against casting tape fiction

first-person narration and interiority

Hello friends—

I am writing to you from Paris, where I have been for a couple of weeks. I’ve been teaching at the residency for NYU’s Low-Res program based here in Paris. Each residency, the faculty give talks and readings. My craft talks usually end up here, which is what’s going on with this post. The talk I am giving this residency is on what I am calling “casting tape fiction,” which is really just first-person narration evacuated of interiority and dramatic context. A kind of consequence of misguided cinematization that I blame on reality TV, tbh. Though, looking back over it, it kind of reminds me of the “hyperreal.”

It’s a loose talk, and I’ll probably come back to these thoughts in more concrete form later.

Also, I published a short story in The Atlantic. The story is called “American Realism.” I personally find the story very strange and mysterious. It’s inner workings remain a mystery to me.

For reasons not totally clear to me, my last few posts have gotten a lot of engagement and attention. I have never had more subscribers here. So I want to take this opportunity to direct your attention to some really important things. Particularly if you are feeling anxious and powerless about the state of the world, I encourage you to look for whatever small thing you can do.

As some of you know, Los Angeles is currently facing a…horrible climate emergency at the moment. Here is a link to a set of resources compiled by Mutual Aid Network, with links to give and ways you can help. I really encourage you to do what you can.

And as always, the people of Palestine are facing unimaginable difficulty and horrors. Compounded by bitingly cold weather during this winter and starvation. So I am linking to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and World Central Kitchen.

This is a time of critical need for so many in this world. And I know that it can be overwhelming, but sometimes, it starts with just one small act of generosity and kindness. So I leave those links for you to do whatever it is you feel moved to do.

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The life of a creative-writing teacher is a strange one, often requiring you to take on formal and aesthetic questions that otherwise would be of little utility or interest to you. I have no desire or intention to ever write fiction in the first person. I do not know what it is like to sit down and try to write ten or fifteen or two-hundred pages of fictional narration in the voice of I. Writing first-person fiction is as alien to me as attempting to do a Simone Biles floor or beam exercise in front of a panel of Olympic judges. There is a greater chance of my recreating Kim Yuna’s (vastly underscored) Free Program during the Sochi Olympic Games in its entirety than my sitting down to write a piece of first-person fiction.

To me, writing fiction in first-person constitutes weirdo behavior.

But people do it—some well, some poorly—and because I teach creative writing in the twenty-first century, I am often forced to ponder the first-person point of view from a technical perspective. To be clear, the word forced is crucial because otherwise, I would not think of first-person fiction at all. But I am forced, and so I have been thinking of first-person fictional narration, particularly as it relates to what we call “interiority” or “interior narration.” I am especially interested in the decreasing presence of “interiority” in the first-person, as though writers have now begun a project of deracinating the most individual point of view of the individual itself.

What I encounter in workshops and drafts and sometimes even in published pages is a cooly objective first-person narration, stories and novels told from an I lacking both explanatory power and the impulse toward explication itself. The deracinated I is a filmic projection, dancing on cinema’s halogenic glow, but lacking the charisma and poetic force of cinema qua cinema. The first-person narrator without interiority, subtext, and indeed the very capacity for thought or judgement is the purest expression of the passivity that organizes much of contemporary life. This passivity extends from the realm of the aesthetic into the realms of the personal and the political. We have a generation of writers who have watched more movies, television, and footage of human life than they have experienced of that life firsthand. Even their understanding and experience of their own inner lives originates in skits, memes, and video essays. They have no philosophers or prophets. They have YouTubers and influencers, and in this shallow, highly processed and highly mediated experience of consciousness, there is no thought. Merely the telepathic beaming of image from the screen to the interior of the person’s mind.

What I mean is that for the writers of this new era, conveying the contents of a thought or even depicting the process of thought itself in language that does not aspire to the visual has the same foreign, baffling aspect as their trying to use a rotary phone. They simply do not know how to write thoughts. And indeed it sometimes seems as though thoughts themselves are an alien artifact from another time. This generation of writers did not grow up as readers. They grew up as watchers. Their experience of consciousness is fundamentally a mediated one. It exists solely on the surface. A highly mobile face shifting through expressions that convey, symbolically, something to an external viewer. The something is never clear. But the faces are described in exquisite, minute detail that loses all significance.

