Storytelling in Northanger Abbey

In this novel about reading, and writing, it is fitting that the first person narrator is in fact the author of the novel. While that first person voice comes through more frequently in the middle and the end of the text, we must be aware that she is the first person narrator throughout. When she allows this voice to come through, she is acting in two positions: an instructor to her reader's and a defender of the novel as an art form. While the commentary she provides in both areas are very interesting and a deserved focus of this text, I would like to trace the narrator's its effect on storytelling. This narrator is not a part of the story and her only relation to the characters of the story is that she is making them up and developing their stories.
Yet, throughout the bulk of the novel, Austen is acting as a third person narrator that can only know and see what Catherine learns and sees simultaneously. This gives us a picture into the interiority of Catherine (self-concious about her position in society and her position with Henry, yet also excited by adventures resembling the romances that she reads). However, when it comes to moving the plot quickly, Austen often abandons this close tie with her character of choice and moves all of the characters about like chess pieces. In particular, the last two chapters, Austen has completely abandoned Catherine in favor of a third person narrator that can see the actions of all characters, even if Catherine cannot. When she dives into the interiority, it is not Catherine, but a combined Catherine and Henry's interiority: "They felt and they depolored-- but they could not resent it." All throughout the text, Catherine would have died for an opportunity to know the sentiments of Henry, and now it seems that their sentiments are tied together and identical. I belive that this abandonment of Catherine is because in the interest of efficiency, staying close to the interiority of one character is not feasible.
Why follow Catherine as a narrator in this novel? For Nancy Armstrong, the true testament of the novel is to express the excesses of individualism and guage how such acts of individualism are received through the plot. Yet, I would argue that the characters that truly exhibit an excess of individuality are Henry (defying his father by marrying Catherine) and Isabella (actively attempting to engage in relationships that will alter her station in life). The plot effects vary, the one who acts out individuality for love is rewarded with happiness and the one who acts out individuality for greed is left in loneliness. Yet Catherine safely toes the line throughout the text and never acts out of incivility by her own doing. Even when she is outwardly scorned (John not stopping the carriage and General Tilney turning her out of the house) she does not retaliate at all or defend her position acively to those characters. So, why follow her, in this marriage of novel and individual?

The Form of the Novel and the Individual

"No other medium then availabe could have reconstituted the imagined relation between individual reader and national readership with the rhetorical dexterity of the novel" -Nancy Armstrong How Novels Think
As I had said in class today, I found this one of the most compelling quotes of her examination on the relationship between the rise of the novel and the rise of the individual. I was specifically interested in what about the form of the novel gave it the rhetorical dexterity to carry the responsibility of the individual all alone. In looking at a few of the texts we read over the semester, I want to try to make an addition, or perhaps an amendment to Armstrong's thorough argument.
I believe that the novel, more than any other form of literature prior to it, allowed a reader to have unique access to the whole interior of another human being over the course of a story. Yes other forms could illustrate aspects of the individual. The Odyssey shows a man defying not only the social contract, but the gods themselves, in his quest for greatness. Greece could not have wanted every citizen to play the part of Odysseus in their state. Soliloquoys in Shakespeare's plays allowed a viewer to see what a certain character was thinking while no other character in the play was aware of such insight. Sermons and religious writings could warn against excessive individualism as a sin against God and the community. Even the Bible itself follows individual after individual in their exhibitions of faith much to the dismay of dozens of communities over Judeo-Christian tradition. So what is it about the novel that can allow Nancy Armstrong to stake the two together so inseparably?
I have two theories that rely heavily on one another: privacy and the 1st person narrator. The novel was the first form of text that people would take into a room and read alone. The rise of readership truly allowed a body of text to have any power whatsoever, particularly the power to create the individual. All of the other forms of literature were stories shared in a community. The reader had to be separated from that community if they were to understand themselves as apart from that community in a personal way. Secondly, the 1st person narrator (in all of the facets that I've discussed in previous blogs) allowed a reader an intensive inside look into the workings of an individual acting in excess.
In my opinion, a third person narrator, no matter how close to the situation that narrator may be to a single character, could not act in this unique role that Armstrong is giving to the novel. Having an outside person tell a story that does not include them can only express the interiority of the individual in a limited way. That barrier presented by a narrator other than a character of the text is similar to the barrier of a community in the viewing of a play or the listening of an epic tale. And yes, a soliloquoy did allow insight into the interiority of a play, but it was limited in length and depth. The prose writing of fiction allowed a reader to become intimate with a character for the days or weeks it took to read their narrative.

Translating the Rise of the Novel into Something More (or Less) Understandable

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."

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.

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.

