09 Literary Narrative Fiction

History, Genres, Analysis

Narratives
Personal, political, historical, legal, medical narratives: narratives 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 language kinds 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 to the 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

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Lit. narr. fict.

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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)

Novel In: 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 shortstory 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 6070.000 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 and adaptable to a seemingly endless variety of topic and themes.

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 Heptamron, 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, 1992 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith: Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983

Sub-genres
Integrated short stories Arabian Nights' Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio: Decameron James Joyce: Dubliners

Sub-genres
Romance any sort of stroy of chivalry or of love Cervantes: Don Quixote (1605-1615) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14th c.) Thomas Malory: Le Morte DArthur (15th c.) Pastoral romance Longus: Daphnis and Chloe (2nd c. A.D.) Philip Sidney: Arcadia (1590)

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

Sub-genres
picaresque novel tells the life of a knave or a picaroon who is the servant of severel masters Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722) Henry Fielding: Jonathan Wild (1743)

Sub-genres
novel of adventure / desert island novel related to te picaresque novel and the romance Daniel 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 novel a 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 story Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764 Ann 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, doppelgnger

Sub-genres
epistolary novel in 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 sentimentality popular in the 18th c., distresses of the virtuous Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740) Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) sentimentality in fiction Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768)

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

Sub-genres
documentary novel based 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 novel actual persons are presented under fictitious names Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (1928) (D. H. Lawrence)

Sub-genres
thesis / sociological / propaganda novel treats of a social, political, religious problem Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) the condition of England novel /regional novel Charles Dickens: Hard Times (1854) Charlotte Bront: 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: Gullivers Travels (1726, 1735) William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954) anti-utopia, dystopia science fiction phantasy or fantasy

Sub-genres
campus novel has a university campus as setting Mary McCarthy: The Groves of Academe (1952) Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954) David Lodge: Changing Places (1975)

Sub-genres
the saga / chronicle novel narrative about the life of a large family John Galsworthy: Forsyte Saga (1906-1921)

Sub-genres
time novel employs stream of consciousness technique, time is used as a theme James Joyce: Ulysses (1922) Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)

Sub-genres
psychological novel concerned with emotional, mental lives of the characters Virginia 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 B lack leads to restoration

structure
structure: connecting elements, repetition, parallelism selection, connection, ordering of information leading to a recognition moving to illuminate the beginning by the ending

Setting
The space where the narrative takes place: rural setting, urban setting, nature scenes, country houses etc. Settings often echo or emphasize other features: Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights (1847) Yorkshire moors Wuthering 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 view author 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 events e.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 experiences focalizer: the one who is looking focalized: what is being focussed on expression and construction of types of consciousness and self-consciousness Shifting narrative viewpoints, several narrators: Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Narratology
the study of narrative in literature Early examples in the 20th century: Vladimir Propp (Russian Formalist) Morphology of the Folktale (1928) Claude Lvi-Strauss (Structuralist) Anthropologie Structurale (1958) (myths) Grard Genette, Narrative discourse (1972)

Grard Genettes system

Based on the distinction between story and plot (fabula and syuzhet in Russian formalism) - rcit (the chronological order of events in a text or narrative) - histoire (the sequence in which events actually occur) - narration (the act of narrating) (Grard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 1972)

Genettes system
narrative: the result of the interaction of its component levels 3 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 poststructuralism attempt 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 Balzacs 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)