11 Literary Narrative Fiction
Story, Plot, Narrative Voice
Narratives
Personal, political, historical, legal, medical
narratives: narrative’s power to capture
certain truths and experiences in special ways
- unlike other modes of explanation and
analysis such as statistics, descriptions,
summaries, or reasoning via conceptual
abstractions
The spectrum of fiction
fact – fiction – truth?
History
Realism Romance
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.
Nonlit. nonnarr.
nonfiction
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
Building blocks of narrative
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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: flat vs round characters
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)
flat: easily recognized, easily remembered
but a failure to realize the complexities of
the ordinary human mind
round: more highly organized
Flat characters,
according to Forster
Flat characters were called “humours” in the
seventeenth century, and are sometimes
called types, and sometimes caricatures. In
their purest form, they are constructed round
a single idea or quality: when there is more
than one factor in them, we get the beginning
of the curve towards the round. The really flat
character can be expressed in one sentence
such as “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.”
Round charactes,
according to Forster
The test of a round character is whether it is
capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it
never surprises, it is flat. If it does not
convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It
has the incalculability of life about it—life
within the pages of a book. And by using it
sometimes alone, more often in combination
with the other kind, the novelist … harmonizes
the human race with the other aspects of his
work.
… vs stereotypes
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
Forster vs Aristotle
“CHARACTER,” says Aristotle, “gives us qualities,
but it is in actions—what we do—that we are
happy or the reverse.” We have already
decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we
must face the consequences of disagreeing
with him. “All human happiness and misery,”
says Aristotle, “take the form of action.” We
know better. We believe that happiness and
misery exist in the secret life,
Forster vs Aristotle, cont.
which each of us leads privately and to which
(in his characters) the novelist has access. And
by the secret life we mean the life for which
there is no external evidence, not, as is
vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a
chance word or a sigh. A chance word or sigh
are just as much evidence as a speech or a
murder: the life they reveal ceases to be
secret and enters the realm of action.
Story: 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
Plot: 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 Brontë, 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 Brontë, 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 Lévi-Strauss (Structuralist)
Anthropologie Structurale (1958) (myths)
Gérard Genette, Narrative discourse (1972)
Gérard Genette’s system
Based on the distinction between story and plot
(fabula and syuzhet in Russian formalism)
- récit (the chronological order of events
in a text or narrative)
- histoire (the sequence in which events
actually occur)
- narration (the act of narrating)
(Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 1972)
Genette’s system
narrative: the result of the interaction of
its component 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 Balzac’s Sarrasine
text open to interpretation
Task
What can you notice about the following excerpts?
(Can you guess the period, the author, the work?)
How is the weather defining the beginning of the
book in Chapter 1?
What do we find out about the narrator from the
way Mrs Fairfax is introduced in Ch 12?
How is the introduction of the people in Moor
house different in Ch 30?
Do you notice anything special about the way the
last chapter, Ch 38 begins?
Chapter 1
There was no possibility of taking a walk
that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in
the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning;
but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was
no company, dined early), the cold winter
wind had brought with it clouds so sombre,
and a rain so penetrating, that further
outdoor exercise was now out of the question.
(Penguin Classics edition, p 39)
Chapter 12
The promise of a smooth career, which my
first calm introduction to Thornfield Hall
seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer
acquaintance with the place and its inmates.
Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she
appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured
woman, of competent education and average
intelligence. My pupil was a lovely child; who
had been spoilt and indulged (140)
Chapter 30
The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House,
the better I liked them. In a few days I have so far
recovered my health that I could sit up all day,
and walk out sometimes. I could join with Diana
and Mary in all their occupations, converse with
them as much as they wished, and aid them
when and where they would allow me. There was
a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind
now tasted by me for the first time – the pleasure
arising from perfect congeniality of tastes,
sentiments, and principles.
(376)
Chapter 38
Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we
had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were
alone present. When we got back from
church, I went into the kitchen of the manor
house, where Mary was cooking the dinner,
and John cleaning the knives, and I said –
‘Mary, I have been married to Mr
Rochester this morning.’
(474)