I have read pages and pages of scenes narrated from the first person in which an unnamed narrator sits in a room looking at light on a wall or at a cell phone, describing without affect a whole range of physical expressions—gestures, faces they pull—and yet nowhere on those pages does a single thought appear. Not even glancingly. Say what you will about the highly-stylized and voice-driven narration of novels like Luster or The Flamethrowers or Topics of Conversation or Everything is Illuminated, novels which burst with subjectivity and affect, and which might feel a little cheesy by the astringent standards of today’s lobotomized first-person narrators, but at least there was color. Thought. Emotion. Movement. Observation.

What do they present instead of thoughts? Instead of a context for the telling of the story? Physicality. Free-floating, detached from any narrative or dramatic context. It’s as if you’ve just turned on the TV and ended up in the middle of a television show whose plot you do not know and are forced to watch fifteen minutes of contextless action and dialogue, not knowing if you are close to the end or the beginning or the middle. It just goes and on and then it stops.

We talk a lot about the effects of televisual media on prose fiction. We call it cinematic when writers transcribe visual phenomena from the reel in their mind. Clunky, dull description. I call it trite physicality. She lifted the glass to her lips. Or she walked across the room and stood at the window. Or, he extended both of his arms and flapped them up and down. I would argue that this issue runs even deeper and turns into a faulty understanding of point-of-view itself. When you find yourself noting the perceptual apparatus rather than just giving the reader the perceived world, then you are in fact participating in the retrograde mediation of cinema into prose. That is, every time you write, She could hear or He could see or They felt, you are describing looking at someone while they undergo perception. You do not need that extra step of noting that someone is noting something. Where did that come from? I believe that extra step was inserted by cinema. You are so accustomed to looking at someone looking at something that you don’t notice you’re doing it anymore. Prose literature lives and dies on the immediacy of its contact with experience. Any barrier to that experience should be eradicated.

I feel that this is especially in true in the case of first-person fiction. It causes me a special pain when I read lines like I frowned or I felt my lips twitch into a grin or I could see or I could hear or I wiped sweat from my brow. As far as I am concerned, these constitute grave breakdowns in the consistency of the POV. If you are writing in first-person POV, then every object noted in the story is perceived. If there are sounds, obviously, the narrator has heard it, otherwise it would not be in the story. If there’s a glass on the table, I don’t need you to say I could see a glass on the table. Sometimes people write first person as though they are describing something happening to another person instead of to the person currently narrating the story.

Furthermore, this emphasis on the trite physicality of the story itself betrays an overreliance on the visual. The first-person narrator is the most fluid and motile of narrative perspectives. It allows one to be both past and present at the same time, overlaying perspectives, image and afterimage. But the deracinated I of contemporary first-person fiction would limit it only to the surface of reality shorn of any impressions or connotations. It is a thin wafer of a world, this reality, brittle with detail and easily snapped under the lightest pressure.

Why are you describing your narrator’s face muscles more than you are attending to the innermost matter of their soul? Like I said. Weirdo behavior.

There is another aspect to all of this that I find interesting, a knock-on effect from all this watching: passivity. In a film, we watch characters move through a world and sets of circumstances that draw out actions and reactions and responses that force them to act in turn. We derive meaning from these networks of action and response. For the viewer, the string of actions and events might seem arbitrary, like life. A character stumbles over a set of hurdles in order to achieve some vague goal that only becomes clear, perhaps, at the end. It is the same with reality television, which is even more arbitrary, and yet comprises the same base narrative element of film: the scene. A scene is not life. A scene is an orderly storytelling unit, set off by the filmic narrator or the editors, the person in charge of structuring the montage. So that while it might seem like life, it is actually highly ordered, designed to elicit a particular response or to achieve some greater narrative end. The arbitrariness that gives the sense of being like-life is but an illusion.

When we watch Real Housewives or Black Ink Crew or Love Island or any show where people are purported to act like real people under various circumstances ranging from ordinary to competition, we are not witnessing life. We are witnessing scenes, as artificial and posed as a Velazquez painting. What gives the shows their sense of “lifeness” is that the production team have concealed all of the scaffolding of the storytelling, so that it seems as though we are watching people go about their regular days, and that what separates them from us is that they are very rich or have some special talent or are young and tan and want to find love. Yet we know it’s not real. We suspend our disbelief, aided by the patina of arbitrariness that glosses this genre.

As a result, I believe that writers have internalized a similar set of ideas and conventions. Their characters do not act or are not seen to be acting. We open in media res without context as to who these people are or what they care about or what they need, and we just watch them walk down streets and bump into people and sometimes, sometimes, there’s a little thought about what’s going on in their lives, maybe, if you’re lucky. The deracinated I in contemporary first-person fiction is like a reality tv show played without the volume. It’s a string of arbitrary actions.

