In thinking about the "Rise of the Novel," for my own sake, I've been trying to understand the concept in smaller schemas that one day may add up to a more wholesome understanding of this rise of the novel. For the sake of this blog entry, I want to put into words my understanding of the rise of the author as a part of the rise of the novel. I briefly jumbled my way through starting this thinking process in class yesterday, and I would like to somewhat more coherently jumble through it here.
I have noticed a trend as we read about Manley's proposed responsibility of a writer to provide a plausible plot and character, about the new responsibility Samuel Johnson was placing on writers to teach ideals in there writing rather than expose reality in its entirety, and about Wordsworth's proposed responsibility an author has to stay true to his genius even when readers disapprove. The author is growing from this person that is a small part of the "bookselling machine," equal to that of the horsecart driver, to the primary vehicle for art and human understanding in the culture. Wherease early on, the author needs to be instructed on how to create a "plausible" scenario, they ultimately reach a pinnacle where they are the primary means of instruction for the masses.
It seems to me that as the novel originated and developed, there were some hesitations about what exactly the purpose or the vehicle for such a form should be. For example, the author we opened this class with, Eliza Haywood, seemed to embrace this new form as simply a way to make money. With superficial characters that change rapidly and a plot that disjointedly jumps from one scene to the next seemingly just to test a slightly new love triangle out, Haywood illustrated that she was a prolific writer and could make a living doing so. Defoe would add to this legacy, emphasizing the economy of this new market and how to benefit financially from it. And yet, to me their writing is less polished and more prone to sloppy mistakes, not because they are not as talented writers as later "authors," but because the emphasis was not yet on the author of a novel being this vehicle for "veiled beauties." Of course, writers before this time (Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Chaucer) and even of this time (Alexander Pope, Johnation Swift) were seen as conduits of high art, but not within the context of this new form that focused so heavily on the imitation of real life and the interiority of humanity.
Because of this inferiority that the new form seems to have in the art world, and the increasing success that this new form begins to have in the marketplace, a merger between these two opposite worlds seems to collide. Not to say that many of those authors I listed in the past or present did not also enjoy financial success through their writing, but the creation of an entire print market did not coincide with the growth of their chosen form (satire, plays, poems, epic poems). Once the novel begins to be recognized as art, the only place for the author of that art is that of genius, for Johnson this is a person that knows better than the rest of people what is truly good for them and what they should be reading, and for Wordsworth this is a person that knows better than the rest of people what good art is and has the responsibility to keep producing high art for the sake of ungrateful recipients. Either way, as the author becomes more financially successful, and more artistically respected, they illustrate that the "rise of the novel" could really be rephrased as the "rise of the authors of the novel."
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Narratology in Tristram Shandy
While I thought my examination on what it means to tell a story from a narratorial perspective could be put to rest after Fielding's Shamela, Tristram Shandy seems to be the apex for such a conversation to take place. Whereas other authors we've read seemed, to me, like their wheels were spinning in mud because of the new FORM of the novel (the necessity to be telling a story while also acknowledging that this story must be written down, and therefore told always in the past tense and the possibility of self-editing), Laurence Sterne brilliantly embraces the fact that the narrator, Tristram, is writing down this supposed autobiography and laughingly highlights the ridiculous questions posed by the literary and religious authorities about this new form.
To the question of purpose of writing a novel, Sterne points out that "from the first moment I sat down to write my life for the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction, has a cloud insensibly been gathering over my father." The experience is to be laughed at, whereas his opinions should be taken in as moral and social instruction. How can we understand this, when it is through the experiences of Pamela and Robinson Crusoe that the reader was supposedly learning through novels? Wasn't it the experiences of D'Elmont that were seen to "soften" the readers and make them more vulnerable to sin? For Sterne, it is all of the outside digressions and opinions that he includes (that are also quite amusing) that we should be learning from, and not the experiences that all seem a product of bad luck.
To the question of plausibility, we saw Richardson dance through time and space with Pamela, who would be writing exhaustive letters with a few pages of paper and minutes between interruptions. Sterne plays with this notion several times, giving life to the characters of his story only when his pen is writing directly about them. On several occasions, he claims to leave characters for a specific duration of time so that he can tell a different stories or digressions. "To explain this, I must leave him upon the bed for half an hour-- and my good Uncle Toby in his old fringed chair sitting beside him." About a dozen pages later, Sterne finally returns to them, saying "I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour, and five and thirty minutes are laps'd already." Sterne is showing how silly it is to try and make a written story plausible when the nature of writing such a story about a fiction is implausible by nature.
In as much conclusion as a short blog entry on the topic can reach, I think that it is only be showing how silly some of the conventions or expectations of this young genre were. By shedding these conventions through humor, Sterne has freed his writing to be easily the most modern piece of fiction we have read to date.
To the question of purpose of writing a novel, Sterne points out that "from the first moment I sat down to write my life for the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction, has a cloud insensibly been gathering over my father." The experience is to be laughed at, whereas his opinions should be taken in as moral and social instruction. How can we understand this, when it is through the experiences of Pamela and Robinson Crusoe that the reader was supposedly learning through novels? Wasn't it the experiences of D'Elmont that were seen to "soften" the readers and make them more vulnerable to sin? For Sterne, it is all of the outside digressions and opinions that he includes (that are also quite amusing) that we should be learning from, and not the experiences that all seem a product of bad luck.
