Intertextuality

Discussing “intertextuality” is a matter of discussing how a text does not exist in a vacuum—it is influenced by the works that have come before it, and it will most likely exert some kind of influence over works to follow. Authors may use this particular technique of referencing the style or content of other authors to give readers some background information, while still giving them a new perspective. As discussed in class, reading is always rereading to a certain extent, because of the literary experiences readers already bring to the table. Themes that are relevant and striking to readers in one context often appear again in treatment by other authors, but in variations that offer the audience a newer author’s own interpretation.

At a foundational level of intertextuality, authors incorporate the ideas, definitions, and concepts of their cultures into their works. According to Julia Kristeva, the attributed originator of this term, “texts […] have to be seen as systems of signs that exist in relation to other systems of signs” (Dictionary of Sociology). Because this situation of pulling in background culture can arise without the express knowledge of either the author or the reader, Roland Barthes points out that this can lead to problems. By his analysis, readers may incorrectly seek “the explanation of a work […] in the man or woman who produced it,” when they should instead examine the broader range of factors that influenced the text; the readers’ better understanding should then lead to something resembling the “death of the Author” (Barthes in Allen 71, 70). This extreme viewpoint opens the door for the claim that literary works depend on each other, as opposed to a work depending only on its author.

A completely original text thus seems impossible, although works can be intertextually related to different degrees. Authors virtually never regurgitate a perfect replica of a previous text—instead, they frequently produce “anagram, allusion, adaptation, translation, parody, pastiche, imitation, and other kinds of transformation” as a way to offer their own unique spin on a technique or theme (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms).

Examples of intertextuality include James Joyce’s Ulysses, which draws from Homer’s The Odyssey, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which, in fact, draws from Ulysses. The perpetual influence of intertextuality becomes even more apparent when readers can learn that Mrs. Dalloway is a roundabout product of a Greek epic poem. In terms of a more recent example, Meg Cabot’s Abandon converts the myth of Persephone into a young adult novel set in a modern Florida high school, while also beginning each chapter with relevant lines from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.

LW

Works Cited:

Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Signet Classics, 2009. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Image – Music – Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Print. In Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Cabot, Meg. Abandon. New York: Point, 2012. Print.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1997. Print.

“Intertextuality.” A Dictionary of Sociology. 3^rd ed. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

“Intertextuality.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3^rd ed. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1953. Print.

Realism

A popular theoretical account of the origins of realism by Erich Auerbach traces the advent of the literary style back to the Christian gospels. Drawing on St. Augustine’s defense of the Gospels’ use of decorum against the classical theorists’ idea that simple rhetoric should accompany simple matters and impressive rhetoric lofty matters, Auerbach turned this arguments into a “new kind of decorum” in which the impressiveness of rhetoric is dictated by the purpose of the writing rather than the subject matter. (82, 83 Mikics)

Realism has several definitions, depending on the context in which it is discussed. Quite simply, it is defined as a literary claim to tell the truth of reality, mirroring Freud’s “reality principle” which stipulated the acceptance of the hard facts of life (Mikics 255). This is exemplified in Lionel Trilling’s definition of the realist novel in regards to literature as a didactic form as, “refine[ing] our moral sensibility by asking us to react in a just and nuanced way to its depictions of social life (Mikics 86).” This definition relates to that of Georg Lukács, who also hinged realism on an idea of a representation of society that includes an emphasis on the interaction of various social classes, though he doesn’t explicitly invoke realism as a means of teaching morality (Mikics 255). The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms separates realism into a literary method based on detailed descriptions that reject the ideas of romance, and a general attitude that rejects idealization in favor of a recognition of the realities and complexities of life. Modern criticism supports this more complicated idea of realism’s purpose, asserting it as more than a simple account of everyday reality and rather as the use of selection, description, and manners of addressing the reader in order to create a “life-like illusion of some ‘real’ worked outside the text.” The realist movement has carried into the 20^th century despite modernism’s attempts to divert from its emphasis on external reality (Baldick).

