Eye in a Box

The immersive point-of-view character can at times cripple a tale

Bardelys was reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, but though it was pulling him along (which might be the highest compliment any tale can boast) he wasn’t enjoying it as much as its many fans must have. After all, the series of teen romance against the very-gothic Pacific Northwest tales was said to be almost as popular as J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Well, Bardelys had to admit that he wasn’t exactly Meyer’s target audience. He wasn’t a girl, and he was a few years past his teens.

One thing had struck him, though. He was a bit critical about the heroine and her attitude. And he realized that Meyer might have explored Bella’s reactions and character a great deal more, except … she couldn’t.

She couldn’t, because Bella was the point of view character in an immersive, first-person narrative. From such a restricted point of view, Meyer could show us what Bella saw herself, but she couldn’t look back on Bella herself. At most she could have Bella consider her own motives — but that was still looking from inside Bella’s head.

No eye can see itself.

It doesn’t always have to be that way, Bardelys thought. There was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, as well as Nabokov’s Lolita. Both these tales were told as though the protagonist spoke, and both made us look at much at the protagonist as at anything he saw around him.

The difference, Bardelys wondered — where did the difference lie?

Well, there was this: the heroes of Faulkner and Nabokov’s tales were both extreme and different from us in the audience. They were so different from us that it would be quite difficult to identify with them. They weren’t just different — they were repulsive as well. We wouldn’t want to identify with either of them.

As a result, when we read those tales, we are always at one remove from their supposed narrators. We stand apart and seem to hear their ramblings, and we judge them, and we doubt they are telling the full story, and we suspect that they don’t even know the full story. And Faulkner and Nabokov give us skillful glimpses at other alternative events or ways to see things.

These are not ‘immersive’ in any way. The grotesqueness of the heroes forbid us from delving deep. But Meyer wants us to sink deep into Bella’s way of seeing things. This creates a strong box all around the narrative, restricting what we can see or think.

Bardelys imagined that he was only able to step aside from that spell because he was not the target audience; the spell was weak upon a 50-year-old man, and he was thus strong enough to break the chains and wonder how the tale might have been if Meyer had chosen a different narrative strategy.

She might have done it so easily, Bardelys thought. She might have made it an epistolary novel, made up of emails Bella sends her mother. This would have required that Bella tell her mother a lot more than Meyer’s Bella does in the published book, of course. Or Meyer might have told the tale from Bella’s friend’s Jessica’s point of view.

With these strategies, much of the text could be preserved word for word — 95% in emails, and 90% for scenes where Bella pours her heart out to Jessica. But if the text was preserved, the experience Bardelys and other readers would have would have been very different. Just this simple layer of remove would have set us considering Bella from the outside. We would have observed what she looks like, and we would have had, if Jessica had been our point-of-view character, an external, less subjective way of looking at Bella’s physical appearance, and how she looks and changes as she falls in love, and in danger.

Third person subjective point of view would change the text somewhat more, but it would have had the advantage of allowing slight shifts outward, glimpses of a somewhat more objective (at least an external) sight of Bella. It would have permitted a true Narrator, disparaged and disguised, to offer us a hint of analysis into Bella’s heart and character.

This is one of the chief faults of the immersive point-of-view narrative: it makes for insipid leads. Sometimes the heroine’s insipidness is the point (Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is the prime example), but more often the insipidness is an unfortunate by-product of the absolute identification between audience and hero.

Often enough, in the tales that Bardelys had read, this sort of tale was wish-fulfillment, and the hero was an idealized, romanticized image of the self we readers wish we might be. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series of tales, with the super-heroic John Carter, was an example. John Carter’s character (if Bardelys could even consider his character without a smile) was beside the point; more important was his strength, swordsmanship, bravery, and cleverness. John Carter was insipid in a different way than the nameless narrator of Rebecca. He was ‘insipid’ in the sense that he was flat as a character, pasteboard, simple in the extreme. He loved, he hated, he fought, he won. His motives were the most primitive known to man.

Bella of Meyer’s Twilight series, on the other hand, is not quite a wish-fulfillment.

No: Bardelys wondered if he had to take that back. Consider Bella from the vantage point of a typical teenage girl, or at least a teenage girl who reads romantic novels. What would be her wish to be fulfilled? What would be her ideal Other Self?

Well, Bella considered herself plain, but all the boys she meets want to date her, and fall in love with her. So she is Ugly Duckling Girl, and what more typical wish could a teen girl have to fulfill? Then, she falls in love with the most ‘beautiful’ boy in her class, the darkly intriguing Edward. And, wish promptly fulfilled, he falls in love with her. They even have a disagreement, before the first book is half done, as to which of the two loves the other more.

The danger that her love represents, Bardelys deemed, was the very stuff of gothic romance, traceable back to Jane Eyre — the darkly handsome, but wild and even dangerous, masterful lover Edward, was a direct descendent of Mr (Edward) Rochester.

Wishes fulfilled partake of dreams, and Eartherean tales (such as the Twilight series includes) glide through the moonscape of dreams. In dreams the dreamer does less than things happen to him. So too with Bella, Bardelys realized: coincidences (which in Eartherea are the work of Fate or Higher Powers) throw Bella and Edward together to simmer their attraction, and then Edward starts to take matters in his own hands, watching over Bella and appearing fortuitously whenever she falls in danger.

But when a hero does less than is done to him, he falls in peril of insipidness, too.

Maybe, Bardelys had to concede, Bella was a wish-fulfillment to Meyer’s intended audience. He simply hadn’t understood this until he reasoned it out, while writing of it in his blog, because he was so unlike the intended audience, and that wish was so far from his.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, August 11, 2008)