Storytelling and Condemnation
The problem with storytelling is figuring out who’s telling the story. It seems easy. Isn’t this just the question of who your narrator is? Like with any one of these tricky questions, yes, but no.
In workshop with Ethan Canin, one of his classic principles was the idea that POV is not a phenomenon of grammar. First, second, third person is, in Ethan Canin’s conception, accidental to POV. He taught that POV is the “emotional question.” That is, the narrator “has an emotional question like ‘what does it mean to miss someone madly?’ which they’re trying to make sense of by telling the story.” So, a narrator has an experience that doesn’t make sense. They tell the story to try to find the sense. Whether it’s first, second, or third person doesn’t matter.
We ran into a problem with the omniscient. Or, rather, I ran into a problem. I submitted the draft of a novella I was working on where the narration spanned six characters who lived in the same town. Ethan told me I needed to cut out all of the POVs that weren’t Enoc’s, one of the protagonists. After I was workshopped, I asked him what he thought of 100 Years of Solitude. As I remember it, he said, “I remember when 100 Years of Solitude was published in English. Sometime in the 60s. You gotta know, that the third-person omniscient is really new. Before Marquez, no one really did it.”
García Márquez would disagree with this. In his interview with “The Paris Review,” he said he didn’t know the voice of 100 Years of Solitude until he thought of his grandmother’s voice. Toni Morrison said that part of the reason she loved 100 Years of Solitude is because that’s how her family always told stories. Maybe no one knew the third person omniscient before García Márquez besides millions of grandmothers and Toni’s family. There seems to be a sort of generational mode of generational storytelling.
One of the reasons I think García Márquez's third-person omniscient functions so well isn’t because of how powerful it is, but how limited and focused it is. Many readers are often surprised by the agility of the first sentence, “Many years later, when he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had remembered (había de recordar) that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” The expansiveness is obvious. “Many years later,” the first indication of time, begs the question, “Later from what?” Next, “had remembered,” is in the past perfect, but we’re talking about something later or in the future. While “many years later” takes the reader to the future, “had remembered” pulls them back to the past. The next sentence takes us to the town of Macondo, and Colonel Aureliano isn’t mentioned again until several pages later. While this seems expansive, that same omniscient (and maybe even omnipotent) narrator seems confined to the Buendía family and the things that concern them, like Melquiades.
In the end, the reader finds that Melquiades had given the Buendía family a book that contains their fate. As the final Aureliano, Aureliano Babilonia, deciphers the pages, he comes to realize that his fate was a tragic one. This takes us to the last clause of the last sentence of the book: “because lineages condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on the earth.” (I apologize for my very literal translation. Most English readers would have read something more like “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude would not have another day on this earth,” but I’m going off hazy memory and from-the-hip Spanish translation because I’ve lost my English copy). In that ending, the reader finds out that the narrator was confined to a forgotten book locked in a room that tells of the fate of a lineage. That seemingly all-powerful and eternal narrator had a place, knowledge, a point of telling, and, I would argue, what Ethan Canin would call an “emotional question,” i.e., the question of lineages condemned.
This third-person omniscient narrator isn’t too different from any other narrator. It still has a story it needs to tell. It still has a reason to tell that story. There are still things that fall within and outside of its view and concern. There’s a reason why García Márquez’s narrator of 100 Years of Solitude never narrates the events of stockholders in the banana company living in New York City: because it can’t. It is, for the most part, confined to Macondo and the Buendía family. It’s only concerned with the banana company inasmuch as the banana company is a concern of the Buendía family’s fate and condemnation. The true power of omniscience and omnipotence is in ignorance and weakness.
Stories are an attempt of the mind to make sense of suffering. The first-person, second-person, and “close” third-person are generally associated with the suffering of an individual. García Márquez shows the use of the third-person omniscient for making sense of the suffering of a lineage.
