Modulo B

L. e L. Angloamericane / Corso di Lett. Inglese I anno

Parte “Il testo narrativo”
Laurea Triennale
a.a. 2009/2010

Gli aspetti basilari del testo narrativo sono stati illustrati a lezione attraverso l'analisi di brani esemplificativi di autori classici e contemporanei, fra cui da A. Behn, Oroonoko e J. Anim-Addo, Imoinda; D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe e U. E. Winkfield, The Female American; H. Melville, "Bartleby" e Moby-Dick; N. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; H. James, "What Maisie Knew" e Portrait of a Lady; S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; T. Dreiser, Sister Carrie; S. Bellow, Seize the Day; T. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; P. Roth, Sabbath's Theater. Con riferimento al saggio di James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008), si sono considerate domande quali: quanto è reale il realismo? cosa costruisce una metafora, e un personaggio? come si riconosce in narrativa la perfezione del dettaglio? cosa è e come agisce il punto di vista? cosa s'intende per identificazione con la finzione e perché la finzione ci commuove? Scopo delle lezioni è stato mettere a fuoco una definizione di fiction. Qui di seguito il materiale (12 handouts) distribuito a lezione.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 1

Handouts for Module B are based on the recommended reading: James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008).

MODULE B READING LIST

A. Behn, passages from Oroonoko  also available on: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1310016&pageno=2

J. Anim-Addo, and passages provided in class from Imoinda

D. Defoe, passages from Robinson Crusoe also available on: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=71208

U. E. Winkfield, and passage provided in class from The Female American

H. Melville, "Bartleby" in The Heath Anthology and passages from Moby-Dick also available on: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2489

N. Hawthorne, passages from The Scarlet Letter in The Heath Anthology

H. James, "What Maisie Knew" and passages from Portrait of a Lady in The Heath Anthology also available on: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7118

S. Crane, and passages from The Red Badge of Courage also available on: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/463

T. Dreiser, and passages from Sister Carrie also available on: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5267

S. Bellow, and passages provided in class from from Seize the Day

T. Pynchon, and passage in The Heath Anthology from The Crying of Lot 49

P. Roth, and passage provided in class from Sabbath's Theater.

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THE STORY                          FACTUAL/FICTIONAL NARRATIVE                                 THE NOVEL

Look at the different versions of the story below:

1. He looked over at his wife. “She looks so unhappy,” he thought, “almost sick.” He wondered what to say.

= direct + indirect speech (character’s thought narrated as a speech to himself)

2. He looked over at his wife. She looked so unhappy, he thought, almost sick. He wondered what to say.

= indirect speech (character’s internal speech reported by narrator)

3. He looked over at his wife. Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick. What the hell should he say?

                = free indirect speech (narrative moves away from narrator and closer to character)

4. He looked at her. Unhappy, yes. Sickly. Obviously a big mistake to have told her. His stupid conscience again. Why did he blurt it? All his own fault, and what now?

                = stream of consciousness, interior monologue

Compare the move from standard indirect speech to free indirect speech below:

1.Ted watched the orchestra through tears.

2.Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears.

The presence of the author/narrator depends on the word “stupid”; yet, we cannot tell to what extent the word “stupid” belongs solely to the narrator, partly to the narrator and partly to the character, or entirely to the character. In other words, does Ted know that he is stupid and that the author through the narrator infers that he is stupid? A GAP opens between Author and Character and the Reader inhabits omniscience and partiality at once. Irony inhabits such gap. Interpretation is making sense of such gap.

Every novelist makes a world and gives us personal, idiosynchratic visions about such world. The novelist is always working with at least three languages: the Author’s, the Character’s, the World’s. Flaubert wanted the novel to be like a film in order to bring the Reader as close as possible to the narration: “An Author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere” he declared in 1852. He introduced the flaneur, a stand-in for the Author so that he could be at once a realist and a stylist, a reporter and a poet. Through this camera eye, the world  is more than a slice of life; it becomes a ballet.  The narrator is at once a writer and not really a writer. This tension between Author and Character presents a modern paradox: narration is both lifelike and artificial.

