For Fiction, Dropping the Royal “We”

I was an undergraduate when my ethics professor taught me to stop using “they” when describing collective behaviors. He did this in his written response to my ethics paper on pacifism (yes, I was one of those students who read my teacher’s responses). He underlined “they” in a passage like this: “They have gone against the right teaching and have failed to practice peace.” In the margin, he wrote, “‘They’ sounds accusatory. It makes you sound like you are preaching.”

I learned from that.

More recently, I’ve been more sensitive about using “we”–except when describing a night out with my wife, friends, or family, or when expressing delight in a ride at the county fair.

The “we” I am referring to is the “we” that assumes all human behavior. Just as my use of “they” above suggests an us/them dichotomy, using “we” to explain behavior suggests that I’ve left the level of actual experience and have moved into a higher level of generalization, which might be fine for a textbook or a lab report, but not for the nonfiction I’m working on. In switching from the personal to the collective, with “There are times when we do feel this way. We want to cry because we are frustrated. But there is a better way,” I’ve become the expert. This passage really could be rewritten in first person and be just as empathetic, which I suspect is one of the motives behind the royal pronoun. Even so, though I keep looking for ways to use “we” effectively beyond the description in “We went to the airport,” this passage isn’t one of them. For memoir, I generally try to just keep to the lens I know and not implicate others in my conjectures and theories about how everyone acts, based mostly on how I act, of course.

The Royal “We” of Fiction
I’ve noticed what I suspect is another intrusion of the royal “we,” and I think it appears in religious or political fiction. This comes up when the writer has formed a deep conviction around a system of belief, and that conviction is everywhere in the air of the story as the unquestioned truth and may even come out in platitudes. Not too many stories of this kind get published, of course. But they seem to be enough in demand. The recent movies about God not being dead certainly both demonstrated this demand and suffered from this bent.

A better way to write for religious movies or fiction is to anchor the belief or a certain conviction in a specific character. Flannery O’Connor does this. A recent TV series I watched did this with a powerful secondary character who came to have faith. John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany does this. Owen is a peculiar character, and he keeps asserting his faith, but it isn’t a faith that the narrator shares. There are a number of other interesting characters with other ways of thinking, and the novel creates an interesting tension and longing for faith at the end.

There is a challenge in this. Whatever belief system I am convicted by, whether it is Marxism, secularism, Calvinism, libertarianism, or bohemianism, I should seek to convey those beliefs in the passions and failures of particular characters. To do this is to create characters more interesting than we are. To do otherwise is to run the risk of merely writing a religious or political tract.

Avoiding the Royal “We”: An Example
Perhaps one example will clarify this. When I was just entering college, I was reading a lot of John Steinbeck’s fiction. I loved his stories, his use of allegory in settings in California, and his philosophies, and by the end of my sophomore year I’d read most of his novels. Much later, though, in my thirties, I picked up In Dubious Battle, which I hadn’t read as a student. This was a novel Steinbeck wrote just before The Grapes of Wrath, and it draws on some of the same material. And it reads as though the characters are merely acting out the writer’s political convictions, which mainly concern labor rights and the struggles of fruit workers. It is told in Marxist terms, and there are many, many speeches–too many speeches. I say this as someone who is sympathetic to these concerns. In the end, I found this to be a lesser novel than the next one he wrote, The Grapes of Wrath, which also has chapters devoted to the author’s philosophy, but also couches the main conflict in the terms of the migrant Joad family, who do not, at the beginning at least, simply line up with the author’s convictions.

Both novels have literary qualities. Both titles build allusions to other works. The dubious battle Steinbeck is referencing is of course Milton’s reference to the demon’s fight against God. This is a reference that should work in a book about fruit workers fighting against land owners. But the book is full of speeches and convictions too close to the author. It should compel. It doesn’t.

I suspect that this is one of the difficulties that will arise with religious fiction. For that matter, what is a Christian novel? Is it a novel that begins with scriptures? Is it a book that doesn’t have swearing, drinking, or adultery in it? Is it something written by a Christian? Wayne Booth once noted that the problem with reading “Everything that Rises Must Converge” as a Catholic story is one of understanding intention. How do we know, Booth asks, that O’Connor didn’t put her Christian assumptions aside when writing that story? Of course we don’t know that.

I think that Sophocles’ tragedies capture the best of what it means to write a pagan play. They capture the fated sense of the world he saw. They also capture something deeply sensed in what it means to be a flawed human. Oedipus is a story about and by a pagan, but it is also about a human being, and to the degree that the writer dared, that human being still lives and speaks to us.