Showing papers in "Narrative in 2009"

The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient fea ture, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fic tion: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly outmoded omniscient narrator. In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-know ing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive com mentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world. The novelists I'm thinking of include Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, David Lodge, Adam Thirlwell, Michel Faber, and Nicola Barker in the UK; and Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody, and John Updike in the US. In this paper I want to consider why so many contempo rary writers have turned to omniscient narration, given the aesthetic prejudice against this narrative voice which has prevailed for at least a century. For instance, in 2004 Eugene Goodheart pointed out that: "In the age of perspectivism, in which all claims to authority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patron ized when he is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when he appears in contemporary work" (1). How are we to evaluate novels which employ an ostensibly redundant nine teenth century form in the twenty-first century? Are they conservative and nostalgic

Sympathy time: adam smith, george eliot, and the realist novel

Abstract: Talk about novel-reading and sympathy and you are likely to spend some of that time talking about omniscience. If your subject is the nineteenth-century realist novel, you will probably have something to say about the relationship between ethi cal feeling and free indirect discourse which suggests that peering into the secret hearts and minds of characters enables our sympathy for them, and thus that "sym pathy" names that special ability to cultivate our identification with others through feeling what they feel and knowing what they know, or what they are thinking about. In this vein omniscient narration, shrinking the distance between ourselves and oth ers, encourages sympathy: the assumption is that by knowing more?of what others know or think along with what they don't?we draw closer and more inclined to sympathize with their conditions. The link between sympathy and knowledge is all but guaranteed in this formulation, as indeed it regularly goes without saying that fa cilitating our sympathetic identification with characters is what many English real ists' experiments in omniscience were designed to do. Sympathy in such novels, so the story goes, results from both seeing and knowing: the unique seeing into and knowledge of interiors afforded by the nineteenth-century novel's most celebrated

Lost in the Gutter: Within and Between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory

Abstract: One of the most difficult and confusing of narratological concepts is that of the "narrative frame." While numerous studies refer to and examine the frame, its defin- ition remains somewhat elusive. The central reason for this is the sheer quantity of concepts and ideas to which this singular appellation refers. Internal narrators and narratives, paratexts, advertisements, blurbs, the covers of a book: all of these have been referred to as "frames," in addition to more metaphorical applications. In "Framing in Wuthering Heights," for example, John Matthews looks not only at "em- bedded narratives," but also at the metaphorical frame of the human body, and the general concept of boundaries in order to elucidate how the novel explores "empty middles" and Lacanian psycholinguistic "lack." That is, a look at a more or less ob- jectively identifiable narrative feature (narratives within other narratives) is soon treated figuratively, as "liminality" of both form and content, generating a metaphor- ical slippage that may be productive for understanding the individual novel, but is less so for understanding the concept itself. Indeed, as I will argue, constitutive of the difficulty in pinpointing the term is the link between the literary frame and framing in the visual arts, particularly painting. Some of the earliest discussions of the liter- ary frame attempt to map the typical notion of the picture frame onto literature with problematic and confusing results. In order to address this problem, I divide this essay into two primary parts. First, I discuss the shortcomings of the "picture frame" model, particularly in its con- flation of two distinct concepts: the physical liminality of frames and their capacity to direct interpretation. Through a use of a simple two-axis graph, I illustrate how the conflation of these two functions blurs understanding of the various kinds of frames

Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett

Abstract: In the work on narrative difficulty over the last hundred years, much of the en ergy has gone into two contrasting conditions of reader resistance, the defamiliarized and the veiled. The first is most famously associated with Viktor Shklovsky, who gave us the ur-concept of plot (syuzhet) as the means by which the telling can be used to defamiliarize the story (fabula). In this kind of reader resistance the focus is on the conscious management of narrative as a craft, not as an end in itself but as an instrument with insightful rewards for the hard-working reader. Thus, Shklovsky's coinage, "ostranyenie" (pcTpaneHue), often translated as "making strange," is also "showing the strangeness of,"1 and in this regard keyed to the larger purpose of breaking habitual templates and seeing with fresh eyes. This general idea of yielding insight by resisting the easy transport of conventional texts, of slowing the reader down and increasing reflexive awareness, can be found in a broad range of diverse assessments of reader/viewer resistance from Brecht's Verfremdung to Michael M. Boardman's "urgent innovation" to Vicki Mahaffey's "challenging fictions" to James Phelan's concept of "the difficult." In the same spirit, modernist texts imported the more demanding and textually self-conscious modes of poetry (Lodge), even as T. S. Eliot argued that poetry itself must be difficult to be successful. More broadly still, these modernists were simply elaborating what Coleridge contended when he wrote that "Genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty" in rescuing truths that "lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul" (60).

