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lobelia321Finally, here it is! :-) 40 pages in Word...
Part 1 of 2 (broken up into parts because of LJ post limits)
A narratological analysis of fanfiction
by Lobelia
Url of this page: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257093.html#cutid1
Url of part 2: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257458.html#cutid1
Also available here: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/narrfic.html
Please do not cite without referring to one of the above urls.
Introduction
This is a narratological analysis of two fanfics, both slash, both written within the Lotr-rps fandom. The first fic is Border Town, by Nova; the second fic is In the Name of Research, by Brenda. The full text of these fics can be found here:
Nova, Border Town:
http://www.dombillijah.com/users/nova/fic/bordertown.html
Brenda, In the Name of Research:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/azewewish/126223.html
Warning: Massive spoilers for these fics ahead!! No film or book spoilers, though.
The reason I chose these two authors is simple: they were the first to respond to my call for fics. The combination of Nova and Brenda has turned out to be very fruitful for this analysis, as they both have quite different styles. However, as shall be seen, the analysis also threw up some unexpected similarities, and, most intriguingly, some overall insights into fanfic writing in general.
The reason I chose these two particular stories is that I knew and liked them, that they seemed each to embody a particular approach to fic writing, and that they were short enough to allow me to do a comprehensive analysis. I am aware that one crucial part of narrative theory, the analysis of complex plots in novel-length texts, is missing from my own analysis. But, as this is my first foray into this kind of thing, I wanted to start with something short and not so daunting. I may yet try my hand at a long, long fic.
This is an analysis of the narrative framework underlying these two fics. It is not a critical evaluation or feedback or anything resembling beta. I tried to stick strictly to description and to avoid any form of prescription or quality assessment. It was quite weird starting out along these lines, used as I am to the hyperbolic gushing of on-line reading (omg u r a goddess), but after a while, it became familiar and forced me to think about these stories in ways I had not done before.
My analysis is based on the concepts developed by the French narratologist Gérard Genette in his book Narrative Discourse (1972; English translation 1980). There are a number of theorists who disagree with some of Genette's categories or who refine them further (e.g. Mieke Bal, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan). I decided to stick to Genette for the most part but to draw upon others as the need arose. As my analysis developed, I discovered that some of the crucial issues raised by fanfic are not addressed by Genette. So this analysis concludes with some musings that go beyond Genette.
Thank you to Nova and Brenda for offering their fics up. Thanks also to everyone who responded with such unexpected enthusiasm to my narratological musings on LiveJournal.
Order
Every narrative (novel, film, comic strip) is made up of two layers, the story and the plot. (These are sometimes called fabula and syuzhet, wonderful Russian words that I adore, or récit and discours in French, but for simplicity's sake, I will stick to the terms story and plot.) The story is the chronological sequence of the events. The plot is the way these events are presented to us in any given narrative. Most plots scramble story events to some degree. E.g. in most detective narratives, the first story event (murder) is generally presented as the last plot event (end of novel or film). Most plots involve flashbacks, i.e. the story sequence might be 1, 2, 3 but the plot presents these events as 2, 1, 3 (with '1' here designating a flashback).
Genette calls all forms of story scrambling anachronies, i.e. temporal discordances between story and plot. Anachronies come in the shape of retrospection (analepsis or flashback) and anticipation (prolepsis or flashforward). There are also ellipses which are not, strictly speaking, anachronies. Ellipses occur when story elements are left out of the plot; the plot leaps forward in time but story order as such is not scrambled. Sometimes these omitted story elements will be filled in later (in a flashback or analepsis).
Both Border Town and In the Name of Research contain anachronies although in both, at first reading, the story seems to correspond closely to the plot.
The first anachrony in Border Town occurs in the second paragraph. I have numbered the chronology of story events:
At some point (2), this must have seemed like a good idea, you, and him, and a rental car with local plates - safer, he tells you (difficult to locate in time but after 2); he's been here before (1). That particular point, (2) you feel (4), has long since been passed (3), but then, this whole town is a monument to transience and change (4).
(4) refers to the same point in time as the opening paragraph of the fic. It is the time of the present tense, the time of the bulk of this fic. There is a flashback (2), in the form of a memory, to some unspecified point earlier (the point at which this must have seemed like a good idea), and then there is a flashback within the flashback to an even earlier time (1), another unspecified point in the past during which he's been here before. This is quite a complicated passage in terms of plot/story time, and I'm not sure my own labelling is entirely accurate. But there are certainly a number of analepses in these two sentences.
The next major analepsis occurs in the third scene of the story. Again, it is couched in the form of a memory (analepsis underlined): ... the recollection of this phrase from some other, older life makes you shiver. This other, older life is possibly located even further back in time than (2) (at some point) but not as far back, perhaps, as (1) (he's been here before). The time of this older life is again evoked a few sentences down: It seems a long time ago. The long time ago, however, is not quite identical with the older life because the time only seems long ago. The long ago is therefore as much an aspect of the present time of the narrating (it seems) as it is of the time being recalled. It is also not exactly clear when precisely any of these flashbacked events took place (some time during filming of Lotr, we infer; i.e., during 2000). These temporal indeterminacies form a part of what characterises Border Town.
Border Town is organised into four scenes, each separated from the next by a row of three asterisks. These asterisks function as conventional markers for temporal ellipses. They are, in effect, saying: 'Some undetermined length of time passes here.' There are also unasterisked ellipses within the text: He glances over at the broken length of plastic lying on your lap. "Jesus. We were only gone ten minutes." We find out, in retrospect (through an analepsis), that an ellipsis has occurred earlier. It is now filled in: during the ten minutes 'he' and 'you' were in the supermarket, somebody snapped off the aerial. This event is told in such elliptical terms that I only really understood it after my analysis -- another indicator of Nova's elusive style, a style that depends on the reader filling in many of the story gaps.
The anachronies of In the Name of Research appear to be less complex than those of Border Town. The fic basically consists of one scene, and there is the illusion that we are present for the entirety of that scene. There are no overtly marked ellipses. However, closer inspection does reveal some analepses or flashbacks. The very first line of the fic, in fact, contains an analepsis: "You remember the time when--" The time to which this retrospective speech refers is left unspecified (although it probably relates to the wild adventure of the month before) but it is crucial to the meaning of the plot that we start out with this reference to some other incident in the past. The double hyphen at the end of this first line (when--) is a marker for a brief ellipsis, and the same double hyphen at the end of the next paragraph signals the end of this ellipsis. To be more precise, the ellipsis is not really an ellipsis at all: in a temporal ellipsis, a span of time is left out of the plot but this is not the case here. The span of time is filled in by Harry's internal musings. In Genette's terms, this is not an ellipsis of time but a paralipsis or lateral ellipsis. We don't jump forward in time but sideways: Harry couldn't actually concentrate. The paralipsis is also not total but partial: about some wild adventure he and Viggo had gone on the month before. The paralipsis is then filled in retrospectively a few paragraphs down: "...if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--". This retarded revelation of the content of the paralipsis (Karl's report of his conversation with Viggo about kissing) is essential to the effect of surprise and humour. So it turns out that, although anachronies are few in Research, the initial plot gap (the deliberate omission of story information) is at the core of this fic.
Duration
Duration is about the relationship of plot time to story time. The identity of plot time and story time would be a perfect isochrony but this is impossible. In the Name of Research gives the illusion of isochrony: the events told seem to last about the same amount of time as the plot telling them. There are no substantial ellipses and no timeless descriptions. It seems as if it takes us as long to read this as it takes Harry and Karl to do this. This effect of isochrony is reinforced by precise temporal indicators, e.g. the first kiss between Harry and Karl lasts one minute (Both pulled back a minute later). But of course, it does not necessarily take us one minute to read the sentence describing the kiss (Harry leaned forward and pressed his lips against Karl's). There is no time indication for the second kiss nor, for that matter, for actions such as this: Karl picked up his beer and drained it. We can sort of guess how long it takes him to drain the beer but then this is such an irrelevant issue that it only goes to prove how impossible isochrony is in practice. (This is different to how film works: if we saw this scene on film, shot in one take without a cut, plot time would equal story time.) However, I do think that the convention or the illusion of isochrony contributes to the particular effect of Research. We experience the scene in its totality as if we were present.
Duration is also about rhythm and tempo. According to Genette, the four traditional narrative movements are: ellipsis, descriptive pause, scene, and summary. (Mieke Bal adds a fifth one: the slow-down.) In the classic novel (exemplified by 19th-century writers like Honoré de Balzac or George Eliot), we have an alternation of scene and summary. Scenes often contain much dialogue and thus seem to be isochronous.
Neither of the two fics analysed here is anywhere near long enough to present a fully-fledged novelistic alternation of narrative movements. As we have seen, Research consists of one single scene, containing a lot of dialogue, and Border Town consists of four separate scenes, one of which relies on dialogue.
The four major ellipses of Border Town, marked by asterisks, structure this fic's rhythm. The ellipses are indefinite (we don't know exactly how much time has passed from one asterisk to the next) and implicit (i.e. not marked by explicit flagging sentences like 'four hours passed' or 'later on that day'). However, I think that the asterisks have a convention of their own, a bit like the fade-out / fade-in convention in film. They denote more time than, say, one minute; each asterisked ellipsis seems (to me) to elide around 8-12 hours. In this fic, the asterisked ellipses also seem to denote similar durations in each instance (e.g. we would be disconcerted to find that the last set of asterisks denotes an ellipsis of ten years). So, although we are not told exactly how much time passes, the rhythm is consistent throughout.
When I first read Border Town, I thought that it consisted of quite a lot of descriptive pauses as opposed to scenes. Descriptive pauses are moments when the narrative halts to look around at the setting; nothing happens but we are given a context or an atmosphere for events. Border Town starts with a description:
The wind blows in sand from the desert, and the rain, when it falls, dries dusty on the windowpanes and the roofs of the cars. There are no boats on the river ... and so forth.
This initial paragraph has quite a slow tempo, and it inaugurates the rather slow and stop-and-start tempo characteristic of this fic as a whole. This is very different from the fast tempo of Research; after the first ellipsis is filled in retrospectively, the pace never really stops and we gallop on towards the end (aided by the illusion of isochrony).
The second paragraph of Border Town is a mixture of summary and scene. The first two sentences are a summary. They are also an analepsis; indeed, as Genette points out, most analepses are summaries. This is why, it occurs to me, he prefers the term analepsis to the term flashback. The term 'flashback' is really more apt for film where analepses tend to occur in the form of scenes (not summaries), e.g. the flashback to Paris in the movie Casablanca. Contrast this with the analepsis in the second paragraph of Border Town:
At some point, this must have seemed like a good idea, you, and him, and a rental car with local plates -- safer, he tells you; he's been here before. That particular point, you feel, has long since passed...
The phrase At some point, this must have seemed like a good idea summarises what might have been played out in a longer scene or in a variety of different scenes some time in the past. This type of phrase is almost impossible to imagine transposed into movie format (unless as voice-over or direct speech).
I said above that when I first read Border Town, I thought that it consisted of few scenes and many descriptive pauses. However, during this analysis I realised that the fic is, in fact, mostly scene and some description. E.g. in the final paragraph:
You breakfast in a streetside café (scene) under a leafless tree strung with a frayed loop of pink chilli-pepper bulbs; coffee and sweet bread dusted with sugar. (description). The coffee is black and gritty (description), all but undrinkable (this is, I think, part of the scene: undrinkable implies that the 'you' has drunk or is drinking the coffee). The close interweaving of description with scene adds to the overall atmospheric effect of this fic and I will say more about that in the section on perspective.