However, there’s one book that I think pushes this even further: Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. What it took García Márquez almost 500 pages to accomplish, Juan Rulfo surpassed in 100 pages.
Pedro Páramo is a novel told in shifting POV. It is formatted as a series of vignettes where the narrator changes. Often, one has to finish the vignette to find out who the narrator is. Some vignettes are in the first person, others in the third. Some are narrated by characters in the grave, by ghosts, and others seem to be narrated by God. The book begins with a first-person narrator Juan being told by his mother to go to the town of Comala and meet his father, a man named Pedro Páramo. When Juan arrives in the town, he finds that his father’s dead, and so is everyone else in the town. It’s a ghost town — a town totally populated by ghosts. He hears ghosts at night. He dies. There are interpretations of the book that say it’s narrated from hell. Another interpretation says the narrator is God. The book ends with the death of Pedro Páramo: “He gave a dry punch against the earth and went on crumbling as if he were a pile of rocks.”
Pedro Páramo made me ask, “If stories are an attempt of the mind to make sense of suffering, what mind could possibly narrate Pedro Páramo?” Well, it’s clearly one mind because the piece is one and complete. There’s narrative unity. There’s a cohesive beginning, middle, and end. There’s one action, the life and suffering caused by Pedro Páramo. But what’s interesting is that the mind that organized this story seems to not be the one that narrates it, although it has access to different narrators.
There’s a difference between narrator and consciousness. In Pedro Páramo, the narrator of the story is sometimes Juan, other times Eduviges, and sometimes an unnamed spirit, but the consciousness that organizes it is different from those narrators. It has access to those narrators, but it is an organizing principle that supersedes all of them (for the purposes of narratorial order). While Juan narrated the first scene to tell of his need to go looking for his father, the mind that organizes the novel needed to make sense of the existence and condemnation of Pedro Páramo. Throughout the novel, heaven and hell become stakes in the plot. The way in which Pedro Páramo was responsible not only for the poverty of the citizens of Comala but for their loss of heaven, becomes central to the narrative. The mind of the story is trying to make sense of a man who damned his neighbors in life and in death. While Gabriel Garcia Márquez ended with “a lineage condemned to one hundred years of solitude,” Juan Rulfo started with a town condemned to hell and worked backward from there.
The example of Pedro Páramo might seem very abstract, but it’s not too different from the polyphony found in The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides. While the mind that organizes Pedro Páramo is an unnamed spirit, the mind that organizes The Virgin Suicides is an unnamed neighbor-boy from across the street. The shifting POV in Pedro Páramo is likewise analogous to the different interviews the narrator of The Virgin Suicides conducts to fill in the missing parts of the story he’s trying to tell. However, through Pedro Páramo we never know if the mind which organizes the vignettes is the same as the mind which narrates them, whereas, in The Virgin Suicides, the same neighbor-boy who organized the novel is the one who narrates most of it.
Again, stories are an attempt of the mind to make sense of suffering. There seem to be (at least) three different kinds of suffering: the personal, the familial/generational, and the existential. Because of this, there seem to be three different kinds of minds which are capable of making sense of it. The individual mind (often presented as a first-person, second-person, or close third-person), the omniscient (a more agile third as in 100 Years of Solitude), and the conductor of polyphony (the shifting POV we see in Pedro Páramo).
These minds all have a reason to tell a story. They all suffered something or encountered something, which they need to make sense of. They don’t make sense of it by finding its meaning. They make sense of it by imposing a beginning, middle, and end on it; by telling a story. Sometimes, the mind that makes sense of the story is the same mind that narrates the story, as is the case with The Catcher in the Rye or even with Years of Solitude. However, what Juan Rulfo showed with Pedro Páramo is that the mind that organizes the story doesn’t need to be the same one as the mind that tells the story. The mind, if truly omniscient, can have a greater view than the individual POVs that make up the story.
So, who narrates Pedro Páramo?
Someone, something, staring into eternity and despairing it.