Several members of the group in the psychiatrist’s rooms had been amused by the man’s account while several others had seemed to suppose that the man had been exaggerating and had not actually fainted at the bus stop, but the likely chief character, as I called him above, not only believed every detail of the man’s account but asked him whether or not the young woman, hardly more than a girl, had been one of the concerned persons surrounding him while he recovered from his fainting fit and whether or not he and she had spoken to one another on subsequent mornings at the bus stop and had become friends. The man replied that he had been too ashamed to look into the faces of any of the concerned persons and that he had returned home at once and had never afterwards taken a bus to work but had walked each morning far out of his way to a railway station. The chief character, as I call him, would have liked to tell the man who had fainted the story of his, the chief character’s, dealing silently for two years with the young woman, hardly more than a girl, whose name he had once misread as Dathar, but he did not trust the other men in the group to comment honestly on what he might have told them.
If he had not mistrusted most of the men who met in the psychiatrist’s rooms, the chief character of the paragraphs hereabouts might have told them not that he had fainted away on the afternoon when he had spoken, or had tried to speak, for the first time to the young woman, hardly more than a girl, that he had looked at for two years but that he had never been able afterwards to recall anything of the occasion. He could readily recall during the remainder of his life the events leading up to the occasion. A small child had misbehaved in the compartment where he and the young woman travelled, and he had resolved to walk beside the young woman after they had left the train and to remark on the child’s antics. (One possible reason for his having waited for so long before speaking was his being unable to compose what would have been his opening remarks. He could never have merely greeted her or commented on the weather. He felt obliged to impress her from the very first with wit or humour.) He could recall afterwards, with some difficulty, his walking beside the young woman for a short distance before they took their separate ways homewards. And given that the young woman smiled at him when he entered the railway compartment on the following afternoon and that later he sat beside her when a seat had become available and that they talked together during the remainder of their journey, he could not doubt that he had communicated with her in some way or another during the few minutes that he could never afterwards recall. But whether he had said something witty or humorous or something banal or whether he had forced from his constricted throat only some or another friendly sound he would never know. He had certainly not fainted away as had the young man at the bus stop, but part of him had seemingly been numbed or had ceased to function.
As I reported in the previous paragraph, the young woman smiled at the young man as soon as he had stepped into her compartment on the afternoon following his attempt to speak to her, and he and she afterwards talked together. Had she not smiled, the young man would have assumed that no words from him had reached her on the previous afternoon and would merely have exchanged glances with her as before. He and she talked together at last, but the reader should not have in mind an image of two young persons chatting amicably and being at ease with one another. Perhaps the young woman was at ease and was amicably disposed towards the young man, but he was so ill at ease that he was afterwards unable to recall any more than two sentences spoken by the young woman from all that she had said to him during five or ten minutes of conversation on ten or, perhaps, fifteen weekday afternoons before the afternoon when they said goodbye to one another as usual while they walked down the ramp from the railway platform and then went their separate ways, even while he, the young man, had decided that he wanted no more to do with the young woman.
He, whether the reader perceives him as a character in a work of fiction being written by a personage in an upper room of a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys or as a fictional personage in a fictional setting not yet written about or merely as a character in this present work of fiction – he, however he may be perceived, was afterwards able to recall only two items from all that the young woman must surely have talked about during the two or three weeks when he and she had talked together at last. The first of the two items was her given name, which was Darlene. He surely told her during their first conversation that he had been unable to make out her given name on the afternoon when she had placed her exercise-book in his view, but he surely did not tell her that he had thought of her during the previous year as bearing the absurd name of Dathar. The second of the two items was a question that she asked him on the last afternoon when he and she spoke together, which question will be reported later in this work of fiction. Whatever else he had learned about the young woman he afterwards forgot, if he had even absorbed it during their time together, so that she seems to him today not a person that he once dealt with in the world where I sit writing these sentences but an inscrutable image-person whose appearance was derived from a certain dark-haired young woman, hardly more than a girl, that he saw often in a certain railway compartment: an image-person who might have been the chief character of a complicated daydream-world that the girl in the railway compartment could never have guessed at and who later became one of the chief characters in a certain published work of fiction in which she has a different name from the name of the young woman mentioned in the paragraphs and is reported as behaving somewhat differently.