Style in Crusoe and Pamela

In Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, it is particularly interesting to track how conscious the authors are of engaging in this new form. Since other forms of literature had their roots well established in classical tradition, they did not have to defend their style in-text. However, when something different arises in the field of literature, it seems that they cannot have value in and of themselves, without first defending that value tooth and nail.
The physical act of writing, and the awareness thereof, is so heavy in both of these iconic novels that some unintended consequences arise. The author must make their first-person narrator show that they are writing down these words, or else the words must have happened out of midair. In most contemporary novels with a first person narrator, the story is told without any mention of the fact that it is being written down, let alone the experience of writing it down being critical to the plot of the story. It becomes too problematic, as one can see in both Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, that it can interfere with the progression of the story (which most likely accounts for the fact that most authors now ignore it entirely). In Robinson Crusoe he runs out of ink and cannot journal day by day, which in terms of the plot of the story shifts from extremely specific copying to broad summaries of years or even an entire decade. In Pamela, she must depend entirely on opportunities to write in order to tell her story at all. She cannot orally tell the story to us, because Richardson has to account for the fact a reader is reading words printed on a page. For almost every single letter, Pamela must justify the time lapsed between letters, the reason for writing, and the emotions felt towards the specific reader (mother, father, Mr. B, or Mrs. Jervis). As she becomes unable to write letters to her parents, she turns to writing letters that will not be sent, or a diary style. Even the act of writing it down is a question of validity or plausibility for the novel at this time.
The unintended consequence of this style is that a story MUST be written in the past tense, and told AFTER the storyteller has had time to see the whole consequences, alter the memory in their mind, or justify their own actions. Why can we depend so willingly on the memory or truthfullness of Crusoe or Pamela as distanced story tellers? Even the act of writing down a memory will in some way alter the true experience. In Defoe's other blockbuster novel, Moll Flanders, the author must show that Moll is writing down her story at the end of the life. But with fifty years of distance from the onset of the story, just as with Crusoe, how reliable of a narrator can they be? It would be like listening to the crazy ramblings of a grandparent about "when I was your age," knowing full well that a majority of the story is exaggerated, fabricated, or about someone else entirely. I'm not saying that is what is going on in these novels, but the necessity for an author to show that the story is being written down, and making that experience plausible, in fact makes it fantastic and less believable because the narrator is always telling the story after it happened and they had time to think about it. It makes a character like Moll Flanders less sincere about her moral rehabilitation, Crusoe less credible about his intense work ethic, and Pamela less righteous in comarison to every other character. I mean, if a sixteen year old girl was ranting to you about a highschool senior who had a crush on her or a fight she had with her caddy friend, wouldn't she always make herself out to be the angel and the opponent into the devil? But if you witnessed the events, you might see that Pamela was making herself out to be different then she truly was. Perhaps Pamela was leading Mr. B on from the start, and Mr. B was the one resisting for the duration of the plot. Perhaps Pamela was the one who laid traps for Mr. B and hid in the closet until he fell asleep and then molested him. All I'm saying is that the style of always needing to tell a story retroactively, as a defense for the validity and plausibility of encountering a story in print, in fact undermines the credibility of the storyteller.

"Religion" in Robinson Crusoe

I have delayed writing an entry on this subject because I have had difficulty wrapping my head around exactly what Defoe was doing with religion in his first book. I imagine an 18th century England that is very senstive towards religion, not only values of the religion but also which group one associates with. As we have also learned, the idea of reading or writing a novel also presented a sensitive, precarious issue for those involved, not to soften the readers too much and present a "religious," moral message that makes reading worthwhile or meaningful. These summative statements really do a disservice to the many layers of the precarious situation of novel reading or writing at this early stage, but I imagine Defoe was in an exceedingly difficult position in trying to write a fantastic, yet plausible book that had a message (and that message of course should coincide with the maximum number fo readers). For this reason, I see Robinson Crusoe's religious overtone forced by Defoe, and transparent enough for any reader to feel connected to it tangentially. The true focus, to me, is in the industrious nature of Protestantism and how it fuels capitalism.

In Kim's report yesterday in class, she talked about Weber's thesis on Protestantism as the center of Capitalism. The rise of the individual in Prostentantism is exhibited in the personal diaries, the personal charting of good deeds, the self-realizations for callings in life, some are even called to "make money" (oh how things have changed since then). The development of this sense of self and the self's role in attaining salvation (or attaining knowledge if one will be saved or not) actually has a secular effect. The actually tenents of religion are almost completely irrelevant. Robinson Crusoe's enlightenment on the island comes from RANDOMLY opening the Bible to any page and reading a singular line and adopting that line as his temporary slogan. The same effect could come from randomly opening the Koran, the Torah, or even a non-religious text such as an anthology of William Shakespeare or Benjamin Franklin's almanac.

By using religion to fit the prototype of what a "Novel" should look like (interesting that a something considered "novel" had a prototype), Defoe actually shows how little associating with a specific Religion matters. The truly important task for religion to accomplish is sustainability and adaptability. We can see this idea today, where conversations across Religions about Religion are tenuous, awkward, and generally pointless (I would compare it to a political debate about abortion between two opposing sides, the conversation will almost never end with someone changing their view). And yet, as fiercely as people attach themselves to a specific Religion, the principles of all faiths seems to adapt to the economic system that we, in the United States, live in: Capitalism. The forced, awkward presentation of Religion in Robinson Crusoe previews the environment that we live in today, where it is not variations of Christianity that create sensitive issues, but total differences in religion. And yet, for as much as religion matters to the individual, Defoe shows that deep down it is as grounded and meaningful as flipping open a book, reading a sentence, and using that sentence for whatever purposes one wants.