardner’s technique is arguably subtler than Anderson’s
grotesques rendered via third person narrator. Lardner uses the
offhandedness in Whitey’s first person present monologue to reverse
figure and ground in the story. The characters you root for are
actually in the background and the town comes out more vividly
within the story because the other individuals in the town are
left faceless and remain voiceless. Lardner keeps the story’s
real-time remarkably bare. The reader never sees or hears the
captive listener’s reaction to Whitey’s story. For all we know,
he’s fallen asleep in the chair. We also never see the aftermath
for several other characters. Does the Doctor ever notice Julie
Gregg? What becomes of Jim’s family? What becomes of Hod? Why
does Whitey keep Jim’s shaving mug on display in the shop? Is
it a remembrance or a reminder? Did Whitey get to shave Jim’s
corpse? The surface of the story remains just another day in a
town where nothing much happens, yet underneath there’s been a
murder and cover up that no one appears to acknowledge.
Traditionally, critics have talked about Lardner’s use of the
“unreliable narrator” in “Haircut,” but I think it’s more helpful
to look at the way he exploits the negative space around that
narrator. “Do you want me to comb it wet or dry?”, the seemingly
mundane bit of dialogue that ends the story vibrates with complex
suppressed emotion as the town lurks around the keyhole perspective
of Lardner’s outwardly naive narrator.
About a month ago, I happened to read May-Lan Tan’s first published
story, “Legendary” in Zoetrope All-Story’s summer issue. As a
middle-aged writer who’s labored at the craft for many years,
it was one of those Salieri moments for me. “Legendary” is another
first person present narrative that uses shadows, voids, and the
longing for identity in artfully quirky ways that made me think,
“Mmmmm, there’s another level here that I haven’t gotten into
my own stories yet.” You wind up intensely jealous and moved at
the same time.
The first time I felt that way was more than twenty-five years
ago. My friend, Lee Ann, came back from Bread Loaf to tell me
how wonderful one of the “fellows” she befriended there was. At
the time, I had just started to write and imagined that I had
some special talent. Anyway, Lee Ann insisted that I check out
her friend’s first published story. Her friend’s name was Amy
Hempel and the story was “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.”
This was a moment of reckoning in my journey as a writer: I realized
whatever talent I might have, there were people with more of it.
Lee Ann had some weird notion that her friend Amy and I might
hit it off. How do I put this? Had we been actors, it would have
been like setting up Mark Hamill with Helen Mirren. I haven’t
seen Lee Ann in years and my guess is that she isn’t currently
working as a matchmaker. Btw, I’ve never met Amy Hempel in person.
“In the Cemetery” came out of a class taught by Gordon Lish in
which the assignment was to write your worst secret. Hempel later
claimed that clumps of her hair started to fall out when she composed
the story. Cemetery is a story of betrayal where the reader surprisingly
winds up liking the betrayer more after the act of betrayal than
before. The nameless main character is unable to stay with a terminally
ill friend all the way through to her death. The act is foreshadowed
by one of many jokey bits of trivia that form the core of the
narrative about a “good dog knowing when to disobey.” A second
bit of funny animal trivia gives the story its structure. This
one is about a mother gorilla who learns sign language. Animals
are a recurring theme in Hempel’s stories and Cemetery is arguably
a meditation on the way humor allows us to keep talking yet also
frustrates the expression of our purest feelings.
Before discussing the POV choice, I should mention that it’s
not a pure first person present story. Cemetery actually begins
in first person past, then gives way to sections written in first
person present. Even more interesting, it’s hard to say where
the “present” is in Cemetery. Early in the story, it’s early in
the visit to the hospital when the two friends are bantering and
then it moves to the beach. At the end of the story, the present
appears to be some time well after the friend has died and been
buried in Al Jolson’s cemetery (Jessica Wolfson is in fact buried
in the same cemetery as Al Jolson). The inconsistency is something
that beginning writers get crucified for. In Cemetery, the shaky
first person present adds an edginess that enhances the story’s
impact. The narrator is unable to let go of her shame about what
she could not do for her best friend. Just before the end, she
reverts to FPF (well after the death) to tell the reader,
“I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see
by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking
is still me.”
