shhhh it's a secret (the secret is narrative responsibility)
A couple weeks ago my former fave tweeted this absolutely bonkers quote and since then I have had the phrase Narrative Responsibility stuck in my dang head.
And just in case something happens to the actual linked tweet, here’s the relevant bit:
“I don’t care how many people enjoy it, fiction in the present tense is an ABDICATION OF NARRATIVE RESPONSIBILITY.”
Okay so as a person who uses first-person-present and even second-person sometimes, I absolutely fucking hate this take all the way to hell and back, which is sad because I used to really love Phillip Pullman — he’s the man who inspired me to write, for christ’s sake. He’s fallen pretty far in my mind not just for stupid, “get off my lawn” type takes but also for the far more egregious offense of writing a series with a major narrative contradiction, one I am low-key still trying to rectify in every single thing I write.
BUT, that is not what i am here to talk about. (Hey, later Aya, write about how becoming the authority on yourself is the only way through and how that relates to His Dark Materials and the failure therein. Or don’t, see if I care. I’m not the authority on you. I’m the authority on me and I’m here to talk about something else!)
So… I’m here to talk about what I understand narrative responsibility to actually mean, and the true inspiration for this post is actually not Mr. Pullman at all, but rather everyone’s favorite murder suspect, Delia Owens.
MAJOR SPOILERS for Where the Crawdads Sing ahead. You’ve been warned!
Before I delve into the Crawdads book, let me lay out what I’m talking about. In most books, the Point-of-View character is more or less a surrogate for the reader. The reader sees what they see, knows what they know, and thus “simulates” to some degree or another the feeling of being that character.
Sometimes, this parity is broken and the reader is given more information than the character. This is called dramatic irony, and it happens in basically every tragedy (because we know how things will end even if Hamlet doesn’t) and also any time the narrator says, “Little did he know.” Dramatic irony can be a way of heightening the stakes, because we the audience know exactly what stands to go wrong. Despite it being a giveaway of the events, if the outcome seems unlikely, the audience is all the more curious to know how it will unfold. (Such is the case for my fave up there, Mr. Harold Crick. Go watch Stranger than Fiction if you haven’t before, it’s good.)
Okay, so what happens when the reverse happens? What happens when our previously trustworthy narrator begins keeping secrets? I don’t think there’s a name for this (though please correct me if I’m wrong), and that’s probably because it is usually only used one way — from which Crawdads is a departure.
For example: In She Who Became the Sun, the POV character keeps short-term secrets to great effect. It goes like this: Zhu has a problem she sees no way out of; then Zhu has an idea and the chapter ends. In the next chapter, the audience watches Zhu’s idea unfold brilliantly, without knowing the details beforehand.
If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because this device is used a lot in action-adventure films and television, including cartoons. The gang gathers round, someone says, “I have an idea,” and the scene cuts. You wait on the edge of your seat while it unfolds, and voila! Our brilliant heroes got out of their impossible predicament.
This device can be reversed as well: if the gang tells you their whole plan, you just know it’s going to go absolutely sideways. The tension arises from the delta between your knowledge and what happens in both cases, and I do not think that this type of short-term secret-keeping is an abdication of narrative responsibility.
But sometimes… sometimes I think secret-keeping is an abdication, and Crawdads is a great example of this. I will stop here momentarily to recap Crawdads so we’re all on the same page:
Kya is the Marsh Girl and is rejected by society
Kya’s POV is close throughout the whole book, leading to a sense that we know what she knows
The book has two timelines; in the first, Kya is growing up in the marsh. In the second, Chase Anderson is found dead and Kya is taken in as the prime suspect in his murder. Her trial proceeds in this timeline.
In the past timeline, Kya’s relationship with Chase unfolds and he is shown to be abusive. His death is never shown on page, leading to some narrative dissonance: because we have previously seen all of Kya’s POV, we conclude from never seeing Chase’s death that Kya did not kill him.
In the Court Proceedings timeline, Kya and her lawyer successfully argue that what is on trial is not actually Kya’s innocence or guilt in Chase’s murder, but rather her innocence or guilt as an outsider to the town. Miraculously, the jury find her Not Guilty and Kya is deeply relieved.
At the very end of the book, after Kya is dead, her husband Tate finds her confession in a journal: Kya did kill Chase, because she had no other way to escape his abuse, and she felt no guilt for it.
[gif of Lucille from Arrested Development saying “Good for her!”]
Okay, now, it is not for me to judge whether this book is good or not (I have my own opinions) but there is one thing I feel fair in concluding: it breaks narrative trust and abdicates narrative responsibility by framing Kya as innocent in the Court Proceedings timeline.
Again, you’re welcome to disagree with me about whether this breakage is emotionally effective or not, but it’s pretty clearly laid out that one is supposed to side with Kya: the town are accusing her of this crime not because she did it, but because she’s wild. Throughout the court proceedings, Kya knows that she is actually guilty, that she in fact did kill Chase, but she never reveals this to the audience. As if she doesn’t trust them.
Why?
Here is where I will begin giving what is essentially just my opinion; I welcome discussion on this matter. Kya does not trust the reader with this information, not because it is authentic for her to do so, but because Delia Owens (herself an accused murderer) finds the gotcha to be clever. If you the reader conclude that Kya is keeping a secret, then you, like the town, have judged her guilty. Joke’s on you!
