Monday, April 20, 2009

Liars, Agency, and the Passive Voice

The passive voice -- and the related issue of fuzzy agency -- has some interesting features regarding its effect on the reader. But first, let me make sure to define my terms.

When grammarians say "passive voice", they are generally referring to a sentence in which the subject of the sentence is the object of the action of the verb.

I was hit by the ball John threw.


On the other hand, there is another class of sentences where causation is just plain fuzzy. The agent is missing.

The cup broke.


In some languages, that's just the way the verb "broke" works -- or worse, the agent himself can be held to be the victim of the broken cup. The sentence "I broke the cup", when translated properly to Spanish and literally back, returns as "The cup broke itself at me"!

In English, the agentless sentence "the cup broke" is acceptable, but problematic. When spoken by a person who was there, without further context, that sentence implies that the speaker is intentionally dropping information about the "agent", the person who broke the cup. The omission is likely to be a passive lie.

In addition, that type of switch can flag an active lie. Active liars have a tendency to disassociate from the part of the story that they invented, so that things just happened, rather than being done or directly experienced by the liar.

On the other hand, when the speaker was not personally there, there is no such implication in a sentence exhibiting lack of agency. When I say that the gas main broke downtown, or that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there is no reason to infer that I was the one that broke teh main or dropped the bomb. This lack of agency is common in historical writing, especially where the identity of the actual agent is not clear from the record. One does not know, for example, whether it was Ronald Reagan personally or one of his staffers who came up with the Solomon's solution in the following anecdote -

In February of 1982 a Christian protester named Mitch Snyder began a fast to protest the naming of a nuclear submarine "Corpus Christi" - Latin for "Body of Christ". Of course, the name was chosen by following the pattern of naming submarines after U.S. seaports, not as an affront to any particular religion; the U.S. Department of the Navy refused to change the name for over 40 days and 40 nights. Snyder was becoming weaker all the time. Eventually, the word came down from the office of President Reagan - the name of the submarine had been changed. It was now, "City of Corpus Christi".


Some fiction writers object to the use of this fuzzy agency in narrative summary, since it reminds them of what liars do. My suggestion for other writers is to be careful about your method of switching focus, so as not to trigger this association. If you are keeping tight focus on a particular person's POV when you are writing your scenes, then make sure to present your summaries from that same POV, as modified by the time and space element involved. If the POV character knew the agency of the act, then include that information, but only if it doesn't overcomplicate getting your reader from scene A to scene B. Definitely do not include information in narrative summary that your POV character couldn't have known across the time and place of the summary.

On the other hand, if you are writing primarily in an omniscient style, just be consistent in your practice.

Hat tip for advancing the subject, Tricia of NTSFW.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From IronManTexas on the NTSFW mailing list, posted here with permission:

I can't help but throw in my own two cents on the use of the passive voice, the overuse of the so-called "weak passive," and the reasons why this usage is so prevalent.

First, I'd better put myself firmly in the camp of Strunk and White, having used this work since high school. I think 95% of writers from various field can benefit from it. As Stephen King put it, books on writing are mostly bullshit. But regarding THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE, he said, "There is very little bullshit here."**

I also side with the book's viewpoint that writers of English should prefer the active voice, that it's a stronger, more concise form of writing, which bolsters his other commandment, "Vigorous writing is concise . . . Omit needless words!"**

Now, no book on writing style (or any book on anything) is perfect, and the book does have some archaic usage recommendations from the 1920s. These have been corrected in a new edition, by the way, and most style mavens who recommend this work readily point out the serial comma and possessive apostrophe as two "elements" of style you can ignore in this book. But if that is all people can find wrong after eighty years, it must be a pretty good book.

But this begs the question about the passive voice: Why is the passive voice considered weak? First, we should qualify that the passive voice is weak in the English language. In other inflective languages like Latin, the passive is not necessarily weak. In fact, great Latin poets like Vergil can use the passive voice in the middle of a sexual scene or intense battle and make it sound very strong. Since the position of Latin words can be moved around more flexibly, you can get away with it in Latin, and all strong Latin writers use it, even the sparse prose of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars.