Frequency
In Genette's scheme, there are three types of narrative frequency. There is singulative narration (an event that happened n times is narrated n times), repeating narration (an event that happened once is narrated n times), and iterative narration (an event that happened n times is narrated once). Iterative narration tells of events that used to happen (e.g. 'every Sunday, we went to the seaside' - here, something that happened many times is narrated once). Repeating narration tells the same thing several times over (e.g. from different viewpoints or once as real, once as remembered). Singulative narration is the most common form: one-off events are told once.
In the classic novel, iterative narration is at the service of singulative narration and is often close to description. This is also the way iterative narration works in Border Town. The first paragraph of Border Town is, in effect, iterative:
The wind blows in sand from the desert, and the rain, when it falls, dries dusty on the windowpanes and the roofs of cars
The wind, presumably, blows several times, and the rain is specified as occurring repeatedly at intervals: when it falls. The iterative form sets up the dreamlike temporality of this fic: the first paragraph moves us into a distant time and space, into 'somewhere else and sometime else'. Not only events were different then; everything appears to be different and pregnant with meaning. (But that takes me out of the notion of frequency so I will leave this point but return to overall interpretation later.)
The rest of Border Town's narration is mostly singulative, apart from descriptive passages. However, there are at least three notable further instances of iterative narration.
Firstly, there is an occurrence of iterative narration in the second scene:
He starts the car (singulative); he likes to drive, and you don't (iterative and descriptive of their characters), or at least not over here in unfamiliar towns, where the whole wrong-side-of-the-road thing bothers you more (iterative and descriptive) and every junction brings on a flutter of minor panic (iterative and specific as to frequency: this happens at every junction -- although it is left open exactly how many junctions there are).
Secondly, an ambiguous use of iterative narration appears at the very beginning of the second scene: When you turn on the taps in the guesthouse room, rusty water piddles into the bowl. It's not clear whether the tap is turned on only once, or whether the water is rusty every time the tap is turned on. The ambiguity, I think, is due to the ambivalence of the English word when here, and also due to the seeming non sequitur of the sentence immediately following this one: The two of you drive to a supermarket a few blocks away and load up the trunk of the car with boxes of bottles, blue plastic and brown glass. Closer inspection (and indeed, I only noticed this just now, typing these words) reveals that there is some causal connection after all: because the water is rusty, they have to buy bottled water. It is typical of this fic's style that such connections are not spelled out.
Finally, in the third scene, there is an iterative statement embedded in direct speech: "You did just as much swordfighting as the rest of us." The swordfighting, we presume, went on over a period of time.
The narration of In the Name of Research is, by contrast, almost entirely singulative. Description is rare. Most description is seen 'in action', similar to description in Homer (e.g. Homer's fast ships). An example is this: Harry looked around their usual corner booth... The adjective usual evokes the iterative: they have sat in this corner booth many times. But the usual is introduced in the context of a singulative action: Harry looked around ... hoping to see a familiar face. A bit later, we have the description of a wooden table; this is already a very reduced description, confined to one attribute only of table, and furthermore, the description is again introduced as part of an action: Karl said, leaning forward, forearms resting on the wooden table. Iteration and description are entirely at the service of singular narration in this fic. It is significant in this context that adverbs are more plentiful than adjectives: Karl shifted uncomfortably... Karl thumped Harry on the back helpfully... Karl smiled sheepishly... Adverbs are here a kind of 'description-in-action' (not Genette's term but my own).
May I just digress on an aside: I've participated in some on-line discussions about adverbs. Adverbs seem to be regarded by some writers and advice-givers as somehow ignoble, and I've heard the suggestion several times that it is a good idea to prune one's prose of adverbs, the implication being that adverbs take away from 'showing the action'. My analysis of In the Name of Research shows the folly of such blanket proscriptions: adverbs can be as effective as verbs, or for that matter any other element of language, in creating particular effects. Indeed, adverbs are more closely tied to actions (to verbs) than are adjectives (which modify nouns).
Mood
Genette uses the term 'mood' in the grammatical sense (e.g. 'the subjunctive mood'). Mood is the regulation of narrative information, and, according to Genette, mood operates through two principal modalities: distance and perspective A narrative can seem to keep at a greater or lesser distance from what it tells. A narrative can also seem to adopt a particular perspective with regard to the story. Perspective corresponds to the English term 'point of view', and this term (mostly abbreviated as pov) is certainly very much used in fanfic discussion. Indeed, pov is one of the most familiar technical terms used among slashers, and I do not think that this is coincidental (as will become clear later).
I find Genette's bundling of distance and perspective into one chapter a bit confusing so I will discuss these two instances under two separate headings. It will be seen that the category of mood yields a much more detailed, lengthy analysis than the other categories. I will explain why I think this is later.
Mood 1: Distance
There are two types of narration: the narration of events and the narration of words. The narration of events tells of actions; the narration of words tells of dialogue. The most common form of the narration of words is that of direct speech (what Genette, confusingly, calls reported speech).
Digression: Show-not-tell
This is the moment to digress on the knotty subject of show-not-tell. The show-not-tell exhortation goes back to the American critic and writer Percy Lubbock who first codified this dictum in his book The Craft of Fiction (1921). Lubbock argued that showing was the 'dramatic way' of telling a story, letting the reader infer a character's emotions from that character's actions, much as happens in drama. This, Lubbock claimed, was 'the more effective' way, superior to telling, i.e. to the author stepping forward and explaining to us the character's thoughts (pp.157-8). Lubbock also thought that all other modes of narration should be subordinated to the scene because scenes create the most vivid, dramatised effect: we forget the narrator and focus on the actions and on the dialogue (pp.267-8).
Showing in textual narration really comes down to dramatising, and telling is another way of saying narrating. The injunction to dramatise brings prose fiction close to theatre or script writing. Plays consists almost entirely of dialogue and enacted scenes. Films do have recourse to devices such as voice-over and emotive music to give us an insight into a character's thoughts. However, mainstream Hollywood films tend to be script-driven and downplay other, peculiarly cinematic possibilities of telling thoughts and emotions, e.g. via montage or cinematography. Perhaps one of the reasons for the preference of dramatising within fanfic is the central position of Hollywood within our cultural lives these days, reinforced by the circumstance that a lot of fanfic makes use of Hollywood-type material (movies, TV series).
The preference for dramatising ultimately goes back to Aristotle while the preference for narrating goes back to Plato. Aristotle valued tragedy over poetry, comedy and epic poetry because tragedy is 'performed by actors, not through narration' (p.10). Plato, on the other hand, disliked the dramatising of action in the form of dialogue because this was borrowing from the theatre; he preferred pure narration and rewrote the opening of The Iliad without speech (in Book 3 of The Republic; see discussion by Genette).
Among how-to-write-a-novel advisors and fanfic writers, Lubbock's mandate has taken on a kind of holy-cow status. However, among narratologists, the show-not-tell opposition seems to be generally dismissed as misleading and too woolly for precise analysis. Genette, for example, argues that only the narration of words (i.e. dialogue) can show; every other form of narration can only pretend to show (pp.163-4). I did not find the concepts showing and telling at all useful for gleaning insights into how these two chosen fics worked, so I will now cheerfully leave the whole show-and-tell controversy aside and focus on more interesting matters.
(For an earlier rant on the show-not-tell fallacy, see my musings here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/246198.html).
Mood 1: Distance (continued)
To return to the analysis of the fics and to the narration of events and the narration of words:
In Border Town, the narration of events forms the bulk of the text: The wind blows in sand from the desert... People don't come here to stay... you turn on the radio... In the second paragraph, there is one instance of what Genette calls transposed speech but which I prefer to call indirect speech: - safer, he tells you. But the first instance of direct speech does not occur until half-way through the second scene:
He glances over at the broken length of plastic lying on your lap. "Jesus. We were only gone ten minutes."
This is an example of what Genette calls immediate speech: speech without any declarative verb (such as 'he said', 'I yelled'). As a result of the absence of such a declarative verb, we cannot be quite sure who is speaking here. We assume it is the 'he' who has just been glancing at the broken length of plastic because this 'he' seems to be the subject of the overall paragraph (because 'he' is the subject of the paragraph's first sentence). However, as Genette points out, immediate speech always carries the risk (or, I would add, the deliberate ambiguity) of not being able to be attributed to anybody specific.
In Border Town, the third scene stands out as being the only one dominated by dialogue, or to be more precise: by direct speech. There are five paragraphs and each contains lines of direct speech. In three paragraphs, the speech is marked by declarative verbs (he intones in another man's voice... you say... he says at last...). In two paragraphs, the speech has no declarative verb: it is immediate speech.
"Bullshit." He's lying on his bed, swigging beer from the bottle. "You did just as much swordfighting as the rest of us."
Here, the sentence He's lying on his bed... functions as an identifying marker of the speaker, analogous to a declarative-verb sentence. It is clear that the 'he' lying on his bed is also the 'he' who says "Bullshit."
"Well then, maybe I didn't listen quite as hard." The aerial zips and whines through the air as you slash at your insubstantial foe, lunge, parry, riposte; he watches you critically.
Here, there is no identifying marker. (It is clearly not the aerial that is speaking!) The 'he' who watches you critically is not the 'he' who says "Well then..." However, we can follow the who's who of speaking because of the one-subject-per-paragraph convention I mentioned above (not Genette's idea, but mine). Speakers alternate: speaker 1 in paragraph 1, speaker 2 in para 2, speaker 1 in para 3, and so forth.
At the very end of Border Town, we find a second instance of indirect speech:
He assures you that it does get better, that it will get better, the further on you go.
This speech is different from direct speech because there are no quotation marks: the floor is not given to the character; instead, there is a stronger presence of the narrator and, concomitantly, a greater distance between narration and story. I think it is quite significant that the last sentence of the fic is not couched in the form of direct speech. If we turn it into direct speech in our heads, we can see (I think) how much more dominant the 'he'-character would become. However, what is crucial about this final sentence is that the 'you'-character is as present in it as is the 'he'-character. The 'he'-character may be saying these things but the 'you' character is thinking them and narrating them. Perhaps, the 'you'-character is sceptical of the truth of what the 'he'-character is saying. Either way, we are left with the feelings of the 'you' character. If this speech were direct, we would be left with the words of the 'he'-character -- and that would skew the fic from its consistent focus on the 'you'-narrator (more on focus and focalisation below, in the section on perspective).
By contrast with Border Town, the fic In the Name of Research appears at first glance to be dominated by direct speech throughout. The very first sentence of the fic is in direct speech ("You remember the time when--"). It is also a sentence without a declarative verb (i.e. it is an instance of immediate speech) so that we have no idea who is speaking. Indeed, our discovery of the speaker's identity is delayed for two sentences:
“You remember the time when--” (immediate speech)
Harry nodded (but he is not the speaker), not really listening. Karl was talking (speaker revealed -- we need to fill in the information retrospectively; in a way, Karl was talking is a kind of analepsis).
