When I was reading and studying for my Bachelor’s in English Literature, I used to joke that the reason English books were so much thinner than Russian lit books, was that secondary characters in Russian literature were never two dimensional like they were in English Lit. A Russian author wouldn’t just mention the stable boy in passing. You’d learn how the stable boy’s family [full names of the paternal line, but some mention of the maternal line possible] was tied to the estate for as long as four generations and how each one (insert full Russian name here) preceded the others and handed down the skill and the respect needed to be a true horse master. Then you would learn about the current horse master.
Also I felt that Russian authors hated pronouns until the mid 1900’s.
Sometimes my distinction earned a chuckle in conversation, but of course, the only evidence that I truly had was the few Russian novels I read, and the multitude I put down around the time of the stable boy. Thinking about it now, I wonder if we live our lives like my purported English novel: as if the characters in our lives are dimension-less. It’s certainly grown more popular in popular books and media we watch. Maybe even the games we teach our kids to play. Like when we sell action figures of Iron-man or the Hulk (but far less frequently, Tony Stark or Bruce Banner.)
To tell a cogent story, it helps to simplify and have a one or at most a few multi-dimensional characters, to make the demands and decisions of the lead character(s) more logical. Think about the Fantasy genre. I would say that the norm is a series, not a single book. Multiple books tell stories of interweaving characters, to the extent that a glossary of characters and/or family trees are provided to help the reader keep things straight.
One of the things I adore about contemporary Romance is the choice the author makes to either tell the story from a single perspective or from two. [By the way, did I confess somewhere in my blog that I am an avid reader of the Romance genre, yes?] Some would say that it is often necessary to have two character perspectives for some tropes to create the misunderstandings that drive the story forward.
[Romance isn’t the only genre that uses multiple character perspectives. I recall the first time I read something of the sort was an early Dean Koontz thriller. I can’t say which one, but I still lived at home, so mid-late 80s. He most likely wasn’t the first, just that it was the first that I read. ]
The author also has to choose not just the who and the what of the story, but the when and how. With multi-character perspective story-telling, the author can choose to keep a continuous timeline, allowing the reader insight into the plot sequence only from character window from whomever’s perspective the narrator has placed you. Or sometimes, the timeline overlaps for characters. You read about an event, then you change character, dial back time, and see that plot point again from a different perspective.
Let’s think of it this way. A bank is robbed and the police are collecting witness statements. Our four main characters A, E, O, and U. A and E are in the bank and witness the event. O is across the street and U is two blocks away along the getaway path. The author’s passages for A and E might be from the same overlapped timeline. While the passages for O and U could be along a continuous timeline.
Then there is not only the timing of the perspectives but then there is how each character views the world. How each character’s decisions and actions move the narrative forward. Now we’re back to the author’s choice to provide an explicit backstory for each character versus an implicit or shallow backstory for at least some of the characters. Do you want to write a series or a book? Do you want to write a tome or something you hope goes to mass paperback, stocked in airport bookstores?
In real life, we stereotype those we don’t know or only know a little. Is it human nature to reduce people to characters or caricatures? but what about the important people in our lives: our friends, our family, our partners, our colleagues? Have we reduced the people in our lives to the characters?
If we simplify the people around us, presumably, it makes it easier to traverse our own timeline both historically and to the future and how anticipate and prepare for it. Possibly, we reduce the choices that others make as binaries made with us in mind. Sure it reduces the chaos, but as a society, has the isolation of the pandemic exaggerated the reductions so much that it is slowly severing our ties with our fellow humans. Let’s call it the Pandemic Point of View, PPOV.
Sitting on the bleachers for the graduation ceremony, there were folks chattering through part of the introduction of the ceremony. From the pandemic point of view, I initially regarded them as rude and inconsiderate of others. Didn’t they know the silence protocol for watching a speech, a protocol I probably learned as a child at church?
But I’ve been trying to switch my point of view. What if this women sitting behind me sees a rigid, lone person wearing a large brimmed hat impeding her view? Perhaps she and her sisters are looking for an out of state relative who hasn’t arrived. Maybe to her when friends and family gather even or especially at church or celebratory events, open and overlapping speech is part of the network that builds and sustains community. Maybe her kid is graduating with top honors and she can barely see them because of I rudely wore a large sunhat.
I understand this is an impossible task. This is omniscience and only possible within the confines of an author’s (and by invitation, reader’s) world. Still, it’s something I’m trying to consider when looking back on my life, especially if I’m assigning blame or if I have hurt someone even if incidentally. It’s easier, but still impossible, looking back than looking forward.
I wonder if my anxiety and need to isolate stems from the habit of constantly trying to anticipate the actions of a few others. Maybe my world is unintentionally reduced to another’s perspective.
Emotional vigilance is an exhausting Sisyphean task.
There is no moral to this story. I’m just thinking about the people in my life. How close should be? How much space I should allow for others in my world. What is my volume and capacity? And, of course, the fourth dimension, time. How much time and for how long do I invite and allow others into my narrative?