Realism has undergone ambiguous phases throughout history, such as in the 18^th century when writers such as Defoe presented their novels as a news source, causing a convergence between the novel and journalism (Mikics 255). However, Baldick sites these uses as invoking the methods and attitudes of realism but distinguishing between these uses and the dominant literary trend of the 19^th century novel. It was then that novels such as Elliot’s Middlemarch and Glaubert’s Madame Bovary in describing middle and lower class life and problems of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances existing within the complexities of social life, solidified what we now think of as the classic realist novel.

The scholar Calvin Bedient claims Middlemarch to be the utmost example of realism in literature, referring to it as “dead unto itself” insofar as it there is no separation between its rhetoric and its purpose; it wears “no aesthetic garment (Bedient 71).” In Mrs. Dalloway, realism is presented in the form of an intimate view inside the thoughts of Woolf’s characters through the use of stream of consciousness. Through this detailed portrayal of the minds of many characters, we view their experience of the truth and are privy to social issues that run deep through individuals’ consciousness’s.

Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Bedient, Calvin. “Middlemarch: Touching Down.” The Hudson Review 22 (1969): 70+. Print.

Eliot, George, and Gordon Sherman. Haight. Middlemarch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Print.

Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace and, 1925. Print.

Genre

A genre constitutes a means of classifying literature (Mikics). “Genre” is a term so deceptively basic and so deeply embedded into our collective understanding of literature that many readers, authors, and critics tend to use it without fully exploring two major areas of interest within genre studies: first, what distinguishes one genre from another; and second, what place genre occupies in the history of literature.

The first question has been tackled by a number of critics, but in his article “The Origin of Genres”, Tzvetan Todorov provides a useful amalgamation of the thoughts of these critics regarding the criteria of genre which he presents in four categories:

1. The semantic—the meaning of a text.
2. The syntactic—relationships that are internal to a text.
3. The pragmatic—the relation of a text to its readers.
4. The verbal—the intent behind the words within a text.

It is due to these aspects that, for example, the historical fiction Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and the autobiography Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki cannot share the same genre. Although they both present accounts of the same basic experiences, they differ semantically in that Memoirs of a Geisha uses Iwasaki’s actual life story as the basis upon which to build a fictional story, whereas Geisha, A Life is a historically accurate depiction of her life. This, in turn, effects a pragmatic difference: readers can glean a sense of realness and authenticity from Geisha, A Life that they cannot get from Memoirs of a Geisha.

The second question has been subject to more dispute among critics. Some 20^th century critics have rejected the notion of genre as a concept of continuing relevance. Writes Maurice Blanchot: “A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book arises from literature alone.”

In Todorov’s estimation, this apparent disappearance may be explained by the tendency of authors to attempt to intentionally depart from generic conventions. However, this is not truly a rejection of genre: conscious departure from a genre necessarily implies acknowledgement of and guidance by said genre. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is acutely demonstrative of this phenomenon in its timeline. The story is told reverse chronologically—a clear subversion of the usual order in which narratives are told. But by subverting this norm, Amis implicitly affirms the narrative genre by making the reader constantly aware of its usual presentation of chronology.

Sometimes these departures from generic norms become in themselves so commonplace that they evolve into a new genre unto themselves. Therein lies Todorov’s argument against the idea of disappearing genres: “It is not ‘genres’ that have disappeared, but the genre of the past, and they have been replaced by others.” (Todorov)

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow, Or, The Nature of the Offense. New York: Harmony, 1991. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre À Venir. N.p.: Gallimard, 1959. Print.

Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha. Thorndike, Me: G.K. Hall, 1998. Print.

Iwasaki, Mineko, and Rande Brown. Geisha, A Life. New York: Atria, 2002. Print.

Mikics, David. “Genre.” A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. 132-33. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 159-70. Print.