By the way, Genette reports that somebody called Pierre Fontanier, an 18th/early-19th-century 'grammarian', coined the term abruption for speech without declarative verbs. I quite adore this term but will refrain from using it here in the place of immediate speech. However, the word does seem to me to characterise the effect that this first line of Research has: it springs upon the reader abruptly. We don't know who is speaking but we also don't know when the speech is taking place: the absence of a declarative verb, as says Genette, makes such an utterance timeless (is it he said, or is it he says, or is it he will say?). It's different from placing immediate speech within a narrational context: because this is the very first line, there is as yet no context. For me, that makes the speech abruptive. (My on-line dictionary defines abruption as a violent breaking-off or separation but seems to be ignorant of Fontanier's meaning.)
Immediate speech predominates throughout In the Name of Research. Indeed, there are more than twice as many instances of direct speech without a declarative verb than there are instances of direct speech with a declarative verb (I counted 51 instances of immediate speech : 20 instances of non-immediate direct speech). However, after the initial first sentence, there is no longer any ambiguity as to the identity of the speaker. This is due mainly to the convention of focusing on only one subject per paragraph. (Border Town adheres to this practice as well.) The narration in Research keeps strictly to the one-subject-per-paragraph convention and alternates speakers consistently. Indeed, the largest cluster of non-immediate direct speech occurs when a third speaker, the waitress Susan, is introduced. Because we now have three interlocutors, the risk of confusing speakers is greater but the relatively frequent use of declarative verbs in this section (she asked and Harry squeaked and Karl said cheerfully) ensures that we are always able to identify the speaker.
Another device used to make sure we know who is talking in the absence of declarative verbs is the repeated use of names throughout the fic: "Susan, I think that table behind us is trying to get your attention." "I mean, I admire you, Harry..." "No offense, Harry, but..." "You've kissed before, Karl..."
In Research, declarative sentences of the 'he said' type are, in the majority of cases, replaced with sentences describing an action that accompanies the direct speech, such as these:
(a) "Oh, well. Couldn't." Karl looked intently at his mug. "He's well, he's Vig, y'know..."
(b) "Um." Karl shrugged, wrinkling his nose...
(c) "Right." Harry sighed. Fuck. "Well, alright, but just lips..."
These accompanying sentences are often embedded in between two instances of direct speech, as in (a) and (c). Some of the accompanying sentences are so close to being declarative that one could easily substitute a comma for the full point at the end of the direct speech. E.g., (c): "Right." Harry sighed. (immediate speech plus accompanying sentence) -- could be rewritten as: "Right," Harry sighed. (direct speech plus declarative sentence). Of course, the re-write subtly alters the effect of this passage.
I said above that Research appears to be dominated by direct speech. However, closer scrutiny reveals that the fic is actually heavily reliant on the narration of events as well as on the narration of words, and that it makes particularly liberal use of the form of free indirect discourse.
I will discuss the narration of events first. The narration of events mostly occurs in the form of the type of speech-accompanying sentences (my own term) I analysed above. I think this is why it does not become apparent as such immediately. Indeed, I only really realised that that is what is happening when writing the above paragraphs. Narration of events is presented in Research as being completely intertwined with narration of words in the form of direct speech. This makes the narration of events seem very immediate and almost as dramatised as the direct speech itself.
However, there is some narration of events which does not appear to further the story. Here is the most noticeable example:
"Everything alright with you two?" she asked, setting the glasses on the table and wiping it down with a damp cloth.
The wiping with a damp cloth is information that is superfluous to the story. Genette calls such details "functionally useless in the story" (p.165). In addition, Genette fascinatingly links such 'functionally useless' details to the French semiotician Roland Barthes's theory of the reality effect. Barthes argued that the accumulation of descriptive detail in 19th-century novels serves to tie the narrative closer to reality. Details that don't contribute to the story are understood, by readers, to connote life itself. Here is how Genette formulates it:
'A useless and contingent detail, it is the medium par excellence of the referential illusion, and therefore of the mimetic effect: it is a connotator of mimesis.' (p.165)
And this is, I think, precisely how the damp cloth functions in Research. It creates an effect of the real. This 'useless and contingent' detail that has nothing to do with the main story of the kissing, reinforces the illusion of reality. It connotes mimesis, i.e. the immediate imitation of action.
The exchange with Susan also does something else: It slows down the action. In that sense, Susan the waitress constitutes a narrative pause. (Genette has no category for a narrative pause that is not descriptive.) The introduction of Susan at this point allows both Harry and the reader to catch their breaths after the surprise analeptic revelation of the initial ellipsis ("...and if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--") and to heighten reader expectation of what is to come. But we readers are being made to wait for the development of this plot complication, and that reinforces the effect of suspense here.
I will now discuss the use of free indirect discourse in Research. (Genette calls this free indirect style or free indirect speech but I adopt here the more inclusive term of free indirect discourse, gleaned from Rimmon-Kenan and others.) The term free indirect discourse refers to indirect speech that has no declarative verb and that is transmuted into the third person. Here are some examples made up by me to demonstrate the four modes of narrating speech, with free indirect discourse last:
(a) He smacked his forehead and said, "I am so stupid." -- direct speech with a declarative verb
(b) He smacked his forehead. "I am so stupid." -- direct speech without a declarative verb, i.e. immediate speech
(c) He smacked his forehead and said that he was so stupid. -- indirect speech...
(d) He smacked his forehead. He was so stupid. -- free indirect discourse. Note the similarity to (c). The two examples (c) and (d) are practically identical in form except for the omission of the conjunction that in (d). They are, however, very different in effect.
Here are some examples of free indirect discourse in Research:
(a) “It’s alright.” (immediate speech) At least, that part was alright. The other part...well...yeah. (free indirect discourse: Harry's thoughts, using sentences and fragments of a sentence in the past tense)
(b) "Right." (direct speech) Harry sighed (speech-accompanying sentence). Fuck. (free indirect discourse: Harry's thought, using an expletive)
(c) “Alright, fine. Show me a bit of that technique, then.” (immediate speech) And what the *hell* was he saying? (free indirect discourse: Harry's thought, using the third person and the past tense)
(d) Fuck it. In for the long haul. (free indirect discourse: Harry's thoughts, using expletive and a kind of imperative-cum-exhortation) Harry obediently pressed his lips against Karl's...
Example (c) uses the third person which makes clear that the non-dialogue sentence is free indirect discourse. Examples (a), (b) and (c) are, in principle, not tied to any particular character. However, the one-subject-per-paragraph convention makes it clear who is doing the thinking here. Examples (b) and (d) are interesting because the free indirect discourse is particularly close to direct speech here. They use no pronoun and no tense.
Note, by the way, that only Harry's thoughts are given in free indirect discourse, not Karl's or Susan's. This is an indicator of restricted internal focalisation (on which more below). Reader expectation of consistent focalisation within this fic is the main reason that we attribute every instance of free indirect discourse to Harry, even if it's as floating as a fuck.
Free indirect discourse has been much discussed in narratological circles and hailed as a complex, modernist form . I will not go into these debates here but will only note that it is an extremely popular and wide-spread form in fanfic. I am not quite sure why this is so; I have a hunch that it is a form that allows for maximum insight into a character's subjectivity without sacrificing the connection of utterances to the narrator -- thus, both the pleasures of narratorial control and characterisation are satisfied. Genette points out that free indirect discourse merges the voice of the character with the voice of the narrator. Here is Genette on the essential difference between free indirect discourse and immediate speech:
'... in free indirect speech, the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances are then merged; in immediate speech, the narrator is obliterated and the character substitutes for him [sic]. (p.174)
The connection of narrator/fan to character/real-person or fictional-person might be particularly important to fanfic writers (and readers) whose fictional desires are driven by their desires to exploit the inner emotional turmoil and sexualities of their male protagonists: to 'crawl into' their mens' heads and bodies.
Mood 2: Perspective
In each narrative, there is someone who is doing the telling (the narrator) and someone who is doing the seeing (a character in the story-world). Genette calls this latter instance, the one doing the seeing, the focalisor. Focalisation corresponds roughly to the more commonly used term point of view but it is more precise.
When I first started to read about narratology, I found the concept of focalisation one of the most difficult to come to grips with, and it is only after having done this analysis that I have really understood it. Focalisation is central to many (if not most) forms of narration, and it is certainly central to fanfic. I hope the meaning of focalisation will become clearer below, in concrete examples from the two fics being analysed here.
There are three types of focalisation: zero focalisation, internal focalisation and external focalisation.
In zero focalisation, the narrator says more than the characters know. Note that it is not a case of the narrator knowing more than the characters: it's a case of saying more or less than the characters. I myself actually think that the narrator always knows more than the characters know. It is a case of the different degrees to which the narrator says that she knows more. This kind of narrator is often known as omniscient narrator.
Internal focalisation means that the narrator says as much as the characters know. The point of view can be restricted to one character only, or it can vary among characters (e.g. Dom first, then Orli, then back to Dom).
External focalisation refers to the situation where the narrator says less than the characters know. This is sometimes known as objective point of view (and that is certainly what I have called it in the past). I take it to refer to a kind of narration where the reader learns little about what is going on inside the characters' minds.
There can also be a type of purposeful lapse: we have already encountered paralipsis (the omission of what Karl tells Harry as a kind of lateral ellipsis), and there is another kind of lapse in the form of paralepsis. A paralipsis gives less information than is necessary. A paralepsis gives more information than is authorised within the overall code of focalisation. These points may seem somewhat obscure; I will elucidate them below, using examples.
Focalisation must not be confused with person. E.g., a first-person narrative does not necessarily imply an internal focalisation. Indeed, a first-person narrative authorises a focalisation through the narrator: the narrator is identical with the first-person 'I'-character, but the narrator is telling that 'I'-character's story retrospectively. Therefore, the narrator will inevitably know more than the 'I'-character.
Border Town is an example of first-person narrative. It is true that the actual grammatical pronoun used is 'you' but I agree with Mieke Bal here: 'without much effort, the reader "translates" [the second person] into the first-person format' (p.29). For me, the first-person effect was so strong that I found myself typing 'I' at several points in this analysis when referring to the 'you'-character in Border Town. I do, however, think that it is never a complete translation into first person. The second person is rare in published literature but it is a bit more common in fanfic (e.g. Gabby Hope's Saturday Night). I think this may be for the same reasons that I adduced for free indirect discourse. 'You' connects the slashed character more directly to the reader (and narrator) than either 'I' or 'he', and slash readers and writers tend to delight in such closeness.
In Border Town we have internal fixed focalisation. The narrator says as much as the character knows, and the point of view is restricted to one character ('you'). However, there are ellipses and paralipses: information is withheld, and some of the withheld information is never supplied. For example, what exactly is these two people's history? Why are they where they are, and where in fact are they? Do they have sex after the final sentence of scene 3? (His hand closes over your own.) Some of this information we fill in as readers: I speculated that the setting of the fic is Mexico (using the clues of title, landscape, language, US dollars and extra-narrative knowledge about the rl actors). I also speculated about the sex, more on which below (section on genre).
Most of the fic has an internal focalisor but not all. Much of the second paragraph of the first scene feels like omniscient narration, i.e. like zero focalisation:
...this whole town is a monument to transience and change. People don't come here to stay, they come here in the hope of discarding their old lives like worn-out tyres at the side of the road before zooming off again, speeding on shiny-wheeled dreams towards some half-imagined sunset, although the faded faces glimpsed on every street corner suggest to you that only a very few will actually get very far.
Here, the narrator seems to say more than the character can know. How, e.g., can the 'you' really know that people don't come here to stay? But, I think, this is omniscient narration in appearance only: it continues to be internally focalised through the 'you'-character. To me, this passage is the focalisor's interpretation of these other people's inner motivations and, as I see it, a projection of his own motivation in coming here. My interpretation is reinforced by the last line of the paragraph:
It all comes down to this: you could go on, or you could go back.
