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Here's a writing problem for you...
Feb. 24th, 2010 10:42 amI've a friend who's written a novel, as yet unpublished (I hope that won't be the case for long because its subject matter is fascinating and curiously little used, given that it affects everyone who'll ever be a parent).
Anyway. This novel centres on a group of young middle-class women in London, brought together by an extremely likely circumstance which I won't go into for fear of spoilers, but suffice to say it's a good way of bringing together women of assorted incomes and professions. It's narrated by one of them. When this was read in a group, about halfway through, someone remarked that, though the multiculturality of London clearly showed in the minor characters, the central group of half a dozen women were all WASPs. Why no, said the astonished author, Phoebe's black.
Well, she was to the author, who had the character's image firmly in her head, but her readers - who really were all WASPs - had simply assumed that all the characters looked like them unless the contrary was specifically indicated. Now you might well say this assumption of defaults was a reader-created problem, but of course it falls to the author to solve it, and it isn't all that easy to do so without being too obvious. One way, clearly, would be to make the character, rather than Caribbean, Asian, because then her name would indicate origin. But this doesn't really seem like a full answer: suppose the author has good cause to leave Phoebe's background as it is, how do you indicate it early on for the reader without waving a flagpole? The POV character/narrator is not the kind of person who would remark on such a thing or, probably, even notice it, since she lives in a very multicultural area. Indeed the author's inclination was to say nothing if it could be avoided, on the ground that Phoebe's ethnicity is no more important to the story than anyone else's (true). But the one way in which it is important is in reflecting the society these women live in; it really would be quite odd if the POV character had no friends from a different ethnic background.
In the first (and for all I know the only) book he ever wrote in the voice of a white man, Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin, right at the start, has his narrator look in a reflecting window and observe "my blond hair gleams". He can use this unlikely device with some credibility, because his narrator is a narcissistic man trapped in his own self-image; the novel is full of reflecting surfaces. It wouldn't work anywhere else. I don't recall how my friend solved it in the end; probably this sort of problem has one solution per novel, but ever since I came across it in this one I've been wondering if there are any general "rules" one could use for how to indicate ethnicity if (a) names won't do it (b) you have a narrative voice that won't easily mention it and (c) you don't want to make a big thing of it?
(The character's name wasn't Phoebe, btw.)
Anyway. This novel centres on a group of young middle-class women in London, brought together by an extremely likely circumstance which I won't go into for fear of spoilers, but suffice to say it's a good way of bringing together women of assorted incomes and professions. It's narrated by one of them. When this was read in a group, about halfway through, someone remarked that, though the multiculturality of London clearly showed in the minor characters, the central group of half a dozen women were all WASPs. Why no, said the astonished author, Phoebe's black.
Well, she was to the author, who had the character's image firmly in her head, but her readers - who really were all WASPs - had simply assumed that all the characters looked like them unless the contrary was specifically indicated. Now you might well say this assumption of defaults was a reader-created problem, but of course it falls to the author to solve it, and it isn't all that easy to do so without being too obvious. One way, clearly, would be to make the character, rather than Caribbean, Asian, because then her name would indicate origin. But this doesn't really seem like a full answer: suppose the author has good cause to leave Phoebe's background as it is, how do you indicate it early on for the reader without waving a flagpole? The POV character/narrator is not the kind of person who would remark on such a thing or, probably, even notice it, since she lives in a very multicultural area. Indeed the author's inclination was to say nothing if it could be avoided, on the ground that Phoebe's ethnicity is no more important to the story than anyone else's (true). But the one way in which it is important is in reflecting the society these women live in; it really would be quite odd if the POV character had no friends from a different ethnic background.
In the first (and for all I know the only) book he ever wrote in the voice of a white man, Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin, right at the start, has his narrator look in a reflecting window and observe "my blond hair gleams". He can use this unlikely device with some credibility, because his narrator is a narcissistic man trapped in his own self-image; the novel is full of reflecting surfaces. It wouldn't work anywhere else. I don't recall how my friend solved it in the end; probably this sort of problem has one solution per novel, but ever since I came across it in this one I've been wondering if there are any general "rules" one could use for how to indicate ethnicity if (a) names won't do it (b) you have a narrative voice that won't easily mention it and (c) you don't want to make a big thing of it?
(The character's name wasn't Phoebe, btw.)