Chronotope

Mikhail Bakhtin put forth the theory of the literary chronotope as referring to the unity of time and space inherent to a narrative (1). The chronotope was initially used in genre theory in helping categorize the major chronotopes of the western novel (2). Chronotopes are also regarded as studies in narrative imagination, i.e. readers visualize for themselves the entire world of the narrative as a changing spatial situation with an accompanying change in time (3).  Thus chronotopes refer both to particular narrative genres and particular worldviews (2).

Previous to Bakhtin, space and time in narratives were frequently regarded distinct from one another. He writes that time and space are not separable; events are always correlated to a chronology (time), and each narrative thus has an “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” in constructing a particular world (2). The chronotope is characterized by intersections of spatial and temporal indicators that make up a “concrete whole” (3).

The lack of a systematic definition of chronotope has led to a proliferation of types and categorizations. When speaking of genre, for instance, Bakhtin introduces chronotopes based on novelistic time such as the folkloric chronotope or the chronotope of the adventure novel of everyday life, with different types of space related to historical verisimilitude and on the level of relationships between the hero and spatial forms in the novel (4).  Examples include abstract space, which does not represent any real-life place, or concrete space, which intends to represent a specific location at a historical point of time. Minor chronotopes of environment may include alien, native, static, dynamic, etc (4).  Later critics have expounded on chronotopic categorizations; Keunen, who proposes, for example, the teleological chronotope, or the dialogical chronotope, types based upon where and when the conflict takes place in the narrative (2).

Ex 1: “The Colonel’s Daughter” by Robert Coover

This story takes place in a den in an unnamed country where several men are planning a coup, but wonder who will be the one to betray them, while the colonel’s daughter becomes the object upon which each character projects their particular thoughts. At the end of the story, one character “leaves the room in search of the toilet. When he returns” the coup has failed, the Colonel is dead, the funeral ceremony is in progress, and the daughter has agreed to enter a convent. The major space chronotope is abstract; both space and time become compressed as all action takes place within the room and outside world events which should have taken months have already occurred, converging back inside the space of the den.

Ex 2:  Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway occupies a concrete space, which is the post-war London Woolf lived in. Details are given to provide verisimilitude, like describing particular places like St. James Park and including symbols like Big Ben. The time-space relationship is compressed, and the narrative centers around the relationships—whether implicit or explicit—of the characters in the novel who are unified by their occupation of the same space and time. This can thus be understood as a dialogical chronotope. Relationships between characters and the motion of the narrative are founded upon objects sharing a space-time position. One example is Septimus, sitting in Regent’s Park, sees images of the dead and of Evans (Woolf, 69). Peter Walsh, passing the same location at the time Septimus and Rezia are there, sees the couple and understands that Rezia looks desperate, though neither notice him (69).

References

(1)  Baldick, Chris. “chronotope.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. : Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Date Accessed 20 Oct. 2013 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-202&gt;.

(2)  Bemong, Nele, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen de ermmerman, and Bart Keunen. Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives. New Hampshire: Academia Press, 2010.

(3)  Keunen, Bart. Time and Imagination: Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture. United States: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

(4)  Vlasov, Eduard . “The World According to Bakhtin: On the Description of Space and Spatial Forms in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Works.” Canadian Slavonic Papers. 37.1/2 (March-June 1995): 37-58. Web.

(5)  Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. United States: Harcourt Inc., 1925. Print.

(6)  Coover, Robert. “The Colonel’s Daughter .” New Yorker. 2 Sep 2013: n. page. Web. 20 Oct. 2013. <http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2013/09/02/130902fi_fiction_coover?currentPage=all&gt;.

-AQ

Metalepsis

Metalepsis was first identified and defined by the literary theorist Gérard Genette who wrote within the context of the Structuralist movement. There are separate meanings for rhetorical metalepsis, and narratological metalepsis, and this glossary entry is concerned with narratological melapsis. In “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme,” metalepsis is summarized in the following formulation,

“Genette defines narrative metalepsis as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.) or the inverse” (234–35). Metalepsis thus designates the transgression of a line of demarcation that authors usually do not touch, namely the “shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the. “world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (236)” (Cohn and Gleich).

