Third-person abstraction can convey intimacy better than first-person immersion

Evidence

Rather, it uses third-person perspective to impersonalize vivid yens and acute pain, it uses narrative ellipsis to abstract away from crescendos of interpersonal conflict or personal suffering, and it evokes a scientist’s study of particulate matter and sensuous data, an objective microscopy of smells and birds, weather, and wasps. The novel also constructs a staggeringly lyrical, metaphorical, figurative linguistic texture, an intricacy that beautifully confounds expressivism and refuses prosaic immersion. Sentence by sentence, the reader is not asked to identify one to one with the emanating individual on the page, but to conceptualize the interlocking social forces that contour the story and systematize individuals. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 351

Categorization

• XREF: This is the heart of her defense of mediation against immediacy: a novel about a queer Black graduate student uses impersonal third person precisely to capture intimacy. Pairs directly with her ‘Antitheory’ fight and her broader anti-autofiction argument.
• SEED: Essay angle: Taylor’s Real Life as a case study in how ‘impersonal’ technique can convey marginal experience better than the confessional first-person forms mainstream culture rewards.