Beyond the Frame: Cognitive Science, Common Sense and Fiction

Abstract: According to popular definition, the subject matter of fiction is invention, whereas nonfiction relies on factual ("real-world") data. Recent developments in cognitive narratology (Ryan, Fludernik, Jahn, Herman) considerably reduce the value of sharp distinction between fiction and nonfiction, however. The concepts of "frame", "schema" and "script" provide a link between the "real-life" and "fictional" experience. As Pierre Ouellet observes, the "real-life" knowledge contains a signifi cant number of propositions that are taken for granted and are employed by the com munity or individuals either intuitively (as rules of thumb) or rationally as "shortcuts" of experience; these often do not withstand critical scrutiny and may qualify as "natural fictions" based solely on the immediacy and fullness of belief. From this perspective, fiction is continuous with accepted opinions, stereotypes and other components of folk knowledge (i.e. beliefs used as "default knowledge") that people rely on in everyday life. My hypothesis is that certain types of modernist and postmodernist self-reflexive fiction paradoxically provoke focused schema-consis tent reading and foreground stereotype frames to alleviate the cognitive load that schema-inconsistent information presents to the reader. In this case naturalizing reading and focusing on the commonsense frames as secure and reliable as com pared with the strange or indeterminate data beyond the frame is provocatively sup ported by the text itself; however, if sustained, it leads to impoverished interpretation of the events and diminishes the cognitive effect of inconsistent data.

Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel

Abstract: "'Scientific people/ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space'" (The Time Machine 268). What is at stake in treating time "as a kind of space," politically, philosophi cally, and narratologically? While time travel has often been dismissed as merely a popular science-fictional gimmick, it seems far more productive to regard it as an in scription of a specific ideology of temporality. The roots of this ideology are in the evolutionary debate of the fin-de-siecle but its contemporary offshoots have become part of postmodernity's problematic relationship with time and history. The post modern trouble with time finds its expression in the "spatial turn" in narrativity, which includes the topos of time travel (Smethurst 37). In this essay, I will trace the development of time travel, from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine to postmodern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity. As opposed to most narrative conventions, time travel originates in a single text, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895).1 In his first novel, Wells invents not just a new plot but a new chronotope. Chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the spa tial-temporal configuration of the narrative text, "the intrinsic connectedness of tem poral and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (15). The

Romance to Novel: A Secret History

Abstract: Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) is pref- aced by a timid confession. She writes: "I am fearful of having been led into an error by my friends, when taught by them to believe that I could write something which would interest and please; and it was chiefly with a view to ascertain what confidence I might place in their kind assurances on the subject, that I collected and consented, though reluctantly, to the publication of these letters. Should a less partial public give them a favourable reception, and allow them to possess some merit, it would encour- age me to endeavour to obtain their further approbation by a little work already planned and in some forwardness" (60). Sansay immediately discloses a productive tension at the core of her text's narrative structure. A private tale written by a Philadel- phia-born woman and presented as "A Series of Letters" based on those she wrote to the "Late Vice-President, Colonel Burr," Leonora Sansay's Secret History announces its aim to provide intimate secrets for the benefit of public history. This conceit, among others, locates the text within the British literary genealogy of the secret history, a genre primarily encountered in England during the long eighteenth-century; early practitioners included Daniel Defoe, John Oldmixon, Henry Brooks, Aphra Behn, De- lariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood. 1 Sansay's Secret History is generically jarring in part because of these similarities to such literary predecessors, but also because of its physical distance from a metropolitan center, and its temporal distance from the genre's nearly comprehensive decline over half a century earlier. One cannot help but be struck by how far out—and away—the secret history has traveled. 2

