Narrative Perspective and Rowling's Writing

Rambling Preamble I just recently picked up CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength from my bookshelf absentmindedly as something to read on a subway ride down to Manhattan, and then again grabbed it tonight on my way out the door to work in case I found the physical arrangements of the security desk not quite as condusive to studying German as hoped (which is often the case since there are now 2 of us working this desk every night, and getting "set up" to do German is a little more involved than the random calls sometimes allow for - when the phone rings when you have the German folder out and all you have to clear it away sort of and grab the pad so as to write details of the call etc, as opposed to being able to just plop the book down quickly and pick it back up quickly when the phone or radio call is done ... and an additional added pleasantry tonight was that the supervisor, who is a big guy but pretty low-key and quiet, mid 40s or so, retired law enforcement, as all the supervisors are, saw me reading the Lewis book and read the cover and said "CS Lewis? ... that guy was really brilliant" - which was really cool; I think I made some small talk about that it must be a copy I bought in college because it is not totally beat up, and I picked up reading Lewis from my dad, who loved Lewis to the extent that when I went through his shelf copies of Lewis' works after he died they were all completely dilapidated from how many times he had read them - there are several night supervisors who have rotated in and out a week or two at a time since I started the gig at the beginning of the summer, but this is the guy who was on nights the week I started so I have worked with this guy off and on since the beginning of the summer, and have always gotten along with him pretty well on the professional level of superviosor and desk assistant, but it was really cool to have that added extra element of a shared appreciation of something like Lewis - nothing overdone ... he is a very "salt of the earth" kind of guy in his own quiet way ... but just that passing connection of it in the midst of every day work that you get every once in a while out of the blue with "salt of the earth" types- the type of thing you encounter in the trades, with a tradesman whose job it is to be "no-bones" business and efficient but you can tell is not defined as a person solely by being a "manual laborer" or a "ex-cop security supervisor" - the type of thing that is completely different from the "romanticazation" of the trades: the trades remain the trades and when in the trades a guy is focused on the trade, but he also takes time here and there for more and has his own unique understanding of some pretty deep stuff and writing ... you have some other very interesting types too, closest "other wordly" fiction fans, like a guard who is a complete trip, sort of out on the edge a little type, is behind on the Potter series at book 3 but was eager to hear how book 7 ended and was totally into the way it ended and then was tugging my ear tonight about a vampire series from the 90s by Harold Lumley ... total trip to talk to) Introduction Anyway, I was noticing something on Lewis' use of narrative perspective, in light of some of John Granger's substanital comments on "narrative misdirection" ... well, more particularly for this post, "limited omnicient 3rd person narrative" ... in the year before the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and this lead to some thoughts on recent comments by Stephen King on the closing of the Potter series. So I thought I would jot it down here briefly. Lewis What I was noticing in reading That Hideous Strength is the difference, in the opening chapters, between the sections focussing on the Mark Studdock plot-line, and those focussing on his wife, Jane. The reason that I shifted gears from focussing on "narrative misdirection" to "limited omniscient 3rd person" in the last paragraph is atht I am not so sure Lewis is going for any type of misdirection, although I do think he is using 3rd person limited. Actually I think he is trying to make it pretty blatant for the reader - he seems to me to use the language of "thinking" and "got the impression" and "rather felt like ..." and it seems to me like the aim is not so much to "trick" the reader into a false impression of a completely omniscient narrative perspective, but to emphasize to the reader the fact that he is drawing character lines here. The difference that it seems to me like there is between the Mark sections and the Jane sections is that it seems like in the Mark sections the reader gets ONLY the "Markan Perspective" ... only ever gets to see things through his eyes and see what he can see and think. In the Jane sections, on the other hand, you find other people's perspectives, to which Jane would not be privvy, such as: "Dimble guessed that Brachton was going to seel the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Brachton men." (That Hideous Strength, 30). Of course, Lewis' style is much different than Rowling's, and when I first read that, having over the past year (IE since the last time I read the book) thought a lot more about narrative perspective (and I must add a note of thanks to Dr Granger, since his discussion of narrative perspective in Harry Potter has been a main catalyst for such thought and inquiry in literature for me in the past year), I simply chalked up the presence of multiple character perspectives in the narrative to the general style