At some time during every day, I like to walk in the grounds that I see often from my upstairs window but have hardly begun to explore. The reader should not suppose from my having used the word grounds just now what I supposed during the first years when I frequented this singular building. I used then to suppose that the extensive formal parks and lawns and lakes and flower-beds, together with the labyrinths of paths and walkways connecting them, would have ended abruptly in every direction, and at some considerable distance from the building, in a high fence or a wall or hedge, on the further side of which would have been the nearest paddocks of the mostly level grassy countryside that seems to surround building and grounds on all sides and seems to be crossed at long intervals by roads where sunlight flashes occasionally in the late afternoon from the windscreen of some or another car or truck too far away to be seen or heard, and seems to extend far beyond the low hills or the lines of trees on the horizon. In fact, I have never come across any such fence or wall or hedge. I mostly stroll without purpose in the grounds around this mansion, so to call it, but I have sometimes walked directly away from the building, wanting to learn how far I might travel while still feeling myself in sight of a few at least of the sumless windows behind me. Not only did I never come up against any seeming boundary, but I was never able to decide, at the furthest point of my excursion, whether the mostly level grass and the scattered trees around me were still part of the estate that included the tall house where I belonged for the time being or whether I had strayed across some unmarked border into the countryside that had always seemed, when I looked towards it from my upper window, beyond the reach of a person writing for hour after hour at a desk.
I mostly stroll without purpose, as I wrote above, and yet I seem to be drawn often to one particular sort of place. In several level areas within sight of one or another wing of the house, so to call it, I find myself seemingly ensnared for the time being among a number of pebbled paths forming a series of concentric circles separated each from the other by a box hedge reaching no higher than my thighs. From an upper window of the nearest wing, the paths and the hedges between might appear as one of those carefully planned and tended mazes where persons become truly lost among dense green barriers higher than themselves and where they cry out to be led back to the outside world, so to call it. Never, on any path among the dwarf-hedges, have I ceased to know where I stood in relation to this towering building in the one direction and the mostly level and far-reaching countryside in the other. And yet, I have b
een sometimes able to experience, while I supposed myself trapped for the time being in a whorl of topiary even though in sight of safety – I have been sometimes able to experience what I suppose to be the pleasurable confusion of a certain sort of reader of a certain sort of fiction.
Somewhere in both the first and the later edition of his book, the American scholar mentioned earlier uses the expression double-voicing to denote the technique by which the narrator of a work of fiction is able to seem to report a series of events while at the same time seeming to report the thoughts and feelings of some or another character involved in the events. The technique has been used by numerous narrators, but the undiscerning reader of this narrative may still be in need of an example.
Nick rubbed his eye. There was a big bump coming up. He would have a black eye, all right. It ached already. That son of a crutting brakeman.
The four sentences and the exclamation above are part of some or another work of fiction by Ernest Hemingway. A person reading the sentences with alertness should hear, as it were, two voices, one voice being that of the narrator and the other being that of the character Nick. In the first sentence, only the voice of the narrator can be heard. In the second, third, and fourth sentences, that same voice is heard again. In those three sentences, however, the voice of the narrator reports not only his own observations but sensations and insights of the character himself, and when these two are reported the language seems not only the narrator’s but partly that of the character. The discerning reader might even notice a gradual change in the viewpoint from sentence to sentence. The first sentence reports only what might be seen of the character. Later sentences move more closely, as it were, towards the character’s own viewpoint, and the final exclamation seems so much in keeping with the character that it might have been enclosed within quotation marks. By this time, the narrator who seemed, only moments earlier, to be addressing us in his own voice has seemed to fall silent.
I would estimate that rather more than half the fiction published during my lifetime is written from a point of view hardly different from that of the passage quoted above and seems to be told by a narrator claiming to know all that is known to the chief character but not much more. By this I mean that if the narrator were reporting the visit of the chief character to a certain hotel, he or she (the narrator) would not usually inform the reader that the hotel had been the site, a hundred years before, of the founding of a certain political party or of a notorious murder if the chief character was unaware of such matters. Not only have I read much fiction of the sort quoted but I have myself sometimes written such fiction and not wanted afterwards to repudiate it. This sort of fiction provides its readers with an experience not unlike what I felt when I stood confused among the concentric box hedges and gravel paths. I was not lost or in any sort of danger. Even if I had not been able to plot a path outwards through the hedges, I could have scrambled over them or through them and could have got back to my room whenever I chose. For as long as I limited my thinking, however; for as long as I observed what I supposed were the conventions of gardens and their designers; for as long as I felt bound to walk only on designated pathways and forbidden from breaking through even a miniature hedge, then I seemed truly a captive of the artifice and of whoever had designed it, even though I could look away at any time from the petty labyrinth and outwards towards the far-reaching countryside or upwards towards this massive building and its numerous windows.
