CHARACTERS IN FICTION
181
in some fairy story; then you awake to the fact that the con–
sciousness you have been thrust into is named Benjy and is feeble–
minded or is a criminal old painter with a passion for William
Blake's poetry or a charity patient whose eyesight, owing to
the failing muscles of old age, bends and distorts everything
in
the immediate foreground and can only focus clearly on
what is far off. Once you know where you are, you can relax
and study your surroundings, though you must watch out for
sudden, disorienting jolts and jerks-an indication that the
character is in movement, colliding or interacting with objective
reality.
The reader, here, as in
Ulysses,
is restricted to a narrow field
of vision or to several narrow fields in succession. Now some–
thing comparable happens in recent books that, on the surface,
seem to owe very little to the stream-of-consciousness tradition
and to take no interest in the mechanics of perception or the
field of vision as such. I mean such books
as
Augie March,
Henderson the Rain King, The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita,
and
two of my own novels,
The Groves of Academe
and
A Charmed
Life.
These books are impersonations, ventriloquial acts; the
author, like some prankster on the telephone, is speaking in an
assumed voice-high or deep, hollow or falsetto, but in any case
not his own. He is imitating the voice of Augie or of Holden
Caulfield and the book is written in Augie's or Holden's "style."
The style is the man (or the boy), and the author, pretending
to be Augie or Holden or Humbert Humbert, remains "in
character" throughout the book, unless he shifts to another style,
that is, to another character.
These
books, in short, are dramatic
monologues or series of dramatic monologues. The reader,
tuned in, is left in no doubt as to where he is physically, and
yet in many of these books he finds himself puzzled by the very
vocal consciousness he has entered: is it good or bad, impartial
or biased? Can it be trusted as Huck Finn or Marcel or David
Copperfield could be trusted? He senses the author, cramped
inside the character like a contortionist in a box, and suspects
