I. Most great literature is about specific human beings in
specific human environments, and much of their content is about the
peculiarities of those humans, the things that they do, their social relations,
and how what they do relates to what other people are doing. In other words,
they are stitched together from elements cut out of the rich and sophisticated lifeworld
of culture, society, morality, and politics and coloured by social emotions like
gratitude, resentment, shame, guilt, pride, ambition, greed, envy, fellowship,
and love which constitute the everyday character of that world. They are about what
we might call human situations. These situations are the typical (but by
no means only) subject of great literature.
These situations obviously do not come from nothing; the author must
describe them through the act of writing. But nor do these descriptions come
from nowhere, for the description itself must come from some or other
perspective. For example, a novel may be written from a sort of view from nowhere,
from an inhuman, omniscient third person that does not think or feel in the ways
we do, but instead merely observes and describes, doing so through bare, indiscriminate
statements of fact and reports of things said, in a way that does not privilege
the specific perspectives of any specific characters. Or it may be written about
from the first person, exclusively from the perspective of just one character. Or
it may be somewhere in between these possibilities, where the writing takes the
perspective, largely, of one or several characters, but intentionally leaves
the perspective of others’ opaque, thereby blending and keeping distinct
various perspectives.