Desert Prince narratologised
Mar. 8th, 2008 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321I'm writing Desert Prince again.
Yesterday and day before, I got myself into it again. I haven't looked at this in years! But there it is, all fresh and ready to leap to life. I just re-read the whole thing. And made notes. And at some point in the past, I had actually made myself a set of plot point cards! So I put all those in order.
I know the ending, of course. The ending shapes the whole story.
I was inspired by your generous and unexpected poll responses wherein enthusiasm for DP was shown. Motivation!!
Anyway, it is interesting to re-read DP at the same time as reading Proust's Swann's Way, vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past. Because both are written in the first person.
Which reminds me of Genette. Because it is Genette who got me onto Proust in the first place. I can't remember if I got this from Genette, or from Mieke Bal, or from elseone, but the first person lends itself superbly to omniscient narration. In fact, it is perhaps the grammatical person best and most suited to what is generally known as omniscient narration (but which Genette calls 'zero focalisation' (wherein the narrator says more than the characters know).
Here's a beautiful example of this in Proust:
As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place .... The sentence and the digression go on.
But what is operative here for me is the marvellous and fluent as I was to learn in due course. The first person is tremendously suited for conveying this kind of running through time: ahead, and back, and ahead again. It makes the narrative very rich.
This means that the first person can foreshadow superbly. There can be all manner of hints at what is to come later. Because the first person, by definition, can never be identical with the focalisor. The 'I' that writes and narrates is not the 'I' that does the experiencing, be it in the distant past, the recent past or the narrative present. Because the narrative present is always already the past.
There is a misapprehension among some 'how to write a plot' guidebook authors (of whom I have read my fair share) that the first person is somehow automatically more 'immediate'. Apart from the fact, that there can be no 'immediate' narration (every representation is just that: a re-presentation, something that is mediated), the first person is supremely un-immediate because it brings home the disjuncture between narrator (telling the events) and focalisor (person in the narrative through whom we experience and see the events).
In Proust's paragraph, the 'I' of 'I imagined' is not the same 'I' as the 'I' of 'as I was to learn in due course'. The first 'I' is the focalised character as a young boy. The second 'I' is the focalised character (narrator?) as an adult man. The repetition of the pronoun 'I' is misleading; it offers up the illusion that the signifier of 'I' is referring here to the same signified (person of character/narrator) in both instances -- which is clearly not the case.
I may have to go away and do an analysis of one of those passages that use the first person, combined with the present tense, to convey the illusion of immediacy (e.g. Sophie Kinsella's chicklit or any number of fanfic written by others and by me). I suspect that there we have the first person but with internal character-bound focalisation (sometimes known as limited pov).
I also suspect that this plays out differently in the reading and in the writing. Because narratologists, much as I heart them, do tend to focus on the end product rather, and not bother much with the writing process and with the experience of actually writing. They're pretty much 'the author is dead' (TM Barthes) kind of people. I'd like to wrest the narratological wonderfulness from them and turn it round and make it alive for the writing process. For me!!
Yesterday and day before, I got myself into it again. I haven't looked at this in years! But there it is, all fresh and ready to leap to life. I just re-read the whole thing. And made notes. And at some point in the past, I had actually made myself a set of plot point cards! So I put all those in order.
I know the ending, of course. The ending shapes the whole story.
I was inspired by your generous and unexpected poll responses wherein enthusiasm for DP was shown. Motivation!!
Anyway, it is interesting to re-read DP at the same time as reading Proust's Swann's Way, vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past. Because both are written in the first person.
Which reminds me of Genette. Because it is Genette who got me onto Proust in the first place. I can't remember if I got this from Genette, or from Mieke Bal, or from elseone, but the first person lends itself superbly to omniscient narration. In fact, it is perhaps the grammatical person best and most suited to what is generally known as omniscient narration (but which Genette calls 'zero focalisation' (wherein the narrator says more than the characters know).
Here's a beautiful example of this in Proust:
As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place .... The sentence and the digression go on.
But what is operative here for me is the marvellous and fluent as I was to learn in due course. The first person is tremendously suited for conveying this kind of running through time: ahead, and back, and ahead again. It makes the narrative very rich.
This means that the first person can foreshadow superbly. There can be all manner of hints at what is to come later. Because the first person, by definition, can never be identical with the focalisor. The 'I' that writes and narrates is not the 'I' that does the experiencing, be it in the distant past, the recent past or the narrative present. Because the narrative present is always already the past.
There is a misapprehension among some 'how to write a plot' guidebook authors (of whom I have read my fair share) that the first person is somehow automatically more 'immediate'. Apart from the fact, that there can be no 'immediate' narration (every representation is just that: a re-presentation, something that is mediated), the first person is supremely un-immediate because it brings home the disjuncture between narrator (telling the events) and focalisor (person in the narrative through whom we experience and see the events).
In Proust's paragraph, the 'I' of 'I imagined' is not the same 'I' as the 'I' of 'as I was to learn in due course'. The first 'I' is the focalised character as a young boy. The second 'I' is the focalised character (narrator?) as an adult man. The repetition of the pronoun 'I' is misleading; it offers up the illusion that the signifier of 'I' is referring here to the same signified (person of character/narrator) in both instances -- which is clearly not the case.
I may have to go away and do an analysis of one of those passages that use the first person, combined with the present tense, to convey the illusion of immediacy (e.g. Sophie Kinsella's chicklit or any number of fanfic written by others and by me). I suspect that there we have the first person but with internal character-bound focalisation (sometimes known as limited pov).
I also suspect that this plays out differently in the reading and in the writing. Because narratologists, much as I heart them, do tend to focus on the end product rather, and not bother much with the writing process and with the experience of actually writing. They're pretty much 'the author is dead' (TM Barthes) kind of people. I'd like to wrest the narratological wonderfulness from them and turn it round and make it alive for the writing process. For me!!
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-08 06:21 pm (UTC)And also, yes! to the first person. I don't think I used to appreciate it properly, but if I had known then what I know now- haha, sorry!- but these days I really consciously enjoy that wonderful foreshadowing.