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Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 2

WORKSHOP: Analyze how these two narratives move towards the character and the author.

James’s free indirect style inhabits three perspectives: the adult world’s view about Mrx. Wix; Maisie’s version of the adult world’s view; Maisie’s view of Mrs. Wix. Interpret whose word is “embarrassingly” and whose word is “huddled”. Use a good monolingual dictionary to explore the meaning of words. Consider how free indirect speech works in and out of touch with the character.

Crane’s writing refuses to become involved in the emotion of the material, narrative is cinematic, as Flaubert would have wanted it to be, a zoom on the horror of the war insisting on its anti-sentimentality; every detail is noticed. Interpret the contrast between the dead body and the living ants, their indifference to human mortality.

Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897)

It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay, really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wox had accompanied her into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the ladies she found there—a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping ropes and thick black stitching, like ruled lines for musical notes on beautiful white gloves—announce to another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix ever so publicly so. Neither this, however, nor the old brown frock nor the diadem nor the button, made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through everything, the charm of Mrs. Wix’s conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly safe; safer than any one in the world, than papa, than mamma, than the lady with the arched eyebrows, safer even, though so much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore, on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl was faintly conscious that one couldn’t rest with quite the same tucked-in and kissed-for-good-night feeling- Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kernsal Green, where they had been together to see her little huddled grave.

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.

Consider the following stamen from  J. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello:

The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, cast up upon the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. “I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them,” says he, “except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.” Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proof of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 3

Henry James’s What Maisie Knew: third person narration of Maisie, which brings us into the girl’s confusion about being bounced between two divorced parents. James’s free indirect speech allows three different perspectives at once: the official adults’ judgement on Mrs. Wix (this is THE WORLD, what Roland Barthes calls “the reference code”—governesses should be paid little or nothing); Maisie’s version of the official view (what a child might understand of the worlds of the adult lady); Maisie’s view of Mrs. Wix (she was soothingly safe). Maisie’s childish words, “mamma”, “tucked-in and kissed-for-good-night feeling” are contrasted with “huddled grave” which signals a language a child cannot possibly know. This is James’s language not the child’s. And what about “embarrassingly”? This is the child’s, because only a child is embarrassed by watching the grief of the adult she depends on. But is is also the World’s, we can imagine the ladies saying that it is embarrassing that the governess takes Maisie to visit the grave of her own dead daughter. Henry James’s third person narration of Maisie brings us into the girl’s confusion about being bounced between two divorced parents and among different governesses in a world that considers them servants. The confusion is made clear by the use of free indirect speech, which in this case is represented by the added words “embarrassingly” and “huddled”: take these two words out of the sentence and you are left with factual description without opinions, without indirect speech.

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is a cinematic passage. The calm horror is followed by a zoomlike action focusing on the corpse bringing the Reader closer and closer to the horror. The prose is not sentimental; it is rather made of exact details as if the protagonist noticed everything. And the ants on the corpse telling us that life goes on.

In life as in literature we focus on details. Literature teaches us to notice the details life is full of. Literature makes us better noticers of life, better readers of both life and literature. Literature gives us exact words that make details palpable. The history of the novel can be traced through the development of free indirect style as well as though the rise of detail. Defoe is full of particulars but a contemporary writer like J. M. Coetzee observes: (see below). Coetzee describes a writing in which the modern cult of detail has not yet been established, no noting and renoticing as Flaubert who can spend many words on an object that is no longer seen in the novel, as if the novel had to become an act of painting. Roland Barthes in “The Reality Effect” argues that irrelevant detail is a code we no longer notice and one that has little to do with how life really is. Objects sometimes do tell the real, they simply signify it in order to create a realistic effect. The implication is that realism in general is a business of false denotation, an artificial tissue of arbitrary signs. Realism offers the appearance of reality, “the referential illusion”, but it is fake. Literature like fashion, Barthes argues in Mythologies, makes one read the signifying of things rather than their meanings. Nevertheless, we should consider that even though fictional reality is made up of such effects, realism can be an effect and still be true.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 4

