than a beguiling illusion. One of his heroes during his first twenty years was an uncle of his, an unmarried brother of his father and a brother also of the devout unmarried woman who was the sender each year of the calendars mentioned earlier. This man, who was hardly less devout than the sender of the calendars, several times during the first twenty years of the chief character of these fictional pages deplored in his hearing the number of young men who lost their faith and gave up the practice of their religion as a result of their dealings with some or another, or with more than one, young woman. During an exchange of letters in a year soon after the chief character had lost his faith and had given up the practice of his religion and had preferred not to meet with his devout uncle and aunt, the uncle had put it to the nephew that the true cause of his lapsing, as he, the uncle, called it, had been some or another, or more than one, young woman. The chief character had denied his uncle’s claim, but he, the chief character, had acknowledged to himself that the claim was accurate, although not in the sense that his uncle would have intended. He, the chief character, far from lusting after and then taking up with or cohabiting with some or another, or more than one, young woman, (the sentences hereabouts report fictional events purporting to have taken place during the fictional 1950s) had decided – no, had accepted what had seemed from the moment of his acceptance to have been inevitable since the time when he had first read the first page of fiction that had made sense to him (the chief character would have been some or another fictional female) and from the time when he had written the first sentence of fiction that he could later recall (the subject was some or another fictional young female). He had accepted, at some or another moment while he was reading some or another poem by A.E. Housman or some or another work of fiction by Thomas Hardy, that his most urgent need was not to perfect himself so that his soul would later be admitted to a heaven without end but to bring into being some or another fictional version of himself that would be able to move unchallenged, if only during a few fictional hours or days, among the unfulfilled lads of Shropshire; nor to burn with the devotion to some or another deity or virgin-mother of sanctified personage, but to convey by some or another means to some or another female personage in some or another work of fiction by Thomas Hardy that a fictional version of himself was in sympathy with her.
The previous four paragraphs may be thought of as having been written behind some or another upper window in a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys and in some or another room opening off a corridor frequented by, among others, those wayward few who look for their subject-matter not in visible places on the far side of the mostly level grassy countryside surrounding this building but in the mental space surrounding fictional texts, which space is to be thought of as reaching endlessly backwards, so to speak, from the first paragraph of each text, endlessly forward, so to speak, from the final paragraph, and endlessly sideways, so to speak, from every intervening paragraph. The wayward few, as I call them, take for their subject-matter scenes and events never reported in any fictional text but likely to have taken place in the vast zone of possibility surrounding not just every page but the merest sentence on that page. And the mental space that I mentioned just now extends so far in every direction from every fictional text that the wayward ones, as I call them, are able to write as though the content of many a seemingly separate fictional text adjoins, or is entangled with, the content of many another such.
One of the terms often appearing in books meant to instruct intending writers of fiction is point-of-view. Being an unscholarly person, I can only speculate as to when some or another writer of fiction or commentator on fiction first devised the term, which he or she surely did in an effort to describe and, partly, to explain a process that countless readers of fiction and nearly as many writers of it had engaged in for centuries past and engage in to this day without troubling themselves to examine it. The result of the process is that the reader (myself and, surely, not a few others excluded) is persuaded that he or she stands in relation to one or more fictional personages as no one in the world where I sit writing these words could ever stand in relation to another: the reader (excluding those noted earlier in this sentence) is persuaded that he or she knows what the fictional personage thinks, feels, remembers, hopes for, fears, and much else. I am not concerned here with the manifest folly of the reader thus persuaded: the reader who wants from fiction an experience hardly more subtle than the viewer gets from a film. I prefer to suppose that the discerning reader of this work of fiction needs no further reminder from me in the matter. Perhaps even the discerning reader, however, is unaware of the many variations of the process that goes nowadays by the name point-of-view. At one extreme is the boldness and directness of the nineteenth-century writer of fiction who informs the reader, as though possessing an unchallenged right to do so, that this or that character is contented or disconnected or weighed down with remorse or uplifted by hope. Many a writer of this sort ranges freely from character to character, even within the same few pages, with the result that the reader might be enabled to know the intentions of each of two characters in a dispute between antagonists, for example, or a proposal of marriage. One such passage that occurs to me reports the scene, so to call it, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, in which Tess Durbeyfield and Alec d’Urberville meet for the first time. The narrator reports in the same few pages not only Tess’s thoughts and feelings but some of what occurs to Alex when he first meets her and even the motives of Alec’s dead father, he who had built the mansion in front of which Tess and Alec meet and had appropriated the ancient surname that seemingly linked the two characters. I quote here a short paragraph from the chapter titled ‘The Maiden’.
Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at being here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the attraction of the swarthy Alexander.
I quoted the lines above for no other purpose than to show how a certain sort of author of fiction claims to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one of his or her characters and will sometimes report in a single sentence, as the narrator reports in the quoted passage, the viewpoints, so to call them, of two, but while I was copying the sentence above, I noticed, for the first time that I could recall, the seeming incongruity of the adverb here. I then read the paragraphs before and after the paragraph that includes the quoted sentence. In those paragraphs, the author moves freely, as it were, among his characters, so to call them. At some or another moment, he might seem to lean closely towards one or another character while he reports, in the person of the narrator, the thoughts and feelings of that character. Soon afterwards, according to the time-scale of the narrative, the author might seem privy to the thoughts and feelings of quite a different character. Soon afterwards again, the same author might seem to step noticeably backwards from all of the characters and, far from seeming to loiter furtively, with bowed head and downcast eyes, in range of the sighs and murmurings of this or that character, might seem to fling back his head and to look far outwards and upwards while he reports to the reader not only the broad outlines of the far-reaching fictional landscapes surrounding the cramped cottage-garden or the tiny parlour where he had learned, not long before, the secrets of those characters, but the fold upon fold of field and forest surrounding garden and parlour and even the sight of distant villages and towns that he, the far-seeing author, but none of his characters might have been aware of and, this being the boldest of all his authorial claims, the history of all that he claimed to see or, should I say, the tendencies that he divined in the history, its moral purpose or the lack thereof, and the pressure of that history on his characters, whether or not they perceived it.
The sort of author who practises this narratory nimbleness might seem sometimes, even to the discerning reader and, more importantly, even to himself or herself, the nimble narrator, to be present in the place that he or she happens to be writing about rather than in the place where he or she sits writing. If I, a reader of average discernment, saw, while I read the passage quoted above, a translucent image of an elderly man derived from a few reproductions of photographs in some or another biography – saw the ghostly image sometimes lurking near this or that character, then perhaps the author of the passage would have seemed sometimes, while he was writing the same passage or similar passages, to be present in the setting, so to call it, of his own fiction. And yet, despite such
