The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) taught the habit of asking what a unit of narrative is for and requiring an answer that names a category rather than a feeling. This file transposes the habit from the scene to the grant. The question is not whether a character is interesting, since nearly every character is interesting to the person who invented her, but what direct access to this mind buys that no existing vantage could deliver. The answers fall into five domains, set out below with a proposed sixth. The domains are a diagnostic, not a licence: naming one does not justify a grant, it only states the grant’s purpose so that the purpose can be weighed against the cost. Used as a checklist for building a viewpoint character, they produce a committee’s character.
Access
Access is the domain of a grant made so that the narrative can be present where the existing focaliser cannot be: another room, another city, a conversation held in her absence, a death she does not witness. It makes certain books possible at all, since a novel of a war or a family dispersed across a continent cannot be told from one vantage without becoming a novel about not knowing. It is also the most often invoked and least often examined justification, because it is the one a writer reaches while solving a plot problem, and its work can nearly always be done more cheaply, by the instruments listed in The Mechanism. It under-delivers when the viewpoint chapter could be compressed into a line of reported speech in the next chapter, and over-delivers when every location acquires a resident mind and the book becomes a map, fully informed and attached to no one. Tolstoy needs vantages at Austerlitz, at Borodino and in occupied Moscow in War and Peace, but nearly every one of them also does a second job: Pierre at Borodino is a civilian who does not understand what he is looking at, which is the novel’s argument about history in small.
Dramatic irony
Dramatic irony is the domain of a grant that gives the reader knowledge another character lacks. Meir Sternberg’s distinction (Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, 1978) is the instrument: suspense is uncertainty about what will happen, curiosity is uncertainty about what has happened, and surprise is the discovery that one’s model was wrong. A grant that tells the reader what the protagonist does not know converts curiosity into suspense, and the reader stops wondering and starts dreading. The trade is not always favourable. A crime novel that grants the killer a viewpoint has exchanged who did it? for will they be caught, and at what cost?, and a draft that makes the exchange in order to enjoy the villain’s company has spent its main asset without noticing. The quietest form is the strongest: a wife knows what her husband does not, the reader has been inside both, and every later domestic exchange has two floors. The domain has one requirement that is easy to miss, which is that the two vantages meet again; an asymmetry the ignorant party never acts on in the reader’s presence buys dread and spends it on nothing. Crime and Punishment discloses the murderer at once, and every scene with Porfiry Petrovich is legible on two levels.
Contrast (viewpoint domain)
Contrast (viewpoint domain) is the domain of a grant that lets the reader occupy a materially different way of seeing: another class, generation, temperament, moral framework or condition of mind. The name is qualified because The Subplot (Chapter 14) uses contrast for the commentary one plot line makes on another; this domain is that argument made at the level of consciousness. Its carriers are differential noticing (two vantages register different things in the same room), differential naming (what each calls the same person, place or act), differential explanation (what each treats as needing none), a different sense of time, and different theories of cause, so that one sees God where another sees money and a third sees luck. It is the domain most often claimed and least often delivered, because the differences drafts supply are usually differences of circumstance, of job, age and problem, while the two minds notice the same things in the same order. It over-delivers when a vantage becomes a position, the pious one or the cynical one, rather than a person. In The Sound and the Fury Benjy, Quentin and Jason inhabit different relations to time, language and cause; Benjy’s section has no chronology because he has none, and Jason’s is a running account of grievance and money.
Sympathy engineering
Sympathy engineering is the domain of a grant made to a character the reader would otherwise judge from outside, so that the judgement becomes harder. It is Booth’s alignment used on purpose, and it has two modes. The exculpatory mode supplies information that changes what an act was: the silence was protection, the theft was for someone else. The non-exculpatory mode supplies no such information; the act stays what it was and the reader is made to inhabit the person who did it. The second is more valuable and harder, because exculpation is a plot revelation delivered by structural means, after which the vantage has nothing left to do. Timing decides much: sympathy placed before a damaging act produces dread and complicity, and placed after it produces re-evaluation or, handled badly, the sense of an author lobbying. In Anna Karenina Karenin’s forgiveness at Anna’s sickbed makes a man the novel has let the reader despise briefly the best person in the room; nothing is excused, and the reader loses the option of contempt.