In “Haircut,” the barber narrator is a dim bulb. In “Cemetery,”
the narrator is sharp, funny, even hyper-bright in many ways—she’s
a verbal laser. The two friends in the story are quite well matched.
Their banter is so witty and so filled with whacked-out trivia
that at points they seem more like stand-up comics than actual
people. Prior to writing, Hempel studied improv and has often
compared her minimalism to the precise editing and timing needed
for stand-up. It’s just that it becomes apparent that the narrator
can’t talk about certain things. For instance, she can’t explain
to her friend why it took her so long to visit. She can’t tell
her that she’s afraid of catching her disease (the masks) even
though the friend is well aware that the narrator is highly phobic.
She can’t say the word “death” or discuss the friend’s physical
state. Instead of crying, they watch a forgettable movie on television.
Instead of saying “goodbye” in a heartfelt way, the narrator leaves
abruptly despite the fact that the staff has prepared a bed for
her to sleep next to her dying friend. The friend reacts to the
betrayal by crawling into a closet.
FPF helps sell the reader on the illusion that the jokey dialogue
in the story matters and that it’s the banter that is lost or
about to be lost. Hempel’s FPF ending explodes this by completing
the story about the mother gorilla that the narrator never finished
for her friend. We find out that the baby gorilla died and the
mother signs, “‘Baby come hug’ in the fluent language of grief.”
In the most basic language possible, the mother gorilla is much
more emotionally advanced than our laser-sharp narrator. It’s
not the loss of the banter between the friends that hurts so deeply,
the narrator’s lexical facility has blocked her capacity to share
the intimacy of friendship at its most primal level.
Al Jolson, of course, is known as the star of the first major
talking motion picture. The heart of the story turns out to be
what our FPF narrator couldn’t express.
This is the least known of my four examples. Bev Akerman is a
Canadian geneticist (if you were wondering why I slipped in the
word “haplotype” when talking Lardner, now you know) who published
“Pie” as part of her first collection of short stories, The Meaning
of Children. I both love the story and have it here because, as
the simplest and shortest story structure, it may be the clearest
example of flashlight voice.
Like “Haircut,” “Pie” is a monologue. This time instead of telling
a story within a story, our FPF narrator is telling an unseen
listener how to make a pie. In the second line our narrator says,
“My hands can’t talk” which tells the reader that our story really
isn’t about the details of making pie. We next learn that she
hasn’t baked one in forty years. After that, she mentions her
son, Eamon who used to be in the kitchen with her when she baked
pies. She then continues to mix in bits of Eamon with directions
for making pie. Eamon persists as a shadow in the narrative’s
blindspot. He’s there, but she’s talking about pie.
Of course, we learn that the last time our narrator made a pie
was the last day she saw Eamon. The writer completes the reversal
of figure and ground for our narrator by implying that Eamon died
in the war. Much like “Cemetery,” FPF lets us feel our narrator’s
pain precisely because she can’t talk about it directly or even
say that her son died. As much as she loves baking pies, she hasn’t
made one since because her loss is still so overpowering. The
reader also never finds out just why the narrator decided to demonstrate
making pies again or who’s listening. As a result, we feel her
loss much more profoundly than if she had talked about Eamon’s
absence inside the flashlight beam.
One of the more interesting things about this story is that it
arguably has no plot. Much like the floating past-present in Cemetery,
Best Girlfriend is another great story that breaks the textbooks
rules for story construction. If there is any tension in Best
Girlfriend, it’s the question of whether Leo and the narrator
will become something more than friends, but nothing ever happens
to change that stasis. The real movement is the reader’s shifting
understanding of the narrator. Houston’s first person present
narrator spends a postcard-romantic Sunday with a male friend
in the ultimate postcard city, San Francisco. They appear perfect
for one another but for the fact that neither is ready to pursue
a romance at all.
