Representing the Unspoken Interior Life in Fiction

Pamela Erens | September 2020

Pamela Erens

The speciality of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man does not talk to himself quite truly—not even to himself; the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality. The novelist has a real pull here. He can show the subconscious short-circuiting straight into action (the dramatist can do this too); he can also show it in its relation to soliloquy. He commands all the secret life, and he must not be robbed of this privilege.

—E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

I read fiction for many reasons. I read for language, for the sheer pleasure of words and rhythms aptly, resonantly, musically chosen; I read for story, for the atavistic satisfaction of a narrative that creates a compelling shape; I read to be moved: to be frightened, grieved, touched, outraged, to fall in love with invented beings. But another reason might be the most decisive one for me: I read to see into other people’s minds. Who knows where the urgent desire for this kind of spying comes from? Not everyone possesses it. Perhaps it’s a certain kind of wiring, or the special inheritance of children who grew up in households where a great deal was going on beneath the surface and in time we had to wonder what the hell our mothers and fathers were really thinking and feeling, and if they even knew about it. Perhaps some of us have receptors more highly attuned to the “sound” of other people thinking, just as others of us have truer musical pitch, or a more subtle understanding of color. Or maybe—and I sometimes think this is true in my own case—those of us who are obsessed with the question of what’s going on inside the heads of made-up characters are precisely those who are not always very good at guessing what’s going on in the heads of actual people in our lives. At least when we read fiction, someone—the author, the narrator—is there to steer us away from error.

E.M. Forster wrote that the novelist must not be robbed of the privilege of seeing into and showing us what he calls “the secret life,” and he’s very specific about what this is. “By the secret life,” he says, “we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as is vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance word or sigh. A chance word or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or murder: the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.” We don’t get this secret life in quite the same way in any other art. Visual art may give us the unconscious, but untranslated—we are left on our own to experience it, sometimes to drown in it. The same with music, which works even more directly on our bodies, our sensory receptors. Drama shows us the outward result of interior processes; and as Forster suggests, even Shakespearean-type soliloquies are acts: there is no outside narrator to tell us whether or not the soliloquizer is accurately reporting her own motivations—usually she is not. So, the novelist—I’ll expand on Forster and say the fiction writer generally—should not relinquish this built-in advantage of her genre.

But how to do it? How to show the inside life without falling into that catastrophic error of “telling too much,” of seeming intrusive, pedantic, clumsy? How to create the magic whereby the reader seems to see directly into the consciousness of other beings? This is something I’ve thought about and struggled with all of my writing life, and while magic never has a formula, I can talk about some of the ways certain great writers past and present have done it. No writer attempts it in quite the same way as any other, and each one’s modus operandi has a lot to do with her era in history and her temperament.

Edith Wharton said that the fiction of interiority really started with La Princesse de Clèves, published in 1678. La Princesse de Clèves is an incredibly compelling and incredibly histrionic narrative in which characters love and pine and suffer unto death and yet, because the story takes place among the French aristocracy—where all actions are controlled by a rigid etiquette—extremely little of this roiling emotion shows on the outside. Everybody goes on saying the right things and doing the right things and suffering abominably inside. Here’s a fairly subdued example. M. de Nemours is in love with the married Princesse de Clèves, whom he suspects of returning his feelings. They have never exchanged any words on the matter. M. de Nemours spies on her one night from outside her window. She hears a noise and catches a glimpse and thinks it may be him. The next day M. de Nemours is visiting his sister and arranges for them to “accidentally” come across the princess:

When they reached Coulommiers, they found Madame de Clèves walking in a broad path along the edge of the flower-garden. The sight of Monsieur de Nemours embarrassed her not a little, and made her sure that it was he whom she had seen the previous night. This conviction filled her with anger that he should have been so bold and imprudent. He noticed with pain her evident coldness. The talk ran on insignificant subjects, and yet he succeeded in displaying so much wit and amiability, and so much admiration for Madame de Clèves, that he finally dispelled some of her coolness, in spite of her determination not to be appeased.

So, outside versus inside: one of the first examples of the fiction of interiority, which Wharton says is modern fiction, period.