THE NOVEL AND THE TRUTH

1600: news pamphlets replaced the ballad as journalism, with the consequent need to define factual as opposed to fictional, journalism and history on the one hand, storytelling and entertaining writing on the other. The accusation of authoring libels shifted from antigovernment (no link to telling or not telling the truth) to being fictional. The Stamp Act of 1724 reinforced the division, focusing on content and defining news as that content which is taxable. The novel came to be defined as that which is sufficiently removed from factual events to be protected from legal action.

William Congreve (1692) draws a distinction between the romance (lofty language, miraculous contingencies, impossible performances) and the novel (more familiar, not so distant from our beliefs). In late 1700 Clara Reeve emphasizes that the novel deals with such things as may happen to our friend or to ourselves, that we are affected by the joys and distresses of the person in the story as of they were our own. Thus novels are truthful reports on the actual world. Claims of truth characterized the texts that are considered the first two English novels: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (7119).

In Oroonoko, Aphra Behn places herself in the midst of the story to say that the novel should avoid plotting and scheming; she insists, “I was myself an eye-witness” and she emphasizes that in Oroonoko’s state of innocence lying did not exist. In other words, she accepts the law against fictions. In so doing we might argue that she states that she is writing a novel which is NOT a novel, because it is NOT a fabrication!

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is exemplary of how lies can be presented as truth by employing numerous literal, circumstantial details. By the time Crusoe is on his island, we are ready to believe that the impossible is true and our belief is reinforced by the exact details: he was on the island  28 years, 2 months and 19 days; we believe the story because Defoe foregrounds the protagonist: Crusoe, the impossible individualist hero, becomes ordinary through scrupulous possible details about his everyday life. The character Crusoe dominates the story so much that the first being he encounters after 20 years of solitude becomes his slave. When Robinson Crusoe was published there was no distinction between NEWS and FICTION: Defoe was a journalist who became a novelist.

As the culture began making clearer demands for factual or fictional narrative the idea that a narrative was true became harder to substantiate and the possibility that it could be fictional arose. Defoe claims his RC to be true—“a just history of fact.” Crusoe is at once true and false, a fiction with a true existence and a true story with a fictional structure. The distinction between fact and fiction is deliberately unclear. Defoe in Serious Reflections declares in impressive legal terms:

Robinson Crusoe, being at this time in perfect and sound mind and memory, thanks be to God, therefore, do hereby declare their objection is an invention scandalous in design, and false in fact; and do affirm that the story, though allegorical is also historical; and that it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortunes…

Defoe declares that Robinson Crusoe, a fictional character of his own creation, is true. He also declares that the work is both allegorical and historical: whose life does he allegorize if it is an allegory? There is evidence that Defoe was alluding to himself, both successful and imprisoned writer and journalist.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 5

THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

At what historical moment does narrative become what we call novelistic? The search for origins depends on its method: a beginning, Edward Said argues, is always the indication of a later time, place or action. Thus, in evolutionary terms, the early history of the novel appears as the history of something that is not yet the novel, as the victory of what is new/novel over romance. In osmotic terms, the novel appears on the literary scene because of a structural change in society, the advent of the middle-classes. Through a convergent framing, the novel comes out of everything that preceded it without causality and intentionality. A fourth model regards the novel as Foucauldian discourse, as an ensemble of written texts that define and limit it, as ruptures and transformations of particular ideologies.

