Here I am grateful for the multiple-meaning of the word school in the English language. My analogy for the week has a natural link, this time; the little boy, in a school of boys, narrates the individual within the collective like a school of fish. I've never read a collective voice that holds up so well, staying close and unaffected throughout the book. In most other examples I can think of ("The Virgin Suicides", "A Rose for Emily"), the collective voice often tends towards a forced exaggeration of instinct and pack mentality - not quite believable, at least not for me.
What makes Chamoiseau's school-of-fish voice believable? Context matters. Character matters. I'm more inclined to believe in a group's shared emotional responses/experiences when they are bound up in solidarity against a common threat (in this case, that threat being the cruel bewilderment of institutionalized assimilation). I don't feel that so much when it comes to the voyeurism of so many collective voices.
New question: How do we know when this craft tactic is a good match for our own work?
(This is a question I'm prodding myself to think on more often).
Related: How do we know when we can pull it off? I have a few guesses at what makes a school-of-fish voice work.
- The characters in the group MUST have something significant in common - preferably something compelling.
- They must know each other well, even if they have never met before.
- That which they have in common MUST relate somehow to the narrative's major conflict.
- Group decisions/actions must come from a place of instinct. Group decisions involving individual reasoning, plus the time/space for that reasoning, are less believable.
Without intermittent focus on the individual narrator(s), however, collective voice may teeter into extra-terrestrial, shared-brain territory (could be cool, but maybe not the thing for a memoir). There are still individuals within the group, and to flesh out the individual's own experience within the group is to give the group human depth. Plus, you really don't get the full force of shared experience - shared terror, shared shame, shared rebellion, shared victory - without bouts of lone/lonely emotions mixed in for contrast.
I don't think collective voice is right for any of my work right now, but I'm interested in reading up on other ways it could be done well.
you read the wrong book.
ReplyDeleteBravo Gwen, this is the kind of focus i was hoping for when you all read this book. It's tricky because so much seems to be in the perspective of the Little Black Boy, but we know this is the collective--which works well with childhood b/c we rarely have individual moments that aren't reactive. It also goes more to the point of the post-colonial aspect of the story--this was happening TO them. I appreciate this post.
ReplyDeletee