In the English language, Jane Austen is one of the earliest great delineators of interiority. We continue to read Austen today precisely because she is so remarkable at showing the subtle interior shifts that lead characters from pride to prejudice, from sensibility to sense, that allow them to be persuaded. In a passage fairly early on in the novel Emma, Mr. Knightley, Emma’s older friend, scolds her for interfering with the marriage prospects of Harriet Smith. Emma has led Harriet to believe she is too good for a very decent man who wants to marry her. Here is what follows:

Emma made no answer, and tried to look cheerfully unconcerned, but was really feeling uncomfortable and wanting him very much to be gone. She did not repent what she had done; she still thought herself a better judge of such a point of female right and refinement than he [Mr. Knightley] could be; but yet she had a sort of habitual respect for his judgment in general, which made her dislike having it so loudly against her; and to have him sitting just opposite to her in angry state, was very disagreeable. Some minutes passed in this unpleasant silence, with only one attempt on Emma’s side to talk of the weather, but he made no answer. He was thinking.

Here we have a paragraph that opens with a character not talking, and closes with a character not talking, and in between, except for one comment from one of the characters, two characters do not talk at all but only think. We have access to the content of that thinking for one of the characters, Emma. First, Austen makes sure we see the discrepancy between her demeanor and her feeling. She is a well-brought-up young woman, so she makes sure she appears unruffled even though she is upset, and we can assume that she is successful at maintaining her mask. But Austen is precise about Emma’s actual state of mind, which is unrepentant and righteous, annoyed and uneasy. Complicated, in short. We have a hint here that Emma credits Mr. Knightley’s views more than she can acknowledge to herself. There’s a hint of shame. And by ending the paragraph with a return to Mr. Knightley, and a comment that he is thinking, Austen signals that Mr. Knightley has an interiority meant to be taken as seriously as Emma’s; implicitly, he is a worthy match for her, and this lays the groundwork for the way the novel ends, with a marriage between Mr. Knightly and Emma, who at this point isn’t in the least thinking of marrying him or anyone else.

So a lot gets conveyed in a short paragraph. What are the characteristics of Austen’s method? Well, the narrator is omniscient. She can tell us what Mr. Knightley as well as Emma is thinking, and in fact right after this passage she goes ahead and does so. She is seemingly objective and therefore she is authoritative. There is nothing in the prose that leads a reader to believe that perhaps the narrator’s view of the matter is only one of many, or perhaps she has an ax to grind, or perhaps she’s mistaken. No. What we are told is the “capital-T Truth,” the one single correct translation. If Emma and Mr. Knightley’s interaction could be observed by another party with similar access to their consciousnesses, the implication is that the report would be identical.

This is the sort of unselfconscious and confident narration typical of the Enlightenment—Austen was a child of the Enlightenment even if she overlapped with the early Romantics. I want to point out that this approach is very light on mood. It’s detached. It’s “reasonable.” As a result, there’s a airiness and fluidity to the prose—we move right along. We don’t get stuck in Emma’s emotions. She’s feeling shame and anger, which are very unpleasant, sticky emotions, but we touch on them and pass on. Emma surely remains with them longer than we do. And for this reason I would say that with writers like Jane Austen, we are allied with the narrator, not the character. We have empathy for the character, but we are also invited to sit in the position of judge. We are somewhat like Mr. Knightley: inclined to be benevolent, but in the end impartial. And I suspect this is one reason people still love the novels of Jane Austen so very much, and seek to extend their contact with her works via fan fiction and zombie sequels and endless movie adaptations—they (we) want to recapture this lightness, this sense of getting inside a character yet being simultaneously free from her. All the gain with very little of the pain.

I’ll also note that the representation of unconsciousness in this passage is almost nil. The narrator doesn’t describe anything that Emma is unaware of feeling. This narrator is going to tell us only about things that are just below the surface, as close to Emma as the blush that may or may not be—probably is not—appearing on her face. The narrator does not see the need to go deeper, to delve into what might be the origins of Emma’s shame, or investigate what childhood traumas might have fashioned her arrogance or her desire to meddle in other people’s love lives.

It’s not just because Jane Austen was writing in the very early 19th century that she used this authoritative, breezy, rationalistic approach to interiority. But of course it is part of the reason, and there is a progression, over time, in English literature from narratives that peep just below the surface, as Austen does, toward narratives that dive deeper into the messy chambers of the unconscious. So by the time we get to George Eliot, sixty years later, we can see something else going on.

