Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

Head jumping (or “head hopping”) occurs when a novel jumps, within a particular scene or stretch of narrative, from one character’s internal thoughts and perspective to those of another. The “within a particular scene” qualification is important, to distinguish head jumping from the kind of multi-perspective novel in which switches of point-of-view are clearly delineated by chapter- or section-breaks.

Google “head jumping” and you’ll find a consensus that head jumping is in general a Bad Thing. And in my years of creative writing teaching, I’ve generally followed this consensus myself, wagging an admonishing finger at my students as I warned them of the dangers of this particular novelistic vice.

But recently, I’ve been having second thoughts. . .

A bit of context: point-of-view (POV) has an importance for the novelist that it doesn’t have for the scriptwriter, because one of the things that fiction can do powerfully, that film or stage-plays find more difficult, is move swiftly and easily from characters’ external appearance or action (including speech) to their innermost, unspoken thoughts and feelings. (Compare the Shakespearean monologue, or the use of voice-over in film, which is rare precisely because it feels “clunky”.) This flexibility allows fiction to explore both the complexities of psychology and motivation, and the gap that often exists between what we do and say, on the one hand, and what we simultaneously and secretly think or feel. (In film and drama, it is down to the actor to suggest these subtleties.)

So fiction-writers have a particular ability to convey to readers both events, and simultaneously how those events are perceived and interpreted by characters. But which characters? Whose POV should the author adopt? This is where the head-jumping debate comes in.

In contemporary fiction, the default mode is to stick closely to the point-of-view of a particular character (usually the protagonist) – in the jargon, it’s known as “limited third-person” narration: we see the story-world and what happens in it through the eyes of a particular character who becomes (to use the French critic Gerard Genette’s term) the “focaliser” of the narrative. In the context of “limited third-person” narration, head-jumping is a no-no (hence my finger-wagging at my students) because it breaks this immersion of the reader in the protagonist’s POV.

But some recent reading has reminded me that there are other ways of thinking about these things. The books I’m thinking of are Frank Herbert’s seminal science-fiction fantasy Dune (1964), and two masterpieces of C20th literary modernism by Australian writers – Patrick White’s Voss (1957)and Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980). This isn’t the place to try summarise these three wonderful novels: what matters here is that all three head jump like there’s no tomorrow, like it’s become an Olympic sport. And in the context of those particular novels, it works!

So what’s going on? I think it has a lot to do with genre, and with what might call the role of the author. One thing to notice about “limited third-person” is that the author takes something of backseat: it’s the character, the protagonist who calls the shots and leads the way, with the author-narrator trotting obediently along behind, faithfully recording the protagonist’s impressions. Herbert, White and Hazzard, in their different ways, take a more expansive view of the role of the author. In the case of Herbert, he’s heir to the panoramic perspective of the epic poet-narrator, a tradition that goes back to Homer. In the case of White and Hazzard, one is conscious of a more recent tradition – the author as modernist artist, as overseeing arranger of sometimes disparate materials. (One of the striking things about Voss is the collage-like stylistic freedom of the writing: a sentence that could almost have been penned by George Eliot will be closely followed by others that are more like surrealist poetry.) In both cases, in different ways, the balance-of-power between author and character has been tipped back in the author’s favour.

It’s striking, of course, that all three novels I’ve mentioned were first published more that forty years ago. The kind of modernist approach to novel-writing represented by White and Hazzard is deeply unfashionable today (supplanted by “authenticity”, for example, as a value). But fashions go around and around, and the day will surely come when modernism becomes so unfashionable as to reappear again as fashionable – and we’ll all be free to head jump to our heart’s content. . .