09 Literary Narrative Fiction

History, Genres, Analysis

Narratives

Personal, political, historical, legal, medical narratives: narrative’s power to capture certain truths and experiences in special ways

- unlike other modes of explanation and analysis such as statistics, descriptions, summaries, or reasoning via conceptual abstractions

The spectrum of fiction

fact – fiction – truth?

History Realism Romance Fantasy

Realism vs romance: a matter of perception vs a matter of vision

2 principal ways fiction can be related to life

Literary narrative fiction

literature: art of languagekinds of Iiterature: poetry,

drama, narrative fiction

prose: from Latin prosa or proversa oratio=‘straightforward discourse’

M. Jourdain: I've been speaking in PROSE all along! Moliere (1622-1673), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

Literary conventions

an agreement between artist and audience as tothe significance of features appearing in a work of art

knowledge of conventions = literary competence narrative: tells of real or imagined events;

tells a story fiction: an imagined creation in verse/prose/drama story: (imagined) events or happenings,

involving a conflict plot: arrangement of action → structure

Literary, narrative, fictional:

distinct features, do not presuppose each other

• Where do we place lyric poetry?

Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory.Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1991

Literary, narrative, fictional:

examples literary narrative fictional

+ + + Lit. narr. fict.

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+ - +

+ - -

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- - - Nonlit. nonnarr. nonfiction

The history of fiction

• Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957)

• Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (1988)• Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the

Novel (1996)

NovelIn: J. A. Cuddon: Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1999

Derived from Italian novella, 'tale, piece of news', and now applied to a wide variety of writings whose only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction. But 'extended' begs a number of questions. The length of novels varies greatly and there has been much debate on how long a novel is or should be - to he reductio ad absurdum of when is a novel not a novel or a long short-story or a short novel or a novella. There seem to be fewer and fewer rules, but it would probably be generally agreed that, in contemporary practice, a novel will be between 60-70.000 words and, say, 200.000.

Cuddon

The actual term 'novel' has had a variety of meanings and implications at different stages. From roughly the 15th to the 18th c. its meaning tended to derive from the Italian novella and the Spanish novela (the French term nouvelle, is closely related) and the term (often used in a plural sense) denoted short stories or tales of the kind one finds in Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1349-51).

Cuddon

Nowadays we would classify all the contents of the above as short stories. Broadly speaking, the term denoted a prose narrative about characters and their actions in what was recognizably everyday life and usually in the present, with the emphasis on things being 'new' or a 'novelty'.

And it was used in contradistinction to 'romance'. In the 19th c. the concept of 'novel' was enlarged. In Germany the term Novelle was still associated with the Renaissance novella.

Cuddon

As to the quiddity of the novel there has been as much debate. However, without performing contortions to be comprehensive we may hazard that it is a form of story or prose narrative containing characters, action and incident and, perhaps, a plot. In fact it is very difficult to write a story without there being some sort of plot, however vague and tenuous. So well developed is the average reader's need for a plot (at its simplest the desire to known what is going to happen next) that the reader will look for and find a plot where, perhaps, none is intended. Moreover, as soon as the reader is sufficiently interested in one or more of the characters (one can hardly envisage a novel without a character of some kind) to want to know what is going to happen to them next and to ask why, when and where - then there is a plot.

Cuddon

Apart from dramatic comedy, no other form has been so susceptible to change and development and the literary taxonomist at once finds himself confronted with a wide range of sub-species or categories.

For example, we have the epistolary novel, the sentimental novel, the novel of sensation, the condition of England novel, the campus novel, the Gothic novel and the historical novel; we have the propaganda, regional, thesis (or sociological), psychological, proletarian, documentary and time novel; we have the novel of the soil and the saga (or chronicle) novel, the picaresque novel, the key novel and the anti-novel; not to mention the detective novel, the thriller, the crime novel, the police procedural, the spy novel, the novel of adventure and the novelette.

Cuddon

The subject matter of the novel eludes classification.No other literary form has proved so pliable andadaptable to a seemingly endless variety of topic andthemes.

Cuddon

A number of these classifications shade off into each other. For example, psychological novel is a term which embraces many books; proletarian, propaganda and thesis novels tend to have much in common; the picaresque narrative is often a novel of adventure; a saga novel may also be a regional novel. And so on.

The absolute origins of the genre are obscure, but it seems clear that in the time of the XIIth Dynasty Middle Kingdom (c. 1200 BC) Egyptians were writing fiction of a kind which one would describe as a novel today. For instance, The Princess of Bachstaan; The Predestined Prince, and Sinuhe.

Cuddon

From Classical times other works of fiction have come down to us: notably, The Milesian Tales (2nd c. BC), Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. BC) by Longus, The Golden Ass (2nd c. AD) by Apuleius, and the Satyricon (1st c. AD) of Petronius Arbiter. Most of these are concerned with love of one sort and another and contain the rudiments of novels as we understand them today. This is especially true of the pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe.