Truth and falsehood, fact and fiction are not opposites but part of a continuum and they are abstract categories which we employ for interpretation.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is framed twice, overtly and covertly: it proclaims “this work is true” and it masks its actual proclamation that “this work is really not true”. The interplay between fact and fiction becomes fundamental; a suspension of disbelief implies that readers already know that the work proclaiming that it is telling the truth is fictional. Printing technology permitted rapid publication of matters of public interest—news, journalism, or as such works were called in the sixteenth century NOVELS. The main form of journalism in the sixteenth century was the printed ballad, the equivalent of modern newspapers. Ballads always claim to be new, even though they were often reprinted so many times that they became legends, folktales instead of news. Thus a contradiction at the origin of the news/novels discourse. In the seventeenth century the ballad was replaced by the newsbook as major form of journalism. A more pressing need to define legally the nature of factual news which might be banned as opposed to fictional news grew as a consequence. This process contributed to defining the novel/story on the one hand and journalism/history on the other. A clear social cause of this splitting into two genres was the legal definition of factual and fictional narrative. The 1724 Stamp Act defined news as taxable. The novel became a gnre in which events were reported in a manner sufficiently removed from reality to be safely protected from legal action.

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) are considered the originators of the English novel. Compare their truth claims in the incipits:

I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this Royal Slave, to entertain my reader with adventures of a feigned hero, whose life and fortunes fancy may manage at the poet's pleasure; nor in relating the truth, design to adorn it with any accidents but such as arrived in earnest to him: and it shall come simply into the world, recommended by its own proper merits and natural intrigues; there being enough of reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the addition of invention.

I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down; and what I could not be witness of, I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself, who gave us the whole transactions of his youth: and though I shall omit, for brevity's sake, a thousand little accidents of his life, which, however pleasant to us, where history was scarce and adventures very rare, yet might prove tedious and heavy to my reader, in a world where he finds diversions for every minute, new and strange. But we who were perfectly charmed with the character of this great man were curious to gather every circumstance of his life.

I WAS born in the year 1632,in the city of York, of a good family,

though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen,

who settled first at Hull.  He got a good estate by merchandise,

and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he

had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very

good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson

Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we

are now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe;

and so my companions always called me.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 6

THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

The two beginnings of the English novel take us to the New World, the Americas. The birth of the novel historically coincides with the birth of the European colonial project. Standing between fact and fiction, the novel stands also as imperial genre, not only because it thematizes empire, but also because it structures a narrative voice that holds the narrative together and constructs a universal and homogenous subject, held together by the annihilation of other subject positions. In addition, English language and literature participate to colonization by becoming pedagogical tools in the colonies.

Oroonoko stands witness to and is part of the colonial imperial project; questions of race, gender and power are powerfully portrayed. Written and narrated by a white female voice it celebrates a black slave; the narrator is unable to follow the protagonist in his rebellion and as a result the text portrays his dismemberment. The text addresses the question of a colonized subject who is completely annihilated; in addition it entirely effaces the Black woman by leaving Imoinda passively in the background of the story. Although written by a woman, Oroonoko shows no sisterly attempt to turn Imoinda into a subject.

Robinson Crusoe shows its protagonist on an island in “the other world” for 28 years, 2 months and 19 days: the control of time shows a dominating narrative about an individualist character, Crusoe, “the universal representative” according to Coleridge. He is a practical and religious man, an allegory of the author’s autobiography and a “true story” of an adventure overseas. He is a fiction with a true existence and a true story with a fictional structure. The text thematizes colonialization by showing how Crusoe enslaves Friday (a Caribbean cannibal), teaches him English (the word Master before teaching him yes and no) and converts him to Christianity. Their relationships juxtaposes emotions and rationality, nature and culture, colonies and empire.

Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe are only two of the many texts about the early Transatlantic. The novel emerges during a historical period of instability not only about the category of truth but also about the category of virtue—it is difficult to establish whether the text is telling the truth and whether the protagonist is virtuous. Novels represent and perform this cultural crisis, in particular when they deal with emarginated subjects such as slaves and women.

Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767) is informed by Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe but revises the narrative of capitalist accumulation, colonial conquest and political imperialism to engage the fantasy of utopianism in a feminist cross-racial community. The heroine represents a radical alternative to Crusoe. So-called female Robinsonades were popular in the eighteenth and ninenteenth. Winkfield underlines her unique non-domestic existence and her American identity: her Native American culture as daughter of an Indian Princess and her Cristianity as nice of an English minister enable her to engage a life that would be unthinkable for an English female character and to become a powerful religious leader. Ultimately, she chooses to remain on the desert island.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 7

AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: REALISM IN ROMANCE, MYSTERY, ADVENTURE

HENRY JAMES (The Art of Fiction, 1888): “We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair…”

TONI MORRISON (1984): “narrative is the principal way in which human knowledge is made possible”

LESLIE MARMON SILKO (Ceremony, 1978):                    You don’t have anything

if you don’t have the stories.

Their evil is mighty

but it can’t stand up to our stories. 

So they try to destroy the stories

Let the stories be confused or forgotten.

They would like that.

They would be happy

Because we would be defenseless then.

Questions of function, of form, of structure, of content: for James fiction is an aesthetic object that creates a world; for Morrison and Silko, fiction acts in the world.

Note that Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter; A Romance

“The Custom House” must be passed through before we enter the LETTER. The novel creates a set of anticipations that shape our understanding of what follows. We first meet the letter A, then Hester who transforms the letter from “badge of shame” and Adultery to “mystic token of integration” and Able, Admirable, Agency capable of transforming her cottage at the edge of the Forest into a meeting ground for dissidents, a counseling center particularly for unhappy women. The A reaches back to national origin, recovers the Puritan past of America, not with nostalgia but rather to look forward together with Hester to “a brighter period”, a future of America. The LETTER A becomes a story of socialization and thus of reciprocity between text and context. The A is first, and it is a cultural artifact expressing the needs for a society; it is Hester who makes America her home; she returns to the colony that had tried to make her a slave. Hester merges love and the world, the personal and the political, the social and the historical. Sacvan Bercovitch states that in The Scarlet Letter, “Hawthorne’s portrait of Hester is a study of the lover as social rebel,” not as witch, as adulteress, not as sexual transgression but “as an individualist of revolutionary commitment.” For this reason the community comes to regard Hester with Affection and Admiration. Hester is a romantic heroine who defiantly impersonates free will, linking colonial America and the USA with her embroidery that makes the A glitter and hides the dark original sin. Hester expresses the myth of continuing revolution and the letter expresses revelation through enlightenment and concealment, BOTH/AND not either/or. This makes it possible to embrace many truths, to be in tune with Melville’s and Dickinson’s idea of truths. Dissent becomes an agent of reciprocity. And democracy is defined as negotiation. Indeterminacy is rechanneled into pluralism. It is the story of an outcast that rejoins the community by compromising for principle—and works out her compromise by writing, representing it, by articulating the relationship between the social and the rhetorical.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 8

HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

Indeterminacy, hesitation, continuous search for the exact word, beginning with the title and with the introductory chapters, as well as the incipit of the story itself: “Call me Ishmael …” It is a novel of process, as evasive as the white whale; it is clear that the novel is full of meanings but pinning down the meaning of the novel is almost impossible. The narrator, Ishmael, is eclectic, ready to

employ many means, polysemic like the story he is telling. “Loomings” highlights the dialectic between engagement and distance—this applies both to Ishmael and the Reader. Look at the syntax on the first paragraph pointing at conflicts within the psyche of the narrator. Look at the insistent use of the negative. What kind of story is this that seems to get nowhere? Ishmael is a humble member of the crew as the ship is propelled by Ahab’s compulsive will. Everyday occupations make the Pequod a static world; hence the voyage is inward, into reflections, into thinking. His refusal to give us a reliable name has many effects: he is just one among many Ishmaels; he is a real person concealing his real name under a fictional mask; he is inviting us readers to make him, to participate in authoring the story he is telling. The narrative voice is inconsistent, indeterminate and the text is writerly (R. Barthes): Moby-Dick offers a staged debate. E, M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel states: Melville is a prophetic writer, “his theme is the universe or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to ‘say’ anything about the universe; he proposes to sing” (116). Forster goes on to say that the world in Moby-Dick is not an allegory of the real world but it is the world of fiction which reaches back though its song to the mystery of the real world. It points out that experience is ultimately irreducible to representation, that thought is not the exact meaning of experience. For this reason Moby-Dick is full of meanings and even its symbols, like Queequeng’s tattooed body and coffin, do not mean by themselves but in relation to the context that the novel creates for liberating a network of speculations. As Ahab pursues the white whale, Ishmael develops a lexicon—the whale remains just what it is, a whale, but interpretations multiply as to what it means to the Captain, the Narrator, each member of the crew and the readers. The text focuses on the radical ambiguity of language, of naming. The whiteness of the whale is as ungraspable as the whiteness of America—the America of post-revolutionary freedom and slavery; the post-abolitionist America that reduces blackness to a specter as Toni Morrison aptly points out one century after Melville.