This last line ties the previous sentences about people who come here in the hope of discarding their old lives back to the 'you'-narrator. The alternatives -- zooming off again or the fact that few will actually get very far, going on or going back -- are important to the 'you'-character. This ties back to the very last line of the fic where the theme of going on is taken up again:
...it does get better, that it will get better, the further on you go.
This brings me back to the point I made earlier (section on duration) about the interweaving of description with scene. There is no unfocalised, 'pure' description in Border Town. All the descriptive passages, from the initial The wind blows in sand from the desert to the final You breakfast in a streetside cafe under a leafless tree is focalised through the 'you'-character. Landscape and café become extensions of the 'you'-character's thoughts; they function as metaphors for the 'you'-character's emotional landscape. This diffusion of the focalisor throughout every aspect of Border Town's narration is what gives this fic its particular mood and atmosphere.
The internal focalisation is even more fixed in Border Town than it is in In the Name of Research. There is no paralepsis in Border Town (we will see that there is in Research). The narrator is forgotten in Border Town. As I discussed above, this is not necessary for a first (second)-person fic. The 'you'-narrator could, theoretically, take over from the 'you'-focalisor now and again, e.g. by statements such as You remember it well or But this would not happen, as you know now. However, this never happens in Border Town, and the strict internal focalisation is aided by the use of the present tense. It would be odd for the 'you'-narrator to intrude with retrospective comments when the illusion is of the action happening as it is narrated. The present tense in Border Town assists in obscuring the temporal distance between narrator and focalisor. This tense creates the illusion of a convergence between story time and plot time: as if the events told were happening before our very eyes, at the time of their telling.
It occurs to me now that the translation of second person into first person isn't quite as complete as Mieke Bal (and I) initially thought (see above). In Border Town, the focalisor is 'you' but the narrator cannot possibly be 'you'; the narrator is addressing the focalisor in the second person. The 'you' creates a distance between narrator and focalisor that is not there in this way when narrator and focalisor are both an 'I'. On the other hand, the 'you' also creates an intimacy between narrator and narrator-addressed focalisor, as if the narrator had special insight into the focalisor's thoughts and can also manipulate the focalisor to some extent. Gabby Hope once told me, with regard to her fic Saturday Night, that she imagined sitting on Dom's shoulder and whispering into his ear, 'Do this, do that!' Again, the 'you' reinforces the close bond that slashers like to seek with their slashed characters.
In the Name of Research also, like Border Town, helps readers to forget the narrator's presence. The first line of the fic ("You remember the time when--") might make readers expect the speaker of this piece of immediate speech to be the focalisor of the fic. As I discussed above, the speaker of the speech is not revealed until two sentences later. However, the focalisor is revealed in the second sentence of the fic, and it is not the speaker: it is Harry. (Harry nodded, not really listening.) It thus becomes apparent in retrospect that the first line of immediate speech was a kind of focalisation in itself. We, the readers, are hearing this speech through Harry's (the focalisor's) ears. This means that we also lose track of the speech when Harry loses track (the crucial ellipsis signalled by the double hyphen: ...the time when--"). Indeed, the entire second paragraph of Research is an extended piece of internal focalisation: we are right inside Harry's head. This is signalled by various means (underlined):
--very earnestly from the way his brow was furrowed... sounded like a funky word for sperm... about some wild adventure... probably vastly entertaining...stupid allergy medication...
The use of probably and sounded like and some indicate that we are presented with unreliable information, information filtered through Harry's mind. We are also given a reason for the unreliability of the information: stupid allergy medication, making him all loopy--well, loopier--in the head...
The double hyphens, markers of ellipses, are also indicators of internal focalisation. The kind of broken-off, fragmented information they convey corresponds with the confused state of mind of the focalisor Harry (all loopy) and his fragmented response to Karl's proposition of kissing. Note the way the double hyphen is used to convey the focalisor's feelings:
(a) and if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--"
(b) ...tongue pushing insistently forward and just--
(c) "Oh, for fuck's--"
The double hyphen in (c) is a bit different to the others: Harry is starting to take matters in hand and asserting himself, rather than responding to Karl as he has done up to then.
Research employs a restricted and fixed internal focalisor (Harry). The narrator tells as much as the focalisor knows, no more and no less. However, there is a paralepsis in the last line of the fic. As I explained above, a paralepsis gives more information than is authorised within the overall code of focalisation. The overall code of focalisation in Research is restricted internal focalisation through Harry. The very last line of the fic is a departure from this:
The sound of Harry choking was barely audible over the sound of Karl's laughter.
Barely audible to whom? It doesn't quite make sense to read this as barely audible to Harry as it is the sound of himself choking. It also doesn't really make sense to read this as barely audible to Karl as it is barely audible over the sound of Karl's own laughter. I think this sentence represents an interpolation of the narrator. Here, the narrator tells more than the focalisor knows. Ultimately, the sound of Harry choking and the sound of Karl's own laughter is audible (or barely audible) to us, the readers (and to the narrator). Here we have zero focalisation. We look at the action together with the narrator, from the outside of the narration, as it were.
I think it is no accident that this paralepsis occurs in the very last sentence of the fic. It concludes the fic as much as it opens the narration out. After the last full point, we will stop reading, we will stop being in that fictional space -- and the last sentence is a kind of transition from being-in-the-fic to being-outside-of-the-fic. We are being reminded that this is not reality, but a fic told by a narrator and presented for our, the reader's, delectation.
There is one other apparent paralepsis in the fic:
"Of course." Karl looked affronted that Harry had even asked.
Here, the narrator appears to intervene to tell us that Karl looked affronted because Harry had even asked. Karl looking affronted is something Harry can see (it's focalised) but the reason for the look cannot be known to Harry (it's narrated). However, after thinking about this for a bit, I concluded that it is possible to read this sentence as follows: Harry sees Karl looking affronted, and Harry surmises that it is because Harry had even asked. If we interpret the sentence like that, the focalisation remains internal. The whole sentence also becomes an instance of free indirect discourse because it conveys Harry's thoughts (about Karl). I prefer this reading because it confines the paralepsis to the last line, and a unique paralepsis at the end has a rather neat effect. (I am reminded of the great paralepsis at the end of Dee's fic Ring Pull:
He shifted, leaned into me, mouth close to my ear. "Yours is closer."
And no, that's not where the story ends.
But that's all I'm going to tell you, so you can just bugger off.)
Voice
The category of voice is about the narrator (or, in Genette's words, the 'narrating instance'). Genette looks at the narrating situation under the headings of the time of the narrating, narrative level and 'person'. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan extends this to the degree of perceptibility and to the reliability of the narrator (pp.96-103). I've already touched on perceptibility and reliability in the section on perspective above. The category of voice is closely related to the category of mood, especially to the mood-subcategory of distance (discussed above), and some narratologists conflate both categories into one or order the categories entirely differently.
The time of the narrating is clear for In the Name of Research: it is subsequent to the time of what is narrated. This is signalled by the use of the past tense. Border Town is a case of simultaneous narration. The use of the present tense in Border Town conflates the time of the telling with the time of the events being told, or at least, seems to do so. The effect is one of immediacy: this is happening here and now. However, because much of the present tense is used for description (The wind blows in sand from the desert... the gargle of static, a fizz and whoosh like waves breaking against the shore of some faraway metallic sea...), the effect is also one of timelessness: the wind always blows, the sea is always metallic; we are transported into another place and time: into another world. Curiously, I found Research with its use of past tense more 'immediate' than Border Town with its use of present tense. Perhaps the effect in Border Town is that of the so-called historical present. Also, the effect of the past tense in Research is offset by the preponderance of dialogue, and much of the dialogue (though not all) is in the present tense.
The term narrative level refers to levels of the telling. Sometimes there are stories told within a story (e.g. the Arabian Nights); in such cases, we have a first story-level (Shahrazad trying to save her life by telling stories) and a second story-level (the stories told by Shahrazad, of demons and dervishes and so forth). A more precise word for the story-world, the 'reality' created by the fiction, is diegesis, and this is the word Genette uses to label story-levels. Genette calls the first story-level diegetic (or intradiegetic) and the second story-level metadiegetic. (Rimmon-Kenan calls the second story-level hypodiegetic; I find this term confusing and won't use it.) Mieke Bal talks of embedded narratives which I quite like because this clearly expresses what is going on when stories appear within stories (pp.52-66).
There are no important instances of embedded narration in either Border Town or In the Name of Research, as far as I can see. Both stick to the diegetic level of narration. Perhaps the shortness of these fics does not really lend itself to much embedding; perhaps, also, the fics rely on the effect of immediacy given by sticking to one (or a few) scenes and to one diegetic level. I suppose the analepses (the reference to some other, older life in Border Town and the reference to some wild adventure he and Viggo had gone on the month before) are, technically speaking, embedded narrations on a second story-level.
On seventh-or-so reading, it occurs to me that there is a very short but crucial second-level narrative embedded within the overall first-level narrative of Research:
"See, that's just what Viggo said," Karl said... "Said that everyone should experiment. ..."
Here we have Viggo's indirect speech, embedded within Karl's direct speech. It is this miniature embedded narrative (that everyone should experiment) which, in fact, drives the entire first-level narrative forward. Viggo's words propel Karl into wanting to experiment for himself.
At which story-level is the narrator located in either fic? In Border Town, the narrator is not part of the diegesis. The narrator fades away in favour of the story told and in favour of the focalisor (the 'you'-character). The narrator is thus at one level above the diegesis. Genette calls this level extradiegetic. In Research, too, the narrator is extradiegetic except in that final sentence analysed above: here, we suddenly move up one level and hear the narrator directly. I suppose you could say the narrator here becomes a diegetic (or intradiegetic) narrator.
Genette's final term 'person' is, to my mind, confusing. It is confusing because within fandom (and within some other narratological writings, e.g. Bal, pp.21-33; Abbott, pp.64-66) the word person is mostly used in the conjunction of 'first-person pov', 'third-person pov', and so forth; i.e. it is confined to the grammatical use of the word person. It is also confusing because I think Genette never quite defines it properly and does not distinguish it sufficiently from perspective (incl. focalisation). What Genette does do is to divide narration under the rubric of 'person' into heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narration. These terms refer to the relationship of the narrator to the story. A heterodiegetic narrator is absent from the story told. A homodiegetic narrator is part of the story-world. Mieke Bal speaks of external narrators and character-bound narrators (p.22). The narrator in Border Town is homodiegetic and character-bound; the narrator in Research is heterodiegetic and external.
Reading through Genette's categories, it struck me that his concept of mood is much more central for slash than are the concepts of order, duration, frequency and even voice. At least this is the case with Lotr-rps fics, perhaps because they tend to be relatively short (in contrast with, for example, the novel-length fics abounding in HP fandom). However, I also think that this privileging of mood has something to do with the general gist of fanfic: this is a romantic genre. It is bound up with issues of emotional conflict and characterisation. It often features an intensely personal involvement of the author with her characters. Also, fanfic writers don't experiment as much with narrative order, duration and frequency as do those writers of avantgarde literature most beloved by narratologists (writers such as Laurence Sterne and Marcel Proust). However, fanfic writers do spend a lot of effort on constructing mood and voice because those are the aspects of narration most closely bound up with character involvement.