Cuddon

But it is not until towards the end of the first millennium that we find work more recognizably like the novels we have become accustomed to in the last 200-odd years. These works are in Japanese. For example, the Taketoi Monogatari (c. 850-920), the Utsubo Monogatari (c. 850-900), a collection of anonymous stories. From this period, the most famous of all Japanese works is the tale of Genji (c. 1000) written by a woman unde the pseudonym Murasald Shikibu. This long story of court life relating the adventures of a Japanese Don Juan at the imperial court is an important work in the history of the genre because of its analysis of character and its study of psychology in love.

Cuddon

It is likely that round about this time of the 10th c. the collection of stories subsequently known as the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, was in embryonic form. However, they were not collected and established as a group of stories until much later, and then probably by an Egyptian professional story-teller at some time between the 14th and 16th c. These tales did not become known in Europe until early in the 18th c., since when they have had a considerable influence.

Cuddon

In Italy in the 14th c., there was a vogue for collections of novella or short tales, of which the most famous is Boccaccio's Decameron, which had much influence on Chaucer and many of which were later translated by William Painter and published under the title Palace of Pleasure (1566, 1567). In the 16th c. Bandello published Le Novelle (written between 1510 and 1560), and Marguerite of Navarre published the Heptaméron, following the form of Boccaccio.Originally these stories 'of seven days' were called Contes de la Reine de Navarre.

Cuddon

These were all short stories but are extremely important because they were in prose, and because in their method of narration and in their creation and development of character they are forerunners of the modern novel.

Cuddon

Until the 14th c. most of the literature of entertainment (and the novel is usually intended as an entertainment) was confined to narrative verse, particularly the epic and the romance. Romance eventually yielded the word roman, which is the term for novel in most European languages. In some ways the novel is a descendant of the medieval romances, which, in the first place, like the epic, were written in verse and then in prose (e.g. Malory's Morte D'Arthur, 1485). Verse narratives had been supplanted by prose narratives by the end of the 17th c.

Cuddon

Spain was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of the novel form. The greatest of all Spanish novels is Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), which satirized chivalry and a number of the earlier novels.

Apart from Don Quixote the only other major work in European literature at this time which could be called a novel is Rabelais's Gargantua (1534) and Pantagruel (1532). Both these can be classed as novels of phantasy, or mythopoeic. It is a kind which has remained popular until the present day. Some notable instances of this 'line' are Gulliver's Travels (1726), Candide (1579), and scores of works which may be loosely described as science fiction.

Cuddon

In England, at the end of the 15th c., the novel was in its infancy. From the closing years of the century there date two important works in the evolution of the extended prose narrative. They are John Lyly's Euphues (in two parts, 1578 and 1580, and Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance Arcadia (1590).

In 1719 Defoe published his story of adventure Robinson Crusoe, one in a long tradition of desert island fiction. From then on the novel comes of age and within another seventy yearsis a major and matured form. Defoe's other two main contributions to the novel form were Moll Flanders (1722), a sociological novel, and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) – a reconstruction and thus a piece of historical fiction.

Books on Fiction

Booth, Wayne: The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second edition. London: Penguin, 1991 (1983)

Lodge, David: The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin, 1992Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith: Narrative Fiction: Contemporary

Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983

Sub-genres

Integrated short storiesArabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio: DecameronJames Joyce: Dubliners

Sub-genres

Romanceany sort of stroy of chivalry or of loveCervantes: Don Quixote (1605-1615)Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th c.)Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur (15th c.)

Pastoral romanceLongus: Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. A.D.)Philip Sidney: Arcadia (1590)

Anti-pastoral:Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895)

Sub-genres

picaresque noveltells the life of a knave or a picaroon who is the servant of severel mastersDaniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722)Henry Fielding: Jonathan Wild (1743)

Sub-genres

novel of adventure / desert island novelrelated to te picaresque novel and the romanceDaniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)R.L. Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883)Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer (1876)

Huckleberry Finn (1885)James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

Sub-genres

Gothic novela type of romance, popular from the 1760s until the 1820s, has terror and cruelty as main themes, impact on the ghost story and the horror storyHorace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764Ann Radcliffe: Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (1818)Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861)R. L. Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Dracula, doppelgänger

Sub-genres

epistolary novelin the form of letters, popular in the 18th c.Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740) and Clarissa

Harlowe (1747, 1748)Tobias Smollett: Humphrey Clinker (1771)

Sub-genres

sentimental novel / novel of sentimentalitypopular in the 18th c., distresses of the virtuous Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

sentimentality in fictionLaurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)

Sub-genres

historical novela form of fictional narrative which reconstructs history imaginativelyWalter Scott: Waverly (1814)William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1847-48)Robert Graves: I, Claudius (1934)William Golding: Rites of Passage (1980)

Sub-genres

documentary novelbased on documentary evidence in the shape of newspapee article, etc.Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (1966)Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955)

Sub-genres

key novelactual persons are presented under fictitious namesAldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (1928) (D. H. Lawrence)

Sub-genres

thesis / sociological / propaganda noveltreats of a social, political, religious problemHarriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

the condition of England novel /regional novelCharles Dickens: Hard Times (1854)Charlotte Brontë: Shirley (1849)