Why? I think in part because we are so accustomed to receiving life through the mediation of a screen. What these writers are writing is not life. They are writing a mediation of life in stock moves and maneuvers they have gotten from somewhere else without fully understanding them. How else does one arrive at the notion to write in first-person without interiority. Why bother with first-person narration at all, then? What is its function?

I suppose I should say something about the technical aspects of first-person narration. The first-person narrator is both participant and witness in the events they are narrating. This is particularly the case when the narration is retrospective, coming from some distance in the future of the events recounted. A professor once told me that all past-tense first-person narration in retrospective. I think that makes a great deal of sense, but I don’t want to make the structuralists angry, so I won’t go further on that score.

The first-person narrator has a great deal of responsibility. They are responsible for presenting the story, yes. Laying out the descriptions as well as the exposition. They have to construct the scenes and make decisions about time and its treatment. They must convey the reader from the plane of specific incident into the plane of the generalized observation and back again. They are responsible for the structure of the narrative, both its teller and its editor, and, yes, they are also the origin of all the subjectivity in the piece, and everything is filtered through their experiences, attitudes, ideas, and motives. I do not mean “unreliable.” I mean, the first-person narrative is always subjective. They do not always know they are lying. They are perhaps sometimes lying to themselves. But one thing the first-person narrator cannot be—probably—is silent. Because they are telling the story. Even when they outsource it to other people, they are arranging the events of the story into a sequence that has some meaning. No matter how arbitrary, no matter how seemingly incoherent, the story is always ordered by a motivation, an impulse, an organizing principle.

As a participant in the events being recounted or conveyed, the first-person narrator is also a character in the field of the story. This is where it gets tricky when we have a generation of writers who have internalized the mediation and arbitrariness of reality television as our culture’s dominant mode. Because there is a tendency toward oppressive passiveness. It seems to me that many writers, particularly beginning writers, are after the sense they get when they watch a close-up of Isabelle Huppert’s face in furious silence in The Piano Teacher. Or the sense of implication they get from watching Viola Davis’s quivering lips, wordless, but moved by great emotion. They want that. They write their first-person narrators with mute interiority because they are mimicking what they have seen without the skills or the understanding or acute sensitivity to understand what is going on inside of those women. They are after the silence of the blasted female consciousness, so denuded and effaced by suffering and trauma that their faces project a gorgeous, raging silence.

The inarticulacy is inextricable from the condition and circumstances of these narrators, so that where once one might have encountered a flickering strobe of fractured experience, there is now only anesthetized whiteness, a blank field. What one finds instead of Rauschenberg’s White paintings is raw canvas mistaken for a painting.

Silence has meaning when it contains more than can be expressed. When we feel more than we know how to express, then silence is pressurized. But when we try to force silence for effect without understanding the material and spiritual conditions that give rise to that silence, what we have is a mediated idea of an experience. An abstraction of an abstraction.

What I mean to say is that for many contemporary writers today, they are not working from life itself. They are working from a mediation of life. They are working from a set of abstractions that have been conveyed to them via reality television and cinema and social media. Their reality is already a story world, and so when it comes time to construct a novel or a story or a play, what we have is reality at a second remove. This is a second order storyworld, where the behaviors of the characters are not governed by the rules of life or a set of rules based on life. The behaviors in these secondary storyworlds are judged according to rules based on rules based on rules from life. So that we judge them, not according to whether their actions or responses or feelings refer back to real life as we understand it, but according to whether or not they behave properly like characters in a story.

The contemporary first-person narrator is a voyeur, a watcher and only a watcher, a rolling camera that captures all the surfaces of the storyworld which have meaning only insofar as the audience is able to erect elaborate explanations for this or that gesture, this or that object, this or that line of dialogue. But I would say that we do not come to the first-person narrator for that purpose. The purpose of the first-person narrator is not to witness a string of arbitrary actions, but to understand the process by which this individual integrates or fails to integrate that string of arbitrary actions into something of meaning. The first-person narrator lacking a psychological process is merely a badly conceived third-person narrator, faulty and misfiring, mistaking the physical world for the totality of life and history.

What was the point of modernism and the rise of subjective art if we are going to arrive at production even more severely positivist than Naturalism. At least in the third-person narratives of Naturalism, the novel still had an interest in thought.

