✗ Good prose favours the telling and brilliant detail that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing that it mantains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary that it judges good and bad neutrally that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us and that the author’s fingerprings on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. But if the author and character get too separated we feel the cold breath of an alienation over the text and begin to resent the over-“literary” efforts of the stylist. ✗ So there is a basic tension to stories and novels: can we reconcile the author’s perceptions and language with the character’s? If the author and character are completely merged the author mimics the actually existing corrupt language we know well and are in fact quite desperate to escape. ✗ “Sancho couldn’t imagine how those hulks moving along on top of the sea could have so many feet.” This is estranging metaphor as a branch of free indirect style it makes the world look peculiar but it makes Sancho look very familiar. This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see (an unrealiability identifical to the unreliable first person narrator’s). A gap opens between author and character and the bridge – which is free indirect style itself – between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. ✗ Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language, too.
Easy read, interesting and sometimes really insightful. Recommended by pir8fancier, I'm glad I picked it up.
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