In the story’s present, they read poetry to each other near the
Legion of Honor while Asian couples wed in the presence of swans,
they stop for drinks by the waterfront, then end their day by
taking a sailboat out into the bay. Lucille, the narrator, spends
most of the story either chatting with Leo or sharing anecdotes
about the two of them and the people they know that expose their
twin damaged histories. Leo came close to jumping off the Golden
Gate Bridge after being dumped by a girlfriend only to decide
against it because his death would not be a notable number in
the count of jumpers for the year. Lucille has a brilliant but
psychotic boyfriend, Gordon, whom she clings to out of fear of
being alone. She also has a horrifying relationship with an alcoholic
father who repeatedly rejected her. Along the way, a darker side
of San Francisco emerges. Lucille’s anecdotes populate the city
with muggers (in fact, there are two parallel muggings), urine,
and a set of loading cranes near the harbor that resemble the
dementors in Harry Potter. As in Cemetery, Lucille’s anecdotes
have a wit and sharpness that belie her inability to act on her
own insights. Like Cemetery’s unnamed narrator, Lucille is hypnotically
charming. In fact the mystery seems to be that she can stare straight
into her ongoing history of emotional damage, describe it accurately,
but has no idea how to process the intimacy she shares with Leo
because he doesn’t desire her romantically (at least not yet).
On top of that, we don’t know which of her stories have actually
been shared with Leo.
Perhaps most fascinating of all, we never exactly see Leo during
the day. Houston uses FPF to keep Leo’s reactions and feelings
out of the narrative frame. The reader has no idea what Leo really
feels. It could well be “not yet” instead of “no” (I had to wonder
what kind of guy would pass on an active-artistic woman who knows
football). One wonders why the two essentially go through the
motions of a romantic date without any of the intentionality.
Lucille and Leo appear to see and know each other. It’s just that
they can’t see themselves in some critical way. Leo chases women
who are literally unavailable. Lucille seeks out a man whose only
virtue appears to be his need to passionately claim her as “his.”
At the end of the story, Leo metaphorically helps Lucille face
the great mass of moving water that always threatens to collide
with her life. Ironically, he then tells her, “I can’t help you”
and Lucille never challenges the statement or demands an explanation.
Early in the story, it’s Leo not Lucille who utters the story’s
title, “the best girlfriend you never had.” Leo is, of course,
the best boyfriend she’s never had. It’s just that the narrator
has spent the entire day waving her first flashlight across the
entirety of her adult life without seeing what’s right next to
her. Whether he’s a future boyfriend or not, she already has a
positive model for emotional intimacy with a man, but can’t recognize
it because she keeps longing for and demanding that it take the
form of a boyfriend. Again, it’s the “narrowness” of FPF that
lets the story be as complex and subtle as it is because it pushes
the reader to also look at what’s not being said or thought.
Two years ago, I bought my stepfather a high-quality LED flashlight
for Christmas. It was a nice flashlight, but a relatively cheap
gift for someone that close to you. I’d certainly bought him more
expensive things, but he loved the flashlight for some reason
and used it constantly. He died last fall. What I didn’t see then
was that the flashlight was very much like him, solid, well constructed,
practical, and not terribly ambitious about its place in the world,
yet quietly performing its functions well. Looking back, I think
he liked it so much because the gift symbolized my seeing and
appreciating him for who he was. The best gifts often aren’t extravagant
and they’re often about what the gift symbolizes rather than what
it is physically.
FPF is the POV that often works best when the reader sees what
the narrator doesn’t. They say the best way to get someone to
do something is to convince that person that it was his idea in
the first place. The best way to get the reader to think the writer
is brilliant is to give the reader the sensation of actively mining
the text to pick up connections and insights that he thinks the
writer only meant to imply or suggest. FPF appears to be the most
limited narrative voice in letting the reader see the entire room,
yet that also makes it the most powerful way to reveal the feelings
in that room. Whether you’re trying to gain admission to the Literary
Country Club or just do this to share a story or two, don’t overlook
the simple gift of first person present. It’s the POV I use the
most in my own fiction. After all, even the greatest fiction can
only aspire to be a flashlight in the darkened room we know as
life.
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© 2012 Marco Fong |