The following fragments are from Middlemarch. Here’s the context. Dorothea Brooke, who is still very young, twenty or so, has married a scholar in his fifties because, at the time, she mistakenly believed that he was a genius. She had romantic visions of being his muse and amanuensis for his world-altering project of scholarship entitled The Key to All Mythologies. More recently, she has figured out that her husband’s scholarship is sadly dated and that, in any case, he is constitutionally incapable of moving past the note-taking stage. The husband, who is always referred to by his last name, Casaubon, has sensed that Dorothea no longer believes in him, which has led to trouble between them. Lately Casaubon hasn’t been feeling well, and a doctor has just broken the news to him that he has a terminal heart condition. Casaubon is a clergyman, and technically a man of faith. But here is what George Eliot writes (I’m excerpting from a longer passage):

When the commonplace “We must die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die—and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel…. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.… He held himself to be, with some private scholarly reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of the present and hopes of the future. But … Mr. Casaubon’s immediate desire was not for divine communion and light divested of earthly conditions; his passionate longings, poor man, clung low and mist-like in very shady places.

Right after this passage, the narrator switches her gaze to Dorothea. She’s had a rough time of her short marriage. Casaubon is distant and has no idea how to be intimate with a woman. Dorothea has grown quite depressed. She feels trapped and resentful. But seeing that her husband is distressed by the visit from the doctor, she goes to take his arm. He coldly rebuffs her. She goes up to her room, “in the reaction of a rebellious anger stronger than any she had felt since her marriage.” Over a long afternoon she thinks over their relations. She is a warm, ardent woman but her husband has always held her at bay. She believes that if he had loved her, she never would have come to question his work and realize that he is, essentially, a fraud and a failure. “She saw her own and her husband’s solitude—how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him. If he had drawn her towards him, she would never have surveyed him—never have said, ‘Is he worth living for?’ but would have felt him simply part of her own life. Now she said bitterly, ‘It is his fault, not mine.’ In the jar of her whole being, Pity was overthrown.”

The passage goes on, and evening arrives. Dorothea decides not to come down for dinner but to send a message to her husband saying that she is not feeling well. Passive aggression. Before she has time to do this, he sends a message that he will have dinner alone. Damn it, outmaneuvered! All evening Dorothea struggles with her rage and fantasies of wounding her husband. He always stays up very late reading. Dorothea finally masters her feelings enough to decide to wait up for him and say goodnight, but she does so mostly out of duty—he is, after all, quite ill.

She stands outside her room watching for him to come upstairs. When he eventually does, she is startled at how haggard he looks. There is this exchange:

“Dorothea!” he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. “Were you waiting for me?”
“Yes, I did not like to disturb you.”
“Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.”
When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.

I’ve quoted at length from Middlemarch because Eliot is less compact than Austen. But you’ll notice here the use of metaphor and imagery. The river Casaubon imagines, or that Eliot imagines for him, the misty banks, the walking apart, the wounding of a lamed creature. Austen rarely uses metaphor in her novels. Technically you could say that Eliot is the less precise writer. Rather than telling us cleanly and succinctly that so-and-so is feeling uncomfortable and unrepentant, she draws pictures to represent what is going on inside the characters’ heads; she relies on poetry. If this is less precise, it is also more nuanced and probably truer to the way we think and feel. The narrator has invoked archetypes of the unconscious: water, rivers, animals. As a result, there’s a heavier, moodier atmosphere. We don’t have the Jane Austen sprightliness anymore. We go inside the characters and we have to stay there for a while, walking the misty banks or a country lane behind a spouse. It feels as if, regardless of the length of the text, we are “there” with the characters’ thoughts longer. And the corollary is that we are a little further from the narrator and a little closer to the characters. There is perhaps more empathy and less judgment. I like Jane Austen’s protagonist Emma a lot, but she retains a bit of the feeling of a specimen for me, someone I can view under a microscope or in a petri dish and write up in a lab report. Now, Eliot is famous for her grand narrator, and for the godlike perspective of that narrator on earthly proceedings. But all the same, that narrator is more tangled up with her characters than Austen’s is, and as the reader, I’m more tangled up too. It’s hard to give, in these brief fragments, a sense of the robustness and depth of Eliot’s characters; the effect is cumulative. Casaubon’s terror of death is my terror of death. Dorothea’s feeling of abandonment is my feeling of abandonment; her rage is my rage.

So, at this point, a working hypothesis: More metaphor and more imagery is associated with a sense of being deeper into the mind of a character.

