Persons and voices
Oct. 10th, 2008 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughA while ago I blogged about why a writer might choose a particular tense to tell a story in; this time I'm interested in the choice of person and voice. Why does a story, or poem, end up in the first, second or third person, in an outside narrator's voice or character voice?
The I voice first, because it's arguably the greatest minefield. As I know both from email and experience with students, if you tell a story in the first person, many of your audience will at once assume (a) that it's true and (b) that the "I" is the author. For a people too cynical to believe a word politicians tell us, we seem to be incredibly gullible when it comes to the professional liars who are authors. Even when readers know it can't be so. I have had a reviewer assume automatically that the first-person narrator in an historical novel was female, simply because he knew the author was, though even a half-close reading should have made it clear it was a man.
I never use the I voice unless I'm in persona, pretending to be someone else and speaking in that voice. If I were writing about me, I would surely use the third person - and probably change the protagonist's sex - just to get more distance from the subject. And when I'm reading, being a writer, I assume that, as the phrase goes, "I is a lie". I have met students, and others, who dislike this, and indeed any authorial technique that makes the narrator unreliable. They want to be able to trust the narrator to be telling the truth, and they feel the I voice is a pledge of that. That's a point of view I can't understand, because to me unreliable narrators are not only the most interesting from a fictional point of view but, I would have thought, the most like real life - how often do real people tell each other the whole truth, or even know it?
I used to use the I voice, in persona, a lot, because it's fun to try out other voices. I've used it less lately; in my new book, the only first-person poem I can recall is in the voice of a tortoise, who had a viewpoint that couldn't really be interpreted through anyone else's voice. The third person gives not just more distance but more universality. It also, however, has the major disadvantage of introducing gender into the equation. Last time I brought a book out, some (male) reviewer with a lot of time on his hands thought it worthwhile to count the number of male and female protagonists, as if it mattered. In most cases, of course, it didn't; the poem had nowt to do with the gender of its protagonist.
In love poems this can be an especial annoyance if one's aiming for universality or ambiguity. Edwin Morgan, writing gay love poems back in the sixties and seventies when that wasn't legally safe, used to avoid gendering the protagonists, mostly by using the second person. But it's interesting that now, with no legal or social barrier to worry about, he still does it, and he says himself that it's because he doesn't want the poems pigeonholed as being for a particular audience; they're love poems, full stop.
The "you" voice does away with gender; it also introduces a lot of ambiguity. Does "you" mean one individual, or the reader, or mankind in general, or "you" as in the I voice talking to itself? This ambiguity can be fruitful, though not when the writing itself seems to vacillate between those possibilities. I know a writer who really hates "you" poems addressed to an individual (usually a dead one) because he feels they tell said individual what, in the nature of things, he must already know.
He has a point, but personally the voice that bugs me is first-person plural - the "we" voice. Again this is ambiguous; "we" can be mankind as a whole, or the writer and the reader, but as often as not it's the writer and his/her unidentified friends, and I dislike that, as a reader, because it makes me feel like an outsider; the "we" feels cliquish and exclusive.
Adwaitya
(died Calcutta, 2006, estimated age 250)
How could I not understand
their sounds, after so long?
But I have no answers.
They lean over
my fence, throw greens
and questions, as if
I could reply.
"Were you really Clive's tortoise?"
I beam
short-sightedly. I've no idea.
There have been many hands
proffering lettuce,
many blurred faces
high above. I do recall one:
sad voice, sad eyes,
watching me munch
for hours. I thought
it eased his mind,
but they say he stopped
his life in the end.
Such little lives
as they have, you would think
there was no time
to tire of them.
After I knew
they did not last, I took
less note. I have watched
young grow old, their years
racing like days,
and then they stop.
I view them now
as purveyors of leaves
and bran. I am partial to bran.
They marvel
to see me amble, chew.
That I still am,
after so long, like trees
or stones, consoles them.
Lately, even bran
has lost its taste.
I think
I may stop soon,
and I fear for their sad eyes,
seeing change
where they looked for certainty.
