The other day I was reading a story in the New Yorker that had what I consider the now-standard pattern of starting the reader with no information about the key characters so that it takes awhile to figure out who the narrator is and how he relates to the scene. (After a few pages I got the sense that he was a well-off doctor in his fifties or sixties on a vacation with his wife and some friends.)
Anyway, here’s my beef. I’ve always found this sort of style annoying, in comparison to the more traditional opening (“Once upon a time there was a well-off doctor in his sixties named James. One day he went on a vacation with his wife and some friends . . .”). At the same time, I’ve been conditioned to think that the “New Yorker”-style opening is better, more true to life–after all, in real life, people aren’t generally introduced to you with a “Once upon a time”!
But then I was thinking that maybe this New Yorker style isn’t so natural. These stories are generally told from one character’s perspective–and, from that perspective, you would actually know someone’s name, age, etc. It’s not so natural at all to have to spend the first part of a story figuring out who’s talking to whom.
My new take on this is that this style is a cheat, a way of creating a feeling of mystery and suspense without doing the work to create actual mystery and suspense. Actual mystery is when there’s a situation you should be able to understand, but you don’t, there are some missing pieces that you’re trying to figure out. Actual suspense is when you want to know what happens next. Fake mystery and suspense is when you’re just confused and don’t know what’s happening.
For example, the movie North by Northwest is actually mysterious and suspenseful. But not because it’s a cheat and everyone’s in a fog and you don’t know who’s who; it’s because you’re in the position of a character who knows who he is, but he doesn’t know what’s going on around him. That’s a little different, in my opinion. Similarly with, say, John Le Carre: there’s lots of things that, as a reader, you don’t understand, but you’re clear right away on who’s saying what.
Or, for that matter, Mister New Yorker, John Updike, who begins a story with, “The Maples had moved just the day before to West Thirteenth Street, and that evening they had Rebecca Cune over, because now they were so close.” Lots of hidden meaning there, but none of this artificial confusion where you’re basically thrown into someone’s brain at a random moment and not given any background. Following John Updike (or, for that matter, John O’Hara), I think the real challenge is giving the right amount of background–not too much, and not too little. Zero is not usually a serious option, in my opinion.
But, if you’re writing a story that really has no mystery and no suspense, then starting by giving the reader no information can be a good way to give the illusion of depth.
P.S. Just to be clear, I’m not complaining about the “start in the middle” approach where the story begins and then you use flashbacks or other revelations to give a sense of how things all got started. That makes a lot of sense to me. What I’m bothered by is the particular trick of not identifying anything explicitly about the main characters so that the first part of the story involves the reader having to figure out the basics.
P.P.S. Sorry for ranting again. Yes, I know, I know, nobody’s forcing me to read this story. But these questions of style interest me.
P.P.P.S. These issues also arise when writing statistics books.
The technique is called in medias res. Its use goes back to ancient epic poetry — the first book of the Iliad begins nine years into the Trojan War.
Corey:
Yah, I went to high school and learned about "in medias res." Please see my P.S. above.
Huh. It's a little odd to call it "the now-standard pattern" and "New Yorker style" when it's been around for several thousand years. Maybe you meant to label just the unnecessary, fake-suspense in medias res as New Yorker style?
In real life, you usually start out with basic information about a person:
"Andrew, may I introduce you to James?"
"Hello, James. What do you do?"
"I'm a doctor."
Etc. You always have pretty good information about the person's age once you see him/her and can make informed guesses about level of education etc.
Corey: Yes, I see what you mean. I wasn't so clear in the opening paragraph and I've rewritten to try to clarify.
Hard to say. The examples that are coming to my mind are all cases where the narrator had amnesia or some other mental impairment. I don't read the stories in the New Yorker very often; the type of story I tend to come across that use this device have, say, a character waking up in the mud among a lot of dead bodies with no idea who he is or how he got there. He gets up, decides he'd better get away before anyone comes, presently learns something about himself: he's good at killing. Very very good. This is something he has done many times before…
With regard to stories where there is a body of information available both to character and writer (age, profession, family background and so on), I wonder whether one reason for withholding this information might be a sense of dissonance between the stuff of which CVs are made and other aspects of experience. Another might be the sense that if one explains anything at all one needs to explain too much.