As THE NOVEL progresses towards MODERNISM the emphasis moves from PLOT to CHARACTER: Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote are the same at the end as at the beginning of their stories. Their STORIES are thus linear: they begin at the beginning, develop in the middle and come to a conclusion. As characters start changing, beginning at the beginning is no longer the rule. Ford Madox Ford (The English Novel):

What was the matter with the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went straightforward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintanceship with your fellows you never do go straightforward. You meet an English gentleman at your golf club. He is beefy, full of health, the model of the boy from an English public school of the finest type. You discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly neurasthenic, dishonest in matters of small change, but unexpectedly self-sacrificing, a dreadful liar, but a most painfully careful student of Leptidoptera and, finally, from the public prints, a bigamist who was once, under another name, hammered on the Stock Exchange . . . To get such a man in fiction you could not begin and work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him in with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over his past …

The Novel thus is the site of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and investigation into humanity.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 9

WORKSHOP: Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853)

Wall Street

John Jacob Astor (July 17, 1763 – March 29, 1848), born Johann Jakob or Johann Jacob Astor, was the first prominent member of the Astor family and the first multi-millionaire in the United States. He was the creator of the first trust in America, from which he made his fortune in fur trading, real estate, and opium. From humble origins in Germany as a flute maker with his brother George, they emigrated to London and John Jacob then went to the America following the American Revolutionary War. He built a fur-trading empire that extended to the Great Lakes region and Canada, and later expanded into the American West and Pacific coast. In the early 1800s he diversified into New York City real estate and later became a famed patron of the arts. At the time of his death in 1848, Astor was the wealthiest person in the United States, leaving an estate estimated to be worth at least $20 million. According to a Forbes article, his estimated net worth as a fraction of the U.S. gross domestic product at the time would be equivalent to $110.1 billion in 2006 U.S. dollars, making him the fourth wealthiest person in American history. His great-grandchild, John Jacob Astor IV (July 13, 1864 – April 15, 1912) was an American millionaire businessman, real estate builder, inventor, writer, a member of the prominent Astor family, and a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish-American War. He died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

The narration begins with “I am . . .” DESCRIBE this voice and its role in the story. Define his position in society. Narrator? Protagonist? Point of view? What are his advantages and limitations? Are there any contradictions involved in being an "unambitious lawyer" who admires John Jacob Astor?

Before he introduces Bartleby, he introduces Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut. What is the role of these characters in the story? How does the narrator’s view about them shape our evaluation of these characters?

The narrator introduces Bartleby as “the strangest” among the scriveners in the first lines: how does this shape our understanding of the protagonist?

Does Bartleby change in the course of the story?

Does the Narrator’s understanding of Bartleby change?

Does Bartleby have any power over the Narrator?

Would you have behaved differently from the Narrator towards Bartleby?

Do you sympathize with Bartleby or the Narrator in the end?

Isolation and alienation: social and/or psychological issues?

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 10

ANALYZING NARRATIVE/FICTION/NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES

Narrative is integral to human experience; we use it constantly to make sense of experience, to remember and relate events, to establish patterns of behaviour. We tell stories all the time.

