Outside conventions and expectations - The POV

One of the problems with writing against the conventions of your times is that the avalanche of material coming the other way can sometimes sweep you off your feet.

Many readers like books that are the same as other books. Their expectation means that if your book is not like all the other books they don't know where they stand. They find that experience unsettling and ultimately they reject your work in favour of what they know.

One of my biggest beefs is with the third person narrative. The so called "eye of God".

The reason I don't like that perspective is that no human being is ever God. There are no invisible cameras with limited or total omniscience. If a person takes a camera anywhere other people react to the camera. Some act up for it, others hide their faces. To get people to ignore a camera you generally have to pay them. If you are a person in a room with other people talking about relationships you have to be in the room. You can't be an uninvolved witness or you are antisocially eavesdropping. You are either involved or you choose to do nothing - which is pretty much assent. But you can't pretend to be invisible. You aren't.

What the third person narrative has also created is a laziness in readers about authority, the narrator and the exposition. Readers simply accept what the narrator says. They don't ask the same questions they would ask a human narrator, such as: 'where were you?', 'why were you present?', 'what was your interest in the situation?', 'what was your point of view?', 'are you an unbiased narrator?' And yet why are these questions not valid? As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida asked, who is speaking, and why? We know what is being revealed, but do we know what is being omitted? The third person narrative is an insidious form of authority based on nothing more than assertion.

What the third person narrative also allows is for the narrator to use any voice they like. Suddenly an English major is in the middle of a swordfight or taming horses. Really? Is this really the voice of a swordfighter or a horse whisperer. No, it's the language of an English major trying to impress the other English majors at the publishing house in order to get their book published. Because what if the language of swordfighters is ugly, ignorant and unlikely to get an A in English composition? What if the language of horse whisperers is largely plain, unspoken, and again unlikely to get an A for English composition?

Because the voice of the narrator does convey a position, an attitude and a lot of prejudices. If I write a narration in short, sparkling sentences reminiscent of Jane Austen and then introduce a character with a Cornish accent I've as good as told you that this Cornish character is a rough man of the land with whom I have had little acquaintance, and frankly, less sympathy. He is, not of us, dear reader.

In short the voice of God in a third person narrative ultimately excludes those who do not have his voice. Historically the voice of authority has been rich, white and supremacist. Not only does the third person narrator have command of events, but also more insidiously command of the language of events and the ability to eavesdrop on words and even thoughts with impunity. No wonder, then, respect for the otherness of the other is so hard to find, and that some writers end up with characters like poorly defined sock puppets devoted to merely exploring the Id of the author.

But what are the risks of departing this conventional point of view?

I've only discovered these by doing it, and many authors haven't so I thought I would share them.

First person points of view are not convenient. You can't have multiple "I"s in one book without hopelessly confusing the reader. "I" means the protagonist. Because of this you can't change voices or suddenly see into the points of view of others. Sure your protagonist might be psychic but the point of view of the protagonist can't readily change to that of anyone else. Like real people the protagonist is where they stand. Even if they may sympathise with the points of view of others they cannot actually BE others.

People who read mainly third person stories fall into the assumption that the first person narrator is doing the job of the third person narrator. They aren't (or they shouldn't be), A first person narrator has incomplete information, failures of perception, biases and prejudices, all of which colours what they see and how they report it. A first person narrator is a liar by default, in the way that a third person narrator is not by default. The ability to read a first person narrator is the ability to read testimony with a critical eye. If you have no critical eye you fall into the trap of believing every thing they think and say.

For the exposition of the story the first person inflicts a considerable constraint. To build up tension writers often switch points of view in order to explore the world of the antagonist. They slip us (the audience) information the protagonist doesn't know. We watch in growing fascination and tension the inevitable collision between the protagonist and the antagonist. The first person narrative has no such option. The audience can't tell what the antagonist is doing except through the flawed eyes of the protagonist.

But an advantage the first person brings is that the narrator is a character. The language they use may well be that rough Cornishman's and we accept that as his acting in the world. If he chooses to mimic Miss Elizabeth we know the point of view he has is his, not God's. For the author narration becomes more akin to acting and less like directing.

It seems to me that movies have robbed audiences of a critical eye of story telling. Where a play is clearly a contrivance by a group of people in an empty space which derives its authority purely from the story and its enactment the effort of increasingly sophisticated movie making is to hide all that contrivance. The result is an audience unaware of anything but a sequence of scenes. Films where the contrivance of the story becomes visible are disparaged or relegated to film festivals as if they are some from of betrayal of the convention between creator and audience.

Yet rail as I may against this deficiency the result is still the same. The convention of the third person eye of God remains dominant and authors defy it at their peril.