To the question of plausibility, we saw Richardson dance through time and space with Pamela, who would be writing exhaustive letters with a few pages of paper and minutes between interruptions. Sterne plays with this notion several times, giving life to the characters of his story only when his pen is writing directly about them. On several occasions, he claims to leave characters for a specific duration of time so that he can tell a different stories or digressions. "To explain this, I must leave him upon the bed for half an hour-- and my good Uncle Toby in his old fringed chair sitting beside him." About a dozen pages later, Sterne finally returns to them, saying "I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour, and five and thirty minutes are laps'd already." Sterne is showing how silly it is to try and make a written story plausible when the nature of writing such a story about a fiction is implausible by nature.
In as much conclusion as a short blog entry on the topic can reach, I think that it is only be showing how silly some of the conventions or expectations of this young genre were. By shedding these conventions through humor, Sterne has freed his writing to be easily the most modern piece of fiction we have read to date.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Continued Thoughts on Narration during "The Rise of the Novel"
On this journey of piecing together understandings about how the "novel" came to be, I am becoming more and more interested in how the way of transmitting a story is evolving at this time period, and how it has changed to what we recognize as an acceptable "novel" today. Having now read some of Fielding's work, I am even more interested in the awareness authors of this time have of themselves, this new genre, and the gravity of having a first-person narrator tell a story.
The term "unreliable narrator" is used when, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the person telling the story cannot be trusted or who's point-of-view is compromised. This phenomenon may occur for dozens of reasons, Poe often has his stories told from insane, jealous, or vengeful narrators, Lolita is told by a pedophile, and The Sound and the Fury's most reliable narrator is arguably a mentally challenged man-child. But in all of these stories, we can tell that the author employs these narrators as unreliable to achieve a specific response for their readers. Yet, I believe, as my last blog suggests, that the nature of telling a story from a first-person for Defoe and Richardson create unreliable narrators because of their hyper-awareness of a reader response to this new genre. As I was pointing out last week, Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Pamela must somehow tell their stories, while also justifying that the words are written down, not by an author but by the title character, creates an unreliable narrator because the story is inevitably told after it has happened. Richardson actually achieves the most accurate possible type of narration under these circumstances by having the story told in increments immediately after the action has taken place, rather than years later. But even in this clever form, the narrator can never overcome the form and create a believable story.
Henry Fielding, in Shamela, humorously shows just how unreliable a narrator Pamela was, partly because of the form of writing that Richardson employs. He points out that in order to get closer to the action of the story, interestingly in this truer version of events, Shamela writies in a tense that does not reflect her writing situation. "Odsbobs! I hear him coming in at the door. You see I write in the present Tense as Parson Williams, says." Throughout this entire story, Fielding shows the humour and unreliability of the genre of novel, or form of first-person narrator in that genre. And yet, Fielding's perceptiveness of form does not absolve him of his own hyper-awareness of writing and desire to show people how to read his work in this new genre. He spends the entire preface of his major work Joseph Andrews distilling the differences between comedy and burlesque, defending its validity with antiquity, and explaining what people should and should not find funny. The emergence of this form of writing is so clear in the writing itself. Once the reader and writer were able to accept that a story could be told by a character, without having to justify the words being printed on a page, more or less reliable narrators could be created by the author's design rather than by the genre's design.
The term "unreliable narrator" is used when, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the person telling the story cannot be trusted or who's point-of-view is compromised. This phenomenon may occur for dozens of reasons, Poe often has his stories told from insane, jealous, or vengeful narrators, Lolita is told by a pedophile, and The Sound and the Fury's most reliable narrator is arguably a mentally challenged man-child. But in all of these stories, we can tell that the author employs these narrators as unreliable to achieve a specific response for their readers. Yet, I believe, as my last blog suggests, that the nature of telling a story from a first-person for Defoe and Richardson create unreliable narrators because of their hyper-awareness of a reader response to this new genre. As I was pointing out last week, Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Pamela must somehow tell their stories, while also justifying that the words are written down, not by an author but by the title character, creates an unreliable narrator because the story is inevitably told after it has happened. Richardson actually achieves the most accurate possible type of narration under these circumstances by having the story told in increments immediately after the action has taken place, rather than years later. But even in this clever form, the narrator can never overcome the form and create a believable story.
Henry Fielding, in Shamela, humorously shows just how unreliable a narrator Pamela was, partly because of the form of writing that Richardson employs. He points out that in order to get closer to the action of the story, interestingly in this truer version of events, Shamela writies in a tense that does not reflect her writing situation. "Odsbobs! I hear him coming in at the door. You see I write in the present Tense as Parson Williams, says." Throughout this entire story, Fielding shows the humour and unreliability of the genre of novel, or form of first-person narrator in that genre. And yet, Fielding's perceptiveness of form does not absolve him of his own hyper-awareness of writing and desire to show people how to read his work in this new genre. He spends the entire preface of his major work Joseph Andrews distilling the differences between comedy and burlesque, defending its validity with antiquity, and explaining what people should and should not find funny. The emergence of this form of writing is so clear in the writing itself. Once the reader and writer were able to accept that a story could be told by a character, without having to justify the words being printed on a page, more or less reliable narrators could be created by the author's design rather than by the genre's design.
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