Go to Part 2.
Part 1 of 2 (broken up into parts because of LJ post limits)
A narratological analysis of fanfiction
by Lobelia
Url of this page: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257093.html#cutid1
Url of part 2: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/257458.html#cutid1
Also available here: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/narrfic.html
Please do not cite without referring to one of the above urls.
Introduction
This is a narratological analysis of two fanfics, both slash, both written within the Lotr-rps fandom. The first fic is Border Town, by Nova; the second fic is In the Name of Research, by Brenda. The full text of these fics can be found here:
Nova, Border Town:
http://www.dombillijah.com/users/nova/fic/bordertown.html
Brenda, In the Name of Research:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/azewewish/126223.html
Warning: Massive spoilers for these fics ahead!! No film or book spoilers, though.
The reason I chose these two authors is simple: they were the first to respond to my call for fics. The combination of Nova and Brenda has turned out to be very fruitful for this analysis, as they both have quite different styles. However, as shall be seen, the analysis also threw up some unexpected similarities, and, most intriguingly, some overall insights into fanfic writing in general.
The reason I chose these two particular stories is that I knew and liked them, that they seemed each to embody a particular approach to fic writing, and that they were short enough to allow me to do a comprehensive analysis. I am aware that one crucial part of narrative theory, the analysis of complex plots in novel-length texts, is missing from my own analysis. But, as this is my first foray into this kind of thing, I wanted to start with something short and not so daunting. I may yet try my hand at a long, long fic.
This is an analysis of the narrative framework underlying these two fics. It is not a critical evaluation or feedback or anything resembling beta. I tried to stick strictly to description and to avoid any form of prescription or quality assessment. It was quite weird starting out along these lines, used as I am to the hyperbolic gushing of on-line reading (omg u r a goddess), but after a while, it became familiar and forced me to think about these stories in ways I had not done before.
My analysis is based on the concepts developed by the French narratologist Gérard Genette in his book Narrative Discourse (1972; English translation 1980). There are a number of theorists who disagree with some of Genette's categories or who refine them further (e.g. Mieke Bal, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan). I decided to stick to Genette for the most part but to draw upon others as the need arose. As my analysis developed, I discovered that some of the crucial issues raised by fanfic are not addressed by Genette. So this analysis concludes with some musings that go beyond Genette.
Thank you to Nova and Brenda for offering their fics up. Thanks also to everyone who responded with such unexpected enthusiasm to my narratological musings on LiveJournal.
Order
Every narrative (novel, film, comic strip) is made up of two layers, the story and the plot. (These are sometimes called fabula and syuzhet, wonderful Russian words that I adore, or récit and discours in French, but for simplicity's sake, I will stick to the terms story and plot.) The story is the chronological sequence of the events. The plot is the way these events are presented to us in any given narrative. Most plots scramble story events to some degree. E.g. in most detective narratives, the first story event (murder) is generally presented as the last plot event (end of novel or film). Most plots involve flashbacks, i.e. the story sequence might be 1, 2, 3 but the plot presents these events as 2, 1, 3 (with '1' here designating a flashback).
Genette calls all forms of story scrambling anachronies, i.e. temporal discordances between story and plot. Anachronies come in the shape of retrospection (analepsis or flashback) and anticipation (prolepsis or flashforward). There are also ellipses which are not, strictly speaking, anachronies. Ellipses occur when story elements are left out of the plot; the plot leaps forward in time but story order as such is not scrambled. Sometimes these omitted story elements will be filled in later (in a flashback or analepsis).
Both Border Town and In the Name of Research contain anachronies although in both, at first reading, the story seems to correspond closely to the plot.
The first anachrony in Border Town occurs in the second paragraph. I have numbered the chronology of story events:
At some point (2), this must have seemed like a good idea, you, and him, and a rental car with local plates - safer, he tells you (difficult to locate in time but after 2); he's been here before (1). That particular point, (2) you feel (4), has long since been passed (3), but then, this whole town is a monument to transience and change (4).
(4) refers to the same point in time as the opening paragraph of the fic. It is the time of the present tense, the time of the bulk of this fic. There is a flashback (2), in the form of a memory, to some unspecified point earlier (the point at which this must have seemed like a good idea), and then there is a flashback within the flashback to an even earlier time (1), another unspecified point in the past during which he's been here before. This is quite a complicated passage in terms of plot/story time, and I'm not sure my own labelling is entirely accurate. But there are certainly a number of analepses in these two sentences.
The next major analepsis occurs in the third scene of the story. Again, it is couched in the form of a memory (analepsis underlined): ... the recollection of this phrase from some other, older life makes you shiver. This other, older life is possibly located even further back in time than (2) (at some point) but not as far back, perhaps, as (1) (he's been here before). The time of this older life is again evoked a few sentences down: It seems a long time ago. The long time ago, however, is not quite identical with the older life because the time only seems long ago. The long ago is therefore as much an aspect of the present time of the narrating (it seems) as it is of the time being recalled. It is also not exactly clear when precisely any of these flashbacked events took place (some time during filming of Lotr, we infer; i.e., during 2000). These temporal indeterminacies form a part of what characterises Border Town.
Border Town is organised into four scenes, each separated from the next by a row of three asterisks. These asterisks function as conventional markers for temporal ellipses. They are, in effect, saying: 'Some undetermined length of time passes here.' There are also unasterisked ellipses within the text: He glances over at the broken length of plastic lying on your lap. "Jesus. We were only gone ten minutes." We find out, in retrospect (through an analepsis), that an ellipsis has occurred earlier. It is now filled in: during the ten minutes 'he' and 'you' were in the supermarket, somebody snapped off the aerial. This event is told in such elliptical terms that I only really understood it after my analysis -- another indicator of Nova's elusive style, a style that depends on the reader filling in many of the story gaps.
The anachronies of In the Name of Research appear to be less complex than those of Border Town. The fic basically consists of one scene, and there is the illusion that we are present for the entirety of that scene. There are no overtly marked ellipses. However, closer inspection does reveal some analepses or flashbacks. The very first line of the fic, in fact, contains an analepsis: "You remember the time when--" The time to which this retrospective speech refers is left unspecified (although it probably relates to the wild adventure of the month before) but it is crucial to the meaning of the plot that we start out with this reference to some other incident in the past. The double hyphen at the end of this first line (when--) is a marker for a brief ellipsis, and the same double hyphen at the end of the next paragraph signals the end of this ellipsis. To be more precise, the ellipsis is not really an ellipsis at all: in a temporal ellipsis, a span of time is left out of the plot but this is not the case here. The span of time is filled in by Harry's internal musings. In Genette's terms, this is not an ellipsis of time but a paralipsis or lateral ellipsis. We don't jump forward in time but sideways: Harry couldn't actually concentrate. The paralipsis is also not total but partial: about some wild adventure he and Viggo had gone on the month before. The paralipsis is then filled in retrospectively a few paragraphs down: "...if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--". This retarded revelation of the content of the paralipsis (Karl's report of his conversation with Viggo about kissing) is essential to the effect of surprise and humour. So it turns out that, although anachronies are few in Research, the initial plot gap (the deliberate omission of story information) is at the core of this fic.
Duration
Duration is about the relationship of plot time to story time. The identity of plot time and story time would be a perfect isochrony but this is impossible. In the Name of Research gives the illusion of isochrony: the events told seem to last about the same amount of time as the plot telling them. There are no substantial ellipses and no timeless descriptions. It seems as if it takes us as long to read this as it takes Harry and Karl to do this. This effect of isochrony is reinforced by precise temporal indicators, e.g. the first kiss between Harry and Karl lasts one minute (Both pulled back a minute later). But of course, it does not necessarily take us one minute to read the sentence describing the kiss (Harry leaned forward and pressed his lips against Karl's). There is no time indication for the second kiss nor, for that matter, for actions such as this: Karl picked up his beer and drained it. We can sort of guess how long it takes him to drain the beer but then this is such an irrelevant issue that it only goes to prove how impossible isochrony is in practice. (This is different to how film works: if we saw this scene on film, shot in one take without a cut, plot time would equal story time.) However, I do think that the convention or the illusion of isochrony contributes to the particular effect of Research. We experience the scene in its totality as if we were present.
Duration is also about rhythm and tempo. According to Genette, the four traditional narrative movements are: ellipsis, descriptive pause, scene, and summary. (Mieke Bal adds a fifth one: the slow-down.) In the classic novel (exemplified by 19th-century writers like Honoré de Balzac or George Eliot), we have an alternation of scene and summary. Scenes often contain much dialogue and thus seem to be isochronous.
Neither of the two fics analysed here is anywhere near long enough to present a fully-fledged novelistic alternation of narrative movements. As we have seen, Research consists of one single scene, containing a lot of dialogue, and Border Town consists of four separate scenes, one of which relies on dialogue.
The four major ellipses of Border Town, marked by asterisks, structure this fic's rhythm. The ellipses are indefinite (we don't know exactly how much time has passed from one asterisk to the next) and implicit (i.e. not marked by explicit flagging sentences like 'four hours passed' or 'later on that day'). However, I think that the asterisks have a convention of their own, a bit like the fade-out / fade-in convention in film. They denote more time than, say, one minute; each asterisked ellipsis seems (to me) to elide around 8-12 hours. In this fic, the asterisked ellipses also seem to denote similar durations in each instance (e.g. we would be disconcerted to find that the last set of asterisks denotes an ellipsis of ten years). So, although we are not told exactly how much time passes, the rhythm is consistent throughout.
When I first read Border Town, I thought that it consisted of quite a lot of descriptive pauses as opposed to scenes. Descriptive pauses are moments when the narrative halts to look around at the setting; nothing happens but we are given a context or an atmosphere for events. Border Town starts with a description:
The wind blows in sand from the desert, and the rain, when it falls, dries dusty on the windowpanes and the roofs of the cars. There are no boats on the river ... and so forth.
This initial paragraph has quite a slow tempo, and it inaugurates the rather slow and stop-and-start tempo characteristic of this fic as a whole. This is very different from the fast tempo of Research; after the first ellipsis is filled in retrospectively, the pace never really stops and we gallop on towards the end (aided by the illusion of isochrony).
The second paragraph of Border Town is a mixture of summary and scene. The first two sentences are a summary. They are also an analepsis; indeed, as Genette points out, most analepses are summaries. This is why, it occurs to me, he prefers the term analepsis to the term flashback. The term 'flashback' is really more apt for film where analepses tend to occur in the form of scenes (not summaries), e.g. the flashback to Paris in the movie Casablanca. Contrast this with the analepsis in the second paragraph of Border Town:
At some point, this must have seemed like a good idea, you, and him, and a rental car with local plates -- safer, he tells you; he's been here before. That particular point, you feel, has long since passed...
The phrase At some point, this must have seemed like a good idea summarises what might have been played out in a longer scene or in a variety of different scenes some time in the past. This type of phrase is almost impossible to imagine transposed into movie format (unless as voice-over or direct speech).
I said above that when I first read Border Town, I thought that it consisted of few scenes and many descriptive pauses. However, during this analysis I realised that the fic is, in fact, mostly scene and some description. E.g. in the final paragraph:
You breakfast in a streetside café (scene) under a leafless tree strung with a frayed loop of pink chilli-pepper bulbs; coffee and sweet bread dusted with sugar. (description). The coffee is black and gritty (description), all but undrinkable (this is, I think, part of the scene: undrinkable implies that the 'you' has drunk or is drinking the coffee). The close interweaving of description with scene adds to the overall atmospheric effect of this fic and I will say more about that in the section on perspective.
