The Problem With First-Person Perspective

Prior to this past weekend, I had never heard of Tao Lin. If the reviews at the LA Review of Books and The Millions are to be believed, I'm not missing very much. The complaints about Lin's style and content appear devastatingly well-founded, but the critique puts me in mind of a broader complaint about contemporary fiction's love for first-person narration by a more or less fictionalized version of the author.

In any story that is fiction, for which there is going to be a narrator, it is important that the author clearly demarcate their control of the novel from the narrator's control of the novel, a problem much more severe when the story is being told in flashback. The usual way this gets solved--in Zola or Dostoevsky, for example--is by use of the third person: the novelist provides a perspective character, but the novelist gets a degree of remove. In highest fashion, this is the ingenious method of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. First person narration can do the same, though it doesn't always. To choose the most obvious example: Nick Carraway is not Scott Fitzgerald; Huck Finn is also not Mark Twain.

The Huck Finn example is instructive of the benefit given to an author: the central moral conflict involves the fact that Huck believes freeing Jim to be wrong, and Huck's view is the only one expressed. The reader, nevertheless, knows as well as the author the irony of the situation. But this is only possible because Twain creates his own space in the narrative.

Lin's problem, so far as I can tell, is that there is no such space in his writing. No one can tell if it's intended as a satire, and if so, the aim of that satire. That's a failure of writing. It hits on, incidentally, the problem I sometimes have with Lena Dunham or Louis CK: the author portrays a character who has the same name and some of the same characteristics of the author. Hence the much-praised 'realism.' But crucial questions in the work are left unanswered: is it satire? Of whom? How could we tell?

Oddly enough, Ron Rosenbaum may be onto something:

It has occurred to me that, silly as they are, the zombie, sea monster, and horror movie mash-up versions of the Austen novels are, if not deliberate, then unintentional expressions of What’s Missing From the Snow Globe World of Austen. That sense that she is not questioning the moral order of the universe, the horror of unredeemed human suffering, and the meaning of the human presence within it. She doesn’t have to, but let’s not ignore the fact that she doesn’t. She does not venture into the realm of theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the alleged goodness of God with the prevalence of evil—which almost every great novelist and dramatist does.

Austen writes brilliantly about Bad Behavior in a little world, which Deresiewicz distorts into little sermons on Good Behavior, but she doesn’t stare into the face of evil the way Conrad, Faulkner, and other Modernists—and 19th century novelists like Melville and Hawthorne—do. She could not write “Young Goodman Brown,” nor would we want her to. Her novels are a perfect expression of an exquisite intelligence valuable for itself not for domesticating Deresiewicz.

Combine this with Woody Allen's observation in Manhattan that people tend to create little problems for themselves so they can avoid thinking about the bigger problems, and we're most of the way to a theory about the current vogue for 'realism.'

Contemporary realism is a way of faithfully representing lived experience that conveniently ignores how much lived experience intentionally omits time for serious questions, and replaces great unanswerable questions for smaller ones that, while no less imponderable, are of a dramatically smaller scale. That is to say, just like real life, a pile of small details is taken for the whole. Which, as Rosenbaum points out, is not in itself a problem: it omits something significant, but it can still be done in an excellent manner.

Instead, it points out how much self-deception is involved in these cultural exercises. Take the rise of comedies with a serious dramatic element (someone at Slate pointed this out about Louie, but it applies more broadly). If the show happens to not be funny, the response is "well, it's not just a comedy, so it doesn't need to be funny all the time." If the dramatic notes fail, the response is "well, it's supposed to be a comedy, it's not surprising if it's occasionally a lesser dramatic experience," and, because it's 'experimental' or 'realistic' at turns, it somehow gets credit for experiments that no one much likes ("it's daring!") or, worst of all, for accurately representing life, as though this is a significant accomplishment and not the basic premise of almost all art. All of the critical energy goes into charges and counter-charges about realism and the proper category in which to slot what we see; the criticism, like the thing criticized, manage to replace serious reflection with petty squabbling. Which is not unlike regular life itself.

The consequence of this is that very little attention is given to what we don't see and this, I think, is the significant thing missing. When my students read a text, I tell them (as my own advisor once told me) to read with an eye to what's missing: the author has carefully chosen and constructed his argument, but of necessity or intention, many things have to be left out. To really understand the text, you have to have some idea of what these things are. Many are omitted for reasons of space, or because an author of that time wouldn't have considered them, or for other mundane reasons. Every once in awhile, the omissions are significant: why does Hobbes use the relatively obscure example of Naaman to argue that  the Bible approves of Christians publicly proclaiming a faith other than the one they believe in, and omit mention of the much more famous and significant examples of the opposite in the Book of Daniel? Everything does not, as my favorite saying goes, have to be about everything, but if what you are watching, or reading, is conspicuously or repeatedly not about something significant, that may be important.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

