The Fourth Wall

I blame modernism and postmodernism for the plague of literary rooms that are essentially open plazas or terraces. For me, there’s a problem with assuming that the room can survive without the fourth wall. Writers like Shakespeare, Bronte, Vonnegut, and Salinger successfully break the fourth wall, which means it exists. You can’t break a wall that isn’t there.

Opening with any sort of author note, preface, or introduction, for me as a reader, is the equivalent of a play’s director pitching a tent onstage to direct audience interpretation when I want him to watch from the wings and trust my intellectual ability to interpret the work as I see fit. It’s an admission of failure: any work that cannot stand on its text alone fails the formalist threshold—a unified whole is the formalist threshold. Trust the work to perform on its own.

I’ll try to spare you my New Critical theories and resist bringing Cleanth Brooks into the conversation, but let’s turn to Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria to explore what the fourth wall does. The three key features of this relationship between the text and the reader are internal consistency, emotional engagement, and narrative truth. Notice which of the three resides in the middle and note that unlike the human body, in literature, the center is not the core, it’s the burial ground. Attempts to legitimize a text based on what’s in the burial ground are approximately as successful as suing a dead man.

Why is the middle the rhetorical burial ground? Human beings have a strong tendency to remember beginnings and endings and forget what’s in the middle (remember this when someone is trying to sell you something), so the middle rarely survives in the reader’s mind. Emotional engagement is a triangle side, but it’s not the hypotenuse, and, as we all know, if you remove any of a triangles sides, what’s left collapses into lines on the ground.

In perfect formalist ideals, this is a right triangle with no dominant side; however, perfection lives only in ideals, not on the page. We as writers manipulate the triangle to create a false hypotenuse, but we should all aim to come as close to a right triangle as possible. Internal consistency may dominate, but not well if there’s little truth and little emotional engagement; otherwise the work slips into what Emerson would deem a “foolish consistency.” Likewise, if narrative truth is overly dominant, there’s a great chance of moralizing, a known reader turn-off. Further, moralizing without consistency or reader engagement will actively increase the chances that the reader will abandon the work rather than accept moralizing from a weak authority. And if emotional engagement dominates consistency and truth, the work is essentially propaganda. Please refer to propaganda by denotation, not connotation to avoid erroneously front loading my statement with your emotions.

The three of these form the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, which is the fourth wall. If the triangle collapses, the wall does, too. If the wall falls down, I evacuate the theater. “If it’s never built, it can’t collapse” is failing to try, also known as trying to fail.