Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I don’t like the word distancing . If I say there should be a distance between author and character it sounds as if I’m after the “objectivity” pretended to by naive scientists and sophisticated minimalists. I’m not. I’m all for subjectivity, the artist’s inalienable privilege. But there has to be a distance between the writer and the character.

The naive reader often does not take this distance into account. Inexperienced readers think writers write only from experience. They believe that the writer believes what the characters believe. The idea of the unreliable narrator takes some getting used to.

David Copperfield’s experiences and emotions are very close indeed to those of Charles Dickens, but David Copperfield isn’t Charles Dickens. However closely Dickens “identified with” his character, as we glibly and freudianly say, there was no confusion in Dickens’s mind as to who was who. The distance between them, the difference of point of view, is crucial.

David fictionally lives what Charles factually experienced, and suffers what Charles suffered; but David doesn’t know what Charles knows. He can’t see his life from a distance, from a vantage point of time, thought, and feeling, as Charles can. Charles learned a great deal about himself, and so let us learn a great deal about ourselves, through taking David’s point of view, but if he had confused his point of view with David’s, he and we would have learned nothing. We’d never have got out of the blacking factory.

Another interesting example: Huckleberry Finn . What Mark Twain achieves, with great skill and at tremendous risk, all the way through the book, is an invisible but immense ironic distance between his point of view and Huck’s. Huck tells the story. Every word of it is in his voice, from his point of view. Mark is silent. Mark’s point of view, particularly as regards slavery and the character Jim, is never stated. It is discernible only in the story itself and the characters —Jim’s character, above all. Jim is the only real adult in the book, a kind, warm, strong, patient man, with a delicate and powerful sense of morality. Huck might grow up into that kind of man, given a chance. But Huck at this point is an ignorant, prejudiced kid who doesn’t know right from wrong (though once, when it really matters, he guesses right). In the tension between that kid’s voice and Mark Twain’s silence lies much of the power of the book. We have to understand—as soon as we’re old enough to read this way—that what the book really says lies in that silence.

Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, is going to grow up to be at best a smart entrepreneur, at worst a shyster; his imagination has no ethical ballast at all. The last chapters of Huckleberry Finn are tedious and hateful whenever that manipulative, unfeeling imagination takes over, controlling Huck and Jim and the story.

Toni Morrison has shown that the jail Tom puts Jim into, the tortures he invents for him, and Huck’s uncomfortable but helpless collusion, represent the betrayal of Emancipation during Reconstruction. Freed slaves did find themselves with no freedom at all, and whites accustomed to consider blacks as inferior inevitably colluded in that perpetuation of evil. Seen thus, the long, painful ending makes sense, and the book makes a moral whole. But it was a risk to take, both morally and aesthetically, and it succeeds only partially, perhaps because Mark Twain overidentified with Tom. He loved writing about smart-alecky, go-for-broke manipulators (not only Tom but the King and Duke), and so Huck, and Jim, and we the readers, all have to sit and watch them strut their second-rate stuff. Mark Twain kept his loving distance from Huck perfectly, never breaking the tender irony. But wanting Tom for that final bitter plot twist, he brought him in, indulged him, lost his distance from him—and the book lost its balance.

Though the author may pretend otherwise, the author’s point of view is larger than the character’s and includes knowledge the character lacks. This means that the character, existing only in the author’s knowledge, may be known as we cannot ever know any actual person; and such insight may reveal insights and durable truths relevant to our own lives.

To fuse author and character—to limit the character’s behavior to what the author approves of doing, or the character’s opinions to the author’s opinions, and so forth—is to lose that chance of revelation.

The author’s tone may be cold or passionately concerned; it may be detached or judgmental; the difference of the author’s point of view from the character’s may be obvious or concealed; but the difference must exist. In the space provided by that difference, discovery, change, learning, action, tragedy, fulfillment take place—the story takes place.

A piece put together for this book, from notes for workshops and talks to writers during the nineties.

“Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère…” et ma soeur…

This essay is the somewhat grouchy result of years of reading stories—workshop manuscripts and printed books—that include me, the reader, in a group I don’t belong to and don’t want to belong to.

You’re just like me, you’re one of us, the writer tells me. And I want to shout, I’m not! You don’t know who I am!

We writers of fiction don’t know who reads us. We can make some limited assumptions about our readers only if we write for a publication with a restricted readership such as a campus literary periodical or a magazine with a specific religious or commercial affiliation, or in a strictly coded genre such as the Regency romance. And even then it’s unwise to assume that your readers think the way you do about anything—race, sex, religion, politics, youth, age, oysters, dogs, dirt, Mozart— anything .

The unquestioned assumption, the mistake of thinking we all think alike, is less often made by writers who belong to a minority or oppressed social group. They know all too clearly the difference between “us” and “them.” The confusion of “us” with “everybody” is most tempting to people who are members of one or more of the privileged or dominant groups in their society or in an isolated or sheltered social environment such as a college, or a white American neighborhood, or a newspaper editorial staff.

The premise is: everybody’s like me and we all think alike.

Its corollary is: people who don’t think like me don’t matter.

The supposed phenomenon of “political correctness”—a conspiracy by bleeding-heart liberals to keep us ordinary folks from talking the normal ordinary just-folks down-home way and calling a spade a spade—exhibits the corollary as an article of belief, invoked to defend various bigotries.

Arrogance is usually ignorant. It can be innocent. Children’s ignorance of how others think and feel has to be forgiven, while it’s being corrected. Many adults in communities isolated by geography or poverty have known only people like themselves, of their own community, creed, values, assumptions, and so on.

But these days, no writer can legitimately claim either ignorance or innocence as a defense of prejudice or bigotry in their writing.

How does anybody know anything about other people’s minds and feelings? Through experience, yes, but fiction writers get and handle a great part of their experience through their imagination, and pass it on to their readers entirely through the same channel. Knowledge concerning the enormous differences among people is there for any reader, no matter how isolated and protected. And a writer who doesn’t read is inexcusable.