A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  One of the terms often appearing in books meant to instruct intending writers of fiction is point-of-view. Being an unscholarly person, I can only speculate as to when some or another writer of fiction or commentator on fiction first devised the term, which he or she surely did in an effort to describe and, partly, to explain a process that countless readers of fiction and nearly as many writers of it had engaged in for centuries past and engage in to this day without troubling themselves to examine it. The result of the process is that the reader (myself and, surely, not a few others excluded) is persuaded that he or she stands in relation to one or more fictional personages as no one in the world where I sit writing these words could ever stand in relation to another: the reader (excluding those noted earlier in this sentence) is persuaded that he or she knows what the fictional personage thinks, feels, remembers, hopes for, fears, and much else. I am not concerned here with the manifest folly of the reader thus persuaded: the reader who wants from fiction an experience hardly more subtle than the viewer gets from a film. I prefer to suppose that the discerning reader of this work of fiction needs no further reminder from me in the matter. Perhaps even the discerning reader, however, is unaware of the many variations of the process that goes nowadays by the name point-of-view. At one extreme is the boldness and directness of the nineteenth-century writer of fiction who informs the reader, as though possessing an unchallenged right to do so, that this or that character is contented or disconnected or weighed down with remorse or uplifted by hope. Many a writer of this sort ranges freely from character to character, even within the same few pages, with the result that the reader might be enabled to know the intentions of each of two characters in a dispute between antagonists, for example, or a proposal of marriage. One such passage that occurs to me reports the scene, so to call it, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, in which Tess Durbeyfield and Alec d’Urberville meet for the first time. The narrator reports in the same few pages not only Tess’s thoughts and feelings but some of what occurs to Alex when he first meets her and even the motives of Alec’s dead father, he who had built the mansion in front of which Tess and Alec meet and had appropriated the ancient surname that seemingly linked the two characters. I quote here a short paragraph from the chapter titled ‘The Maiden’.

  Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at being here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the attraction of the swarthy Alexander.

  I quoted the lines above for no other purpose than to show how a certain sort of author of fiction claims to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one of his or her characters and will sometimes report in a single sentence, as the narrator reports in the quoted passage, the viewpoints, so to call them, of two, but while I was copying the sentence above, I noticed, for the first time that I could recall, the seeming incongruity of the adverb here. I then read the paragraphs before and after the paragraph that includes the quoted sentence. In those paragraphs, the author moves freely, as it were, among his characters, so to call them. At some or another moment, he might seem to lean closely towards one or another character while he reports, in the person of the narrator, the thoughts and feelings of that character. Soon afterwards, according to the time-scale of the narrative, the author might seem privy to the thoughts and feelings of quite a different character. Soon afterwards again, the same author might seem to step noticeably backwards from all of the characters and, far from seeming to loiter furtively, with bowed head and downcast eyes, in range of the sighs and murmurings of this or that character, might seem to fling back his head and to look far outwards and upwards while he reports to the reader not only the broad outlines of the far-reaching fictional landscapes surrounding the cramped cottage-garden or the tiny parlour where he had learned, not long before, the secrets of those characters, but the fold upon fold of field and forest surrounding garden and parlour and even the sight of distant villages and towns that he, the far-seeing author, but none of his characters might have been aware of and, this being the boldest of all his authorial claims, the history of all that he claimed to see or, should I say, the tendencies that he divined in the history, its moral purpose or the lack thereof, and the pressure of that history on his characters, whether or not they perceived it.

  The sort of author who practises this narratory nimbleness might seem sometimes, even to the discerning reader and, more importantly, even to himself or herself, the nimble narrator, to be present in the place that he or she happens to be writing about rather than in the place where he or she sits writing. If I, a reader of average discernment, saw, while I read the passage quoted above, a translucent image of an elderly man derived from a few reproductions of photographs in some or another biography – saw the ghostly image sometimes lurking near this or that character, then perhaps the author of the passage would have seemed sometimes, while he was writing the same passage or similar passages, to be present in the setting, so to call it, of his own fiction. And yet, despite such brief impressions, he, the author, could surely never have supposed, while he composed his actual sentences, that he was doing so anywhere else but in the visible world while his characters, so to call them, were elsewhere. Why, then, did not Thomas Hardy, when reporting indirectly the reaction of his character Tess to her being in a certain fictional place and in the presence of his character Alexander – why did not Hardy use the adverb there but its opposite here? An actor in a film would use the word here when referring to her situation. Likewise, a character in a work of fiction by an author with no more worthy aim than to have his or her characters seem to be actors in a film – such a character would report himself or herself to be here. But Thomas Hardy was using the traditional form of wholly indirect fictional narration in which all fictional events are presumed to have taken place during a fictional past and at a fictional distance, as it were, from the places where authors write and readers read and was therefore obliged by convention to write not here but there. Other readers of Thomas Hardy may conclude far otherwise, but I choose to conclude that he, Hardy, on at least one occasion during the countless hours while he wrote fiction or while he had in mind fictional subject-matter, seemed to be in the presence of one or more of his characters, so to call them. He may have supposed himself to be standing on the same soil where stood Tess Durbeyfield and Alec d’Urberville, or he may have supposed those two to be standing beside his desk; whatever he supposed, I derive much encouragement from the mere fact of his having supposed it and I believe that he would have supposed similarly on other occasions, even if his grammar offers no evidence for this. I derive much encouragement, I who have been always a timid author, but the residents of a certain upper storey in a certain wing of a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys may for long have considered self-evident my hesitant conclusions and all that follows from them.