difference, which also includes much more "intropsective" commentary of the actual "omniscient" sort. It was not till I went further along into the Mark Studdock scenes that I think I noticed, "well, in the Mark sections there does seem to much more a 'limited omniscient' or singular perspective quality to the narrative viewpoint." I should note that this post has actually been written piece-meal ... I have, since beginning this post, and since the last paragraph, finished That Hideous Strength. However the paragraph follwing this one was begun before before finishing the book but is, from about halfway through the paragraph, being finished now. Other than that I will not burden with the further details of the convoluted manner and timing in which this post has been written. What I will note is that as the book progresses the narrative technique in the "Mark/Progressive Element/Belbury Sections" broadens out and you get such chapters as conversations between Wither and Fairy Hardcastle or Frost without Mark present, or just on the DD with more truly "omniscient" narrative perspective. But I still think a case can be made that in the early part of the book, where the emphasis is more so strongly, directly and solely on the differences between Mark and Jane, one of the marked differences is this dominance of a singular perspective with Mark's sections, versus a more "open" disposition in the Jane sections Now, there is an explanation of the singular narrative perspecitve in the Mark scenes/plot that "differs" from what I am talking about here, but I prefer to think of it not as an "alternate" explanation (as in "either-or"), but as a complimentary one in which both explanations work and compliment each other on various levels of the work. The "other" explanation is simply the standard "mystery story" one: Belbury is the dark intrigue, so some hiding of detail and slower unveilng of the same is simply material plot pacing. If you spill on the beans on Belbury in the beginning you have nothing to keep your reader intrigued and pulling on. But then you do have that with St Anne's too (some intrigue about what Grace Ironwood and the Director and their crew are about and up to), but there is still more openness in narrative perspective that I think indicates a more open, honest, democratic (in the sense that Chesterton speaks of the "democracy of the dead" ... which is, for me, after reading Deathly Hallows, a VERY central theme in the HP series), and in short humble perspective in the group Jane finds herself being drawn into. And I think the "material intrigue" element can work alongside this perfectly fine without either being exclusive of the other. Rowling Anyway, on to Stephen King, JK Rowling and Harry Potter. King recently sort of "reviewed" the series (in some magazine or paper I saw laying around somewhere recently, maybe a Newsweek at the doctor's office waiting room? ... really can't remember), and in a generally pretty favorable light. He gives Rowling credit with penning some really maturely written lines in book 7, as well he should. He notes this as a progression in writing style and ability from the first book (I think the main one he noted is the stylistic pacing of a last line like "all was well"). Now, I do think it would be silly to deny that as a writer progresses there will be development in style prowess, and concordantly that development in skill is somewhat behind deeper style book 7 than in book 1 (especially as this series is Rowling's first major work published). In short there is some truth in King's read of the situation ... but I don't think that read completely covers everything going on. As Granger notes, we view most of the series from a perspective that is, yes, not limited to any character's first person perspective, but in reality it is not much farther 'above' the character of Harry than, "sitting on top of his shoulder." The thing is that in book 1 that shoulder is part of an 11 year old person, and in book 7 it is part of a 17 year old person - which carries with it its own intrinsic progression, or "improvement" in what I might call "aesthetically effective communication abilities." In other words, I think it is precisely the fact that Rowling has done such a good job of integrating the element of narrative perspective with the central element of the development of Harry's character (really THE theme of the series, along the lines of Granger's other work on the prodcution of the golden soul as the ultimate goal of the alchemical process), that makes it difficult to pin down a difference between, let us call it, "character development artistically rendered in the text" and, what I would call, "development of artistic prowess in the writing of the text," at least, I think, distinctly more difficult to pin down a difference quite as facilely as King's comments would lend to. (Although, all in all King's comments on the books were very positive, and it seemd genuinely so, even if he might have seemed at points in the past a little jealous of the rapidness of Rowling's success and things like that ... I think we're all a pretty content little, or not so little, family - my main goal in bringing it in was just to illustrate better the stuff I had been thinking on how Rowling worked the stuff really well - just more and more pleased with it as time goes on ... and also grateful to Dr Granger for his helpful expositions of some things in narrative technique that help me to see and to appreciate better the artistry going on in works the Harry Potter and That Hideous Strength).