What Naturalisms Leave Out (1/2)

some notes on character interiority

Feb 01, 2023

[“To all appearances, it was a hand of flesh and blood just like my own,” Odile Redon, 1896, courtesy of the Met Open Access online gallery. Image is in the public domain.]

While researching a totally different question in a totally different context, I tripped over this quote attributed to American novelist Dawn Powell: “Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.”

Amusing as this is, it seems worth challenging. I think Powell’s sense of realism may track more closely to what we’ve been calling naturalism, or materialist realism.

The posture of the stripe of materialism we have been critiquing comes down to a reductivist view of human interiority. Materialism of this kind explains human interiority as a mere function of biochemical reactions, which we do not yet understand fully because of the present limited state of science. In this accounting physical matter is all that meaningfully exists. In it, a full understanding of matter and material causes would fully explain all heretofore unexplained phenomena—including whatever goes on in the human mind and heart. Our emotions and intellections—including the acts by which we perform the activities of science!—are thought to be byproducts of natural forces too obscure to be traced accurately in detail to their origins, though maybe one day we will know enough to trace them.*

But then, what is it we leave out when we leave out human interiority? To start with, we leave out whatever our interiority reflects or refracts to us, which ends in including all exterior claims to reality other than those that make a direct claim on our bodily senses. If you have the patience, you can follow this logic all the way out to the point where it collapses in solipsism.

Yet when it comes to narrative art, surely what counts in the end is action—what people do, not why they do it? Surely motive is unguessable, even the most intimate self-accountings of motive potentially unreliable and therefore to be eliminated from any honest accounting?

In this case, the best fiction could do would be to give a totally visual, surface gloss on human action—in the manner of an acclaimed novel I recently read, which really contained sentences similar to the following (of my own composition, not a direct quote):

He scrolled down the page, typed in a few words, and then sat looking at the screen for a moment. No one could have told what he might be thinking, if he was thinking anything at all.

It’s possible, I guess, to believe in such an account as comprehensive and complete: the best we can do. Yet, speaking just for myself, it leaves me dissatisfied. It seems impoverished in ways we can’t and shouldn’t rest satisfied with. If you are not satisfied by it either, if you want to explore what it leaves out, let’s turn into that territory together.

Key to the art of fiction is story, the representation of a complete dramatic action of a serious nature. Fiction differs from staged theatrical or cinematic drama in that fiction must directly depict the action through some form of narration, which cannot be limited to or fully expressed in what characters say to each other. (“A conversation is not an action,” as a much-admired fiction teacher once told me, in a moment of perfectly justified exasperation with my characters’ [and perhaps also my own] endless talk.) Story requires not merely internal but external action that involves characters as whole, embodied entities interacting with other characters and with their environment. Yet in some stories, such as Sigrid Undset’s late novel of ideas, The Wild Orchid, much of the action is prompted by, furthered by, or in fact occurs within, dialogue.

In Book I of The Wild Orchid, Paul Selmer, a science student nearing the end of his degree program, falls seriously in love with the exiled daughter of a poor Protestant clergyman. Lucy Arnesen has been sent away from home on an unfounded suspicion of an affair with a visiting seminarian. Yet once she is out of her parents’ house, she decides that she “may just as well be what they take me for.” Neither hoping for nor believing she deserves any better, Lucy takes up with a series of men who, predictably, discard her once she has given them the shallow pleasure they are after. Paul, by contrast, genuinely believes that his love for Lucy is higher and purer than anything her other lovers have ever offered her, because its emotional character is keener and more intense than anything he has ever felt.

Before they start sleeping together, Paul tells Lucy of his serious intentions to marry her once he finishes school and finds a job. He goes so far as to quit school and enter his friend’s business so that they can be married sooner. But when the weight of permanent commitment and the practical difficulties of their position come to bear on her, Lucy takes fright, breaks off the engagement, and runs away with a man more like the first men she was with: one who loves her less but, arguably, understands her better. In the aftermath Paul cynically asks himself whether, despite the heights of his “colossal naïvete” and emotionalistic devotion, what seemed like an “unspoiled freshness” in Lucy was really just “a certain talent” for making him feel unique and wanted when in fact, to her, he was neither.

In another novelist’s hands this unhappy love episode might overtake the entirety of a novel’s plot. In Undset’s own development there are early novels whose action could be fully summarized in such brief compass. Yet the Undset who writes The Wild Orchid is not the same Undset whose brief, jewel-like novellas about tragic, doomed affairs—Marta Oulie and Jenny—made her notorious in Norwegian publishing in the early twentieth century. By the time of The Wild Orchid, 1931, Undset has converted to Catholicism. She has finished Kristin Lavransdatter and has grown accustomed to the pace of the epic. She has more in mind now than monologic** romance.