A story has a development, characters, a setting, is told by a narrator, and claims to represent 'the world' in some fashion. A story always has a relation with reality and the truth.

1. Plot: arrangement of events, in relation to one another, to create significance, extend the meaning. Relationships that create significance make the plot.

2. Characters:  explore certain aspects of human experience, depict particular traits of human nature; they may represent only one or two traits or they may represent very complex conflicts, values and emotions.

3. Setting: often has culturally coded significance used in contrasting and comparative ways to add significance. It is the world of the story.

4. Narrator(s): someone (or more than one) who tells the story, who sees things from a certain perspective, or point of view. A narrator may be external, telling the story from the outside with an ostensibly objective and omniscient voice. An omniscient external narrator may carry us into the thoughts of a character, who is unaware of the narration or the narrator. This narrator may achieve the narrative by telling or by showing, keep the reader in a relation of suspense to the story (we know no more than the characters) or in a relation of irony (we know things the characters are unaware of). A narrator may be internal as a character within the story, telling the story in the first person. A narrator/character may be reliable, telling the truth, or unreliable, lacking in perspective or knowledge.

5. Point of view: who is thinking what is being stated? Who is actually using that exact word to describe such event, feeling, character, thought, or action? Narration, no matter what type of narrator creates the story, opens up various possibilities of knowledge, and interrogates the making of meaning. Point of view is essential in determining such possibilities of knowledge. As readers we must constantly interrogate the relationships among character(s), narrator(s), the world within and outside of the story, the author.

6. Figurative language: characterizes the sensibility and understanding of characters and establishes thematic and tonal continuities and significance.

7. Representation of reality: fiction that claims to represent 'reality' is known as realistic—mimesis; however, any narrative is presented through symbols and codes, thus fiction cannot represent reality directly, and different narratives and forms of narrative represent different aspects of reality, and represent reality in different ways. A narrative might adhere closely to time and place, another may represent psychological, moral or spiritual aspects through symbols, characters used representatively or symbolically, improbable events, and other devices. All narrative requires selection, and therefore exclusion as well, and it requires devices to put the selected elements of experience in meaningful relation to each other (key elements such as coincidence, parallels and opposites, repetitions).

8. World-view: narrative represents uses cultural codes and language to represent experience. Inevitably, it must be read for its structure of values, for its understanding of the world, or world-view, and for its ideological assumptions. Every narrative makes claims, often implicitly, about the nature of the world as the narrator and his or her cultural traditions understand it to be. The reader of fiction must be aware of the shape of the world that the fiction projects, the structure of values that underlie the fiction (what the fiction explicitly claims and what it implicitly claims through its codes and its ideological understandings); aware of the distances and similarities between the world of the fiction and the world that the reader inhabits; and aware of the significances of the selections and exclusions of the narrative in representing human experience.

9. Interpretation: Someone is always speaking in a novel, whether it is a narrator who is not a character within the fiction, or a character within the narrative. Consequently both the particular ideas, attitudes, feelings, perspectives of that speaker, and the concerns and attitudes of the novel as a whole, will be presented through the prose The analytical reader needs to understand what information is conveyed and how it is conveyed.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 11

See this descriptive passage from D.H. Lawrence,’s Sea and Sardinia:

Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I have got so far.

Note how the prose registers step by step the painful farewell by using a form of repetition that is rather alteration: the movement of the prose is like the movement of the writer who in the end has only reached the path.

See this description of flying from Saul Bellow’s “The Old System”:

On the airport bus, he opened his father’s copy of the Psalms. The black Hebrew letters only gaped at him like open mouths with tongues hanging down, pointing upward, flaming but dumb. He tried—forcing. It did no good. The tunnel, the swamps, the auto skeletons, machine entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark trembling in fiery summer, held his attention minutely ... Then in the jet running with concentrated fury to take off—the powr to pull away from the magnetic earth; and more: When he saw the ground tilt backward, the machine rising from the runaway, he said to himself in clear internal words, “Shema Yisrael,” Hear, O Israel, God alone is God! On the right, New York leaned gigantically seaward, and the plane with a jolt of retracted wheels turned towards the river. The Hudson grteen within green, and rough with tide and wind. Isaac released the breath he had been holding, but sat belted tight. Above the marvellous bridges, over clouds, sailing in atmosphere, you know better than ever that you are no angel.

