Indicating on the sly what characters are feeling
Let’s look a bit deeper into the ‘limited objective’ point of view in talesmanship.
This is a narrative strategy where the talesman only tells us what his characters say and do, and what physical things happen in the story’s scenes. He does not tell us what anyone thinks or feels – at least not directly.
The result is that we have to guess at their feelings. We confront the characters through a middle ground of this uncertainty, which can be greater or less, and the talesman can use the relative depth of the uncertainty to create greater suspense for us.
We will hear of simple and minor characters, ‘one-string’ characters, the functionaries, and we will have no doubt about what they feel or think – more, we won’t much care, for their feelings won’t matter much to the events to come. And we will hear of more important characters, even major characters, and their motives and inner hearts will remain cloudy, murky, and obscure to us. We won’t have any way of telling just what they will do next and, because they are more-important characters, this will make a difference to the future outcome of events.
Where a hero seems torn between two paths, and we wallow in his feelings and thoughts, we are so much closer to being able to predict the outcome of his inner conflict. But when the talesman won’t permit us any glimpse within the hero, we are left on the edge of our seats with doubt as to which way he will decide.
So much for suspense.
What about ways to indicate the character’s heart? If the talesman gives us some clues, but no definite answers, as to what a character is feeling, suspense comes from this alone. Even when we feel sure, very sure, of the character’s feelings, we can’t be 100% sure, and we fret and read on to find that last 1%, that last confirmation that we were right.
More, when we must work through clues to guessing about a character’s motives and feelings, we grow all the more involved in the tale, and in the characters.
A talesman can show us feelings through several methods that fall short of out-and-out telling us. These methods form a spectrum from the more-sure to the more-obscure.
The most obvious method is for the character to tell us (and other characters present) what he is feeling or thinking. This is almost the same as when the talesman tells us, but it falls just that 1% shy of full confidence, for there may be characters, and situations, when they will not tell the truth – supposing they know the truth of their feelings at all.
The next obvious method is for the talesman to describe the character’s facial expression, and have it expressive of his emotions. We have evolved to be pretty good at reading other peoples’ faces as windows into their hearts.
Next in line is the character’s posture and general mien, his ‘body language.’ We are not on the whole so expert at reading bodies as we are reading faces, and the language we use reflects this, as there are few parallels in describing body postures to facial expressions such as ‘he smiled, he frowned, he scowled.’
After this there is the roundabout and indirect method of deducing a character’s heart from what he does. This is a ‘lagging indicator’ to borrow a term from the economists: we only get an idea of a character’s feelings and thoughts after the fact; his action now tells us what he thought the moment before.
Then there is the scenery itself, and this is my main point today, for it is somewhat controversial, and seems to me underused.
A scene can be described in such a way as to make us in the audience feel a certain way, and sympathetically, this can give us the impression that the characters present must feel something like it.
This technique used to be employed often with weather, and as such has been mistakenly called a pathetic fallacy. The ‘pathetic fallacy’ in thinking refers to the anthropomorphic notion that animals, plants, stones, and weather have human feelings, and think and react in some way ‘just like us.’ This fallacious way of thinking was taken up by some literary critics and applied to scenes in literature (mostly Romantic literature, I imagine) where a storm would break when characters were torn at heart, and angry at one another, but fair sunshine would warm the world when the characters felt happy and at peace.
The critics who bludgeoned such practice as ‘pathetic fallacy’ proved they didn’t really understand the nature and methods of talesmanship. They wrote as though the talesmen involved were actually recording cause and effect in the story world as though it did, and should, reflect the real world. But in truth I will assure you, those talesmen were only using these changes in weather as a means of aligning us readers with the characters, and making us feel along with them.
But using weather in this way is rather a crude technique. It is crude because it is so obvious, and relies upon things happening to give us the desired feelings. More subtle is to shade the description of things that do not change in and of themselves, in such a way as to indicate the feelings of the characters.
In our own lives, we all have looked on the same rooms and objects, and hated them when we were angry, and enjoyed them when we were happy. The clever talesman makes use of this to show us these objects in his scenes in such a way that makes them appear hateful or pleasing, according to how he wishes to indicate his characters feel.
This is a very subtle method, and its subtlety can go over the heads of the conscious reader, as we see from the literary critics’ reactions. But I will wager that subliminally, in the right brain, more emotional or ‘gut’ aspects of the audience, we understand it better. We at least will get the idea of what the character is feeling in these scenes.
(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 28, 2008)
