Ordering Chaos

Among a fiction writer’s greatest challenges: how to evoke chaos while still making sense. The phrase “making sense” here is key, since ultimately the question boils down to whose sense is being rendered.

If the chaos confronting the reader is genuine chaos as experienced by the point-of-view character or characters—as opposed to an inadvertent, accidental, and hence inauthentic chaos arising from the author’s lack of command over his or her materials—then that chaos is welcomed, or anyway not entirely pointless.

In the given passage, one evening on his way home John Zambelli is rudely met by police officers who are, let us say, disinclined to ask questions first. In its particulars the scene is convincingly and vividly rendered. We are treated to the “rough hands” and “gruff voice” of Sergeant Molinski as he frisks his quarry, who lies prostrate across the paving stones of his front walkway. As the Sergeant works him over, a second officer, a woman named Dobbs, jabs her nightstick into John’s rib cage. Satisfied that Zambelli is unarmed and having duly blinded him with a flashlight, the officers learn his identity.

All of this is presented clearly enough for me to furnish this summary. Yet in the passage as written there are small points of confusion. In the opening sentence, we are told “John’s hands searched for comfort in the familiar stones beneath him.” From this we reasonably conclude that he is either on all fours or lying flat on the stone path onto which he has presumably been shoved hard. Did John have a chance to see his assailants before they tackled him? Unclear. But a moment later, where the gruff voice says, “He’s clean,” we are told—from John’s point of view—that the voice comes from “behind him” and that it “belong[s] to the cop holding the nightstick.” It’s logical, then, to conclude that John has not only glimpsed his attackers, but is able to positively identify them as police officers. In fact he's already done so, since in the first paragraph he describes the object being jammed into him as a nightstick as opposed to an unidentified blunt object.

Two paragraphs later, after John has “rotated his body slowly” to confront the officer’s flashlight beam, Molinski “ease[s] onto the landing and click[s] off the flashlight”, allowing John his first real glimpse of the cop, whose “service cap . . . barely reached John’s shoulders.” For this to be so the Sergeant would have to be very short indeed, considering that John still lies or sits on the ground.

These are small issues in a scene that, for the most part, is neatly written. The disorientation that has John Zambelli experiencing the “familiar stones” of his front walkway as alien objects now that they touch his hands rather than his feet is nicely observed. But however well established, John’s viewpoint isn’t followed through consistently such that we see, feel, hear, and touch as John does; so that his confusion makes complete sense, so that we know, for instance, that he is standing and not sitting or lying when he compares his height with that of his attacker. It’s a very small issue, but small issues like it add up and give way to larger problems: namely a lack of sufficient immersion on the author’s part in her viewpoint characters' perspectives, and the attendant overall murkiness resulting thereof.

The difference between ordered and disordered chaos is one most readers may not notice, but they’ll still feel it. Since fiction’s goal is to convey experience, even a very slight mishandling of POV will result in an obscuring or dilution of the fictional experience. An orchestra needs a conductor. What’s being orchestrated in a work of fiction is the reader’s senses through those of her fictional character or characters. When POV is mishandled, the instruments keep playing their parts, but the symphony is discordant. If that analogy won’t do here’s another. Reading fiction in which the viewpoint isn’t perfectly handled is like kissing a beautiful person with bad breath. You still get the kiss, but it’s not the kiss that might have been.