But even this extends from the deeper matter of passivity. Passiveness is the by-word of contemporary life. Our characters must behave in ways that we feel reflect our feelings about how people behave in life. That is, we have accepted that for a narrative to feel “realistic,” there can be nothing too much or too loud or too bold or too extraordinary. We favor what Georg Lukács calls the “average.” Lukács once characterized modern realism as the rejection of what is typical through its emphasis on the mundane and the tedious. The surface is all:

This new canon of realism inevitably resulted also in contracting everyday reality, for a logical consequence is that even those rare events of daily life in which basic contradictions might appear meaningfully and typically are rejected as inappropriate and that only the banality of daily reality, the commonplace and mediocre aspects, are allowed as subject matter.

The "average" is a dead synthesis of the process of social development. The emphasis on the "mean" transforms literature from a representation of life in motion into a descrip­tion of more or less static conditions. Plot dissolves, being replaced by a mere sequence of static scenes.

Our storyworlds are conflict-avoidant and rattle along on acute, exquisite observations of the mundane. It is easy to imagine examples of things like this. The work of Norwegian master Karl Ove Knausgaard, who attempts to recreate a totality with minute documentation of gesture and object as well as the most tedious and boring of thoughts. The seismic events in My Struggle are almost all personal. Even changes in the social process unfolding in Norway across the decades of his life are but small blips on the horizon. It’s an expression of what many of us in developed Western nations feel, no? That the outcomes of the political and social process happen in halls of power far from many of us and that the sign of a well-functioning bourgeois government is that we do not feel perturbations when the actors change. In that way, My Struggle is a monument to bourgeois literature in terms of life. It is in other aspects a kind of subversion of bourgeois literature in terms of aesthetics in that he is refuting the high-style and theatrics of modernism’s collapse in favor of something almost radically astringent. Unartistic.

But I would say, look at Knausgaard’s new work, The Morningstar cycle. In that series of novels, you simply cannot get more outrageous. Every novel is a kind of genre-bending thriller. The series opens with a mysterious new star in the sky over Norway, and from there, the social order unravels. Knausgaard maintains his usual attention to dailiness, but here, he juxtaposes with the cosmic and the celestial and the social. Small personal choices echo out into large networks of relation, and one feels, or at least, I should say I feel, profoundly aware of the degree to which all of these people are connected in a vast totality. But most crucial to the point I am trying to make here is that his more recent novels are not governed by the average. There are extreme situations—murders, satanic rituals, demons walking the earth, disappearances, ghostly doubles—which are extreme not merely for personal reasons but extreme by many metric. He is writing incredibly personal novels of the apocalypse. It’s astonishing.

These novels are also in first-person and move among a variety of characters—perhaps too many, to be honest. Even in their passive moments, when they are holding back or not acting for fear of reprisal, the narrative itself never feels passive because the characters are thinking through their motivations, their fears, their anxieties, their favorite singer, their favorite movie, what their mother made for dinner, what they’re going to do when they got home. The narratives operate via thought. People thinking as they move through life. Even when the intense or dangerous situation arises, the characters process it, think through it, react, respond. We do not linger on their face as is the case in some first-person narratives. Instead, we unfurl the network of responses and relations to the event so that the character emerges brighter and more vivid in our minds rather than murky.

Lukács discusses this in the same essay mentioned above:

In itself the extreme situation con­tains the contradictions in the intense and pure form essential for art, but a character's reflections about his own actions are absolutely necessary for transforming this "thing in itself" into a "thing for us".

That is, the capacity for interiority is critical for an art that is actually welcoming of the reader.

Now that I have hopefully made some point—no doubt, very poorly—about the importance of interiority and first-person narration and the dangers of arbitrary strings of action, I would like to offer some thoughts on common first-person narration considerations and ideas.

Perhaps the most pervasive issue I find in workshops and in discussions about first-person is this idea of the withholding narrative. Some writers think that their characters’ trauma or past or the difficulty of their circumstances prevents them from disclosing to themselves or the reader certain crucial bits of information. I am going to be very prescriptive, so please forgive me. But this is a mistake.

Even when we do not want to think about something, we think about something else, no? Even when we try very hard not to look at the grossest parts of ourselves, we look somewhere else, no? A character who cannot speak on a subject is only interesting dramatically if they speak on something else so that what they do say and do express bears the imprint of what is unsaid. And indeed, that is only interesting if the reader has some sense of what is unsaid or that there is something unsaid. Otherwise, we’re just watching a person be boring and incommunicative. And what is the point of that?