  At the other extreme from Thomas Hardy and his like are those writers of fiction who became increasingly numerous during the twentieth century and whose narratives report the thoughts and motives and such of only the chief character. This character is often of the same gender as is the author, and some at least of his or her fictional experiences can be seen to resemble the actual experiences of the author. However far-reaching or however narrow might be the view, so to call it, of the narrator, whenever I read a fictional text I am never unaware of his or her fictional presence. What happens in my mind hours or days or years after I have read such a text may be far otherwise, but for as long as the text is in front of my eyes I am mindful of its being a fictional text: sentence after sentence composed by a human agent. I seem to hear the written words as being transmitted to me in a sort of silent speech, however absurd that expression might seem. I cannot hear, or seem to hear, such speech without seeing, or seeming to see, the personage responsible for it, and even though my reporting what follows may be evidence of credulousness or gullibility on my part, I confess that my first impulse is usually
to trust the narrator; to regard him or her as reliable. At this point, the discerning reader wants to know how I react in the presence of a narrator whom I suspect of being unreliable or when confronted by one of those curious texts sometimes published as fiction but having the appearance of diary-entries or collections of letters or other documents. I have no answer for the discerning reader, but I can state for his or her benefit that I decline to read any piece of fiction if I suspect the author of believing that fiction is mere artifice and that the reader of fiction has no more urgent need than to be diverted or teased. (Even the undiscerning reader should have learned from the previous sentence that the narrator of this present work of fiction is to be trusted.)

  I have mentioned so far only third-person narrators and none of my sort of narrator, who writes in the first person. The undiscerning reader may be surprised to learn that first-person narrators are hardly less varied than third-person narrators if they are classified according to how much or how little they claim to know. In fact, almost all first-person narrators during the past century have been of the one sort: reporters of their own thoughts and feelings and also of what they observe of the doings of other fictional participants. At the other extreme from these limited narrators, as they might be called, are those – mostly from the nineteenth century and earlier – who seem to report for the most part in the conventional mode of far-seeing and knowledgeable third-person narrator but who report occasionally in the first person. Anthony Trollope, in some at least of his novels, narrates thus. I seem to recall a few examples of such narration in the novels of Thomas Hardy. At a further remove even from these writers and their kind is Henry James, who will be mentioned later in this work of fiction, he being of much interest to some of the occupants of an upper floor of a certain building of two or, perhaps, three storeys. Whereas my instinct is to trust a third-person narrator, I am wary of several kinds of first-person narrator. I cannot bring myself to read any fictional text issuing from a pretend-narrator, as I call any purported first-person narrator of a different gender from the author of the text or from a different historical world. I could not read, for example, a first-person narrative by a female personage if the author is known to be male. Nor could I read a first-person narrative by a personage who is obviously derived from a grandparent or a forebear of the author. The sort of first-person narrative that most repels me has for its purported narrator a personage who could never have had the wit to recite the narrative, let alone the verbal skills to set it down in writing. The late-twentieth-century American writer Raymond Carver wrote many stories purporting to be narrated by pretend-narrators, as I call them. I object to such fiction because it claims to be other than fiction; because it makes the same absurd claim that a film makes: the claim that its subject-matter is of the same order as what is commonly called real or true or actual. Fiction, even what I call true fiction, is fiction. An author demeans fiction if he or she requires the reader to believe that what happens in his or her mind while reading is no different from what happens over his or her shoulder or outside his or her window. What happens in the mind of the reader of true fiction is richer and more memorable by far than anything seen through the lens of a camera or overheard by an author in a bar or a trailer park.

  Even the discerning reader who is also a student of narration – even he or she might struggle so far to classify the narrator of this present work and might struggle further as the work becomes more complicated in later pages. It is not for me to define myself, as it were. The reader should think of me as a personage as being in some respects less than an actual person and in other respects rather more so. At the very least, I am a voice: the voice behind the text. At the risk of confusing the undiscerning reader, I might well describe myself as the voice of another sort of personage who has been scarcely mentioned as yet in this work: the author or, rather, the implied author, by which I mean the personage of whom nothing is known except what can be inferred from this text. At the very least, I am a voice, but who knows what I might not seem to the discerning and sympathetic reader before he or she has read to the end of these pages, which are, let it be remembered, a sequence of sentences composed by a human hand long before they sounded to any reader as though recited by a mere voice.

