Orthography and (literary) point of view
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As I mentioned last post, I’ve been (re-)reading GRRM’s fantasy series A song of ice and fire. Now, Martin’s books take an interesting format, eschewing traditional chapters, which might normally be around 20 pages each in a comparable novel, in place of somewhat shorter (10 to 15 pages) sections. These are unnumbered and headed simply by the name of the character whose POV the section is written from. This makes for a somewhat faster-paced story, and also leads the reader to consider why each section is important to a particular character, rather than just the next section of plot. (Of course, this does not mean that every section from character X’s POV is primarily about X - there are some characters who seem as though they will never get a POV, so sometimes a section will be from the POV of someone who is near X, but most of the text is devoted to the actions and dialogue of X)
One of the POV characters, Arya, is 10 years old. In one scene she is speaking with a sort of holy man, who is telling her a story about a miner revolt. He is describing the mine conditions, and the following exchange takes place
“Certain shafts were cut so low that the slaves could not stand upright, but had to crawl or bend. And there were wyrms in that red darkness too.” “Earthworms?” she asked, frowning. “Firewyrms. Some say they are akin to dragons, for wyrms breathe fire too.”
Assuming that worm and wyrm are pronounced the same in this fantasy world, what has happened here is that the character Arya is unsure exactly what the significance of “worms” might be in the story, and so asks for clarification, and also may have done some guessing that some other class of worm (unknown to her) is involved, and so specifies the “earth” variety in her question. The holy man corrects her with “firewyrms.”
What’s interesting is that Arya’s representation of the spelling of firewyrm (she is literate) probably has an “o,” not a “y.” The “y” is there because the holy man knows that these are not ordinary worms, but some large worm-like creature that breathes fire. The reader (and possibly Martin) may assume that the holy man is literate, and this is likely. Unfortunately, this sort of dialogue doesn’t occur with the illiterate POV characters, so it’s hard to know what Martin would have done.
But in any case, what this does is highlight an imperfection (if you will) of single-POV prose–the character we see the world from doesn’t know enough to express everything that the author wants to express. Now, in the non-dialogue parts of prose, this normally isn’t that big of a problem. Because there is no actual speech, the author is mostly free to write as he pleases, using words or constructions in ways that the POV character might not use themselves (though keeping away from anachronisms like neon). However, when the POV character speaks the author is constrained to create dialogue that is realistic for that person. One might also think that when non-POV characters speak, the author is similarly constrained to portray that dialogue is the POV character would hear it. In most cases this is observed (ignoring such conveniences as assuming that people in conversation pay attention throughout the interlocutor’s turn, hearing everything perfectly), but in a case like this some orthography sneaks in.
This is less obvious than the sorts of orthographic oddness seen in the Harry Potter books (observed by Eric Bakovic here), it brings up some interesting questions regarding POV and dialogue. For instance: how much can an author sneak in information (related to the story or related to the author) using spelling, and what is the most “damage” an author can do by subtly altering the words of a speaker? And are illiterate characters/people more susceptible to this sort of intrusion?
Interesting. Could you explain more about what you mean is the relevance that the characters are literate? Are the chapters supposed to be written by the characters, or spoken by them? I’m unfamiliar with this kind of format - it seems to be in third person (”she asked”), not first person from the character’s POV. So given that, it makes sense that the author spells things “right” even though the character might not. And if an author were to spell dialogue according to how the character would spell it rather than speak it, a whole bunch of stuff might be misspelled, mightn’t it? Lots of characters, though literate, are probably bad spellers. Spelling is more likely (and more importantly, I think) to represent speech, not the characters’ spelling, is what I’m trying to say.
Right, the chapters are written from their POV, but not by them. And the individual chapters/sections themselves are not special in terms of how the POV works out, what is special (or at least somewhat novel, to me) is merely their short length and the fact that they do not have titles as such, just character names as headers.
The spelling of the words in each chapter is not dependent on how the POV character would spell them (if they are literate or not), as you say, but in the case I quoted above with worms and wyrms, I think the situation is a bit stickier. I was wondering what exactly the author was trying to accomplish. Say that a worm is not a wyrm (i.e., these are not just spelling alternatives). In that case, we know that Arya still is ignorant regarding the type of creature that lived in the mines - she thinks they are fireworms, when in fact they are firewyrms. On the other hand, say that these are just spelling alternates - then the question is why give Arya the “o” spelling and the holy man the “y” spelling? Probably to show that one is more knowledgable than the other (probably the holy man, given the assumption that many people reading the books know about worms but probably not about wyrms - but it’s the sort of knowledge not available to Arya.
Summing up, the author faithfully represents the POV character’s knowledge (of spelling and knowledge in general) when quoting them, but can give the reader extra knowledge when quoting other characters. This generally doesn’t happen in straight prose. In other words, there is never anything like Several rather unsavory characters lie waiting for Arya behind that door, but she didn’t have a clue about it (except in flashbacks). Similarly no non-POV characters’ speech is represented when the POV character didn’t hear it. The exception is in the spelling of other characters’ speech, which can represent a wider range of spellings than the POV character has access to. And in the case where a worm is not a wyrm, we have some (in)significant piece of information that the reader has, which the character doesn’t.
The consequences (which, truthfully, I didn’t really think too hard on) is a disparity between what the reader knows and what the character knows, even when the reader is supposed to only have access to the character’s knowledge (obvious exception: the reader knows it from reading in another person’s POV). I imagined that this could be exploited to a greater degree with illiterate characters, thought I suppose that doesn’t make much sense - and I’m not sure what to think about a case like the wyrm one where Arya is illiterate. I was thinking of a hypothetical case where the difference between two homophonous words is crucial, and the illiterate character is aware of the distinction between the two words but is nevertheless represented as using the incorrect word (via spelling).
There are some other possibilities just pointed out to me: the two are not, as I have assumed, pronounced the same; or, the use of wyrm is a dialect marker, similar to using a spelling like centre in the speech of a British character.