Going the Narrative Distance

Holy misappropriation, Batman! My personal scrivener, Angry, and I have developed a new mask for me in his fiction. New masks for the two of us, rather: the First Nations versions of us. I really want to think this is a really bad thing, to be giving words and voice to this character I really don't know, but I don't. It works for the audience and gives a context for my very geographically-defined worldview. Having just been given license to elaborate on this by my scrivener, I shall...

The mask in satire has always held an attraction for me. Great English-language satirists like Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift and Marshall Bruce Mathers III do all their real work behind your eyes, forcing you to question their speakers' reliability. If you don't do this, you lose the work. It's simple: probe the ethos of the speaker, ignore the "author." Simple.

So simple that for me, that is the real job of the reader. I am far more interested in how a story is told than I am in what the story is, although a "good story, well told" is the epitome of fiction for me. The "good story" part of the equation comes without much work on the writer's or the reader's part. It is just the truth, and it sits there waiting to be delivered. How much of that truth is brought to us depends on the "well told" part of the equation.

Now to the mask. This is a major part of the delivery system. I don't need to elaborate on that. I do need to justify allowing myself a First Nations mask. So...here goes. First of all, I'm not writing this stuff, my half-Native scrivener is. I may have a hand in composing it, but Angry is the writer, his name appears on the stuff. So they're his characters. My hands are clean...but why is it important that they be Native. Well, admittedly, it has nothing to do with the Aboriginal experience.

It has to do with the audience's experience with the Aboriginal. A reader will allow herself to make connections between landscape, both geographical and social, and history, both broad and personal, when they are dealing with First Nations characters. A reader will allow herself an uncomfortable relationship with language to run far below the surface of words spoken by a Native mouth without needing it to surface. A reader will allow Aboriginal characters a certain kind of active idleness that highlights a tension between self and mainstream. These three features define this Didi and Gogo pairing that Angry and I have created.

I'm looking forward to watching them go nowhere.