Now we come to English, which is unique because it has a Germanic syntax, highly positional and not very inflective, yet it draws heavily on Latin for its vocabulary-- over fifty percent of all English words come from Latin--more so than its direct ancestor, German. As English began to move farther away from German about the time of Chaucer, there was a deliberate attempt to make it sound less vulgar than the continental tribal tongues. All educated discourse was done in Latin until after the Renaissance, so if you wanted to write in your native tongue but still sound serious, you used lots of Latin derivatives, readily supplied into English from French and the Norman Invasions.

But this begs the question about the passive voice: Why is the passive voice considered weak? First, we should qualify that the passive voice is weak in the English language. In other inflective languages like Latin, the passive is not necessarily weak. In fact, great Latin poets like Vergil can use the passive voice in the middle of a sexual scene or intense battle and make it sound very strong. Since the position of Latin words can be moved around more flexibly, you can get away with it in Latin, and all strong Latin writers use it, even the sparse prose of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars.

Now we come to English, which is unique because it has a Germanic syntax, highly positional and not very inflective, yet it draws heavily on Latin for its vocabulary-- over fifty percent of all English words come from Latin--more so than its direct ancestor, German. As English began to move farther away from German about the time of Chaucer, there was a deliberate attempt to make it sound less vulgar than the continental tribal tongues. All educated discourse was done in Latin until after the Renaissance, so if you wanted to write in your native tongue but still sound serious, you used lots of Latin derivatives, readily supplied into English from French and the Norman Invasions.

~ ~ ~

Which brings us back to fiction, where indeed the writer injects much of herself into the characters, motivating them to action. Here, the third-person narrator speaking in the past tense is the overwhelming favorite of modern writers. A third person narrator using the past tense can almost sound like she's using the passive voice even when she is not. The main verb and auxiliary verbs use similar endings with slightly different positioning. Since many of us learned our grammar in high school or college writing academic papers on non-fiction subjects, we were again conditioned to use the passive voice: in our textbooks, by the older teachers and professors, in our submitted exams, right on down the line. The passive voice becomes so inculcated that it gets in the way of the ideas and the motion of "storytelling" that is required even for cogent non-fiction and historical writing.

Now, we come to worlds like modern fiction and journalism where concise and attractive depictions of action are essential to hold the reader's attention, and the passive voice becomes less and less attractive. The good news is that a decent fiction writer already knows they must keep the action moving, that they must show more than they tell, even when using the past-tense, third-person narrator.

Using the passive voice in fiction can be made to work as long as it does not sound like the academic passive voice. And sometimes you can even use the academic voice if your character is a scholar or a meek figure thrust into action. Examine the voice and usage of "Professor" Jones when he is teaching his class, and the language "Indiana" uses while running through a cave or battling Nazis. George Lucas deliberately shifts the character from passive to active voice to illustrate his dual personality. Obviously, Jones screen time as a professor accounts for less than one percent of all the movies--they are most definitely not character studies. Note that his older, more academic father (Sean Connery), use the passive academic voice more often. This contrast is milked for comedy in the third movie.

An example from the dark side would be Hannibal Lectern, who has a passive academic side (psychiatrist), and an active serial-killer side. The way the actor, Anthony Hopkins, chose to make us "feel" the passive voice was to mimic the feminine, shaky voice of Katherine Hepburn from his prison cell, but shifting to more active usage as he describes horrible crimes. Hannibal Lectern is a passive academic and a terribly active killer.

For most fiction writers, most all of the time, it's better to use the active voice. Writing in a fashion that parallels the active movement of our story and characters is easier than trying to manage crosscurrents. If you attempt this misdirection, you had better be perfect with your style. You cannot mix the active and passive voice by accident and get away with it, unless you are writing comedy and trying to make the character look confused for a laugh--and even then the joke only works once or twice.

If you do it without knowing, then the reader thinks you are the joke, and won't take your writing seriously.

~ ~ ~

** Quotes from Strunk and from King are by memory