The Morphing Metaphor and the Question of Narrative Voice

Abstract: Over the last two decades, the advent of new narrative media has forced many in the field of narratology to grapple with the continuing questions and adjustments raised by such unconventional forms of story-telling. Among the leaders in this charge, Marie-Laure Ryan has worked to delineate the ramifications of new media, largely spawned from computer technology, on narrative theory.1 However, in her essay "Cyberage Narratology" which appears in David Herman's Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Ryan reverses this issue. Instead of asking how new technologies and narrative genres might necessitate "the broadening of the scope of narratology," here, Ryan seeks "to survey what computers can teach us about traditional forms of narrative" (115). Specifically, Ryan proposes applying four computer metaphors to narratological contexts. Among these four metaphors, Ryan suggests the metaphor of "morphing" may help define the changing nature of a narrator's voice throughout a text because the metaphor allows for "flexibility" within the discussion of the narrator's ontology (137). In this essay, I will further explore Ryan's morphing metaphor, specifically fo cusing on its usefulness as a method of discerning and describing the process of shifting textual voices within third-person narratives. I will examine this question from three perspectives. First, I propose that describing voice with a morphing metaphor has the potential to add specificity to ongoing discussions surrounding the nature of free indirect discourse because it introduces the possibility of identifying a transitional process of voice between narrator and character, while also illustrating, through visual terminology, the varying fluctuations between two speaking agents.

Victorian(ist) "Whiles" and the Tenses of Historicism

Abstract: �� ��� This essay is a response to three events in my professional life that unfolded together in 2003 and 2004: finishing my first archivally based book; planning and facilitating a conference called “Disciplinary Flashpoints” that was built around conversations between literary scholars and historians about the emotionally charged boundaries of their disciplines; and teaching an English department writing workshop for third-year graduate students who were all, in their various ways, absorbing the pressure—perhaps even the imperative—to “historicize” their work. All three of these activities involved becoming familiar with what might be called interdisciplinary—but what might more simply be called disciplinary—debates about the imaginary but institutionally powerful line that divides “literature” from “history.” Some of the flashpoints along that line have been addressed for at least twenty years by scholars working in both disciplines: the nature and sufficiency of evidence, the role of language and metaphor, the power of narrative, the relation between truth and fiction, the validity of casual explanations, and the possibilities and limitations of the archive. My project in this essay remains in touch with all of these flashpoints, and with the rich tradition of rhetorical analysis within the theory and philosophy of history, but with its own particular emphases. I am interested, first, in how people who study literature write about history and, second, in the rhetorical gestures that accommodate, submit to, resist, and self-authorize in relation to something called the histori

Subjunctive Time: Henry James's Possible Wars

Abstract: "Whatever we see could be other than it is," and "whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is," Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosoph icus (58) Wittgenstein is speaking here of a world that he refers to as a "limited whole" It is the world that we call "empirical"?the one that is manifest to us, that can be documented or demonstrated, and that appears to be the only world there is This apparent totality is deceptive, Wittgenstein says, for the empirical world is actu ally no more than a fraction, a subset, however self-contained, of a much larger uni verse That larger universe includes not only phenomena that have taken visible form but also phenomena that have not: a world resting just below the threshold of actual ization, made up of could-have-beens and could-still-bes These counterfactuals are, by our common parlance, non-events They are not considered part of history Yet not only are they real alternatives?cousins or even siblings to the real events?they are often comparable to the latter in their degree of likelihood, their probability of oc currence There is no logical reason why they should not have happened and, had they done so, what is now called "otherwise" would have been no more and no less than the real thing The stark antithesis between the two is a semantic distinction, in deed a fluke It is a happenstance, a tightening of the causal net in one direction rather than another, one that, often for no good reason, drastically thins out the range of available options, reducing a multitudinous world to a few hard facts Wittgenstein highlights just this random narrowing of a once-populous field He reminds us that what prevails as reality often does so haphazardly, at the expense of a much larger pool that has no compelling reason for not staying large "All that hap

