I want to thank Steve Himmer again for this extraordinary opportunity and experience, as Writer in Residence here at Necessary Fiction.

Forgive me these fragments of thoughts below on a process I’ve been thinking about for some time. Any arguments or concurrences with these thoughts can be carried out in the comment section of this page or by emailing me directly and more privately at bkiteley@du.edu.

I don’t approve of stories or novels written in the third person. I prefer first-person narrations.

Hugh Kenner, in The Stoic Comedians, says, “The novel has an encyclopedic capacity for fact.” Kenner also points out that the novel, with Flaubert, began to parody itself. Emma Bovary reads and tries to live bad fiction of the recent age with tragic and pathetic consequences. By the late nineteenth century the novel became deeply aware of itself, showing its edges, bindings, and boundaries as art. In The Stoic Comedians, Kenner talks about three writers: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett. He notices that the novel and the encyclopedia travel alongside each other in Flaubert and Joyce. The encyclopedia, unlike the novel, makes no pretense of overarching, organic sense, and it has no literary precursors. Dictionaries and encyclopedias arrived with the invention of print and the idea of the book. The first encyclopedia made cross-references to entries that did not yet exist, an indication of the open-endedness of the form.

Kenner also observes that the branch of the novel that flows from Flaubert is very concerned with the page, with echoing itself, and with language that can only be read, not recited. The novel, by the late nineteenth century, was completely a book. Before this development, it pretended to be something else—a message in a bottle, a set of letters, a dream of life something like the later technology of film. By Flaubert, the novel was only and exquisitely something read, written, and referring back on and to itself.

This is a way of saying that the novel was concerned, from Flaubert to Henry James to James Joyce, with how the mind worked on the page, with how writable information could be filtered through consciousness. Henry James especially worked with the third person as a way of trying to match consciousness with language. His brother William James’ sophisticated theories of the mind worked their way into his former student, Gertrude Stein, who also played with the elements of narrative as they represented thought and perception. Her most popular work took over her lover’s first-person pronoun and limited self-description, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein was playfully stepping outside of her own body and mind to observe herself from this intimate perspective. Tender Buttons is pure thought, leaving the I completely behind.

The attached third-person narration prevails in popular fiction (though not as much in detective fiction, because the occluded eye and I of the private investigator is an important device). Popular fiction’s reliance on this form of narration (which also allows for easy head-hopping, from one mind to another) is perhaps because it seems to imitate the way movies present reality. Film, however, is really just theater that can walk out of the theater into the bright light of day.

First-person narration appeals to me because it implies that it is written, even when that is not necessarily possible. We believe that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is actually writing her letters as events are happening to her (fighting off a rapacious suitor, for example). The voice on the page is the only reality I trust, not this usually unsuccessful amalgamation of film and fiction.

In Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, brutal depression-era realities intrude upon the mind of a newspaper journalist, in the form of letters from the hopeless and pathetic—he writes a Dear Abby-like column and tries to answer these letters. The unnamed third-person narrator (who goes only by the name Miss Lonelyhearts, as if he were simply a set of words on the page) also tries not to pay too much heed to these terribly sad life-stories. The novella is about the dangers of reading life—and of writing back to it. Miss Lonelyhearts has, in many respects, a realistic texture, but it is also quite unreal in the slow, painful, phlegmatic welling of madness Miss Lonelyhearts suffers from. Miss Lonelyhearts’ editor Shrike, the wild parody-spouting antagonist, counters every saintly, empathetic, and literary gesture of Miss Lonelyhearts with unreason, cynicism, and heartlessness. Miss Lonelyhearts, despite his madness and deep sadness, is the reality principle of the book. Shrike is the id or unreality. Shrike says, “I’m a great saint. I can walk on my own water.” Shrike is the embodiment of postmodern fiction, in a book written years before the by-laws of this movement were hammered out. He ridicules everything literary and spiritual—from the Bible to Herman Melville. West’s central figure, though a detached third-person narrator, nevertheless represents consciousness on the page by way of this simple, nifty device—being named for the job he has and the title of his daily column in the newspaper. His letters to these lovelorn and broken readers are first-person cries of pain and embarrassment.

Miss Lonelyhearts is a story concerned with reading and therefore writing. “It was as if a gigantic, living Miss Lonelyhearts letter in the shape of a paper weight had been placed on his brain,” the narration tells us, a concrete example of how reading operates in the book. We hear no cynicism in this prose. The “majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice… they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering.” One character, the husband of a female letter-writer that Miss Lonelyhearts befriends and sleeps with (and this husband, Doyle, eventually kills Miss Lonelyhearts), struggles with language the way the novel struggles with the intensity of emotion in these letters: “Doyle was making no attempt to be understood. He was giving birth to groups of words that lived inside him as things, a jumble of retorts he had meant to make when insulted, and the private curses against fate that experience had taught him to swallow.”

I am reading Joy Williams’ Breaking and Entering, a lovely 1981 novel about a couple who break into empty but furnished Florida homes along the Gulf Coast. They live in the houses for a time, even though their own small house is always nearby. Williams writes in this attached third person, from the point of view of the woman, Liberty. We see things from her mind’s eye.

Roger came into the shop. He kissed Liberty on the forehead. His pigtail harbored string and dust, part of a potato chip. “Liberty,” he said mournfully. “Willie.”

“Thanks for taking Little Dot,” Rosie said. “Roger-Dad and I are just so busy tonight. You’re Christians, right? I bet you are!” Rosie had made this inference many times.

“We believe in guilt and longing,” Willie admitted. “Confession and continual defeat. The circle and the spiral.” The words filled up the room pleasantly, like boulders.

The argument one can make for attached third-person narrations is that they approximate how the mind works in its ordinary operations. We do not walk down the street thinking, “I am walking down the street.” But more and more I rebel against writing and even reading this sort of fiction. But the problem I have with this sort of narrative is that the author can intervene gently, as Joy Williams does beautifully, with the “words filled up the room pleasantly, like boulders.” This is surely Liberty’s thought, but it is also an act wrought by the author. The great pleasure of a first-person narrator saying this same line would be that this character, this writer, would have had to have written it, worked it out on paper, and chosen and observed it lovingly herself. The suspension of disbelief in a first-person narrative is a smaller leap of faith. I think writing should be writing.