  I mentioned earlier in this section my being impelled to trust fictional narrators. This must not be taken to mean that I consider the subject-matter of a trustworthy narrator as anything but fiction. Never, while reading any novel by Thomas Hardy, for example, would I mistake, or even wish to be able to mistake, the text in front of me for a report of actual matters or a description of actual persons in actual places. I acknowledge that many another reader looks to fiction for what he or she might call a deeper understanding of actual persons or events or moral issues, so to call them. I am well aware that scholars are able to name actual or historical persons or places that are the originals, so to speak, or the inspiration for fictional counterparts. (Only the other day, I found in a handsome illustrated selection of poems by Thomas Hardy a reproduction of a painting with the title ‘Tess’s Cottage and Evershot Church’. I have already forgotten most of the details of the reproduction. Nor am I curious to learn why the cottage is so named. If it is claimed to have some or another connection with the fictional character Tess Durbeyfield, then I can only marvel at how far the depicted cottage is from any of the scenery where I have located the fictional personage known to me as Tess Durbeyfield during the past fifty and more years.) Even so, I can only state what clear-sighted observation has taught me, which is that many a fictional character, so to call him or her, has become, from the moment when I first learned of his or her fictional existence, a far from fictional personage in a far from fictional setting that happens to be, among other things, the setting for this and every other of my works of fiction. And if I report that I trust certain narrators, I am thereby announcing my confidence that those fictional presences would approve of the previous sentence.

  One of the many sorts of fiction that became briefly fashionable during the past fifty years was called by most commentators self-referential fiction. I can recall reading several examples of such fiction in the 1970s, or was it the 1980s? Self-referential fiction was never more than a small part of the body of fiction published at the time, but those who wrote it or praised it seemed to suppose that no sort of self-referential works of fiction had been published in earlier times and, predictably, that writers and readers would soon agree that self-referential fiction was better able than more traditional modes to achieve the aims of fiction, whatever they might be. In the 1970s and the 1980s, I was easily deceived as a reader. Even so, I was just sufficiently alert to be able privately to refute the claims of the advocates of self-referential fiction. I had read Tristram Shandy and some of the fiction of Anthony Trollope and much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy. I admit that I was dazzled at first by If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino, but I did not fail to note soon afterwards how little I could recall of its intricate contrivances or of the seeming-qualities of its glib narrator, not to mention its stock characters, and if I think of the book nowadays I think of its author as someone for whom writer and reader are opposed to one another as the players on either side of a chessboard are opposed. Even the undiscerning reader of this fiction of mine should have understood by now that I, the narrator, would dread to feel that we were separated even by these sentences.

  I can recall today no instance of my admiring some or another work of self-referential fiction, much less of my trying to write such a work. (I will explain briefly in the following paragraph why this present work of fiction is not self-referential, although it may have seemed so already to a certain sort of undiscerning reader.) The more extreme examples of their kind repelled me. The narrators of these works would sometimes pause in their reporting and would affect to be unable to decide which of several possible courses of events should follow from that point or, as an undiscerning reader might say, what should happen to the chief char
acters. And yet, I myself was not discerning enough at that time to be able to explain to myself why I turned away instinctively from such writing.

  The narrators who postured in front of their readers and who wondered aloud, as it were, what fates to assign to various characters, were deriving enjoyment, so I now believe, from what they supposed was the dispelling of an illusion held by most, if not all, of their readers. The illusion is that the characters described in fiction are, if not actual persons of the same order as the readers themselves, ideal persons, so to call them, who live out their lives in the same sorts of place as are depicted in films while their authors are required merely to report on them in the way that the makers of films observe their characters. It is not for me to guess how many readers of fiction might be under the illusion mentioned or how many of the deluded, so to call them, might have revised their beliefs after having read that the subject-matter of fiction depended on the mere whim of some or another belittler of the long-held trust between reader and narrator. All that I can do is to state here what seems to me self-evident: while the writer and the reader, together with the words that they write or read, may be seen to exist in this, the visible world, what they are pleased or driven to write about or to read about – their subject-matter – is nowhere to be seen: those seeming persons and seeming events and the seeming scenery behind them are present to one writer alone or one reader alone in the cramped foreground of somewhere vast and vague; and while I would never presume to understand the laws or principles operating in either of the two places – the visible or the invisible – I could never doubt that those in the one differ greatly from those in the other and could never consider any writer claiming otherwise to be anything but a fool.