Key, too, to the art of fiction is perspective. Undset establishes a sense of felt life through Paul’s vantage point at a significant crossroads, on the threshold of independent adulthood at a moment of national crisis. The novel’s early chapters take their time in locating Paul within both his public contexts and his personal, familial, professional, and wider social relationships. They also establish Paul as a keen observer, a suitable “authorial scout” with a perspective on early adulthood that is close to though not identifiable with Undset’s own.

Yet it is Paul’s dialogue with others, as much as his own consciousness of environment and scene, that defines the tone and color of the narration. In a string of disparate influential moments that risks an episodic feel, yet includes a real but obscure chain of causality, the dialogue among characters makes for unity of dramatic action, as it expresses the directions in which Undset wants to turn our interest.

This is and should be surprising, since conventional fictional technique rests on establishing trust in a single-minded narratorial perspective rather than on having a narrator listen to and render a panoply of voices. As we’ve seen, most nineteenth-century fiction favored an authoritative, not to say autocratic, approach to narration, which though fading into disfavor was still a live option in Undset’s moment. By contrast, Undset’s effaced narrator is allied with Paul so closely that even the narrator is not fully able to show us, right away, the undeniable failures of Paul’s perception; Paul himself has to arrive at that awareness before the narrator can access it. Meanwhile, Undset lets Paul encounter a range of perceptions and opinions whose veracity he has no way of immediately evaluating from his own experiences. Consciously unknowing, a principled agnostic, he does the best he can by his own lights. Yet his well-meaning only lands him in a position where he never wanted to be, where he started out sure he could not possibly ever end up.

Another way of stating this is to say that though the novel is full of abstractions about love, belief, truth, moral goodness, and the nature of reality, none of this abstraction does Paul any good until he can pin it to concrete events in which he has really suffered something. Late in the novel, once Paul has lost his youthful confidence in the uniqueness and perspicacity of his own understanding, he floats to a friend the idea that “materialism is never anything but … an accident in a view of life which in its essence is the cult of humanity. But men’s passions are always stronger than their reason” (104) We might still reasonably want to question either assertion, or both: especially as there is a slight vocal shift between the first, which Paul is voicing on his friend’s behalf, and the second, a view that more closely belongs to Paul himself and reflects his experience to date. Because his own passions have so far been allowed to overrun his reason, Paul reads all humanity through the lens of himself—and so he misreads it.

Yet Paul’s misreading, his limitation of scope, is not allowed to be definitive because it is not allowed to be permanent. Dialogue with other voices and experiences carries The Wild Orchid, not only giving the work a polyphonic quality but lifting the protagonist out of his initial ignorance. But a still greater feat is in the offing. Beyond placing Paul in dialogue with a variety of voices that surround him and showing how those voices variously influence and expand (or contract) his understanding, Undset also depicts Paul opening up a dialogue with the divine—and the divine answering back.

Here again, another writer with different goals might place more emphasis on Paul’s religious conversion. An idealist, a monologist, might be tempted to make it the keystone of the narrative, place it in a climactic position, treat it as though it solved all problems and made all mysteries clear. Intriguingly, Undset does not do this. The chronology of her novel takes us from peace to war, and war is the note on which she ends. In peacetime it is possible for Paul’s revelations, reversals, and loss of illusions to take place at a slower, gentler pace. When World War I comes to Norway, it floods everything Paul has built—his business, marriage, fatherhood, even faith—threatening even the private happiness for the sake of which all statecraft is ostensibly done and all war is ostensibly fought, and putting truth itself into the balance.

There is so much fine management of scene and timing as Undset leads us up to this point in Book II of The Wild Orchid. Though on first reading the handling of passing time can feel abrupt and summary, Undset knows exactly what she is doing and why she is doing it. She wants to emphasize, not exclusively Paul’s interior life, but the continuous roll of events to which it must continue to respond. In this rich response each word has its weight and value, yet some tunings are so subtle they would be easy to miss, as when in an apparent throwaway line Undset shows Paul meditating about the religious “ideal” only to follow his next thought down the stream of consciousness—“odious word,” Paul thinks, meaning “ideal”—and away again to another matter.

But recalling this little phrase, “odious word,” entirely changes our reading of the last line, in which Paul calls his marriage “ideal.” The novel ends “not with a bang but a whimper” as he and his wife fall into their first real argument—a seemingly petty tiff about a shopping list, though importantly the list is one of household supplies in preparation for weathering the war. The dispute, as Undset renders it, cannot be explained away as the result of stress in the face of danger—real though the danger is. Rather, it reveals Paul’s and his wife’s incompatible attitudes toward the balance between personal security and public duty, and foreshadows the action of the sequel, The Burning Bush.

Undset’s intense conclusion will not allow us to say “‘peace, peace,’ where there is no peace.” She is a realist not only to the extent that she does not leave the insides of her characters out of her account but, more, to the extent that she combines a rich interiority with an unflinching attention to complex exteriority. And inside her characters as much as outside them—even in those whose lives appear most placid—a multivalent war is raging.

What Naturalisms Leave Out (1/2)

some notes on character interiority

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