Silver Linings Playbook

I had a revelation when watching Silver Linings Playbook: there are really quite a striking number of characters being written for film and television who have mental illness of some kind. Perhaps that's a good thing--increased representation and visibility--but it does also change the way these are written. That's because the mental illness is not "of some kind," but always slight variations on the exact same thing: people who are unable to process emotions and experiences in the normal way, and therefore are always narrating their way through them, whether out loud or in their heads. The movie is good, and hits all the clichés with at least some originality, but its flaw is that you can never not know what the Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper characters are thinking because they always say exactly what they're thinking. It's not unlike the line from the Community parody of Glee: Abed prefers singing to real life because you can "say what you feel instead of making a face." It also connects, at least in my mind, to the (Community again) send-up of 'mockumentary' formatted tv shows, which can cheat the narrative tremendously by having characters tell you exactly what's going on. This carries through many of the most notable tv characters of the last decade or so, as well: House and Dexter and Sheldon Cooper.

The point, I think, is that these people are supposed to be deeply revealing of human nature because they're prepared to think or say those things that other people don't; by needing to question every interaction, they shed light on those things the rest of us take for granted. Instead, it's lazy writing: not trusting either the actors or the material to properly convey the nature of interaction and conflict, nor trusting the audience to understand what's going on unless it is underlined seven or eight different times.

The catch here is that, oddly, though almost no regular interactions involve people who function in these ways (you have to sort of figure out what someone else is thinking because they're not just going to, like, tell you, unless you specifically ask), writing in characters whose behavior follows the mental illness path is taken as more 'real,' because there is an accepted narrative under which regular social life is a convention and thus more or less a lie, and exposing the truth under that lie is therefore 'real.' This is one of the ways in which contemporary aesthetic realism is a rejection of things that are actually real.

Boy howdy:

Some describe conservative life in their liberal enclaves as akin to living “underground” or being in the “counterculture.” This romantic feeling of embattlement is fundamental to the undergraduate conservative’s identity. “I really have been able to fine-tune my arguments and my thoughts and my politics as a result of being around so many liberal people,” says one student. “I really sincerely feel that you become a much lazier thinker if you are part of the majority because you just aren’t challenged that much,” says another.

The latter half is generally true: for whatever reason, students who perceive themselves to be sledding against the majority write better papers. The first half is more problematic, especially given how widespread the culture of conservative victimhood is, and how paradoxical: "Those two contradictory cries—the left have overrun our campuses! the media overstate the student left’s strength!—sum up the overdeveloped sense of siege that has long animated conservatism." The very strong tendency is to read every thought, development or behavior through the ongoing and neverending battle. It's not just that the battle is ongoing, it's that it can never possibly end, and this view tends to warp exactly the sort of sustained reflection conservatism prides itself on; if one is on the team, one gets a hearing. Otherwise not. (For evidence, look at the furious energy expended on tearing down Wendell Berry after he expressed his favorable view of same-sex marriage--'he has betrayed our side the in battle therefore he must be wrong!' I never had use for Berry before, and don't now, but the energy devoted to undermining him is furious and unseemly.)

Beat this nonsense out of their heads right now:

...Which is great if you think that everyone has a valid perspective to contribute—and they do! ...

They absolutely do not. 90% of the work of a political theorist teaching in an introductory setting is correcting misreadings; if I had a nickel for every time I had to explain (to otherwise very intelligent students) that Machiavelli does not teach 'the ends justify the means' I would be a rich, rich man. There are bad readings and understandings of any cultural work, and these deserve neither time nor platform nor respect. They are worse on average than professional or academic critical work, because that professional status means (usually) a considerable amount of time given over to careful reading and attention which the average consumer of culture is unable to match.

What amateur forms of criticism are is easier: looser and more inexact in their standards, more willing to indulge desires rather than consider the merits of serious work (/more likely to be confused about what makes something 'serious'), less able to place narratives and tropes in their cultural and historical context. Consider: political theorists like to make fun of philosophers for the fact that contemporary philosophy rarely engages with anything older than John Rawls, which is to say they only consider work done since 1971. The average cultural frame of reference for, say, the average comic book movie extends no further than, at best, the first X-Men movie, and in no event to any sort of film at all prior to 1980 (Star Wars is the touchstone, and that's only 1977). Thus criticism, if it can even be called that, which is a thousand miles wide and an inch deep. Rigor is the price of accessibility, and accessibility really only makes it easier to accept the mediocre and think it's amazing.