The Expansion of Tense

Abstract: Peter Brooks is one of several theorists and critics who have understood the “strange logic” of reading a narrative to be bound up with the “anticipation of retrospection”: “[i]f the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic” (23). He reaches this suggestion by combining two apparently separate traditions in narrative criticism, one that characterizes the tradition of telling as one in which “everything is transformed by the structuring presence of the end to come” and the other for whom the action of a novel takes place before the eyes as a “kind of present” (ibid.). A fictional narrative, he seems to be saying, can do both of these things at the same time: it can ask us to decode events narrated in the past tense as a kind of present, and ask us to view those events as structured in relation to a future which is already there and waiting for us to reach it. It is clear that, for Brooks, the reason that a narrative can do both of these things, that is to experience the events of a novel as a kind of present and as a kind of past, lies in the fact that the future already exists, and the inference is that the anticipation of retrospection cannot operate as the master trope in the strange logic of what we might call, for want of a better word, life. In life, the future is open, unwritten, and susceptible to our intentions, desires and efforts in a way that cannot be said of narrative.

Place, Space, and Michal Govrin's Snapshots

Abstract: Place, space, chronotope have again become a focus of interest after having been relegated to the status of background or setting in the heyday of classical narra tology1. In the framework of this resurgence, my paper is an attempt to draw atten tion to a configuration that, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been discussed. Transposing the ambiguity, though not the literal meaning, of the title of Irigaray's pathbreaking feminist book (This Sex Which Is Not One), I call this configuration "a place which is not one."2 My concern is with a place that is both "not one? i.e. not unique but multiple, and "not one," i.e. not fully a place, in a sense that will emerge from the analysis. Place itself is provisional shorthand for an unorthodox combina tion of the three opening notions. My hypothesis is that "a place which is not one" is a basic structure (dare I say "deep structure"?) that can have different manifestations in different peri ods/genres/texts. I have been led to this hypothesis by my engagement with the re cent novel Snapshots by Israeli author Michal Govrin (2002; English translation 2007), a narrative text that implicitly theorizes the relation between place and space. Snapshots both integrates and problematizes Jewish religious traditions, secular ideals of the early twentieth century settlers in Israel, present-day political views concerning issues of territory, and contemporary West European (mainly French) thinking about location.3 I shall first show how the work of Michel de Certeau sheds light on Govrin's conceptualizations of place. This will be followed by a close analysis of ways in which the novel goes beyond de Certeau and other theorists by its concrete representations of the dual meaning of "a place which is

"A Perfect Form in Perfect Rest": Spellbinding Narratives and Tennyson's "Day Dream"

Abstract: Victorian reflections upon temporality often conjure up metaphors of enchant ment, of beguilement, of charmed sleep that threatens progress. In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle distinguishes between "a virtual Industrial Aristocracy, as yet only half alive?spell-bound amid money-bags and ledgers; and an actual idle aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent delusions" (1117). He implores his "Princes of In dustry" to wake: "[i]t is you who are already half-alive, whom I will welcome into life; whom I conjure in God's name to shake off your enchanted sleep and live wholly!" (1118) In casting himself as author-prince, giving the kiss of life to the capitalists, Carlyle refers overtly to the narrative of "Sleeping Beauty," a fairy tale that, this essay will argue, not only inhabited, but also shaped the diverse Victorian discourses of political economy, architecture, philosophy, and poetry. In Stones of Venice, for ex ample, John Ruskin posits: "[i]t is that strange disquietude of the gothic spirit that is its greatness, that restlessness of the dreaming mind ... and it can neither rest in, nor from, its labour, but must pass on, sleeplessly, until its love of change shall be paci fied forever in the change that must come alike on the them that wake and them that sleep" (181). Ruskin imagines an historical age as a mind that dreams but paradoxi cally must not sleep if it is to enact change, and thus, like Carlyle, renders "sleep" as a narcotic "quietude" that must be shaken off. Still later in the century, the narrator of