Saturday
In David Jauss's alone with all that could happen, he argues that point of view "is perhaps the least understood of all aspects of fiction" (25). According to Jauss, "manipulating distance is the primary purpose of point of view" (58), and he gives a number of examples in support of this novel view of POV. Imagine the trickiness of POV, the impossibility of ever quite grasping it, to no longer be the thing that haunts you. That's what Jauss does in this chapter of his book on the craft of fiction writing. He solves the mystery of point of view. Once and for all.
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One of more interesting examples of an author's manipulation of distance that Jauss gives occurs in Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." Hemingway's use of a "dramatic point of view"—in this point of view, the narrator assumes maximum distance from the characters he describes and writes about them in language appropriate to him but not necessarily to them" (38)—gives the piece the feeling of a "drama." Hemmingway's narrator "restricts himself to presenting dialogue, action, and description but not thoughts" (38). Here's how Hemingway's story begins:
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.
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The story, as Jauss notes, continues on at this distance until the end:
He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the bar-room, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.
‘Do you feel better?’ he asked.
‘I feel fine,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.’
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Jauss describes that reasonably as "the most important word in the story" and Hemingway's change in point-of-view as "the single smartest move in a story full of smart moves. Reasonably, Jauss writes, "violates the objective, dramatic point of view even more than the statement that the man did not see the train, for it tells us not just what the man sees—or, in this case, fails to see—but the man's opinion about what he sees."
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To find out more Hemingway's manipulation of distance and all the work that reasonably does for the story, I suggest picking up a copy of Jauss's book. And see what happens when you think of point of view as a way to manipulate distance, from distant to near, from inside to outside. And then get tricky with it.
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