The Third Person

Issue 251

Italy, 2016

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When I was in fourth grade, and about ten years old, my teacher gave a lesson in third-person writing. I don’t believe that she referred directly to the term, or even talked about grammar, because her message was mostly about how you should write formal, academic papers without using I in your sentences. For a classroom of children, full of boisterous and inelegant shouts, almost certainly a room of narcissists, this probably wasn’t the easiest lesson to teach. Yet she persisted—instructing us to copy example sentences from the blackboard. It was time to learn, she explained, about writing in clear and declarative and formal sentences—which is both an example of a third-person sentence, and a statement of purpose about the lesson.

The class struggled, there were complaints, and confusion, with many students left speechless—unable to create any sentences without I. They would answer a question—I think, I feel, I believe—and our teacher, exasperated, would ask them to rephrase the sentence, to put those same words into a statement, into a form that’s appropriate for school. Most of the class moaned about this unnatural, peculiar third person, as if it required them to disembody, or dissociate, from what they wanted to say. Imagining a neutral, impersonal sentence seemed, for many students, an impossible task. They were perfectly adept at using language to distort—to lie or pretend or trick—but there was always a persona to inhabit, a role to play. Speaking from a perspective, using a voice to describe the world, wasn’t exactly a choice: how they perceived the world shaped the language that they possessed. Later, when our teacher returned an assignment about the third person, I tried to see—surreptitiously, just like everyone else—the grades that she gave other students. So many papers came back filled with red crosses, all the I’s slashed and corrected.

But I couldn’t understand why the class struggled. For me, although it demanded an adjustment, that adjustment came quickly, and avoiding a personal pronoun felt, somehow, freeing—it was easier to write my sentences with this new method. I couldn’t have articulated or even understood why it felt easier, but I’m aware, today, that I found consolation in the slight distance of the third person. The words were still mine, the sentences weren’t that different, but my identity was less involved and less vulnerable. I didn’t feel the directness and exposure that came from creating sentences based on my perspective. In the first person, the mistakes appeared personal, and I was too timid, too worried about errors, so learning this new form and shifting my words—from I saw the dog walk in the park to the dog walked in the park—wasn’t a burden, as most of the class claimed. After I learned to write in this new way, with the words at a distance yet still expressing what I wanted, that supposedly neutral voice became my only method.

The doctrines taught from the blackboard on that day proved astoundingly durable. For the next two decades, at least, writing in the first person didn’t feel natural, nor did it even feel proper, as if expressing my own perspective on the page revealed arrogance or vanity, while a detached, authoritative voice in the third person always looked perfectly suitable. The lesson solidified in my mind not as a technique but as a principle, so that personal pronouns came to appear childish, unnecessary, an inclusion of ego into a sentence: intelligent and refined adults, I believed, spoke without this hubris, in a manner that was calm and smooth and impartial and that sounded more sophisticated. Soon enough, the standards that I gave myself turned into fatuous beliefs about all writing, and I would have flippant, sneering reactions to any sentence in the first person, whether inserted as an aside in a newspaper column or as the perspective for a novel. This was—I admit—a tricky standard to maintain in a society based on celebrity, youth, and achievement, and that is probably best described as solipsistic.

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For school papers the expectation of formality only increased with the passing years. But I didn’t consider or even notice the lack of I’s in my schoolwork—I felt, instead, relieved to forgo the perspective that described my view of the world. Besides, it isn’t that difficult in English to shape, or contort, a sentence that’s subjective into a sentence that appears objective, so I felt equipped to include my opinions, judgements, and ideas, while still sidestepping the need for a personal pronoun. Over time I learned how far I could push a sentence while still wiping my fingerprints from the language. Yet I never felt inhibited, or believed that I discarded anything essential about myself, by shifting my words. I persisted with the belief that a righteous and authoritative sentence is a sentence that doesn’t brandish the writer’s voice.

Perhaps writing in this manner over so many years provided security. As a writer, I was an old dog who sensed the length of its leash, constrained to its territory without ever testing its limits. I could nudge closer to subjects, yet still remain one step away, looking upon my words from a distance. To inhabit a persona in the third person—not quite me, not quite someone else—offered benefits. I still wrote what I wanted, but I didn’t feel tied, or even responsible, for my words. I could craft lines, whether mischievous, sincere, or indifferent, with a lightness, an insouciance, that I couldn’t feel while I spoke.

Why I desired this distance, why it felt necessary to approach subjects from an angle, is a question about the earlier years of my life that’s awkward for me to answer today—and writing in this manner for so many years might have also distanced me from my own voice, a bit like a stage actor who performs a part for too long, until the mask eventually becomes, as they say, the face.

I’m not exactly sure when I felt comfortable writing again in the first person, though I doubt that the change occurred merely as a consequence of practice. I consider the passing years as important to this transformation as the passing pages. Beyond the fundamentals of language that are necessary for any reasonably coherent sentence, it is the writer’s state when they pick up the pen that’s underrated, which means that my voice on the page changed when my voice in life changed. My past doesn’t contain a moment where I can spot a threshold—a point from which I vaulted past, where a direct sentence, a more vulnerable sentence, began to feel natural. All that I know, in the end, is that a writing voice that feels true and essential and visceral is a consequence of what happens away from the page.

And there’s no surprise that voice is such a common metaphor for artists. Writers talk about it, yes, but so do actors, painters, musicians, and nearly everyone who creates, all of them seeking to find and inhabit and maintain the right voice. But this powerful metaphor is also slippery: there’s an implication of ease, a sense that knowing and expressing what’s inside is a manner of openness, of simply taking the necessary steps to be more sincere, vulnerable, that artistic quality is connected to personal honesty. If that were true, our best artists would simply be our most honest citizens, those best equipped to inhabit the world as sages upon mountaintops. Because of this assumption about voice, actors are often accused of supposedly playing themselves, as if playing yourself isn’t, once you think about it, actually the most difficult role. Writers, too, are often criticized for writing about their own lives, even though the self, when excavated with sweat and exhaustion, is often the most difficult subject.