Bad Head Hops

‘Head hopping’ sounds awkward when the Narrator is unheard

David Lindsay is famous for his fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus which I began to read last night. The narrative tells us what different characters in a single scene are feeling, or thinking. This is known nowadays as ‘head hopping’ and it is frowned upon.

‘Head hopping’ of course is standard tale-telling of old, back in the days when tales were told and the talesman acknowledged the fact that he was telling them. But then there came the more subjective tale, culminating in the stream-of-consciousness tale, in which the text pretends to represent the thoughts and feelings of a character while he is experiencing the events of the tale. And then there came the more objective narrative, in which the talesman confined his words to describing only what an observer to each scene could sense; in the objective narrative we can see, and hear, and even smell and taste and feel, but who is sensing all these experiences is unsaid — no more than an instrument recording certain things, like a tape recorder or surveillance camera.

The objective narrative pretends that the talesman does not exist.

The subjective narrative as it is practiced today, also pretends that the talesman is not telling the tale that he is telling us, but presents its events as experienced by one or more of the characters of the tale. The strong preference of critics, writers, and editors, is that there be no more than one subjective character (or point of view character) in any one scene. Purists of this esthetic prefer that there be only one point of view character in an entire tale, whether it be told in first person or third person subjective.

This approach helps us in the audience to feel that the tale is a dream we are having, one whose events we experience ourselves; this makes the events more engaging, and gives the tale a certain advantage over movies, which cannot create this intense subjectivity.

Thus it is a bit of a jolt to suddenly ‘jump’ from one character’s experience of a scene into another character’s experience of that same scene. Our sense of identification is jarred and broken.

I felt this jolt in Lindsay’s tale, and it occurred to me that those who decry ‘head hopping’ are correct to do so.

On the other hand, what makes the jolt more apparent is the fact that Lindsay has no narrator. He begins his tale in objective fashion, and then (here and there) interposes what this character feels and thinks of the scene, and then what that other character feels and thinks of it.

Had Lindsay acknowledged himself as narrator, and given us readers a strong sense of that narrator, these head hops would not have been jarring at all. They would have been no more jarring than any tale you’ll hear over dinner or at a bar, told by a jolly raconteur:

So John went to his supervisor and demanded a raise. Well, the supervisor didn’t like that, and he didn’t want to give John the raise, but all the same, he didn’t want to lose him. John on the other hand was desperate — he knew he couldn’t afford to lose the job, and yet he wanted that extra money — all his plans depended on it.

Here we can see that the talesman has no ‘I’ presence in the tale, and no opinion of the events, and yet his ‘voice’ is very strong, strong enough to ground us when he bounces us between John and his supervisor’s heads.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, June 20, 2008)