This is Fiction

In matters of fictional reading, I get especially annoyed by the presence of a ‘God the narrator’.

In order to highlight my point, here is a random sentence out of Patrick White’s Voss (my favourite go-to book for all literary things disliked) – “Unlike other men, English officers stationed there, or young landowners coming coltish from the country for the practical purpose of finding a wife, he did not consider himself under the obligation to laugh. Or perhaps it was not funny.”

Ignoring the broad and unsubstantiated generalisations about English officers and young landowners, this quote clearly describes the thoughts of a God looking down at Voss and deciding that he pretty much didn’t have a sense of humour (neither did Patrick for that matter).

We know this because Voss, a social retard just off the DSM scale, was far too stupid to even consider analysing himself, or others. Ironically, White’s God wasn’t omniscient; observe that he wasn’t sure why Voss didn’t laugh. Thus further highlighting that Voss wasn’t doing the narrating.

White accidentally invented a defective God, one that could narrate away but wasn’t sure of his facts. I am sure that he, either one – God or Patrick, didn’t even notice.

Back to my narrative. I view the use of the ‘God the narrator’ mechanism as equivalent to the horrible situation where someone keeps responding to your statements with an emphatic ‘correct!’; i.e. an arbiter of the truth, and not an agreeable person.

But in the case of fiction the author is an arbiter of reality, and still not an agreeable person.

You, author, I find it cowardly of you to hide behind unexplained supernatural forces and imaginary friends, in order to conceal the fact that you have nothing to write about except your own deluded daydreams!

Of slightly lesser offence; occasionally an author will fiddle with time and tense as well. Unexplained wormholes in the fabric of their own fantasies.

For example, it (which, you must admit, is better than assigning a gender to the guileless thing) will be happily writing away in the first person-present tense, but will then throw in the odd all-knowing third person aside that draws upon the benefit of unexpected time-travelling hindsight.

You know what I mean; all of sudden you get a third person one-liner at the end of the chapter, such as – “He didn’t know then but he would come to regret this decision.”

And then without a moment’s regret at its self-spoiling, the author will flip back to the first person-present tense. You (the reader) are supposed to live in deep suspense, awaiting the shonky details of this literary bed wetting.

My guess is that most novelists don’t even know that they are playing any of these tricks. They are a cargo cult of readers turned typists, foisting their derivative imaginations upon the swill of less inclined junkies.