The term “metalepsis” is slippery and seems to defy a concrete definition, but it most widely agreed upon as a bleeding between different narrative boundaries within a holistic narrative. Metalepsis is a phenomenon that is confined to narratives which explicitly or implicitly have more than one narrative world or level. If a narrative is wholly concerned with a static and single world or perspective, there is no room for the crossing of narrative boundaries, and thus no room for metalepsis. Another way to think of the kinds of narratives that allow for instances of metalepsis is to think of “frame narratives” that have “embedded narratives” within them (Baldick). These kinds of multi-layered narratives have stories within stories, and realities within realities, and metalepsis occurs in the cracks in the borders between these distinct stories and realities. We can think of metalepsis as the space between nesting matroyshkas, where each individual painted doll represents a distinction between narrative worlds, or as Pier writes in “The Living Handbook of Narratology, “the world of the telling and the world of the told.”

Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” offers an exemplar of metalepsis as the book unfolds in a dizzying vascillation and permeation between the “frame narrative” of Charles Kinbote’s manical explication of the late Charles Shade’s poem, and the “embedded narrative” of King Charles II of the faraway mystical land of Zembla. The boundaries between Kinbote and King Charles become more and more blurred, more and more mimetic, as metalepsis renders the two men into one character. If “Pale Fire” is an elaborate game of a novel, then the technique of metalepsis is used by Nabokov to gradually knit his narratives together with a seamless suture.

“Line 894: a king

Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch” (Nabokov, Pale Fire).

In the above passage from “Pale Fire” the narrator, Charles Kinbote, blames his American colleagues for conflating him with the “unfortunate monarch,” King Charles II. Here we have a metaleptic meeting of the two distinct narrative worlds of Zembla and Kinbote’s new home of American academia.

Another example of metalepsis in narrative can be found in the Robert Coover’s disturbing short story, “The Babysitter.” In this story a young woman is babysitting for a family, and she becomes the subject of multiple sexual fantasies that are only loosely demarcated as realities or fever dreams within the text. In “The Babysitter” violence and perversity bleed into a seemingly innocent setting of domestic responsibility as perscpectives shift with abandon and pronouns are left unidentified.  The reader is left to piece together the breaking of the narrative boundaries in order to come to a conclusion about what occurs in the fragmented time and space of the story.

Work Cited:

Baldick, Chris. “metalepsis.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. : Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Date Accessed 20 Oct. 2013 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-711&gt;.

Coover, Robert. Pricksongs [and] Descants. New York: New American Library, 1970. Print.

Dorrit Cohn. and Lewis S. Gleich. “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme.” Narrative 20.1 (2012): 105-114. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Oct. 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu/&gt;.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire: A Novel. New York: Berkley, 1975. Http://www.saasmar.ru/russian/resource/english/esl/10/2011_2012/3/VladimirNabokov%20-%20Pale%20Fire.pdf.

Pier, John: “Metalepsis”, Paragraph 1. In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. Web. 20 Oct. 2013

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Mise-en-Abyme

The term “mise-en-abyme” is a phrase whose meaning encapsulates the endless cycle of comprehending and interpreting meta-fictional reference. In its most literal sense, the French term translates to “to put in the abyss” (Hollahan 3). For narrative – and other kinds of art as well, such as painting – the phrase has to come to mean a moment or site of self-reflection, or a sense of self-consciousness that heightens the reader’s awareness of the artistic medium (Oxford English Dictionary). This can range from a literal, physical reflection in a work to an abstract, conceptual self-awareness. An example of the former would be the double mirror effect, which is present in paintings like Velazquez’s “Las Meninas,” but also frequently appears in the novel and in film: when two mirrors face each other at a certain angle, they show a seemingly endless repetition of the mirrored image, each within a subsequent mirror. French novelist Andre Gide coined the term (for what it means in art) in 1891 (Hollahan 358). In a personal journal entry, Gide used examples of heraldic images to describe his insight. Old shields and coats of arms would mimic the double mirror effect – a smaller shield would appear in the larger shield, sometimes more than once in the image (Hollahan 358).