Complete agreement with the proposition that we tend to conflate 'darkness' with 'complexity,' which explains some significant portion of what's wrong with contemporary aesthetics. The example cited is good:

In the second season of “24”, the last one I bothered watching, there’s a wonderful illustrative example. There’s the conspiracy to blow up a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, thwarted by bravery and pluck, and for a several episode sequence all evidence points to the plot being a joint effort by several Middle Eastern governments. Planes are in the air, ambassadors are recalled, the world is on the brink. And of course Jack Bauer discovers the key evidence that reveals that the cabal was actually within the American government itself. Complex? Well that isn’t a simple plot. Dark? Well there were nukes and people dying. But morally complex?

All the air went out of the show at the exact moment of that reveal because it turned a terrible moral question of how to respond to a horrific act of war (do you drop the bomb even though the plot failed? Invade three other countries?) into a simple question. Find the bad guys. Shoot them.

This also explains the shallowness of the comic book movie aesthetic: there are no real stakes because the good guy is never wrong, and never makes questionable decisions--in a real sense of questionable, not 'this might seem wrong but actually I have good reasons for it'--therefore can never generate any narrative frisson. The worst offender being Nolan's Batman--who takes the blame for the Joker's actions for no discernable reason, whose decision to compromise the privacy of everyone in Gotham registers as unobjectionable--but so on further down the line. "Is the Good Guy going to do The Right Thing?" is not a very interesting question; what makes the template supposedly work--all that tortured emotion in the origin story, the angst, etc--means nothing because it is overcome whenever the plot requires it to be. There are neither stakes nor consequences. The result is an aesthetic work that is darker than it needs to be, the relentlessly grim slogs that show up all the time.

Amazingly, the reviews of the movie Cloud Atlas manage to identify the two most substantial problems with the book itself. Instead of identifying them as such, however, they attribute them to problems with the movie (e.g.). These two problems are:

1. The genre "mash-up" that involves taking stock plots and doing little to enliven them (a robot develops the feelings of a human; a postapocalyptic wasteland that's much more like primitive nature, etc).
2. The vague quasi-spiritual transcendental nonsense which is mostly hinted at in the book.

The problem with the movie is that it forces this content to become literal, and when it is literal, rather than implied, it comes across as banal or insipid (or camp). This is not because the movie is a failure: it's a problem with the source material: the plots really are stock genre plots with little to enliven them; Mitchell conspicuously avoids saying anything concrete about the spiritual consequences of the overlapping plots: you might think this is skillful omission requiring the reader to draw their own conclusions, but you might just as easily think it's because there isn't any unified, satisfying explanation of it.

What this gets us to is the problem with the cult of style in contemporary literature. It's possible to write beautiful sentences that never actually say anything useful or interesting, and this, it seems to me, is Mitchell's problem. Readers get caught up in the sentences--in the feeling of reading the book--and never really wonder about what the book itself is about. Readers think that something technically difficult--writing across different genres--is impressive quite apart from the strength of those individual units (it puts me in mind of the praise for Louie, which seems at least as much to derive from nothing more than the sheer fact of his writing comedy and drama, or Socrates' observation in the Republic that artists go astray when they attempt to work in more than one rhetorical mode), and the fact of having completed the book somehow compensates for this. But surely it also matters what a book says, and this, I think, is much less commented upon, so much the worse for our aesthetic tastes.

I agree with this general point about the weakness of Homeland and The Wire, which is reflected in various other cultural properties:

I’ve been saying for tedious years now that the reason The Wire has come to be regarded as the best show of the New Golden Age over, say, The Sopranos is because everything The Wire has to say, it actually says. On both a thematic and a narrative level, The Wire is about the failure of American government and law enforcement. Since many or even most critics writing for mainstream publications use allegory as the great legitimizer for genre art, this is catnip. You don’t even need to do the high-school English-essay amount of interpretation necessary to figure out whether the zombies represent consumerism or the amphibious monster represents American intervention on the Korean peninsula or whatever — all you need to know is how you feel about the War on Drugs, compare it to how David Simon feels about the War on Drugs, and call it a day. I realize I’m being reductive and unfair, there’s more to The Wire than an editorial cartoon, there’s breathtaking breadth and (the final season aside) depth to what he and Ed Burns did there, but yeah, pretty much that’s what’s going on.

The marked trend of fiction in television and movies is towards a realism that thinks accurately presenting the world of something is a sufficient enough achievement to merit the status of art (spitballing: for movies, the Lord of the Rings could very well be patient zero of this trend: so visually and stylistically impressive that plot and pacing decisions are largely left unexamined. And Tolkein would be an interesting case since he so heavily resisted attempts to read into the plotting decisions he made.). If one looks at, oh, Louie or Girls or Breaking Bad or Mad Men on tv, the praise heaped on them is almost always of the form "these people have depicted something that looks and feels like the real world, therefore they have succeeded." It's all visual and emotional and emphatically not intellectual.