Frequency
In Genette's scheme, there are three types of narrative frequency. There is singulative narration (an event that happened n times is narrated n times), repeating narration (an event that happened once is narrated n times), and iterative narration (an event that happened n times is narrated once). Iterative narration tells of events that used to happen (e.g. 'every Sunday, we went to the seaside' - here, something that happened many times is narrated once). Repeating narration tells the same thing several times over (e.g. from different viewpoints or once as real, once as remembered). Singulative narration is the most common form: one-off events are told once.
In the classic novel, iterative narration is at the service of singulative narration and is often close to description. This is also the way iterative narration works in Border Town. The first paragraph of Border Town is, in effect, iterative:
The wind blows in sand from the desert, and the rain, when it falls, dries dusty on the windowpanes and the roofs of cars
The wind, presumably, blows several times, and the rain is specified as occurring repeatedly at intervals: when it falls. The iterative form sets up the dreamlike temporality of this fic: the first paragraph moves us into a distant time and space, into 'somewhere else and sometime else'. Not only events were different then; everything appears to be different and pregnant with meaning. (But that takes me out of the notion of frequency so I will leave this point but return to overall interpretation later.)
The rest of Border Town's narration is mostly singulative, apart from descriptive passages. However, there are at least three notable further instances of iterative narration.
Firstly, there is an occurrence of iterative narration in the second scene:
He starts the car (singulative); he likes to drive, and you don't (iterative and descriptive of their characters), or at least not over here in unfamiliar towns, where the whole wrong-side-of-the-road thing bothers you more (iterative and descriptive) and every junction brings on a flutter of minor panic (iterative and specific as to frequency: this happens at every junction -- although it is left open exactly how many junctions there are).
Secondly, an ambiguous use of iterative narration appears at the very beginning of the second scene: When you turn on the taps in the guesthouse room, rusty water piddles into the bowl. It's not clear whether the tap is turned on only once, or whether the water is rusty every time the tap is turned on. The ambiguity, I think, is due to the ambivalence of the English word when here, and also due to the seeming non sequitur of the sentence immediately following this one: The two of you drive to a supermarket a few blocks away and load up the trunk of the car with boxes of bottles, blue plastic and brown glass. Closer inspection (and indeed, I only noticed this just now, typing these words) reveals that there is some causal connection after all: because the water is rusty, they have to buy bottled water. It is typical of this fic's style that such connections are not spelled out.
Finally, in the third scene, there is an iterative statement embedded in direct speech: "You did just as much swordfighting as the rest of us." The swordfighting, we presume, went on over a period of time.
The narration of In the Name of Research is, by contrast, almost entirely singulative. Description is rare. Most description is seen 'in action', similar to description in Homer (e.g. Homer's fast ships). An example is this: Harry looked around their usual corner booth... The adjective usual evokes the iterative: they have sat in this corner booth many times. But the usual is introduced in the context of a singulative action: Harry looked around ... hoping to see a familiar face. A bit later, we have the description of a wooden table; this is already a very reduced description, confined to one attribute only of table, and furthermore, the description is again introduced as part of an action: Karl said, leaning forward, forearms resting on the wooden table. Iteration and description are entirely at the service of singular narration in this fic. It is significant in this context that adverbs are more plentiful than adjectives: Karl shifted uncomfortably... Karl thumped Harry on the back helpfully... Karl smiled sheepishly... Adverbs are here a kind of 'description-in-action' (not Genette's term but my own).
May I just digress on an aside: I've participated in some on-line discussions about adverbs. Adverbs seem to be regarded by some writers and advice-givers as somehow ignoble, and I've heard the suggestion several times that it is a good idea to prune one's prose of adverbs, the implication being that adverbs take away from 'showing the action'. My analysis of In the Name of Research shows the folly of such blanket proscriptions: adverbs can be as effective as verbs, or for that matter any other element of language, in creating particular effects. Indeed, adverbs are more closely tied to actions (to verbs) than are adjectives (which modify nouns).
Mood
Genette uses the term 'mood' in the grammatical sense (e.g. 'the subjunctive mood'). Mood is the regulation of narrative information, and, according to Genette, mood operates through two principal modalities: distance and perspective A narrative can seem to keep at a greater or lesser distance from what it tells. A narrative can also seem to adopt a particular perspective with regard to the story. Perspective corresponds to the English term 'point of view', and this term (mostly abbreviated as pov) is certainly very much used in fanfic discussion. Indeed, pov is one of the most familiar technical terms used among slashers, and I do not think that this is coincidental (as will become clear later).
I find Genette's bundling of distance and perspective into one chapter a bit confusing so I will discuss these two instances under two separate headings. It will be seen that the category of mood yields a much more detailed, lengthy analysis than the other categories. I will explain why I think this is later.
Mood 1: Distance
There are two types of narration: the narration of events and the narration of words. The narration of events tells of actions; the narration of words tells of dialogue. The most common form of the narration of words is that of direct speech (what Genette, confusingly, calls reported speech).
Digression: Show-not-tell
This is the moment to digress on the knotty subject of show-not-tell. The show-not-tell exhortation goes back to the American critic and writer Percy Lubbock who first codified this dictum in his book The Craft of Fiction (1921). Lubbock argued that showing was the 'dramatic way' of telling a story, letting the reader infer a character's emotions from that character's actions, much as happens in drama. This, Lubbock claimed, was 'the more effective' way, superior to telling, i.e. to the author stepping forward and explaining to us the character's thoughts (pp.157-8). Lubbock also thought that all other modes of narration should be subordinated to the scene because scenes create the most vivid, dramatised effect: we forget the narrator and focus on the actions and on the dialogue (pp.267-8).
Showing in textual narration really comes down to dramatising, and telling is another way of saying narrating. The injunction to dramatise brings prose fiction close to theatre or script writing. Plays consists almost entirely of dialogue and enacted scenes. Films do have recourse to devices such as voice-over and emotive music to give us an insight into a character's thoughts. However, mainstream Hollywood films tend to be script-driven and downplay other, peculiarly cinematic possibilities of telling thoughts and emotions, e.g. via montage or cinematography. Perhaps one of the reasons for the preference of dramatising within fanfic is the central position of Hollywood within our cultural lives these days, reinforced by the circumstance that a lot of fanfic makes use of Hollywood-type material (movies, TV series).
The preference for dramatising ultimately goes back to Aristotle while the preference for narrating goes back to Plato. Aristotle valued tragedy over poetry, comedy and epic poetry because tragedy is 'performed by actors, not through narration' (p.10). Plato, on the other hand, disliked the dramatising of action in the form of dialogue because this was borrowing from the theatre; he preferred pure narration and rewrote the opening of The Iliad without speech (in Book 3 of The Republic; see discussion by Genette).
Among how-to-write-a-novel advisors and fanfic writers, Lubbock's mandate has taken on a kind of holy-cow status. However, among narratologists, the show-not-tell opposition seems to be generally dismissed as misleading and too woolly for precise analysis. Genette, for example, argues that only the narration of words (i.e. dialogue) can show; every other form of narration can only pretend to show (pp.163-4). I did not find the concepts showing and telling at all useful for gleaning insights into how these two chosen fics worked, so I will now cheerfully leave the whole show-and-tell controversy aside and focus on more interesting matters.
(For an earlier rant on the show-not-tell fallacy, see my musings here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/246198.html).
Mood 1: Distance (continued)
To return to the analysis of the fics and to the narration of events and the narration of words:
In Border Town, the narration of events forms the bulk of the text: The wind blows in sand from the desert... People don't come here to stay... you turn on the radio... In the second paragraph, there is one instance of what Genette calls transposed speech but which I prefer to call indirect speech: - safer, he tells you. But the first instance of direct speech does not occur until half-way through the second scene:
He glances over at the broken length of plastic lying on your lap. "Jesus. We were only gone ten minutes."
This is an example of what Genette calls immediate speech: speech without any declarative verb (such as 'he said', 'I yelled'). As a result of the absence of such a declarative verb, we cannot be quite sure who is speaking here. We assume it is the 'he' who has just been glancing at the broken length of plastic because this 'he' seems to be the subject of the overall paragraph (because 'he' is the subject of the paragraph's first sentence). However, as Genette points out, immediate speech always carries the risk (or, I would add, the deliberate ambiguity) of not being able to be attributed to anybody specific.
In Border Town, the third scene stands out as being the only one dominated by dialogue, or to be more precise: by direct speech. There are five paragraphs and each contains lines of direct speech. In three paragraphs, the speech is marked by declarative verbs (he intones in another man's voice... you say... he says at last...). In two paragraphs, the speech has no declarative verb: it is immediate speech.
"Bullshit." He's lying on his bed, swigging beer from the bottle. "You did just as much swordfighting as the rest of us."
Here, the sentence He's lying on his bed... functions as an identifying marker of the speaker, analogous to a declarative-verb sentence. It is clear that the 'he' lying on his bed is also the 'he' who says "Bullshit."
"Well then, maybe I didn't listen quite as hard." The aerial zips and whines through the air as you slash at your insubstantial foe, lunge, parry, riposte; he watches you critically.
Here, there is no identifying marker. (It is clearly not the aerial that is speaking!) The 'he' who watches you critically is not the 'he' who says "Well then..." However, we can follow the who's who of speaking because of the one-subject-per-paragraph convention I mentioned above (not Genette's idea, but mine). Speakers alternate: speaker 1 in paragraph 1, speaker 2 in para 2, speaker 1 in para 3, and so forth.
At the very end of Border Town, we find a second instance of indirect speech:
He assures you that it does get better, that it will get better, the further on you go.
This speech is different from direct speech because there are no quotation marks: the floor is not given to the character; instead, there is a stronger presence of the narrator and, concomitantly, a greater distance between narration and story. I think it is quite significant that the last sentence of the fic is not couched in the form of direct speech. If we turn it into direct speech in our heads, we can see (I think) how much more dominant the 'he'-character would become. However, what is crucial about this final sentence is that the 'you'-character is as present in it as is the 'he'-character. The 'he'-character may be saying these things but the 'you' character is thinking them and narrating them. Perhaps, the 'you'-character is sceptical of the truth of what the 'he'-character is saying. Either way, we are left with the feelings of the 'you' character. If this speech were direct, we would be left with the words of the 'he'-character -- and that would skew the fic from its consistent focus on the 'you'-narrator (more on focus and focalisation below, in the section on perspective).
By contrast with Border Town, the fic In the Name of Research appears at first glance to be dominated by direct speech throughout. The very first sentence of the fic is in direct speech ("You remember the time when--"). It is also a sentence without a declarative verb (i.e. it is an instance of immediate speech) so that we have no idea who is speaking. Indeed, our discovery of the speaker's identity is delayed for two sentences:
“You remember the time when--” (immediate speech)
Harry nodded (but he is not the speaker), not really listening. Karl was talking (speaker revealed -- we need to fill in the information retrospectively; in a way, Karl was talking is a kind of analepsis).
By the way, Genette reports that somebody called Pierre Fontanier, an 18th/early-19th-century 'grammarian', coined the term abruption for speech without declarative verbs. I quite adore this term but will refrain from using it here in the place of immediate speech. However, the word does seem to me to characterise the effect that this first line of Research has: it springs upon the reader abruptly. We don't know who is speaking but we also don't know when the speech is taking place: the absence of a declarative verb, as says Genette, makes such an utterance timeless (is it he said, or is it he says, or is it he will say?). It's different from placing immediate speech within a narrational context: because this is the very first line, there is as yet no context. For me, that makes the speech abruptive. (My on-line dictionary defines abruption as a violent breaking-off or separation but seems to be ignorant of Fontanier's meaning.)