Sub-genres

Utopia[gr. Ou + topos = no place adn eutopia = place where all is well]Thomas More: Utopia (1516)George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735)William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

anti-utopia, dystopiascience fictionphantasy or fantasy

Sub-genres

campus novelhas a university campus as settingMary McCarthy: The Groves of Academe (1952)Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954)David Lodge: Changing Places (1975)

Sub-genres

the saga / chronicle novelnarrative about the life of a large familyJohn Galsworthy: Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)

Sub-genres

time novelemploys stream of consciousness technique, time is used as a themeJames Joyce: Ulysses (1922)Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)

Sub-genres

psychological novelconcerned with emotional, mental lives of the charactersVirginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Building blocks of narrative

• types of character (»roles)• types of event• types of lack and restoration • types of getting from beginning to end

(How do you know it is the end of the story?)• types of setting• types of narrator

characters

characterization: round vs flat characters E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

stereotypes: characters based on conscious or unconscious cultural assumptions that sex, age, ethnic or national identification, occupation, marital status and so on, are predictably accompanied by certain character traits, actions, even values

Arrangement of events

• with a particular kind of beginning and ending orientation, closure, coda

• usually told for a purpose• typically about change:

situation A changes to situation Black leads to

restoration

structure

structure: connecting elements, repetition, parallelism

selection, connection, ordering of information leading to a recognitionmoving to illuminate the beginning

by the ending

SettingThe space where the narrative takes place:

rural setting, urban setting, nature scenes, country houses etc.

Settings often echo or emphasize other features: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Yorkshire moorsWuthering Heights ↔Thrushcross Grange

Earnshaws Lintons harsh, rough warm, soft, civilised

Space and Time

James Joyce, Ulyesses (1922)Dublin, 16 June 1904

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)London, a single day in June,

after WWI

Narrator, narration

narrator: one who tells a story within/outside the space and time of story

Who tells the story? To whom? Why? How?

narration: narrative perspective: point of viewauthor ≠ author's persona (mask) ≠ narrator

(Samuel Clemens vs Mark Twain)

Narrator, narration, narrative• account of a sequence of connected events • told by a narrator

what happened vs how it is told 'story' 'narration'

Narration - rearranges the order of eventse.g., flashback: historical time vs narrated

order - sets up relations between events

e.g., cause and effect

Narrative perspective

• viewing aspect: focus like a movie camera:

choosing, framing, emphasizing, distorting

limited/unlimited (omniscient narrator) stand back: dramatic focus • verbal aspect: voice

Point of view• visual perspective• ideological framework• basic types of narration: 1st person (I-narration)

3rd person (they-narration) e.g., 'window' on text: seems objective

internal vs external restricted knowledge vs unrestricted knowledge(seemed, looked as if)• texts with instability of point of view: watch out for

WHO experiences and WHAT is experienced

Focalization

• external focalization: unidentified narrator• character focalization: a character experiencesfocalizer: the one who is lookingfocalized: what is being focussed on

expression and construction of types of consciousness and self-consciousness

Shifting narrative viewpoints, several narrators:Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Narratology

the study of narrative in literatureEarly examples in the 20th century: Vladimir Propp (Russian Formalist)

Morphology of the Folktale (1928)Claude Lévi-Strauss (Structuralist)

Anthropologie Structurale (1958) (myths)

Gérard Genette, Narrative discourse (1972)

Gérard Genette’s system

Based on the distinction between story and plot (fabula and syuzhet in Russian formalism)

- récit (the chronological order of events in a text or narrative)

- histoire (the sequence in which events actually occur)

- narration (the act of narrating) (Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 1972)

Genette’s system

narrative: the result of the interaction of its component levels3 basic kinds of narrator:

- narrator is absent from his own narrative((‘heterodiegetic narrator’))

- narrator is inside his narrative (1st person) ((‘homodiegetic narrator’))

- narrator is inside his narrative and also main character ((‘autodiegetic narrator’))

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

France: from structuralism to poststructuralismattempt to describe narrative as a formal system

based on the model of a grammar‘The death of the Author’ (essay from 1967)

(against the concept of the author as a way

of forcing a meaning on to a text)S/Z (1970) a critical reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine

text open to interpretation

Task

What can you notice about the following excerpts? (Can you guess the period, the author, the work?)

How is the weather defining the beginning of the book in Chapter 1?

What do we find out about the narrator from the way Mrs Fairfax is introduced in Ch 12?

How is the introduction of the people in Moor house different in Ch 30?

Do you notice anything special about the way the last chapter, Ch 38 begins?

Chapter 1

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early), the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

(Penguin Classics edition, p 39)

Chapter 12

The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction to Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer acquaintance with the place and its inmates. Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education and average intelligence. My pupil was a lovely child; who had been spoilt and indulged (140)

Chapter 30

The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them. In a few days I have so far recovered my health that I could sit up all day, and walk out sometimes. I could join with Diana and Mary in all their occupations, converse with them as much as they wished, and aid them when and where they would allow me. There was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time – the pleasure arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles. (376)

Chapter 38

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor house, where Mary was cooking the dinner, and John cleaning the knives, and I said –

‘Mary, I have been married to Mr Rochester this morning.’ (474)