Something I have been trying to understand is: why does this irk me so much? When I first read Crawdads, I actually rather liked it. And then the more that I thought about and discussed it (especially with others who praised its brilliance in this arena) the more annoyed I became. Isn’t it just as tense to wonder if she will get back to her beloved marsh if we know the truth? Why hide it? Why does this feel like it’s breaking some unspoken promise between myself and the narrator?
To understand this better, I want to talk about my own book (yes of course I’m sorry) and how it evolved my opinion on narrative responsibility. The question under discussion here is: what does the narrator owe the reader? When is it okay to break that trust? I don’t have hard answers to these questions, but I’d sure like to understand it better, so… let’s go!
In the draft of To Name the Fire which I had beta read (Draft 5), my MC Nell broke narrative trust in a major and explicit way. TNTF involves memory games, so a major part of the plot comes from Nell trying to remember what happened to her and why. Of course, what she eventually learns changes things and complicates her other goals, so I had to think very carefully about when she learns what. In Draft 5, she learns everything essentially all at once when she reaches a certain level of determination and desire to understand, and this led her to Keeping a Big Secret from the reader.
One of my readers (hi Kristina) was frank in telling me that this didn’t work for her, and, when pressed, other readers admitted that it was frustrating. Nell knows what happened, why won’t she just tell us! Well, the reason of course is that I think the twist is extremely satisfying and I wanted it saved til closer to the end. But it had an unintended effect: it made my readers not trust Nell’s motivations, because they didn’t really know what they were any more. It didn’t feel authentic to her character to keep this a secret, because she would likely have been thinking about it all the time!
A major change that I made in revision was that Nell gets her memories back gradually. This means that at every moment*, the reader knows what she knows and learns what she learns alongside her. Thus, at moments in-between, her actions are being informed by what she knows and the reader can relate (or at least, they understand.) This had the bonus of allowing my readers to react with Nell in real time when the whole truth was revealed and the past is finally all unraveled. It worked a lot better, honestly.
But the question is why does this work so much better?
To answer this I’m going to take another little diversion and talk about the absolute insanity that is Narrative. When you pick up a book, whether it’s in third person or first person or whatever, you know that the actual person telling you the story is the author, even if it says, “I did xyz.” We agree to not worry about that for the duration of the story. The same applies for film, for video games, and even for live-action games like RPGs or “immersive experiences” like Meow Wolf where your actions matter: you recognize that there is a designer, somewhere, and we know that.
(There are times when this goes very wrong. Case in point: the Crawdads movie has an awkward framing device where, at first, Kya is telling her lawyer about her life. And then she… isn’t anymore? And says things like “Something about that boy eased the tightness in my chest,” which made sense in the book because she didn’t know what she was feeling, but doesn’t make sense as a look-back where she’s talking abstractly. It brought attention to itself, which is the last thing you want to do when using an unusual narrative device.)
So what does the designer of the story owe the reader? These expectations are obviously cultural, and they obviously shift — the use and popularity of different tenses, third vs first-person, etc all go to show that these things change. And one of the oldest stories still in the collective consciousness, The Odyssey, is told in dual timelines with a heaping helping of Dramatic Irony, so don’t go telling me these are newfangled. Whatever the medium and whatever the device, however, some degree of trust is established: I know this story and will take you through it in the most pleasurable or affecting way that I can. Sometimes that means breaking established rules, like when Tim Curry looks right at the camera and says:
See also: the Office, Fleabag, etc. But, even that breaking of established rules is itself a type of narrative responsibility: only by talking to you through the screen could this story be told in the very best way. Only by breaking the rules.
But… when you see a Starbucks cup in a Game of Thrones shot…
[Daenerys Targaryen sitting in front of a Starbucks Cup]
or when you find a typo in a book, or when you go to a play and a line is forgotten, you are, momentarily, reminded that this is a narrative and someone is doing a worse job than you’d like. You remember that this isn’t real, and even when it’s an accident, there’s a sense of disappointment. Oh, yes, this is a story, and it could be better.
This is what abdication of narrative responsibility means to me: the designer of the story, be that author or screenwriter or what have you, has placed some other agenda ahead of telling the best story possible. This is especially true if it pulls you out of the story so much that you have to ask yourself “Why did they do that?”
Do not even get me started on what D&D did to my baby hanging out with the starbucks cup up there. Talk about abdication, hoooey. But I think enough people have torn down Game of Thrones and its writers that I don’t really have to.
Last point here: of course this is a matter of taste. What felt to me like abdication of narrative responsibility was, to many, a delightful and surprising new flavor they’d never tried before! And why shouldn’t it be? After all, what I thought worked brilliantly in Fleabag made me want to gouge my eyes out in Enola Holmes. One argument there, though: breaking the fourth wall says something meaningful about over-thinking, intrusive thoughts, and mental illness in Fleabag, not so in Enola.
So, here’s my conclusion: flawless narrative requires establishing trust. Most of that trust is already available if you follow genre and narrative conventions, but you can break it whenever you choose. However, if you are going to break the trust between yourself and your audience, you better have a damn good reason and it better pay off.
Fin.
* Nell actually still keeps a secret, briefly, in the draft I am querying, but it’s because she’s literally promised to keep a secret and it makes sense in the narrative, I promise.