First Line Friday: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Whaddya say, shall we break the fourth wall today?

Do what with the which now, you ask? Break the fourth wall- that imaginary barrier between the actors on a stage and the audience in the theater (or for our purposes, between characters in a story and the reader turning pages.) Oftentimes, narrators and characters don’t even acknowledge the reader’s existence. Other times they step right up and introduce themselves. “Call me Ishmael,” says Hermann Melville in Moby Dick.  “In a sense, I am Jacob Horner,” says John Barth in his lead off to The End of the Road. 

In both cases you’ve got a first-person narrator, so it’s somewhat natural to address the reader directly, or make personal asides. Still, it’s an interesting choice to shake hands with the reader rather than launch into the story or kick off some tension-building plot point. I happen to like it.

And look at the amount of character info you can convey in just one sentence packed with dialect and mannerisms and tone:

“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.” —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

But you don’t necessarily need a first-person protagonist to make this work. Before he tells us “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” Kurt Vonnegut presents the reader with all sorts of personal vignettes, dirty limericks and the like in  his novel Slaughterhouse-Five.  How does that one begin?

“All this happened, more or less.”

And Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler  speaks directly to the reader because, well, it’s the reader that is the protagonist of that book. He makes that pretty clear in his famous, fourth-wall-breaking first line:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

There are plenty of other examples, too. This kind of opener can set tone, introduce a character or frame the main story:

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” —from Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

“For a long time, I went to bed early.” —from Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” —from Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

As it turns out, I don’t mind in the least if an author breaks the fourth wall. If anything it personalizes what I’m about to read, puts me on an equal footing with the author and treats me like I’m worth their story-telling time. Anybody else a fan? Anybody hate it?

Mark Twain: 1909 (One year before he died)

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Deus ex machina

-"Swing away, Merrill! Deus ex machina's got you covered!"

This may be somewhat related to last week’s complaint, but you know what really bugs me? Deus ex machina.

That’s right, the plot device of last resort (it should be, anyway-) when a character paints themselves into a corner, or finds themselves in a hopeless situation, and some outside force or event swoops in to save their bacon. It’s maddening. You don’t often find it in so-called “high literature,” but it rears its ugly head every now and again. Take Cormack McCarthy’s The Road,  for example.

I loved that book. I loved how McCarthy pulled off ‘post-apocolyptic’ while remaining completely apolitical. That, in itself, is pretty refreshing. But given the bleak existence of his father and son duo in that book, their amazingly good luck in a couple of tight spots laps right up against the borders of Deus ex machina.

Literally starving to death in a scorched landscape where all food sources have been picked clean by raiders, they happen upon an untouched underground cache filled with everything you could imagine. Awfully convenient. Later on, and in similarly dire straits they discover a pristine cistern of crystal clear water under a layer of rain gutter scum. Finally, with his father dead for two days, the boy ventures back out to the road and meets, not another marauding gang or cannibalistic maniac, but one of the last remaining ‘good guys’ who promises to protect him. McCarthy pulls it off because he’s that good, but it still strikes me as a little too convenient when it’s all said and done.

I’ve mentioned Guiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra  before. In that classic of Argentine literature, the main character works his way up as a gaucho, earning his stripes, not to mention a nice little nest egg that he then blows on an ill-advised cock-fight bet. Gone is his hope for the future, gone is his dream of owning “a string of ponies all of one color” ….  Until he inherits his own ranch out of nowhere, that is. Deus ex machina strikes again. And yeah, it kind of bugs me.

The Food of San Francisco

“In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat, too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths and roasted dry and good enough to eat too. Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu and I’d eat it; let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick red roast beef au jus, or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman’s Wharf- nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market Street chili beans, redhot, and frenchfried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausalito across the bay, and that’s my ah-dream of San Francisco.”

-from Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Thud Factor

Like any reader, I’ve got a long list of ‘books-I’d-like-to-read’ rattling around inside my head. Some of them have been there for years. Others I heard about last week. Sometimes, when I’m considering my next read and one of these books comes to mind I’ll log into my local library account and place a hold on one of them. I did this the other day with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom  (the book that inspired the film“Lawrence of Arabia” and a book that’s been on my list for ten years at least.)

But when the notification email came and I headed down to pick it up, there was an audible burst of laughter that I couldn’t contain as the librarian dropped the book on the counter in front of me. I knew in a second that I wasn’t ready for this thing. It was huge, and it was heavy. Huger and heavier than my Organic Chemistry textbook in college. I peeked inside on the off chance it was a large print edition.  It wasn’t.

So I took it home, put it on the scale (a full five pounds, for the curious) and took the following picture, before placing it in a pile of books "to-be-returned," unread:

I should have placed a quarter next to it, or had one of my small children try to hold it, for reference, but I don’t generally carry cash and I don’t believe in child abuse. 

I’ve been tossing around the idea of writing something about the books I’ve never finished. But for now anyway, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom  belongs in different category:  books I never started because I chickened out after a single glance. 

Which books have made you crap your pants?

First Line Friday: A Peek Into the Future

Back to our First Line Fridays series. We’ve covered setting, axioms and dialogue, now let’s take a peek into the future.

Sometimes the best way to kick off a novel is to come right out and hang the ending before the reader like a carrot before a horse. This doesn’t necessarily mean the story is spoiled, mind you, but when the reader is given  some sense of destination the immediate reaction tends to be “Whoa! Okay,  so that’s where we’re going? I’m game.” Here’s a perfect example, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” —from One Hundred Years of Solitude.

We covered another such first line not too long ago, by Jeffrey Eugenides:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” — from Middlesex.