Suppose someone innocently tells me he is writing a story about George, a middle-aged classicist, married to Susan, a slightly younger statistician. I immediately feel that I can have no sense of what George is actually like until I know what kind of classicist he is. I cast my mind over the couple of hundred classicists I've known – at one end,Professor X, who fought a long, protracted battle to get teaching of classics in the original languages OFF the syllabus, because teaching Greek and Latin was too much trouble; at the other end, the savagely argumentative Professor Y, who thinks there are perhaps 5 competent Latinists (including himself) in the whole of the profession. (Would George pass the grade with Y?) And married to a statistician! Is she a Bayesian or a frequentist? Or some other flavour of statistician that I, in my ignorance, know not of? The point being, "classicist" and "statistician" are not terms like "triangle", of which it makes sense to say that you think of the concept without settling on properties of some specific instance. The only people who think "classicist" works that way are people who don't know any. Same with "statistician". One day a computer programmer moves next door; we don't even know whether he prefers Perl to Python.
It would be fairly straightforward to produce a convincing classicist for a readership of classicists, because so much could be taken for granted. Mutatis mutandis, same for a statistician or a computer programmer. But one might think, for instance, that the difference in underlying philosophy between Perl and Python (lots of different ways to do something, one right way) is extremely profound and important and something with relevance to ordinary language and things that go wrong in life generally, something one might want to spell out for a readership of non-programmers. That's really a very tricky thing to pull off, and it's not something that lends itself to brevity.
If one writes a story about a king with three daughters, a woodcutter with three sons, and a talking cat, it's obvious that the conventions of the fairy tale determine the thinness of description. If one brings thin descriptions to the categories of a "realistic" story, though, it's not as obvious that simplification is determined purely by convention and convenience.
But one might reasonably think that one way people make other people wretched is precisely by lumping them into categories that presuppose the adequacy of thin description.
So I suppose someone writing a story might feel it was dishonest to provide the kind of thumbnail sketch which fills the reader in without going into "too much" detail.
Having said all that.
The distinction I would draw is not really between different forms of suspense (real and fake). Stories, whatever their form, generally deal with single cases taken singly; it's not uncommon for generalizations to be drawn, whether explicitly or implicitly; it is the norm for a story to endorse the fallacy of the law of small numbers. Suppose we think of the information provided about players and teams on the bivariate baseball plot (link on my blog, I'm being lazy).
1. Having this kind of information about a field of competitors tells us more about any individual than we could learn if we had only that individual's record in isolation.
2. You need some kind of graphic representation to provide that wealth of information. On the rare occasions when we see statistical information in fiction, it's not used as a way of getting a clearer picture of what's going on, it's used as a device for defamiliarization.
3. It's immediately obvious that data are not actually available in this kind of detail on a vast range of human activities. In the first place this means we really have no way of placing those engaged in such activities in context; we may not even know what the relevant things to measure would actually be. In the second place, though, what's interesting for fiction is that we don't know that we don't know. That is, because the universe of fiction doesn't have a place for artifacts like the bivariate baseball plot, and the kind of information it displays, that is not a universe where questions of what can and can't be measured are asked.
So, well, hm, could go on for another several thousand words, but there is work to be done.
Andrew, I fully agree with your irritation, AND the fact that this seems particularly common in New Yorker stories.
But in thinking about it, nearly all of the short stories I read are in the New Yorker. Although I subscribe to several magazines and journals, none carries fiction, at least intentionally. [although those selections from 150 year old articles in Scientific American are fascinating].
Could our problem not be with New Yorker stories, but modern short fiction in general?
Andrew, great post. I am also annoyed with this style of writing, and it does manage to eek its way into New Yorker fiction a bit too often.
However, I think this frustration is driven largely by the assumption that I think I can know so much about characters simply by their occupation, age, marital status, institutions of learning, modified adjusted gross income or home address.
Perhaps this is an author's way of telling people like me (and perhaps you?) not to rest so easily on these prejudices or assumptions about what defines characters and what doesn't. Or to look towards details outside these typical qualitative variables in order to appreciate characters.
On the other hand, I am more of a plot guy than character guy anyway. Maybe character-driven readers appreciate this style better than I do.
If one is willing to “Peircevere” another “Peircedestrian” quote …
Peirce claimed creativity requires confusion but that confusion cannot be faked (part of his critic of Cartesianism).
You also seem to be complaining about [non-productive] attempts to fake confusion.