The I voice first, because it's arguably the greatest minefield. As I know both from email and experience with students, if you tell a story in the first person, many of your audience will at once assume (a) that it's true and (b) that the "I" is the author. For a people too cynical to believe a word politicians tell us, we seem to be incredibly gullible when it comes to the professional liars who are authors. Even when readers know it can't be so. I have had a reviewer assume automatically that the first-person narrator in an historical novel was female, simply because he knew the author was, though even a half-close reading should have made it clear it was a man.
I never use the I voice unless I'm in persona, pretending to be someone else and speaking in that voice. If I were writing about me, I would surely use the third person - and probably change the protagonist's sex - just to get more distance from the subject. And when I'm reading, being a writer, I assume that, as the phrase goes, "I is a lie". I have met students, and others, who dislike this, and indeed any authorial technique that makes the narrator unreliable. They want to be able to trust the narrator to be telling the truth, and they feel the I voice is a pledge of that. That's a point of view I can't understand, because to me unreliable narrators are not only the most interesting from a fictional point of view but, I would have thought, the most like real life - how often do real people tell each other the whole truth, or even know it?
I used to use the I voice, in persona, a lot, because it's fun to try out other voices. I've used it less lately; in my new book, the only first-person poem I can recall is in the voice of a tortoise, who had a viewpoint that couldn't really be interpreted through anyone else's voice. The third person gives not just more distance but more universality. It also, however, has the major disadvantage of introducing gender into the equation. Last time I brought a book out, some (male) reviewer with a lot of time on his hands thought it worthwhile to count the number of male and female protagonists, as if it mattered. In most cases, of course, it didn't; the poem had nowt to do with the gender of its protagonist.
In love poems this can be an especial annoyance if one's aiming for universality or ambiguity. Edwin Morgan, writing gay love poems back in the sixties and seventies when that wasn't legally safe, used to avoid gendering the protagonists, mostly by using the second person. But it's interesting that now, with no legal or social barrier to worry about, he still does it, and he says himself that it's because he doesn't want the poems pigeonholed as being for a particular audience; they're love poems, full stop.
The "you" voice does away with gender; it also introduces a lot of ambiguity. Does "you" mean one individual, or the reader, or mankind in general, or "you" as in the I voice talking to itself? This ambiguity can be fruitful, though not when the writing itself seems to vacillate between those possibilities. I know a writer who really hates "you" poems addressed to an individual (usually a dead one) because he feels they tell said individual what, in the nature of things, he must already know.
He has a point, but personally the voice that bugs me is first-person plural - the "we" voice. Again this is ambiguous; "we" can be mankind as a whole, or the writer and the reader, but as often as not it's the writer and his/her unidentified friends, and I dislike that, as a reader, because it makes me feel like an outsider; the "we" feels cliquish and exclusive.
Adwaitya
(died Calcutta, 2006, estimated age 250)
How could I not understand
their sounds, after so long?
But I have no answers.
They lean over
my fence, throw greens
and questions, as if
I could reply.
"Were you really Clive's tortoise?"
I beam
short-sightedly. I've no idea.
There have been many hands
proffering lettuce,
many blurred faces
high above. I do recall one:
sad voice, sad eyes,
watching me munch
for hours. I thought
it eased his mind,
but they say he stopped
his life in the end.
Such little lives
as they have, you would think
there was no time
to tire of them.
After I knew
they did not last, I took
less note. I have watched
young grow old, their years
racing like days,
and then they stop.
I view them now
as purveyors of leaves
and bran. I am partial to bran.
They marvel
to see me amble, chew.
That I still am,
after so long, like trees
or stones, consoles them.
Lately, even bran
has lost its taste.
I think
I may stop soon,
and I fear for their sad eyes,
seeing change
where they looked for certainty.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 09:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 09:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 12:15 am (UTC)I think I've only written one first person plural, and that was for aliens joined in a hive-type mind. I'd only use second person if I were having a character address a letter or report to another.
I have to say that unusual constructions can be a barrier for me unless done so well that the power of the story overcomes (e.g. Feersum Enjin).
And I liked your tortoise poem very much.