Note how the rhythm of the passage never settles down and how new language captures the new (new in the history of the novel) experience of flying: the sentence “sailing in atmosphere”conveys the freedom of flying.

See this blasphemous passage from Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater:

Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts—uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit—suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may once have groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late mother.

It equalizes all levels of diction to portray the scandal of male sexuality within the patriarchal order. The inversion of the verb “piercing” however allows Roth to invert the assumed male-female order.

See this passage from Willa Cather’s Death Comes from the Archibishop:

He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.

Sometimes when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life—some part of which they knew nothing.

Note how calm the narrator is while he is lying in bed, approaching death, and  thinking about his old life in France, his new life in the New World and about the architect who built his cathedral in Santa Fé. Consider that realism is more than verisimilitude and more than genre.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane B / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 12

WHAT IS STYLE? WHAT MAKES PROSE BEAUTIFUL?

Simplicity. Language is the ordinary medium of daily communication. Writers use language just like we do, every day. Yet how precise is the language they use when used beautifully. We know exactly what they mean and we see that the words could not be put better. The words are simple, the meaning is simple, the music is simple, too. Look at Virginia Woolf in The Waves where she states: “The day waves yellow with all its crops.” The effect is that the day itself not just the crops are waving and it is saturated in yellow. The sunlight is so absolute that even we the readers wave yellow: eight simple words evoke color, high summer, warm lethargy, ripeness.

Lawrence uses repetition as constant alteration, repetition with a difference. We go down the steps and do not get farther than where the description takes us

Rhythm.  Bellow uses rhythm in the sense that the passage never settles down. Look at the article the—it is repeated and then repeatedly dropped with the effect of agitating the prose, destabilizing it. The protagoniost’s anxiety grows sentence after sentence. Language mebodies whet it describes. Style is in the prose that shows the  process of its own being made.

Register. Style adheres to character also in Roth, where the continuous shift between high and low, educated and vulgar, makes this dirty, blasphemous passage exemplary of a commentary on the protagonist’s sexuality and the exploitation of the woman’s body. Style incarnates meaning: Drenka is both Madonna and whore in classics misogynistic fashion.

Conventionally we think of realism as a genre but it is not so. George Eliot states: “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.” Realism conventionally assumes that the world can be described as if word and referent could be linked. R. Barthes argues that there is no “realistic” way to narrate the world: Realism does not refer to reality; realism is not realistic. Realism is a system of conventional codes, a grammar that structures storytelling. The grammar of realism announces: this is what reality in a novel like this looks like. Barthes again says: but the function of narrative is not to represent; what happens in narrative is language alone. Yet just because artifice and convention are involved in literary style this does not mean that narrative is incapable of referring to reality. Narrative can be conventional without being purely arbitrary. Convention is not untruthful but it has a way of becoming more and more conventional through repetition. When we tell a story our primary objective is to produce an imaginative experience. Mimesis, according to Aristotle, is NOT about reference. It is rather about hypothetical plausibility. It is about the realism of credible imagination. Convention itself is always dying.

The novel thus interrogates the truth, as in Willa Cather. Art is not life itself. Art is always an artifice; it is always mimesis. Yet art is the nearest thing to life. The novelist on the one hand shows you life as it is, on the other conjures it from nothing in front of you. Narrative is the desire to capture the “truth” of  “life”. The desire to be truthful, to produce art that accurately sees “the way things are” is what Henry James in What Maisie Knew calls “the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.” Realism as genre, as technical convention, is nothing compared to this. But realism as truthfulness to the way things are cannot be mere verisimilitude, mere lifelikeness; rather it must be life on the page. As such it must constantly break forms and conventions. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional (James Wood).