Missingness (2)

At a recent book club meeting, even though a New York Times Bestseller, the month’s selection sparked a lively discussion.

Many in the group strongly disliked the novel. Yes, it was a sad story, set over a period of many weeks in a hospital room. They found the writing spare and cold, and the narrative choppy with short, day-by-day chapters. Instead, they wanted a more clearly defined plot development. As well, they craved richer description, especially details about the main character’s difficult childhood. Why did she have such a strained relationship with her mother, who sat by her bed week after week? Why couldn’t the author lay it all out?

Other readers protested they admired the novel’s writing style. It suggested the weary, depressed voice of the main character, laid low by a mysterious infection dragging on and on as the story evolved, and her emotional difficulties, leaked by disturbing clues about the damage she suffered in a dysfunctional family while growing up. The novel was designed less as a full-blown story than an evocative portrait. The reader could intuit what filled in the gaps.

Walking home, it dawned on me why there was such a split reaction to the novel: contrasting expectations. The first group wanted the kind of story told by an “omniscient narrator”. There the book’s author speaks in the voice of a storyteller who, like a god, stands outside the action, knows all, sees all, and as the creator of the characters can manipulate them any way he wants and supply any amount of rich description and insight.

The second group was impressed by the handling of what was the actual “first-person narrator” structure of the book. Here, the long-term hospital patient “I” was immersed in the thick of the story from right inside it. From day to day, her own bare accounts and stilted writing style echoed her illness, her repressed feelings, and the narrowness of her own shuttered vision. Incapable of fathoming the depths of others’ minds and hearts, she could only guess, but understandably often didn’t even want to.

Walking home after the meeting, I could see a rough analogy to poetry. Traditional storytelling narrative poems, such as “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, focus on the resolution of an external sequence of events. Poet and reader stand side by side, both at a distance commanding/observing what is taking place.

Lyric poems, where “I” (whether the poet or his/her persona) is the speaker, plunge the reader into the partial vision of a private psyche, where not plot, but musing and emotion play the bigger part, and much may be implied only, or even withheld.

Is this another aspect of “missingness” that makes some people insist they can’t understand poetry?