Inane Criticism of the Week award goes to Denis Donoghue, writing in the NYRB [$], who takes Jonathan Franzen to task for what Donoghue calls "narrative ventriloquism." Franzen, he writes, "has to intervene on [his characters'] behalf, thinking, feeling, and expressing beyond their range." He gives an example from The Corrections:
The disappointment on Enid's face was disproportionately large. It was an ancient disappointment with the refusal of the world in general and her children in particular to participate in her preferred enchantments."'Preferred enchantments' is beautiful," Donoghue writes, "but it is not credible as a mark of Enid's mind."
Donoghue is making up a rule and then docking Franzen points for failing to follow it. Far from a fault, this technique is one of the great strengths of the "third-person close" mode that Franzen uses: the narration has access both to the characters' internal experience and to the writer's expressive powers. To cite a famous example (or at least an example I've been reading recently), this is exactly what Updike does in the Rabbit books, throughout which the inner life of the unreflective, poorly educated, basically dull protagonist is credibly and movingly described in Updike's sinuous, philosophical, metaphor-laden prose. Open Rabbit Redux at random, as I've just done, and you'll find something like this, from a scene in which Rabbit and Jill are bathing:
he cannot shake the contented impotence of his sensation that they are the ends of spotlight beams thrown on the clouds, that their role is to haunt this house like two bleached creatures on a television set entertaining an empty room.Is this language "credible" as a mark of the mind of Rabbit Angstrom -- typesetter, former car salesman, one-time high school basketball star? No, it's what happens when John Updike lends Rabbit Angstrom his writerly intelligence and turns the character's inner life into poetry. It's this contribution from author to character that makes Updike's portrayal of Rabbit, and Franzen's of Enid, feel so profoundly generous: the implication is that human experience -- even the experience of the unthoughtful or inarticulate -- is rich and complex and substantial enough for art. But apparently it's against the rules of fiction as laid down by Denis Donoghue and thus should be forbidden.