Here’s what I wrote about that line at the time, it applies just as well to the first example:

"I love how the author delivers the crux of the plot in the very first line. He’s still going to take us through the twists and turns of a novel-length work, the slow burn of details, the crescendo of backstories and present action. But right there in the first line, he stabs his finger at the map and shows us our destination. It has the effect of making you wonder ‘how the devil are we going to get from here to there?’ And I, for one, was sold on the story."

Here’s another one, from Robert Graves’  I, Claudius :

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled."

But sometimes all you have to do is hint at the ending. Others have handled the peek-into-the-future opening much more subtly. Take the first line of Dickens’s David Copperfield :

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Or Paul Auster’s City of Glass:

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

In that example, we don’t even have the slightest idea what  “it” is that the wrong number started, but there’s a hint of the story and its ending in there that makes you want to learn more. Count me as a fan of the peek-into-the-future first line. 

Another month in the can

It’s been thirty more days, and in that period we’ve touched on roughly 50 authors. In case you missed them, here are our five most popular posts from last month:

• Poet’sCorner: Electrocuting an Elephant
• WhatBugs Me Wednesday: Fogg’s Non-existent Airship
• Review:Moby Dick
• FirstLine Friday: Setting
• SpeedReviewing

Plus a smattering of the unlikely search terms that brought readers to ShelfActualization.com:

• Billiard history >> History’s great writers playing billiards
• General gracia Jacques >> Led someone here
• Chris mcCandless journey  >> Takes you to this post
• Kerouac map >> Take you there again
• Jane eyre and wuthering heights >> this post pops up every month it seems
• Bald pale men >> Yep, literature’s got’em, too.
• Colorful Vermont  >>  Fall colors, courtesy of Washington Irving
• Hemingway and gellhorn  >> Leads you to this HBO review
• Queen Anne Period Art >> We covered this in a small way

Keep coming back!

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Unbelievable Plot Points

You know what really bugs me? Unbelievable plot points. You know what I’m talking about. Those turning points in a story that, yes, are theoretically or scientifically possible, maybe even witnessed in real life, but are really only credible between the covers of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,  and not  in any fiction that aims for a veneer of realism. As far as I’m concerned, you cannot give your character a one-in-a-million shot at making it out alive, and expect me to swallow it.

Don’t get me wrong, incredible things happen every day. Things that will blow your mind. But you can’t rely on something that happens once in a thousand tries, to save your character, resolve your story, or put a nice bow around a very messy plot. If you do, I’ll probably throw your book across the room.

Take “surviving a freefall” for example. It crops up now and again as a way to spice up fiction, and it really irks me. Are there documented cases of people surviving a fall from heights of 30,000 feet or more? Yes, there are. But that doesn’t mean you should make it the exit strategy for your character. Now, I understand the concept of terminal velocity as well as the next guy. But even if a falling body reaches a maximum falling speed due to increased drag, you’re still going to hit the ground at 122 miles per hour. Unless your book is about Gumby, I just don’t see things working out for your character.

At the climax of his novel Angels & Demons,  Dan Brown lets Robert Langdon plummet thousands of feet over Rome.  He survives, of course. He remembers from earlier in the novel that “one square yard of drag will slow a falling body 20%,” so he manages to grab some sort of window cover on his way out of the chopper. For those doing the math at home, 122 miles per hour reduced by 20% is still 98 miles per hour- but really, that’s for a face-down, belly-to-earth position. Not sure how Langdon would use his makeshift parachute in that maximum drag position. Brown might not have been sure either, which is why he had Langdon land in the Tiber River. This “churning” river is supposedly so “frothy and air-filled” that it is “three times softer than standing water.”*

Forget the fact that the helicopter would have to travel 2,000 to 2,500 horizontal feet to even get from St. Peter’s to the Tiber River. I’ve been to Rome, and that river is neither churning, nor frothy, nor air-filled. It creeps downstream like a moving lake, so I’m not buying Brown’s extenuating circumstances. It’s also probably not that deep, so in all likelihood Langdon would be looking at a few broken bones when it was all said and done. This free-fall has bugged me ever since I read it. It must have bugged Hollywood, too, because they kept Langdon on the ground in the movie.

Amendment to the complaint:

After mulling this over, I am willing to make a very specific exception to this rule. The unbelievable plot point might be acceptable as the inciting incident or launching pad for a story. In other words, if you’ve just survived a fall from 30,000 feet, then yeah, I want to learn more about you. You deserve to have your story told. And if an interesting and believable story follows your amazing brush with certain death, then I’ll read on.

As I understand it, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses  features a free-fall from 29,000 feet. Two characters fall into the English Channel and wash up on the beach alive. Given the magical realism in the book, and the fall serving as an inciting incident for the story, I’m going to give Rushdie a reluctant pass.

This is also why the Bourne Identity works (survival of several gunshot wounds, floating unconscious yet alive in a stormy sea.) It’s unbelievable, but it’s unbelievable in a way that gives you a reason to read on, rather than being a cheap gimmick to save the story. That would have bugged me.

*These quotes from the novel are taken from this page.

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 8

Though they don’t share the same hairline, there’s something in the eyes and mouth that makes young Erich Maria Remarque look an awful lot like John Malkovich:

High foreheard, low eyebrows, and piercing eyes- Jules Verne was his generation's Russel Crowe - plus a couple months of beard growth:

He's portly, he's got a sly expression and lots of thick hair- you can almost picture Alexandre Dumas walking into his local basement-level watering hole to a merry chorus of “Norm!”:

James Fenimore Cooper kind of reminds me of the backstabbing friend from Ghost (Tony Goldwyn):

And E.M. Forster? The first person who comes to mind when I look at that dude is Macy’s smarmy in-house psychologist from “Miracle on 34th Street” (Porter Hall):

Kind of makes you want to rap him on the head with your cane, doesn't it?

Tolstoy, in moving pictures