As for a stats, text you probably don’t want to avoid confusion – which likely impossible ;-)
– but avoid non-productive or as of yet productive confusion. Maybe why the Monte-Hall and low prevalence disease testing examples work well in introductory classes ( though Simpsons Paradox for many seems to hard if pressed to make up examples rather than just parrot the definition ).
But then any real empirical example will always involve some aspect of confusion or as David Cox once put it – “with any empirical question you work on, you cannot prevent someone else making a comment that totally changes your view of it”
When I read stories like this, I think about what type of character would think that items about himself are so unchanging and known that he would never reflect on them. A character study is quickly assembled: the character is future-focused,
extremely self-assured, to the point of egotism, and unaware.
I think that authors are constantly in the business of character construction, and constructing a character around the essential assumption that everyone sees the world the way the character does, says alot about how that character is in the world.
In the particular case of New Yorker stories, this can happen because the bit of writing is part of a novel the author is working on. (I don't think that makes the technique less irritating.)
What about Camus' "The Fall" then? You know who the narrator is (he introduces himself), and that he's talking to "you", but you have no idea who "you" are! Unless "you" are you…
(I'm not complaining about the book, I love it. I feel more moderately excited about the New Yorker)
Alexander: I'm not saying that this technique should never be used, merely that in many cases I've seen, it seems more of a cheap trick. There are times when a bit of fogginess can be fun.
Even before I got to your mention of "North by Northwest", I was thinking of parts of the book "Hitchcock" by François Truffaut, based on conversations between the great auteurs and germane to the overarching point you're making in this post. Have you read this book? I read it like 10 years ago and really liked it, but, then, I like most things Hitchcock. (Wow, in verifying some info about the book I came across audio of the 12 hours (!) of Truffaut/Hitchcock conversations that form the bulk of the book: http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Interview:_Alfr… If I can recall which bits are on point, I'll provide an update.)
One other point: I find that many long-run TV series often start off having the type of suspense you like—the type where you know the facts but don't quite know how they add up—but often devolve into the "hide the ball" suspense you dislike. For TV series, the explanation seems to be that the series creators have an idea for how seasons 1 and maybe 2 should play out, which was the basis of the show being selected for production, but don't necessarily know precisely how they'll keep the show going beyond those seasons, and so "hide the ball" becomes rather tempting. (See, for example, "The X-Files".)
Update: An interesting, on-topic discussion of suspense — and how mystery is not a necessary element of suspense, but emotion is (according to Hitchcock) — begins at 20min & 25sec into Part 19 of the Truffaut/Hitchcock conversation link I posted above … relevant to the fourth paragraph of your post.
Also: In regards to teaching, I've always felt the Socratic Method, which is popular in law schools (if unevenly executed), was an attempt to capitalize on the 'good' type of suspense — wanting the students to put the pieces together, and wanting them to want to understand 'what happens next', so to speak. In teaching, though, it seems to me the problem is the opposite of the New Yorker problem, namely that the prevalent form is to give the students all the pieces in a straightforward manner, which (arguably) does not help them to understand how the pieces fit together and often does not engage them. On the other hand, in my experience as a law student the implementation of the Socratic Method was often lacking, and ending up having the New Yorker problem: Intentional hiding of the pieces and how they fit together created an annoying, fake need in the students to want to know 'what happens next', rather than that critical moment where the audience — in a cinema or a lecture hall — puts the pieces together, has a moment of insight, and thinks, "Ah, yes, I understand!"
What kind of "fake" suspense do you find most distasteful? There are several kinds.
You refer to not knowing the nature of social relationships/character identities/plot situations in a fictive world, but what about science fiction where our initial lack of knowledge about the nature of the fictive world itself constitutes a sort of "false" suspense? I think learning about the world of a good SF novel by "listening in" on character conversations and "observing" situations as they are narrated can be very satisfying in exactly the same way that learning about almost anything new and interesting can be. And having the narrator explain things as they come up can be intrusive and break the frame or suspension of disbelief.
What you seem to be saying is that learning about the characters in the story you were reading didn't sufficiently reward the effort it took to get there. Anyway, it seems like a mistake to proscribe the literary technique of exploiting the gap between the knowledge of characters and the knowledge of readers (quite different, as you correctly point out, from in medias res).
The question is always: is there a persuasive justification for this technique in this particular story? What does the author get by withholding information about a situation/character/world? What does her or she lose? There aren't always obvious answers to these questions.