Structural pacing
Structural pacing is the domain of the alternation itself, the pattern of visits across the whole book used as a rhythm. A book that alternates A, B, A, B for four hundred pages has taught its reader that the sequence means nothing; a book that alternates A, B, A, B, A, A, A has said something about A’s crisis without a word of comment. The carriers are the deferral cut, the interval between returns varied by each thread’s state, a fast external mind set against a slow ruminative one, convergence, and the long stay in one vantage after a regular alternation. A cut away at a moment of tension is The Chapter Break’s decision (Chapter 6); the question it cannot answer belongs here, which is where the reader goes instead, since a deferral into a vantage the reader is glad to see costs little and one into a vantage she has been tolerating turns suspense into irritation. Tolstoy’s proportions in Anna Karenina enact the book’s argument: Levin’s share rises as Anna’s world contracts, and Part Eight has no Anna in it.
A proposed sixth: the epistemological domain
The five domains above all name something a vantage supplies, and assume that assembling vantages produces a fuller picture. Some books grant viewpoint for the opposite reason. The epistemological domain is a grant made to show that no single vantage can know what happened; the incompleteness of each account is the point, and the reader is given irresolution rather than assembly. Its structural signature is Genette’s multiple focalisation without adjudication. The test that separates it from contrast is whether a reader who read only one vantage would come away believing something the book denies: a reader of Levin’s chapters alone has an incomplete picture but not a false one, while a reader of one teller in Absalom, Absalom! is misled, and the book knows it. On screen, The Affair (2014) splits each episode of its first season between two lovers whose memories of the same events disagree, a case Worked Analyses reads.
The objections have force, and the chapter concedes part of each. The domain may be contrast with unreliability added, a compound rather than a new category; its examples cluster in modernist fiction, which suggests a period style; and it names what a structure means rather than what a grant buys for the story, which mixes levels. Against the second, Dracula (1897) and the epistolary novel of contradictory testimony show that it is not a modernist invention. The chapter adopts the domain for diagnosis because it names a purpose a draft can be failing to serve: a writer with three contradictory testimonies who does not know that irresolution is a legitimate destination will reconcile them and destroy the book. The Reveal (Chapter 15) adopts or rejects it at the scale of a book, since a reveal is the adjudication this domain refuses. The Reveal (Chapter 15) adopts it at that scale, as the plural-vantage form of the declined reveal, a book that keeps a question of fact visibly open to its end. At book scale contrast plus unreliability ends in a reveal that says which account to discount, and this domain ends without one, which answers the first objection; the third lapses, since what a structure means is a reveal’s own subject; the second stands in part.
A ruling on the authority domain
The Prologue (Chapter 10) proposed an authority domain for prologues: a separated unit that tells the reader what kind of text follows and how far to trust it, as the Author’s Note of Life of Pi does, or the note before Dracula asserting that the papers have been placed in sequence so that the facts may stand for themselves. This chapter, named to rule on it, declines to add it to the domains of the grant and leaves it where The Prologue (Chapter 10) put it. A grant made to establish standing is already one of two things the model here contains: a witness’s access, as in the log of the Demeter’s captain, or an epistemological structure in which the frame’s claim is tested, as Dracula’s documents test its note and Life of Pi’s second story tests its Author’s Note. The two proposals are one pair seen from opposite sides. The authority domain claims that a vantage suffices; the epistemological domain shows that none does. The first belongs to the threshold of a book, where The Prologue (Chapter 10) measures it, and the second to the allocation inside it.
A grant need not serve every domain. In the novels this chapter reads, the usual shape is two domains served strongly and a third incidentally, and the next file turns that observation into an admission rule.
See also: the Reference domains, with each domain’s carriers tabulated and further illustrations from Dracula, Bleak House, Lolita and Wide Sargasso Sea.