An example of conceptual self-awareness would be employing a novel within a novel, or perhaps the more common example of a play-within-a-play. For instance, in Hamlet, the title character stages a play to “hold, as ‘twere, the mirror/up to nature” (3.2.20). It is not only a play-within-a-play – the inscribed performance includes details from the broader plot (and it even describes its mirror-like quality). In Gide’s own novel The Counterfeiters, the character Edouard, who happens to be a novelist, invokes an equally intense example:

“What I want is to represent reality on the one hand, and on the other to stylize it into art…I invent the character of a novelist, whom I make my central figure; and the subject of the book…is just that very struggle between what reality offers him and what he desires to make of it.” (Gide 173)

Besides heightening one’s awareness of a text, the use of mise-en-abyme raises questions about the act of experiencing, understanding, and interpreting a work. It can alter the fundamental narrative structures that the reader depends on. It can put the narrative into an “abyss” of infinite reflection and cause anxiety or “a sense of vertigo” (Cohn 108). After all, what is the author saying about us, the readers, when fiction is made to reflect reality – are we supposed to feel fictional as well?

Works Cited

Cohn, Dorrit. “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme.” Narrative Vol. 20: 105-114.

Hollahan, Eugene. “Reviews: The Mirror in the Text.” Studies in the Novel Vol. 22: 357-362.

Gide, André. The Counterfeiters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1951, c 1927.

“Mise en abyme.” Oxford English Dictionary. 1968.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1987.

Point of View

On a simple level, point of view refers to the perspective from which a story is seen through and told from. It is in one sense something like a location – a vantage point from which the story is observed and presented (Baldick). In another sense, it is something like a painting – a representation of the story influenced by a story teller whether it be “a narrator, a character, or another hypothetical entity” (Niederoff).

In both cases, point of view relates to a narrator or some form of story teller observing something. Indeed, unlike other literary devices that are often concrete in nature (Niederoff), point of view exists as a relationship between the observed and the form the observed takes when it is presented to us, between observation and narration (Klepper, 5).

Various “types” of points of view have been theorized. A very common distinction is made between first-person (those using “I”) and third person narration. First-person narration is usually limited to one character’s knowledge and experiences. These first-person narrators usually have no access to the thoughts of other characters. Third-person narration on the other hand can either follow a character (and be confined to that character’s knowledge and experience) or can be omniscient and have unrestricted knowledge of the story (Baldick). In any case, the point of view from which the story is told from is influenced by a degree of factors, from the “position, personality, and value” of the story teller (Niederhoff) to the society and surroundings of that story teller (Klepper, 12).

In it interesting to note that the concept of point of view began to emerge in the 19^th century and was first theorized by Henry James (Klepper, 9). James recognized that problem of “breadth and infinity” that existed within novels, in that within a novel, the number of relationships was practically infinite (Klepper, 13). By using point of view to create a “centre of interest” (Klepper, 13), the “problems of economy and proportions” (Klepper, 14) could be solved. It is the “centre of interest” created by point of view that both serves as a mode of observation and a normalizer that holds the narrative as a composition together (Klepper, 15).

As examples, take for instance Martin Amis’ novel, Time’s Arrow. In the beginning the narrator says, “I moved forward, out of the blackness…” (Amis, 3) and begins to observe a world that seems to be moving backwards. Throughout the novel, this narrator makes moral judgments about events and characters that influence the way in which he tells his story. Contrary to this approach, Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs.Dalloway, is told in third person and shifts to follow a variety of characters. Readers move from following Rezia and her feelings, “For she could stand it no longer…” (Woolf, 22) to Septimus who thinks “…She [Rezia] was always interrupting.” (Woolf, 24).

