(That’s First Person POV…)
Ruth Kaufman’s recent RWR article about FPPOV has engendered a lot of discussion on various email lists and blogs. Since most of the email lists and blogs I read focus on romance and its various related genres, most of the discussion I see seems to center around the so-called “recent” rise of FPPOV.
I never thought of it as new, and especially not in romance, and I also never thought of it being a current trend. What about Jane Eyre? Or Clarissa, (all epistolary novels being, by necessity, in FPPOV), or (wandering farther afield, genre-wise) Moby Dick, most of the stories written by Edgar Allen Poe, Gulliver’s Travels, or Frankenstein, or David Copperfield, or how about getting really old school and saying Dante’s Inferno? (First person epic poetry, even!) Perhaps FPPOV is more popular in romance now than it was, say, ten years ago, but I think the discussion is better centered around why it ever went away then than why it has returned now.
Not only does first person POV enjoy a long and distinguished history in the realm of romantic literature, since it was featured so often in gothic romance (not Udolpho, perhaps, but certainly heavyweights from Bronte to Du Maurier employed it), but as one of the pre-eminent narrative devices in the development of the relatively new form of the novel, full stop.
Daniel Defoe, commonly (and perhaps erroneously) considered the Father of the English Novel, employed it in his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe, as well as the more “woman’s fiction” centered The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. At the beginning, the novel was considered first a predominantly “female” (read: fluffy and dismissable, and how things haven’t changed in three hundred years!) form of writing before being co-opted by Defoe et al., which is why many early novels featured female protagonists. More than thirty years previously, the now-famous poet/playwright/spy/first female professional English writer Aphra Behn employed the technique in her book (ostensibly a highly-suspect memoir about an equally suspect trip to Venezuela) called Oroonoko.
In Oroonoko, Behn employed the oft-maligned conversational technique of speaking directly to the reader. (The most famous example of this, perhaps, is “Reader, I married him,” in Jane Eyre.) This kind of author intrusion would be re-interpreted by later writers as the now-out of fashion omniscient narrative. In first person, however, this meta-narrative omniscence lends an extra level of realism to the text — the person telling you the story knew what was to come next. It’s the technique I use in the Secret Society Girl series. The Amy telling you the story knows more than the Amy acting on the page. (We’ll discuss this in more detail — complete with the debate about whether or not Amy is an overt autodiegetic limited external focalizing or an overt autodiegetic limited internal focalizing narrator — tomorrow. Say it with me: Jargon! Goodie!)
This emphasis on realism, to the point of pretending the novel was a memoir, or a found bunch of letters, or etc. (a technique which is very rarely used today, and usually only as some sort of marketing stunt, as with Gryphon and Sabine, the Lost tie-in novel, Bad Twin, or Journal), became very important to the nascent form of the novel, because no one was sure that readers would buy the fantastic prose tale they were about to experience without first being assured, somewhat, of its veracity. First person framing devices were enormously popular. (Compare to the idea of a campfire horror tale where the teller insists this happened to a friend or a cousin.)
It is, of course, very rare today to pretend, either with a wink or with any degree of seriousness, that your novel is anything but a novel. (No Frey jokes, please.) In fact, it seems far more common for readers to insist that a writer’s clearly defined fiction is in fact, a thinly veiled memoir or roman a clef. Especially in the genre of chick lit, where such high-profile books as The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada seem to be just that.
I’ve seen and heard quite a bit of speculation about my own novel. I suppose I should feel flattered that the story is imbued with so much realism that people would think it was actually true. After all, that was the point. I wanted to write a book about secret societies the way they really are, and not the way that Hollywood often makes them out to be. But it’s fiction. If my depictions of a secret sociey’s rituals and behavior sound true, that’s no different than describing realistic police procedures in a mystery. My book is based not on my experience at Yale nor on the experience of any other person. It says so right on the copyright page
But it leads me to an interesting point. If, in fact, there has been a resurgence in FPPOV in novels, which I do not necessarily claim, can it be connected to the upsurge in emphasis that the market is putting on the author’s personal experience with the subject about which she writes? Many writers have told me that authors writing medical thrillers benefit from having a background in medicine, that authors writing from the point of view of a certain ethnicity will play up that ethnicity (to the point of changing their name to a more suitable, ethnic-sounding pseudonym), and that authors writing glamorous fiction had better have a little glamor going on in their bio. The first question an agent is asked upon shopping a piece of multicultural fiction is whether that author is indeed, a member of the culture.
Half of the marketing buzz about the uber-bestseller The Da Vinci Code seemed to center on how many of the novel’s statements were based in fact. (At a recent visit to the Louvre, my mother overheard a curator politely interrupting a “Da Vinci Code tour” to remind the visitors that a certain fact that the DVC tour guide was relating was, in fact, completely fictional, at which point one of the visitors snapped back that she knew all about the cover up, having read the book!)
So, have we returned to the early-novel sense that fiction should be, on some level, true? And is that why the veneer of first person, with it’s “this happened to me” conceit, so popular in the type of fiction (say, chick lit) where the sense of realism (this could happen to you or your best friend) is so important?
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All this week, Diana will be discussing FPPOV.
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