A couple of days ago, in discussing Robert A Heinlein’s novel Glory Road mention was made of the First Person Snare – the trap a talesman braves when he writes an immersive tale in the first person. The danger is that the talesman put too much of himself into his narrator, who ought to be more of an empty vessel for the reader to fill, in order that the tale be as immersive as possible. The danger is worsened when the talesman himself is a very different personality than the outward circumstances of his narrator-protagonist would dictate.
Heinlein, the 50-year old curmudgeon, wrote the tale of a 23-year old innocent, and the innocent’s words sounded suspiciously like those of a 50-year old curmudgeon.
There is this much excuse to grant Heinlein: that the tale is written by the hero long after he has gone through the adventures he faces on Glory Road; in the intervening years he has suffered disillusion and grown older, wiser, and more cynical (and curmudgeonly, perhaps).
So, logically speaking, Heinlein has his reasons.
But logic is a poor defense in talesmanship. At the time we read of these early adventures, Gordon is still an innocent 23-year old. And in order to immerse ourselves in the tale, we must accept and adopt that 23-year old persona ourselves – without reference to a later, older Gordon.
Heinlein could have side-stepped all the discord we felt when we read Gordon’s remarks along the way, had Heinlein merely added such phrases now and then as ‘Looking back on the incident…’ (And to be fair, the tale opens with the older Gordon informing us that he knows of another world, and ‘I could go back there. I could—’)
But every such remark as ‘Looking back on it…’ serves to remind us that Gordon survived this particular danger, and lived on to tell of it. This is to lessen the suspense, our fear that Gordon might fail, and fall, vying with our hope that Gordon will win through. It also makes us aware that we are not hearing of one Gordon, but of two: the older man writing the memoir, and the younger one who lived it.
In order to immerse ourselves in the tale, we must be undivided in our allegiance and identification. We can only be, in this case, the 23-year old man on the Glory Road, for he is indispensable; the older man exists only to tell us of what the younger man experienced. The older man might be our principal focus; we might still immerse ourselves in his tale; but then we would need constant reminders of the physical surroundings and circumstances of the older man; what we would be diving into would be the tale of an older man reminded of his youth, regretting it or longing to return to it; we would need to follow the older man forward through some events in the ‘present time’ in between recollections ‘back in my past.’
It can be tricky, for naturally the older man writing down his exploits for us will look on things differently than he did when he lived them. One way for Heinlein to go would have been to forego the introductory remarks, the ‘I could go back to that world—’ page. But this page brings us a great deal of suspense – most of the suspense, in fact – for the second half of the tale, after he has won through the dangerous Quest on Glory Road, and settles down with his Princess to ‘happily ever after.’ Once the Kingdom is won, the hero and his beloved have everything they could have wanted. There is no danger, no opposition, no conflict for many pages. Only one suspense takes us through these paradisical descriptions: our knowledge, gleaned from that opening page, that the Hero is destined to lose this paradise. He will leave the Kingdom and be sundered from his Princess; and we wonder, Why? What happened to ruin it?
Heinlein seems more interested, indeed, in examining the unpleasant aspects of living ‘happily ever after,’ than in the Quest and adventure itself. He seems almost to rush through the dangers; but then he rushes through the ‘life afterwards’ and then he rushes through the ‘after I lost it all’ back on Earth – and the conclusion must be that Heinlein simply was telling his tale briskly, guided by his training in the pulps.
— asotir
(Composed 12 May 2010 on keyboard)
