I feel within me lately an idea developing, a new way of looking at works of narrative fiction. Reading this author concurrently with Konstatin Paustovksy, two very different styles and eras, served to highlight the contrast in what I am tentatively thinking of as the writer's gaze. Every word the writer makes is a choice, and the choices Vuong and Paustovsky make are so divergent that my naturally tendency to systematize things kicked in and I began to look for a taxonomy of their choices, and the choices of prose writers in general.
The first choice the writers makes, or at least the most basic one, is what to look at, what to attend to. Why does the writer tell us about this passerby rather than that one, this detail of the landscape instead of another. There are infinite choices available to her or him in any scene, but, although experience is had in parallel, writing is done in series, and the writer must tell the reader what specifically is worthy of notice. Vuong reveals himself thus to be interested in words, weather, faces, death and the dead in ways that Paustovksy, for example, is not.
The second choice the writer makes is how to describe these things, what and how many judgements to put on them with adjectives and adverbs. One effect of these choices is a tacit choice of how much to lead the reader, if at all. Mark Twain famously abhorred telling the reader what to think or feel about the things to which he directed their attention,, saying, "when you see an adjective, kill it." Vuong seems to feel the opposite: that adjective always need a friend and furthermore that they should make clear through connotation what the reader is to think and feel about the noun in question. One method is not superior to the other by nature, but Twain's method allows the reader to inhabit the world of the writing, and Vuong's forces the reader to inhabit the narrator's body instead.
And this tendency of Vuong's to commandeer the reader's experience is even more present in the third set of choices he makes as a writer: what connections to make for the reader through allusion, comparison, and figurative language. He does not seem to think a paragraph is complete without a metaphor or three in stark contrast to Paustovsky and his realist influences: Flaubert, Pushkin, Gogol, etc.. The effect in Vuong is appropriate to the narrator that he forces the reader to inhabit. The Little Dog of this novel is indeed too poetic for this world, and if the reader occasionally grows a bit weary of his poetic flights, it only serves to suggest that the narrator himself may be sick of them too. This choice, combines with his extensive descriptions, make it no surprise that the writing feels most natural when he occasionally breaks into something resembling verse.
The fourth choice a writer makes, and it is this that might be considered a mark of youth and immaturity in Vuong, is when to mandate meaning. Paustovsky, and I'm sure I'll have more to say about this when I eventually finish his 800-page epic, says what something means so rarely that the reader is allowed time to forget the eyes with which they are forced to look, and the rare moments when she or he is reminded that the writer has a point to make are the more effective for their rarity. Vuong does not allow the reader this freedom. What to look at, how to feel about it, and what it invokes are all choices that I am comfortable ceding to the writer. If I am also constantly told what it means, however, I begin to resent it. Literature is a conversation, and this one was a little bit one-sided. And just as in a conversation in which it is difficult to get a word in edgewise, I felt by the end that my partner was a little bit insecure in what he was saying, and overcompensated accordingly. A gifted young man, filled with passion and poetry. I wonder what he'll write in twenty years when he calms down a little and settles into himself.
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