I have not wanted to repudiate any fiction of mine the narrator of which has the viewpoint described above, but I have wanted, for almost as long as I have been a writer of fiction, to secure for myself a vantage-point from which each of the events reported in a work of fiction such as this present work, and each of the personages mentioned in the work, might seem, at one and the same time, a unique and inimitable entity impossible to define or to classify but also a mere detail in an intricate scheme or design. I might have written instead of the previous sentence that I have for long wanted to call into being a fictional narrator by definition more knowledgeable and more trustworthy than a personage such as myself, the narrator of this present work.
I have been sometimes dissatisfied with the sort of narration in which the thoughts and feelings of the chief character alone are reported. (‘Nick rubbed his eye...’) I have sometimes felt concerned that such fiction diminishes the importance of the narrator. The undiscerning reader of such fiction might well suppose himself or herself merely to be witnessing one after another event, so to call it, in the life, so to call it, of the chief character in almost the way that the viewer of a film supposes himself or herself to be witnessing actuality, so to call it. And yet, this sort of fiction gives to its reader an experience far richer and more satisfying than is offered by the spurious sort of fiction that seems to lack a narrator.
Was it thirty or forty years ago when I first tried to read the only work that I have tried to read by a certain author from Latin America who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature? I long ago forgot the title of the book that I once tried to read. I had first learned about the book when I read a most favourable review of it in The Times Literary Supplement. I had paid my bookseller of those days a sum that was for me substantial so that she could have a single copy of the book sent to me by sea from England. I began to read the book with much expectation but was puzzled and dissatisfied before I had read twenty pages.
I have confessed already in these pages to being an ignorant and gullible reader. Thirty or forty years ago, I was even more ignorant and more gullible. After I had read the first twenty pages of the acclaimed work of fiction and had got no satisfaction from them, I was inclined to blame myself and my lack of skill as a reader. Even so, I read closely again the pages that had failed to satisfy me and further pages still, looking into the text itself for a possible cause of my dissatisfaction. I suspect that I had not previously studied the narrative technique of any work of fiction. I would have been well aware of the presence of many a narrator while I read but unaware of his or her technique or of its being only one of many that might have been used. In spite of my ignorance, I was quick to recognise that the fiction of the celebrated Latin American lacked any sort of narrative presence. I would have been hesitant thirty or forty years ago to blame or condemn the famous author but I long since decided that the author of a text lacking a narrative presence is guilty of posturing or, more likely, of incompetence.
What I read on the first page of the book mentioned was a monologue, and an undistinguished monologue at that. Someone who might have been male or female and of any age – someone was responsible for an uninterrupted outpouring. No, the author of the text in front of my eyes had written a report intended to persuade me that I was privy to – what were they? – the thoughts, the mutterings, the memories, or the daydreams of an utterly unknown thinker, mutterer, rememberer, or daydreamer. (However ignorant and gullible I might have been at the time, I could never have supposed the monologue, as I call it, to be any sort of purported text, as though the author of the book in front of me was quoting from the writings of one or another of his characters, so to call them. Even the least-skilled of writers could have composed something more readable than the unvarying wordage in front of me.)
After I had read a certain number of densely printed pages, I came to a gap in the text. After the gap came another body of text hardly different from the first, and even the reader that I was at that time began to resent the lack of information provided. Was the second monologue to be attributed to the same young or old, male or female thinker or mutterer or rememberer or daydreamer who had been responsible for the first? Or, was I now reading the presumed thoughts or whatever of quite another personage? Even the reader that I was at the time could see that the rhythms and the grammar of the second monologue differed in no way from those of the first. Perhaps the gap in the text was intended to denote an interval of fictional time. (The previous sentence happens to be the culmination of a series of sentences illustrat
ing once again the form of narration exemplified by the passage that I quoted earlier from Ernest Hemingway. Quite without meaning to do so, I, as narrator, composed the series in order to point up the situation of my chief character, in this case my younger self. My having done so should demonstrate the usefulness of this mode of narration and even, perhaps, what might be called its naturalness.)
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