A withholding narrator is usually a sign of an insecure author, someone who is hoarding their revelations rather than disclosing them. This often is because the author is afraid that they will have nothing else to say later on. A first-person narrator keeping secrets from a reader makes sense if the story takes the form of a direct address, with a clearly delineated point of telling (the place from which the story is told). Otherwise, it just feels like shoddy writing.

A first-person narrator who refuses to look at themselves is all well and good, but they should perhaps have something to say about the people they are interacting with. Or at least something to say about the events they are recounting or expressing in the present. Otherwise, why does the story exist? Why are they telling it? Why are we reading this? This is what I mean by arbitrary. It’s like the reader is expected to just open the book and follow along watching a string of events with no shape and no meaning, and no sense of why the narrator is presenting them to us. In first-person, this is particularly frustrating because, well, here is a voice telling us something, but…not telling us why? Not engaging with the fact that they are shaping the story as it unfolds.

So then what to do.

I believe in asking better questions of our work. For the first-person narrator, the author can take many different approaches depending on whether the narrative is retrospective or not. Whether it is in present tense or past tense. A frame narrative or a continuous story. But some general principles apply.

You might ask yourself, is this story being told to someone? Is my narrator speaking directly to a person or to an idea of a person? If so, is the story they are telling meant to convince? Inform? Warn? Amuse? Are they addressing themselves? To try to understand something crucial?

Once you have figured that out, you might begin to ask, how much time has passed between the telling of the events and the events themselves? Do these events concern the narrator directly? What are the differences between the narrator who is telling the events and the version of them who experienced the events. What are the effects of the telling on the story itself. We sometimes remake our stories as we tell them, catching ourselves, realizing things only in the recounting. Use this. Make it a part of the story. Make the telling active, by which I mean, what is it like for the narrator to go over things again.

If the story is not retrospective, the narrator is still a divided subject—that is, they are still both participant and witness in the events of the narrative. That is, there is the part of them (the exterior) who experiences the world and the interior (the part of them who processes and reacts to the world while also observing and making meaning). The story also will accrue a bit of retrospection as it unfolds because the narrator will have lived through the events of the narrative, and so there will be an opportunity for retrospection. It is also the case that even narrators who are not looking back at the events they are experiencing at a given moment have histories and lives and things from their past that inform how they react and respond. There is a danger of linearity in the non-retrospective first-person narration, as though we are encountering people who have no past and no history at all. A tendency to focus only on the forward march of time. This is a mistake. One must integrate a whole life into the narrator.

Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain is a brilliant example of this. His first-person narrator spends the whole time in bed in a hospital, wondering if he’ll even have a future. The past washes in and out, summoned by the quirks and demands of hospital life, as he recounts poems and protests and the events of his life and also in the broader social world of American society. The jumble of his narrator’s history provides a vivid and restless backdrop against which his present trials unfold.

One might also look to Rachel Cusk for an example of how to handle a story constrained to a tight present, in which little of the narrator’s life pokes through. In Outline, she manages this by using the characters populating her narrator’s field of view. They tell her long stories, which themselves branch out into their stories, featuring other characters, so that we are sometimes privy to a story told to someone about a story told to someone else. At its best, it's exhilarating, the way the stories multiply and change and pressurize each other. In that case, the narration seems to switch to these other sites of consciousness, even though the whole novel is organized by one central narrator, Faye, about whom we learn very little directly and mostly glean through her observations and interior responses to the things people say to her.

What Greenwell and Cusk have in common with each other and a cohort of writers descending from W.G. Sebald like Ben Lerner and Knausgaard, is that their first-person narrators all think and process and react. The world draws responses from them and though these narrators may keep those responses private, we are nevertheless witness to them. Though the characters themselves might feel that their lives and the events that constitute those lives are arbitrary, filled with non-events of only personal important, the novels themselves do not feel arbitrary as the characters wring from those events revelations and epiphanies and non-epiphanies alike. We watch people undergo the transformation of living in the fucking world. Sometimes, great novelists find a way to parallel these personal transformations with insight into the social process, and their characters become both living symbol and individual.

Your narrators may feel as though they are cold bits of stone and ice flung through the void of space. You may show the reader footage of this hurtling through space, but it is also your job to tell them what it means. The watcher watches until the screen goes dark, but the novelist is native to that darkness. It is their greatest virtue and gift. They do not need a screen to see.