This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.
The point of view in The Emperor of Gladness is unstable in a way that, pardon me, feels inappropriate. Take the first chapter, which I’ve just praised. Why does the narrator switch to an I? Or the novel in general: Why are some passages in the past tense and others the present tense? Are the present tense passages meant to be memories or dreams or both? Is the story retrospective? Is it the boy on the bridge telling us the story from many years later? Is this a story focalized through the boy? Certainly at times, we hang close to Hai, funneling observations and insights through the tight scrim of his voice. At other times, the novel sheds this limitation and attains a lyric intensity that sounds more like the Vuong of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in its sonorous profundity. Which loops us back around to the question of the narrator and who is telling us this story. Does it flow from an I and is that I Ocean Vuong or is that I Hai, the boy on the bridge at the start of the novel?
Naturally, some will say that the Western tradition of the realist novel as it descends from Henry James with its single, controlling point of view is an outmoded and outdated notion that is itself a refutation of the novel’s early profligacy with respect to style of narration. And that a looser, messier, even seemingly incoherent set of choices with respect to point of view comes closer to the experience of consciousness, etc., something, something, non-Western narrative traditions, whatever, okay. But the questions I always return to are: Does the technique make the book better? Does it add something? In this case, I would say the violations in point of view just felt random and distracting and underattended to. But let us return to the plot.
Posted 35 days ago.
