I've been doing NaNoWriMo this month (if you don't know what
that is, check it out -- it's like the literary equivalent of a marathon, held
all over the world every November) and it's been taking up a lot of my
time. But it has also forced me to
confront the problems inherent in novel writing -- and in writing my novel in
particular -- that you only see when you are into the work itself.
Anyone who has looked through the reviews on this site
probably has some idea of what those problems are. Non-human characters, point-of-view, how far
we can extend fiction (and more importantly, our empathic imagination) out from
the human center of consciousness and still tell something recognizable as a
story, something that human readers will be interested in.
In October I tried a little experiment over at our sister
blog, Birdland West -- I published a short piece of fiction, more of a sketch
than a story, that attempted to do some of the things that attempt to do some
of things that I'm interested in. In a
very small way. Let me share just a
piece to show you what I mean:
"The hummingbird hung motionless,
except for its furious wings, above the feeder. The red plastic -- a
human would have called it red -- glowed like a beacon in the bird's vision,
reflecting parts of the spectrum no mammal could see. Light glinted off
the bird's feathers which broke it apart like millions of tiny prisms, throwing
flashes of green and red. (Again, green and red as humans would see them
-- with their primate color vision, recently recovered in evolutionary time,
and so limited as compared to the bird's). The hummingbird poised above
the feeder.
"Almost no one noticed. The
writer -- who lived in the house attached to the yard where the feeder hung --
was uncommonly aware of the sounds of the bird's presence -- the high pitched,
fast sound, like a telegraph key -- but the weather was growing cold and the
doors and windows of his house were shut. Besides, he was preoccupied
with work (or with the distractions that kept him from working). And he was
thinking about a young woman he had recently become interested in and what
seemed like the impossibility that she could be interested in (old, fat,
unsuccessful) him. He didn't hear the hummingbird's approach or sense it
hovering over the feeder in the bush at the front of the yard."
Now, not focusing on quality for a second, but just on what
it attempts, the idea of this piece was just to capture a moment in a
neighborhood, with the hummingbird as the focal point. It clearly has an omniscient viewpoint, it's
totally outside the consciousness of all the characters, but it has access to
all of them. It also tries, at least I
intended to try, to put the "non-human" world on equal footing with
the "human" -- or even better to erase some of the artificial
boundary we draw between the two. The
humming bird and (if you read the whole piece) the dogs and birds and squirrel
are not treated, I hope, as background for the humans, who as usual are
preoccupied with their own lives and barely see. That's the problem with being in the third
person limited -- the "inside" pov -- it traps us in human
perspective, in human concerns -- and unless we write about characters who are
uncommonly aware of the natural world, of the greater context, much of it is
lost. And even if our characters are
hyper-aware (try talking to me sometime in a yard full of birds) we're still
getting the human pov -- the hummingbird as seen by a person, not as a thing
into itself, a center of action and awareness no less important than the
human. That's the same as colonial
writers -- say Joseph Conrad -- who despite their great talent and insight into
human begins, could never quite get out the white European perspective, and who
therefore couldn't represent Africans or other colonized people as subjects in
their own right. Even when they are
viewed sympathetically, they are viewed as objects of someone else's
consciousness. The truly revolutionary
power of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin (despite the fact that it has been a
flashpoint in arguments about representation almost since it was published) was
not it's overt polemic against slavery, but that for the first time African
American slaves were presented as real, feeling characters with interior lives
-- as subjects of their own experience.
It was that radical shift that made it impossible for many white
American to ignore, and changed forever the way they thought about
slavery.
I'm not saying that my little hummingbird has the
world-shifting power of Stowe's characters.
I haven't accomplished that yet.
But this is one of my deepest goals as a writer. To de-center fiction, perhaps just slightly,
from the fixed human pov. To shift the
focus even for moments away from our human concerns. To set them in broader
contexts -- ecological, evolutionary, cosmological.
As the poet Mary Oliver says, "Meanwhile, the world
goes on."
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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.
