Last Respects

Let’s pay our respects to the omniscient narrator, that rickety old piece of claptrap machinery that served the likes of Fielding, Dickens, and Trollope. Our skeptical twentieth century saw that all-powerful narrator replaced by that of a single character in the drama, one whose point of view was individual and specific, but who could for the most part be trusted.  Then we moved on to the possibly untrustworthy narrator, to multiple narrators, and then on to the blatantly limited or even mentally ill narrator. There can be no viewpoint other than that of an individual, and any individual is deeply flawed.  Snapshots in consciousness, views into the mind of another, glimpses into the void.  These developments reflect an acceptance of the fundamental relativity of all viewpoints.  No single vantage point has any qualitative advantage over another. We’re all good.  We all suck.

Now we have authors whose works are devoted to the point of view of the obviously limited: Rivka Galchen, Mark Haddon, Rief Larson.  These and many others have written fiction that depicts a wrong-end-of-the-binoculars viewpoint that can be fascinating, might instruct us, and can encourage us to deepen our mistrust of our own limited powers of perception and analysis.  Very cynical, verging on the bitter.  Jenny Offill continues that trend with Dept. of Speculation, a short novel that portrays a marriage from the point of view of "the wife", a young, intelligent, and disturbed female writer.  The character is funny, witty, unhappy, pitiful, and perhaps unsalvageable.  She sees what she wants to see.  She manages to make the worst of just about any situation. She gradually descends into a terrifying personal hell far from her early aspirations:

“How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”

And then there’s the literary form.  Offill follows the lead of Jennifer Egan in her short story Black Box (The New Yorker, 2012). Egan’s story is told as series of tweet-like paragraphs. The NewYorker published it in traditional hard copy, but also put it out as a series of tweets. Offill’s main character narrates in much the same way: a series of short self-contained paragraphs, seemingly random thoughts or diary entries direct from the therapist’s couch. Is that the point? Are readers now therapists for these disturbed characters?  Instead of the author presenting characters and situations with an explicitly "objective" point of view, perhaps the reader is supposed to connect the dots and supply a diagnosis from the random thoughts and expressions brought forth by the narrator? We don’t read someone else’s interpretation of a series of incidents, rather we witness those incidents not through a character’s eyes, but through their mind’s deeply flawed memory.  We get heavily edited and biased reports, and it’s up to us to piece together whatever truth we can find.  Or maybe there is no truth, there is just experience, and the most we can hope for is to bear witness to another’s experience?

This novel is short, easy to read, insightful, and ultimately coherent. It's definitely worth your time and effort.  It will make you think, and more importantly you will feel. Yet I for one miss the omniscient narrator, the one that invited us to gather round and listen to his story, who lent his special voice and tone, who offered his comments on the action, who teased us into coming back for the next installment, who didn’t hesitate to chide us when we exhibited bad behavior like that of his characters or praise us for holding to our better instincts, and who thanked us for our loyalty and attention over the long haul.  He still makes an appearance here and there, but in progressive circles he has pretty much vanished, or at least now hides furtively in the prompter’s box. Perhaps we should put the bearded old chap into the ground and shovel some dirt into the grave. The objective storyteller is dead.  Long live the objective storyteller.