Immediate speech predominates throughout In the Name of Research. Indeed, there are more than twice as many instances of direct speech without a declarative verb than there are instances of direct speech with a declarative verb (I counted 51 instances of immediate speech : 20 instances of non-immediate direct speech). However, after the initial first sentence, there is no longer any ambiguity as to the identity of the speaker. This is due mainly to the convention of focusing on only one subject per paragraph. (Border Town adheres to this practice as well.) The narration in Research keeps strictly to the one-subject-per-paragraph convention and alternates speakers consistently. Indeed, the largest cluster of non-immediate direct speech occurs when a third speaker, the waitress Susan, is introduced. Because we now have three interlocutors, the risk of confusing speakers is greater but the relatively frequent use of declarative verbs in this section (she asked and Harry squeaked and Karl said cheerfully) ensures that we are always able to identify the speaker.
Another device used to make sure we know who is talking in the absence of declarative verbs is the repeated use of names throughout the fic: "Susan, I think that table behind us is trying to get your attention." "I mean, I admire you, Harry..." "No offense, Harry, but..." "You've kissed before, Karl..."
In Research, declarative sentences of the 'he said' type are, in the majority of cases, replaced with sentences describing an action that accompanies the direct speech, such as these:
(a) "Oh, well. Couldn't." Karl looked intently at his mug. "He's well, he's Vig, y'know..."
(b) "Um." Karl shrugged, wrinkling his nose...
(c) "Right." Harry sighed. Fuck. "Well, alright, but just lips..."
These accompanying sentences are often embedded in between two instances of direct speech, as in (a) and (c). Some of the accompanying sentences are so close to being declarative that one could easily substitute a comma for the full point at the end of the direct speech. E.g., (c): "Right." Harry sighed. (immediate speech plus accompanying sentence) -- could be rewritten as: "Right," Harry sighed. (direct speech plus declarative sentence). Of course, the re-write subtly alters the effect of this passage.
I said above that Research appears to be dominated by direct speech. However, closer scrutiny reveals that the fic is actually heavily reliant on the narration of events as well as on the narration of words, and that it makes particularly liberal use of the form of free indirect discourse.
I will discuss the narration of events first. The narration of events mostly occurs in the form of the type of speech-accompanying sentences (my own term) I analysed above. I think this is why it does not become apparent as such immediately. Indeed, I only really realised that that is what is happening when writing the above paragraphs. Narration of events is presented in Research as being completely intertwined with narration of words in the form of direct speech. This makes the narration of events seem very immediate and almost as dramatised as the direct speech itself.
However, there is some narration of events which does not appear to further the story. Here is the most noticeable example:
"Everything alright with you two?" she asked, setting the glasses on the table and wiping it down with a damp cloth.
The wiping with a damp cloth is information that is superfluous to the story. Genette calls such details "functionally useless in the story" (p.165). In addition, Genette fascinatingly links such 'functionally useless' details to the French semiotician Roland Barthes's theory of the reality effect. Barthes argued that the accumulation of descriptive detail in 19th-century novels serves to tie the narrative closer to reality. Details that don't contribute to the story are understood, by readers, to connote life itself. Here is how Genette formulates it:
'A useless and contingent detail, it is the medium par excellence of the referential illusion, and therefore of the mimetic effect: it is a connotator of mimesis.' (p.165)
And this is, I think, precisely how the damp cloth functions in Research. It creates an effect of the real. This 'useless and contingent' detail that has nothing to do with the main story of the kissing, reinforces the illusion of reality. It connotes mimesis, i.e. the immediate imitation of action.
The exchange with Susan also does something else: It slows down the action. In that sense, Susan the waitress constitutes a narrative pause. (Genette has no category for a narrative pause that is not descriptive.) The introduction of Susan at this point allows both Harry and the reader to catch their breaths after the surprise analeptic revelation of the initial ellipsis ("...and if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--") and to heighten reader expectation of what is to come. But we readers are being made to wait for the development of this plot complication, and that reinforces the effect of suspense here.
I will now discuss the use of free indirect discourse in Research. (Genette calls this free indirect style or free indirect speech but I adopt here the more inclusive term of free indirect discourse, gleaned from Rimmon-Kenan and others.) The term free indirect discourse refers to indirect speech that has no declarative verb and that is transmuted into the third person. Here are some examples made up by me to demonstrate the four modes of narrating speech, with free indirect discourse last:
(a) He smacked his forehead and said, "I am so stupid." -- direct speech with a declarative verb
(b) He smacked his forehead. "I am so stupid." -- direct speech without a declarative verb, i.e. immediate speech
(c) He smacked his forehead and said that he was so stupid. -- indirect speech...
(d) He smacked his forehead. He was so stupid. -- free indirect discourse. Note the similarity to (c). The two examples (c) and (d) are practically identical in form except for the omission of the conjunction that in (d). They are, however, very different in effect.
Here are some examples of free indirect discourse in Research:
(a) “It’s alright.” (immediate speech) At least, that part was alright. The other part...well...yeah. (free indirect discourse: Harry's thoughts, using sentences and fragments of a sentence in the past tense)
(b) "Right." (direct speech) Harry sighed (speech-accompanying sentence). Fuck. (free indirect discourse: Harry's thought, using an expletive)
(c) “Alright, fine. Show me a bit of that technique, then.” (immediate speech) And what the *hell* was he saying? (free indirect discourse: Harry's thought, using the third person and the past tense)
(d) Fuck it. In for the long haul. (free indirect discourse: Harry's thoughts, using expletive and a kind of imperative-cum-exhortation) Harry obediently pressed his lips against Karl's...
Example (c) uses the third person which makes clear that the non-dialogue sentence is free indirect discourse. Examples (a), (b) and (c) are, in principle, not tied to any particular character. However, the one-subject-per-paragraph convention makes it clear who is doing the thinking here. Examples (b) and (d) are interesting because the free indirect discourse is particularly close to direct speech here. They use no pronoun and no tense.
Note, by the way, that only Harry's thoughts are given in free indirect discourse, not Karl's or Susan's. This is an indicator of restricted internal focalisation (on which more below). Reader expectation of consistent focalisation within this fic is the main reason that we attribute every instance of free indirect discourse to Harry, even if it's as floating as a fuck.
Free indirect discourse has been much discussed in narratological circles and hailed as a complex, modernist form . I will not go into these debates here but will only note that it is an extremely popular and wide-spread form in fanfic. I am not quite sure why this is so; I have a hunch that it is a form that allows for maximum insight into a character's subjectivity without sacrificing the connection of utterances to the narrator -- thus, both the pleasures of narratorial control and characterisation are satisfied. Genette points out that free indirect discourse merges the voice of the character with the voice of the narrator. Here is Genette on the essential difference between free indirect discourse and immediate speech:
'... in free indirect speech, the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances are then merged; in immediate speech, the narrator is obliterated and the character substitutes for him [sic]. (p.174)
The connection of narrator/fan to character/real-person or fictional-person might be particularly important to fanfic writers (and readers) whose fictional desires are driven by their desires to exploit the inner emotional turmoil and sexualities of their male protagonists: to 'crawl into' their mens' heads and bodies.
Mood 2: Perspective
In each narrative, there is someone who is doing the telling (the narrator) and someone who is doing the seeing (a character in the story-world). Genette calls this latter instance, the one doing the seeing, the focalisor. Focalisation corresponds roughly to the more commonly used term point of view but it is more precise.
When I first started to read about narratology, I found the concept of focalisation one of the most difficult to come to grips with, and it is only after having done this analysis that I have really understood it. Focalisation is central to many (if not most) forms of narration, and it is certainly central to fanfic. I hope the meaning of focalisation will become clearer below, in concrete examples from the two fics being analysed here.
There are three types of focalisation: zero focalisation, internal focalisation and external focalisation.
In zero focalisation, the narrator says more than the characters know. Note that it is not a case of the narrator knowing more than the characters: it's a case of saying more or less than the characters. I myself actually think that the narrator always knows more than the characters know. It is a case of the different degrees to which the narrator says that she knows more. This kind of narrator is often known as omniscient narrator.
Internal focalisation means that the narrator says as much as the characters know. The point of view can be restricted to one character only, or it can vary among characters (e.g. Dom first, then Orli, then back to Dom).
External focalisation refers to the situation where the narrator says less than the characters know. This is sometimes known as objective point of view (and that is certainly what I have called it in the past). I take it to refer to a kind of narration where the reader learns little about what is going on inside the characters' minds.
There can also be a type of purposeful lapse: we have already encountered paralipsis (the omission of what Karl tells Harry as a kind of lateral ellipsis), and there is another kind of lapse in the form of paralepsis. A paralipsis gives less information than is necessary. A paralepsis gives more information than is authorised within the overall code of focalisation. These points may seem somewhat obscure; I will elucidate them below, using examples.
Focalisation must not be confused with person. E.g., a first-person narrative does not necessarily imply an internal focalisation. Indeed, a first-person narrative authorises a focalisation through the narrator: the narrator is identical with the first-person 'I'-character, but the narrator is telling that 'I'-character's story retrospectively. Therefore, the narrator will inevitably know more than the 'I'-character.
Border Town is an example of first-person narrative. It is true that the actual grammatical pronoun used is 'you' but I agree with Mieke Bal here: 'without much effort, the reader "translates" [the second person] into the first-person format' (p.29). For me, the first-person effect was so strong that I found myself typing 'I' at several points in this analysis when referring to the 'you'-character in Border Town. I do, however, think that it is never a complete translation into first person. The second person is rare in published literature but it is a bit more common in fanfic (e.g. Gabby Hope's Saturday Night). I think this may be for the same reasons that I adduced for free indirect discourse. 'You' connects the slashed character more directly to the reader (and narrator) than either 'I' or 'he', and slash readers and writers tend to delight in such closeness.
In Border Town we have internal fixed focalisation. The narrator says as much as the character knows, and the point of view is restricted to one character ('you'). However, there are ellipses and paralipses: information is withheld, and some of the withheld information is never supplied. For example, what exactly is these two people's history? Why are they where they are, and where in fact are they? Do they have sex after the final sentence of scene 3? (His hand closes over your own.) Some of this information we fill in as readers: I speculated that the setting of the fic is Mexico (using the clues of title, landscape, language, US dollars and extra-narrative knowledge about the rl actors). I also speculated about the sex, more on which below (section on genre).
Most of the fic has an internal focalisor but not all. Much of the second paragraph of the first scene feels like omniscient narration, i.e. like zero focalisation:
...this whole town is a monument to transience and change. People don't come here to stay, they come here in the hope of discarding their old lives like worn-out tyres at the side of the road before zooming off again, speeding on shiny-wheeled dreams towards some half-imagined sunset, although the faded faces glimpsed on every street corner suggest to you that only a very few will actually get very far.
Here, the narrator seems to say more than the character can know. How, e.g., can the 'you' really know that people don't come here to stay? But, I think, this is omniscient narration in appearance only: it continues to be internally focalised through the 'you'-character. To me, this passage is the focalisor's interpretation of these other people's inner motivations and, as I see it, a projection of his own motivation in coming here. My interpretation is reinforced by the last line of the paragraph:
It all comes down to this: you could go on, or you could go back.
