Tenses, perspectives, points-of-view!
Another post trade, this week with Zachary. He gave me Tenses, Perspectives, Points-Of-View! What They Bring To Mind For Me As A Reader, which I love. I'm reading Zach's short story collection, Echoes of Distant Stars, because I also love me some queer scifi. It's great and you should check it out.
What would Zach write? Something very useful, like the punchy prose post. What am I going to write? A bit of flailing. Having written a bit about my love of present tense I'm thinking more about perspective and POV. But they all bundle up together when it comes to what they bring to mind for me as a reader.
Reading fanfic, there's more second person. More than the not-far-off-zero encountered in the wider world. The Night Circus has short sections between chapters in second person. (Forgot about In the Dream House. There are some.) I'm not against it!
But today... first person plural. Collective narrators. The we.
The Virgin Suicides is probably the most well-known. But the book I'd love to take this opportunity to ramble on about is After Sappho by Selby Wynne Schwartz. I'm pretty into the whole Paris-as-cauldron-of-Sapphism vibe. Accidentally fell down that rabbit hole and there's no getting out. And that is where the book is largely set, if you can call it set anywhere. Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein.
Obviously I'm aware of the grand tradition of Lesbianism (campaign to bring back the capitalisation) as a historical thing but this book was the first time I felt it. From the way it's constructed that's exactly what I was supposed to feel.
But Natalie had written Équivoque to tell us that we were possible in our own time.
We were possible in our own time! We were there. We were all through history - much as history likes to tell us we weren't. Not just there. Doing things. Making art. Falling in love. Getting Ulysses published.
(I read No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami immediately before After Sappho. It is also extremely good and interesting. At some point I'll have to write up a reading list.)
The actual act of reading the book is so clear in my mind. Which happens, with the best books. Stumbling down the street later in the day trying to describe it to my wife. Trying to recommend it to anyone who might be even the slightest bit interested. In a dreamy sort of very factual fictionalisation, narrated by a formless chorus of women loving women. That I feel a part of, now. I am the we.
As long as we stayed in the rooms of Natalie Barney, we felt, we would be lit from within by the images of what we could be.
It's the ancient Greek chorus (Sappho! I see what she did there!) Which is an underutilised function nowadays, the chorus. I've seen several operas (I've got to say, I don't really get opera as an art form) where choruses are still in use, even in modern operas. Watching, commenting, judging. In Marx in London they were the weight of past and future. A chorus would probably work really well as a surveillance metaphor, or social media, or something.
Henceforth, we told Natalie Barney, Sappho would wear our clothes with buttons and collars. Sappho would drive our motor cars and write our novels.
(Looking for some good quotes and I ended up reading half the book! I would have posted this yesterday but I spent hours reading instead!)
Other great things about this book:
- drags Radclyffe Hall
- a case of the clitoris
- also this sense of: what are you doing? The world is falling apart
So there we go. Perspectives and points of view. And how they messed me up emotionally as a reader.