Which brings me to Virginia Woolf. Woolf rode this train a few stations further. Here’s a passage from Mrs. Dalloway in which Clarissa Dalloway comes home after her famous morning outing to buy flowers. She recently survived an unspecified illness, and because of that she and her husband, Richard, a member of Parliament, now sleep in separate bedrooms. Hers is in the attic:

Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe. She pierced the pin-cushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and she had read deep in Baron Marbot’s Memoirs. She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow. For the House [Parliament] sat so long that Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment—for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And then at Constantinople, and again and again. She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For that she could dimly perceive.

The narrator then tells us that once in a while, with women, Clarissa has glimpses of a what that “something central” might be:

And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident—like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment. Against such moments (with women too) there contrasted (as she laid her hat down) the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt.

Here the narrator, just as with Austen or Eliot, just as in any third-person narration, is separate from the characters and authoritative, but she is far less godlike and remote. She is more like someone who might be sitting next to the reader, someone warm and quietly charismatic. There’s another leap in the quantity of metaphor and imagery, and these elements are less subordinated to getting some particular thought of the character’s across and instead convey an entire personality. Correspondingly, these pages about Clarissa’s mental state are many increments less exact than anything analogous in Austen or Eliot. Yet, they convey subjectivity and feeling in a way that greater exactness cannot. We are at many moments right inside the character, and we stay for a very long time. The more “inside” a character we are, the more tolerance we seem to have for sticking around. I wonder if this might be because we start to believe in that character as an “I,” a genuine consciousness—or, put another way, we start to feel that that character is our “I,” and we always have greater tolerance for our own thoughts and feelings than for those of others.

Anyway, we are deep in Clarissa’s subconscious. I don’t believe that Clarissa, who is a rather ordinary woman, neither artistic nor especially introspective, is going around thinking about a match burning in a crocus. Not consciously. I do believe she thinks about her sexual separation from her husband, and is bewildered over what is hinted to be her lifelong lack of enthusiasm about sex. I think she only half-notices the tight bedsheets; it’s the narrator who uses music and repetition to fix this image vividly in our minds. These images—the crocus, the bedsheets, the attic, the half-burnt candle, the cracks and sores—these are the narrator’s dredging of Clarissa’s subconscious. The narrator is seizing that privilege Forster talks about, to give us pieces of characters that they don’t know themselves.

So again: with less imagery and metaphor, we are closer to an interiority of consciousness, reasonableness, and identifiable and predictable motives. With more imagery and metaphor, we are closer to an interiority of unconsciousness, unreasonableness, the elements of human life that are inexplicable and unpredictable.

It’s probably begun to seem as if there’s an inevitable trajectory, in Anglo-European fiction, from more “objective” to more “subjective” and poetic narrations of interiority, but that’s too simplistic. The latter became more common over time, yes, but you see approaches in contemporary fiction that are all over the map. It’s time to bring up one of my latest crushes, Elena Ferrante. In some ways she’s dealing with her characters’s inner lives very much in the way Jane Austen did. In other ways, she’s doing something completely different. Let’s look at a passage. This is from The Story of a New Name, the second volume in her Neapolitan series. The narrator, Elena, has just lost her virginity to an old friend of her family’s, Donato Sarratore. She is actually in love with Donato’s son Nino, who is her own age, but Nino is carrying on an affair with her married friend Lila. Both girls are only seventeen or eighteen, which in their world is considered well old enough to be married. Nino’s dad, a notorious letch, is a consolation prize for Elena. The next morning Elena sees Lila. They ride together in a cab.

We hardly spoke during the ride in the mini cab.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes. And you?”
“Fine.”

I said nothing about myself, nor did she about herself. But the reasons for that reticence were very different. I had no intention of putting into words what had happened to me: it was a bare fact, it had to do with my body, its physiological reactivity. That for the first time a tiny part of another body had entered it seemed to me irrelevant: the nighttime mass of Sarratore communicated to me nothing except a sensation of alienness, and it was a relief that it had vanished like a storm that never arrives. It seemed to me clear, instead, that Lila was silent because she didn’t have words. I felt she was in a state without thoughts or images, as if in detaching herself from Nino she had forgotten in him everything of herself, even the capacity to say what had happened to her, what was happening. The difference between us made me sad.