 

Works Cited:

Niederhoff, Burkhard. “The Living Handbook of Narratology.” Perspective – Point of View. N.p., 11 June 2011. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Baldick, Chris. “Point of View: The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.” Oxford Reference. Oxford, 2008. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Klepper, Martin. “Introduction.” Introduction. The Discovery of Point of View: Observation and Narration in the American Novel 1790-1910. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011. 1-40. Print.

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York City: Vintage International, 1991. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York, New York: Harcourt Inc, 1925. Print.

Frame Narrative

A frame narrative is a story within a story (and often, within other stories) in which an overarching narrative relays the primary plot (Baldick). There are at least two plots in frame narrative, the main plot and the less exciting narrator’s. Frame narratives do not feature an all-knowing storyteller, so the events’ verity is uncertain, as the different storytellers all experience the story second-hand (MacKay 56). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein exemplifies this fracturing. Shelley divides the narrative amongst three narrators: the main narrator, Walton, hears the monster’s story second-hand, through Dr. Frankenstein. Therefore every event in the story passes through several narrators before reaching the reader, making it impossible for any omniscient narration. How can the reader be sure that the narrators’ portrayals of the monster are accurate? Who is the judge of the story’s fairness? To what extent should the reader trust Walton (MacKay 57)? Frame narratives separate the reader from the main story, showing how “Other voices and narratives take over and rewrite the narrative one posits of one’s life” (Salotto 190). Frame narratives capture memories, but second-hand memories, and they demonstrate the futility of attempting to objectively and completely reconstruct one’s life (Salotto 190).

Two examples of frame narrative are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Canterbury Tales follows a pilgrimage in which every traveler must tell stories to the others (Chaucer 21). Thus the poem turns into a collection of short stories, held together by the narrative of the peoples’ travels. Precious little happens over the journey, so the stories (filled with potty jokes in iambic pentameter) become the main source of entertainment. In Wuthering Heights, the reader learns of Catherine and Heathcliff’s romance through the eyes of a tenant who moves onto the property after the fact, who learns it through an old servant (Bronte 33). Not only does separation from the main action make wholly trusting the story difficult, but it also give a sense of finality to the story before it has even begun. Frame narrative, in short, separates the reader from the main plot, making it difficult to trust the narrators and bringing the story into a different time-fame, with the author presenting the main story as only a second-hand recollection.

Ruth Wellin

Baldick, Christ. “Frame Narrative (frame Story).” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd ed. Oxford University. Oxford Reference. Oxford University, 2012.

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Oxford: Oxford University, 1998.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Modern Library, 1921.

MacKay, Marina. “Narrating the Novel.” Cambridge Introductions to Literature : Cambridge Introduction to the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy, 2011. 39-59.

Salotto, Eleanor. “”Frankenstein” and Dis(re)membered Identity.” The Journal of Narrative Technique” 24.3 (1994): 190-211.

Fabula and Sujet

Originating in Russian Formalism, the terms fabula and sujet describe two different aspects of the timeline of events in a narrative. The fabula of a story is the sequence of events as they are experienced in the world of the characters. In contrast, the sujet is the sequence of events as they are presented to the reader. This distinction is based in what literary scholar Dr. Ritivoi calls the “fundamental narratological assumption: that the universe of utterance and the uttered world … are distinct” (27). The author’s words as they are given to the reader make up the sujet, but the characters belong to a world where those same actions proceed in a chronological manner, known as the fabula. If the reader and the characters proceed through the story in the same sequence, fabula and sujet coincide. However, creative choices in crafting the sujet profoundly influence the reader’s interpretation of the fabula. The sujet affects the reader’s perception of cause and effect, allows for satisfactory moments of discovery, and can build suspense or relieve it.

The reader only has direct access to the sujet, but from that knowledge he or she reconstructs the fabula. As author Doxiadis describes, “Narratives flow linearly in time, yet they mediate between worlds that are largely nonlinear … like specific paths taken through these worlds—partial, linear views of nonlinear environments” (81). The fabula is a linear path of events in the characters’ world, yet the author’s crafting of the sujet can better convey the rich non-linearity of the world in which these characters exist.