This last line ties the previous sentences about people who come here in the hope of discarding their old lives back to the 'you'-narrator. The alternatives -- zooming off again or the fact that few will actually get very far, going on or going back -- are important to the 'you'-character. This ties back to the very last line of the fic where the theme of going on is taken up again:
...it does get better, that it will get better, the further on you go.
This brings me back to the point I made earlier (section on duration) about the interweaving of description with scene. There is no unfocalised, 'pure' description in Border Town. All the descriptive passages, from the initial The wind blows in sand from the desert to the final You breakfast in a streetside cafe under a leafless tree is focalised through the 'you'-character. Landscape and café become extensions of the 'you'-character's thoughts; they function as metaphors for the 'you'-character's emotional landscape. This diffusion of the focalisor throughout every aspect of Border Town's narration is what gives this fic its particular mood and atmosphere.
The internal focalisation is even more fixed in Border Town than it is in In the Name of Research. There is no paralepsis in Border Town (we will see that there is in Research). The narrator is forgotten in Border Town. As I discussed above, this is not necessary for a first (second)-person fic. The 'you'-narrator could, theoretically, take over from the 'you'-focalisor now and again, e.g. by statements such as You remember it well or But this would not happen, as you know now. However, this never happens in Border Town, and the strict internal focalisation is aided by the use of the present tense. It would be odd for the 'you'-narrator to intrude with retrospective comments when the illusion is of the action happening as it is narrated. The present tense in Border Town assists in obscuring the temporal distance between narrator and focalisor. This tense creates the illusion of a convergence between story time and plot time: as if the events told were happening before our very eyes, at the time of their telling.
It occurs to me now that the translation of second person into first person isn't quite as complete as Mieke Bal (and I) initially thought (see above). In Border Town, the focalisor is 'you' but the narrator cannot possibly be 'you'; the narrator is addressing the focalisor in the second person. The 'you' creates a distance between narrator and focalisor that is not there in this way when narrator and focalisor are both an 'I'. On the other hand, the 'you' also creates an intimacy between narrator and narrator-addressed focalisor, as if the narrator had special insight into the focalisor's thoughts and can also manipulate the focalisor to some extent. Gabby Hope once told me, with regard to her fic Saturday Night, that she imagined sitting on Dom's shoulder and whispering into his ear, 'Do this, do that!' Again, the 'you' reinforces the close bond that slashers like to seek with their slashed characters.
In the Name of Research also, like Border Town, helps readers to forget the narrator's presence. The first line of the fic ("You remember the time when--") might make readers expect the speaker of this piece of immediate speech to be the focalisor of the fic. As I discussed above, the speaker of the speech is not revealed until two sentences later. However, the focalisor is revealed in the second sentence of the fic, and it is not the speaker: it is Harry. (Harry nodded, not really listening.) It thus becomes apparent in retrospect that the first line of immediate speech was a kind of focalisation in itself. We, the readers, are hearing this speech through Harry's (the focalisor's) ears. This means that we also lose track of the speech when Harry loses track (the crucial ellipsis signalled by the double hyphen: ...the time when--"). Indeed, the entire second paragraph of Research is an extended piece of internal focalisation: we are right inside Harry's head. This is signalled by various means (underlined):
--very earnestly from the way his brow was furrowed... sounded like a funky word for sperm... about some wild adventure... probably vastly entertaining...stupid allergy medication...
The use of probably and sounded like and some indicate that we are presented with unreliable information, information filtered through Harry's mind. We are also given a reason for the unreliability of the information: stupid allergy medication, making him all loopy--well, loopier--in the head...
The double hyphens, markers of ellipses, are also indicators of internal focalisation. The kind of broken-off, fragmented information they convey corresponds with the confused state of mind of the focalisor Harry (all loopy) and his fragmented response to Karl's proposition of kissing. Note the way the double hyphen is used to convey the focalisor's feelings:
(a) and if everyone else has at least kissed a guy--"
(b) ...tongue pushing insistently forward and just--
(c) "Oh, for fuck's--"
The double hyphen in (c) is a bit different to the others: Harry is starting to take matters in hand and asserting himself, rather than responding to Karl as he has done up to then.
Research employs a restricted and fixed internal focalisor (Harry). The narrator tells as much as the focalisor knows, no more and no less. However, there is a paralepsis in the last line of the fic. As I explained above, a paralepsis gives more information than is authorised within the overall code of focalisation. The overall code of focalisation in Research is restricted internal focalisation through Harry. The very last line of the fic is a departure from this:
The sound of Harry choking was barely audible over the sound of Karl's laughter.
Barely audible to whom? It doesn't quite make sense to read this as barely audible to Harry as it is the sound of himself choking. It also doesn't really make sense to read this as barely audible to Karl as it is barely audible over the sound of Karl's own laughter. I think this sentence represents an interpolation of the narrator. Here, the narrator tells more than the focalisor knows. Ultimately, the sound of Harry choking and the sound of Karl's own laughter is audible (or barely audible) to us, the readers (and to the narrator). Here we have zero focalisation. We look at the action together with the narrator, from the outside of the narration, as it were.
I think it is no accident that this paralepsis occurs in the very last sentence of the fic. It concludes the fic as much as it opens the narration out. After the last full point, we will stop reading, we will stop being in that fictional space -- and the last sentence is a kind of transition from being-in-the-fic to being-outside-of-the-fic. We are being reminded that this is not reality, but a fic told by a narrator and presented for our, the reader's, delectation.
There is one other apparent paralepsis in the fic:
"Of course." Karl looked affronted that Harry had even asked.
Here, the narrator appears to intervene to tell us that Karl looked affronted because Harry had even asked. Karl looking affronted is something Harry can see (it's focalised) but the reason for the look cannot be known to Harry (it's narrated). However, after thinking about this for a bit, I concluded that it is possible to read this sentence as follows: Harry sees Karl looking affronted, and Harry surmises that it is because Harry had even asked. If we interpret the sentence like that, the focalisation remains internal. The whole sentence also becomes an instance of free indirect discourse because it conveys Harry's thoughts (about Karl). I prefer this reading because it confines the paralepsis to the last line, and a unique paralepsis at the end has a rather neat effect. (I am reminded of the great paralepsis at the end of Dee's fic Ring Pull:
He shifted, leaned into me, mouth close to my ear. "Yours is closer."
And no, that's not where the story ends.
But that's all I'm going to tell you, so you can just bugger off.)
Voice
The category of voice is about the narrator (or, in Genette's words, the 'narrating instance'). Genette looks at the narrating situation under the headings of the time of the narrating, narrative level and 'person'. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan extends this to the degree of perceptibility and to the reliability of the narrator (pp.96-103). I've already touched on perceptibility and reliability in the section on perspective above. The category of voice is closely related to the category of mood, especially to the mood-subcategory of distance (discussed above), and some narratologists conflate both categories into one or order the categories entirely differently.
The time of the narrating is clear for In the Name of Research: it is subsequent to the time of what is narrated. This is signalled by the use of the past tense. Border Town is a case of simultaneous narration. The use of the present tense in Border Town conflates the time of the telling with the time of the events being told, or at least, seems to do so. The effect is one of immediacy: this is happening here and now. However, because much of the present tense is used for description (The wind blows in sand from the desert... the gargle of static, a fizz and whoosh like waves breaking against the shore of some faraway metallic sea...), the effect is also one of timelessness: the wind always blows, the sea is always metallic; we are transported into another place and time: into another world. Curiously, I found Research with its use of past tense more 'immediate' than Border Town with its use of present tense. Perhaps the effect in Border Town is that of the so-called historical present. Also, the effect of the past tense in Research is offset by the preponderance of dialogue, and much of the dialogue (though not all) is in the present tense.
The term narrative level refers to levels of the telling. Sometimes there are stories told within a story (e.g. the Arabian Nights); in such cases, we have a first story-level (Shahrazad trying to save her life by telling stories) and a second story-level (the stories told by Shahrazad, of demons and dervishes and so forth). A more precise word for the story-world, the 'reality' created by the fiction, is diegesis, and this is the word Genette uses to label story-levels. Genette calls the first story-level diegetic (or intradiegetic) and the second story-level metadiegetic. (Rimmon-Kenan calls the second story-level hypodiegetic; I find this term confusing and won't use it.) Mieke Bal talks of embedded narratives which I quite like because this clearly expresses what is going on when stories appear within stories (pp.52-66).
There are no important instances of embedded narration in either Border Town or In the Name of Research, as far as I can see. Both stick to the diegetic level of narration. Perhaps the shortness of these fics does not really lend itself to much embedding; perhaps, also, the fics rely on the effect of immediacy given by sticking to one (or a few) scenes and to one diegetic level. I suppose the analepses (the reference to some other, older life in Border Town and the reference to some wild adventure he and Viggo had gone on the month before) are, technically speaking, embedded narrations on a second story-level.
On seventh-or-so reading, it occurs to me that there is a very short but crucial second-level narrative embedded within the overall first-level narrative of Research:
"See, that's just what Viggo said," Karl said... "Said that everyone should experiment. ..."
Here we have Viggo's indirect speech, embedded within Karl's direct speech. It is this miniature embedded narrative (that everyone should experiment) which, in fact, drives the entire first-level narrative forward. Viggo's words propel Karl into wanting to experiment for himself.
At which story-level is the narrator located in either fic? In Border Town, the narrator is not part of the diegesis. The narrator fades away in favour of the story told and in favour of the focalisor (the 'you'-character). The narrator is thus at one level above the diegesis. Genette calls this level extradiegetic. In Research, too, the narrator is extradiegetic except in that final sentence analysed above: here, we suddenly move up one level and hear the narrator directly. I suppose you could say the narrator here becomes a diegetic (or intradiegetic) narrator.
Genette's final term 'person' is, to my mind, confusing. It is confusing because within fandom (and within some other narratological writings, e.g. Bal, pp.21-33; Abbott, pp.64-66) the word person is mostly used in the conjunction of 'first-person pov', 'third-person pov', and so forth; i.e. it is confined to the grammatical use of the word person. It is also confusing because I think Genette never quite defines it properly and does not distinguish it sufficiently from perspective (incl. focalisation). What Genette does do is to divide narration under the rubric of 'person' into heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narration. These terms refer to the relationship of the narrator to the story. A heterodiegetic narrator is absent from the story told. A homodiegetic narrator is part of the story-world. Mieke Bal speaks of external narrators and character-bound narrators (p.22). The narrator in Border Town is homodiegetic and character-bound; the narrator in Research is heterodiegetic and external.
Reading through Genette's categories, it struck me that his concept of mood is much more central for slash than are the concepts of order, duration, frequency and even voice. At least this is the case with Lotr-rps fics, perhaps because they tend to be relatively short (in contrast with, for example, the novel-length fics abounding in HP fandom). However, I also think that this privileging of mood has something to do with the general gist of fanfic: this is a romantic genre. It is bound up with issues of emotional conflict and characterisation. It often features an intensely personal involvement of the author with her characters. Also, fanfic writers don't experiment as much with narrative order, duration and frequency as do those writers of avantgarde literature most beloved by narratologists (writers such as Laurence Sterne and Marcel Proust). However, fanfic writers do spend a lot of effort on constructing mood and voice because those are the aspects of narration most closely bound up with character involvement.
Go to Part 2.