Note the ways in which we’re oddly enough in Austen territory here. There’s the straightforward quality, the dearth of metaphor or image, and the sense of swiftness, of speed, that results from that. The few metaphors Ferrante does use aren’t very potent. There’s one in this passage—the storm that never arrives—and it doesn’t make much of an impression; it’s not very specific or vivid. In fact, I’m not sure it even makes sense—Sarratore’s penis inside her was a storm that never arrived? Also, as with Austen, there’s no mucking about in the unconscious. What Elena tells us, looking back, is what she was aware of feeling and thinking at the time. The passage, like the one in Emma, starts with a statement about someone not speaking, a signal that we’re now going to deal with the inner life. In fact, the passage is all about not speaking. The girls hardly talk in the cab, then Elena says, “I said nothing about myself,” and then she talks about Lila being unable to speak.

But of course there is one huge difference, and that is that this narrative, unlike Emma or any of the others I’ve quoted, is in first person. So we can’t really get that Austen-like sense of transcendent reliability and authority. There’s authority, but it’s a subjective authority. We believe that Elena is a trustworthy guide to whatever she might be feeling in the moment. But a different narrator would give us a very different account of goings-on, and in fact this is a point that Elena, the character and narrator, stresses over and over in the Neapolitan series. Over and over, she learns new facts, someone else rejects her interpretations, she sees things in a new light or realizes she can’t make sense of certain things at all. We are far from the microscope and the petri dish here.

To repeat, in Ferrante we have the combination of a stripped-down, objective-feeling kind of narration with the intimacy and instability of first person. And this interesting fusion may explain in part the wild popularity of Ferrante’s work. I believe that we still long for that frictionless, straight-ahead, tell-it-like-it is style that gives us the impression that we’re getting the one true story, the one privileged glimpse of a character’s interiority. At the same time, because we live in the first half of the 21st century, we feel quite skeptical of the idea of the one true story. Ferrante gives us the sense that we are getting the most complete and accurate possible rendition of a particular woman’s interior life, without fuzziness, without mists on the banks and so forth, but our skepticism doesn’t kick in because we know that it is Elena’s story of herself only, her completely subjective and partial tale. This is a compromise we’re prepared to live with.

I’m not saying that an authoritative third person can’t fly today. Here’s an example from Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”:

Connie had long dark blond hair that drew anyone’s eye to it, and she wore part of it pulled up on her head and puffed out and the rest of it she let fall down her back. She wore a pullover jersey blouse that looked one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on those evenings out; her laugh which was cynical and drawling at home—”Ha, ha, very funny,”—but high-pitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.

This paragraph appears very early in the story; before long, Oates will slide wholly into Connie’s point of view. And this is typical; in contemporary work, if the authoritative stance appears at all, it is generally only during the opening passages of a story or novel. Third-person narrators today rarely give us the sense of all-encompassing omniscience that we get when we read Austen, Eliot, Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, Henry James. Our default style of third person is very close in, almost as subjective as first person. We are constrained by the times we live in, our generational habits of thought and observation and expression. Still, we have choices. We always have choices! And in selecting our narrators, we might want to think about our writerly inclinations and the effects we’re looking to achieve. As a reader, I find that I like a balance—George Eliot is perhaps my ideal. She goes deep into character, she’s not afraid to wade into the unconscious, but she controls her material and her prose with a highly reasonable and analytic narrator. As a writer, for more years than I care to admit, I felt I needed to achieve that Eliotesque largeness of voice, that elevated stance. Eventually, through much trial and error, it became clear to me that my work was most expressive when I allowed it to be fueled by intuitive imagery and by rhythms, and that I was far more drawn to the

inarticulate and the unconscious than to manners and social life. My ideal book may be written by George Eliot, but my stylistic bibles are more in the vein of Virginia Woolf.

So, now you, the writer reading this. When it comes to the secret life, are you more interested in the unconscious or the merely unspoken? Do you believe that the inner self can be articulated fairly directly, by a sensitive and intelligent interpreter, or only via analogy and imagery? Do you want to offer readers the sense of a swift car ride through mappable territory, or a slow foot journey through areas the cartographer has overlooked? How, exactly, can you speak the deeper parts of the self; what will be your own path toward hearing and conveying those “inside voices”?

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Pamela Erens is the author of the novels Eleven Hours, The Virgins, and The Understory. She has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her essays and criticism have appeared in several venues. Her middle grade novel, Matasha, and a book-length essay on Middlemarch will both appear in 2021.