In Mrs. Dalloway the sujet frequently departs from the fabula as characters remember past events, offering flashbacks for the reader. This effect parallels the non-linear form of the characters’ thoughts as they constantly make connections between experiences in other times and places. In other narratives the sujet and fabula differ even more drastically. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s autobiography, the chronology of his life is rarely considered. Stories shift from one moment to another with coherency found in topic or motivation rather than time. Nabokov acknowledges this, warning readers, “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.” (139). His construction of the sujet offers readers a richer sense of the fabula of his life than if the two ran synchronically.

Baldick, Chris. “Fabula.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2012. Web. 19 Oct. 2013

—. “Sjuzet.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2012. Web. 19 Oct. 2013

Doxiadis, Apostolos. “Narrative, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Logic.” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 2.1 (2010): 77-99. Project Muse. Web. 16 Oct. 2013.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York, NY: Vintage International, 1989. Print.

Ritivoi, Andreea D. “Explaining People: Narrative and the Study of Identity.” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1.1 (2009): 25-41. Project Muse. Web. 16 Oct. 2013.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Ed. Mark Hussey. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

 

– Hanna Torrence

Character

The simplest definition of a character or persona in narrative literature is that of an entity existing in the story world. Some critics argue whether a character can be considered as distinct productions that require knowledge about humanity, or merely “recurrent elements in discourse.” The current literary theory seems to go with the first description; characters at their base are “a paradigm of traits” with a “cultural code” that binds them together to create meaningful entities. (Jannidis) Characters are beings subject to the narrative action, but because of their essentiality to the narrative, they are different from other story-world entities. Indeed, characters “motivate and determine the narrative communication.” (Jannidis) According to Gerrig and Allbritton, readers actively participate in the creation of characters, and this is why the human element is so necessary. The entity of a character is actively formed between the text and the way the reader interprets it: there is a “complex interaction of what the text says about the characters and…what the reader knows about the world…about people and, yet more specifically, about “people” in literature.” (Schneider) The more relatable a character is to the reader, the more character-like it is—that is to say, characters are the vehicle of many meanings, only by their understandability to the reader. Some psychological studies have shown that readers apply human psychological models to literary works. The big difference in our mental creations of characters versus other people, however, is that in literary works we are given access to a plethora of thoughts and emotions. In this way, readers gain a feeling of closeness to well developed characters; we form “some kind of mental representation of them, attributing dispositions and motivations to them.” (Schneider) Authors of narrative shape our mental formation of characters by controlling our focus; “through choices of narrator and point of view, authors can potentially bring readers’ causal analyses into line with their own-and potentially make the case for the potency of particular causal antecedents and consequences.” (Gerrig & Allbritton) These models combine our psychological knowledge of other humans with the information given about the character, rendering a narrative character as more than just a written element: they are the embodiment of human psychology in the story-world.

The most poignant examples of characters are often their first lines in a narrative. Here are two examples of character introductions. In these introductions, we are given the first insights into the characters mind, and build our important first impressions of them.

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers…It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
(I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as a fish in my closet, and how all the little success I’d totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.)”

Excerpt from The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath (pg 3)

“The big body pottered on, with slow competence: yes, it really knows its stuff. I kept wanting to relax and take a good look at the garden—but something isn’t quite working. Something isn’t quite working: this body I’m in won’t take orders from this will of mine…Are we okay?”

Excerpt from Times Arrow (pg 6), by Martin Amis

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York City: Vintage International, 1991. Print.

Gerrig, Richard J. & David W. Allbritton (1990). “The Construction of Literary Character: A View
from Cognitive Psychology.” Style 24, 380–91.

Jannidis, Fotis. “Character.” the living handbook of narratology. University of Hamburg, 14 Sep 2013. Web. 17 Oct 2013. <http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/character&gt;.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York City: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.

Schneider, Ralf. “Toward A Cognitive Theory Of Literary Character: The Dynamics Of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35.4 (2001): 607. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.