The Wink

The objective viewpoint is like a sideways glance or a wink

Yesterday I wrote about the objective point of view in its broadest sense – that sense of being a tale told by an author about other people or characters, whose talesman never knows what is in any character’s heart, but makes guesses or assumptions on what they think and feel, to the extent he believes he knows them. This, I noted, is a very different sort of thing from the subjective or omniscient point of view, in which the author is like a god, and sees clearly into the hearts of any of his characters as he pleases – indeed he sees into them all, being their creator, but he only tells us what lurks in the hearts of a few, as best pleases him.

Today I want to put down a few words about the more limited sense of the objective point of view. This comes when the talesman will tell us nothing of what goes on in any character’s heart. Rather he will place us as if we were unseen witnesses to the action, that walk here beside one character, then flit across the field to another, then fly to another place altogether, beside another character. From our vantage points we can see, hear, smell, touch; we can, at the author’s pleasure, know all we would if we were truly present (though the talesman guides our eyes and ears, and only lets us ‘see’ and ‘hear’ what he will) – but we cannot read hearts or minds any more than we can in our own lives.

Thus, the only way we glimpse into the characters’ hearts is through the way they carry themselves, the expressions on their miens, what they say, what they do, and how other characters react to them. And then, over the course of the tale, we may come to feel we ‘know’ these characters, in the same way we come to know acquaintances in our own lives, and we feel we can at least make a measure of their souls. But this is guesswork, and depends upon how well we feel the talesman has drawn his characters, and how confident we feel that they have revealed themselves to us.

This makes our intimacy with the characters a bit more challenging than if the talesman came right out and told us. We must guess – and this can add to our enjoyment of hearing the tale, if the talesman manages it well.

The Impressionist Painters, rather than mixing their pigments on the palette, placed the various constituents of the color they wished us to see in small separate daubs, and at a distance these conflicting patches of hues combined in our eyes into the desired blend. We ‘see’ the same color that we would see had the painter simply laid down the blended pigments in an even stroke; but beneath the threshold of our conscious awareness, there is some part of the rods and cones at the back of our eyes, and the nerves carrying the raw impulses to our brains, the colored daubs stand apart, and fight for dominance, one hue against the others. This struggle, and the (wholly unperceived) process of recombining the hues into the general blend that reaches our conscious awareness, gives to the process of ‘seeing’ that blended color a liveliness, a ‘brightness’ if you will. Our brains are worked, and we are the more alive in our perception for having worked and struggled and, in this sense, painted the image ourselves.

In just this way, the unbiased objective point of view engages us as readers. We must guess at motives and feelings; the author gives us clues, but not the final conclusion – that we must reach ourselves. The process of telling, and hearing, becomes a dance between the talesman and us in the audience, rather like a strip-tease or fan-dance, where the dancer works to make us believe we are seeing more than in fact we are, and where the dancer is re-creating her own appearance and allure out of the stuff of her audience’s desires – and just at that moment when we think we know her, and have her, she winks – and dances off the stage.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, August 27, 2008)