Unfinished

And so we're approaching the New Year's Eve, the most important event in the Russian calendar, the holiday to make all the other holidays unnecessary, the party to obviate all other parties. My parents have been texting family and friends all day long, inventing clever wordings for standard sentiments of goodwill, something more than the simple We wish you very happy 2010, may it bring you health, happiness and everything that you might desire. The first thing we tried to do when we woke up in Haifa this morning was to reserve a restaurant where to reign the New Year in, but the results of our efforts are unclear. There are too many Russians in this city, all the restaurants are booked solid. All of them were telling us that their outside seating is still available, and that's what we're counting on. Our first choice is a restaurant called Nemo, as in Captain Nemo or Nemo the fish.

Happy New Year.

Jerusalem

On the fifth night of being a tourist, things start to get confusing. In the shower this morning it took me a few moments to remember, what on earth did we do yesterday? To remember, I start with the country, zero in on the city, and then go by the internal body sensations: are feet hurting? Have I been walking, climbing or sitting? How's the stomach? Did I eat street foods, did I feast for dinner? Eventually, I flash on a memory: dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant where they serve milkshakes by water pitcher with my cousins Steven and Galia. Steven has moved to Israel from England 20 years ago and Galia has been here as long as I have been in the US. On the way back from the restaurant, she showed us where the divide used to be in 1967 between Israel and the kingdom of Jordan, where the tanks stood. Apparently, the place where our hotel now stands was already on the Jordan side of the border. They told us some stories about local politics, like for example the time before one election when the party of the Holocaust Survivors had to combine TV ad time with the "Green Leaf" (potsmokers) party, because individually they didn't have enough votes to qualify for free TV time. They also recommended a book, "Enchantment," by Orson Scott Card, a novel that manages to combine Russian fairy tales and the modern United States immigrant narrative and puts Baba Yaga on the streets of Manhattan. Can't wait to read it!

Once I remember the dinner, the rest of the day falls into place. In the morning, we took the Arab bus (there does seem to be two separate bus systems here) #75 to the top of the Mount of Olives to enjoy the famous view of the old city, the view that can be seen on countless paintings and frescoes in all of the museums in the world. Panorama of the Mount of Olives is a bit of a tourist trap: there are all kinds of sketchy vendors there, offering to sell us "old coins" and pictures of the old city. Kostya told one guy, "I've just made a picture like that myself," and the guy came back with: "Give it to me, I'll sell it for you!" There's also a camel sitting there, waiting to be photographed with the tourists. The slopes of the Mount of Olives and the neighboring hill where the old city is houses a giant Jewish cemetery. According to an old Jewish legend of which I know only a very sketchy version, the Eastern Gate of the Old City is the one that's supposed to open with the second coming, and the people who are buried the closest to it will be first in line to -- go to heaven? meet the prophet? be saved? Some of those gravestones themselves are hundreds years old.

We sloped the hill downwards, walking between the majestic olive groves that cover the part of the Mount that's not a cemetery. One of these gardens is a famous Gethsemane garden where Jesus had his last supper. The stories of Jesus acquire in Jerusalem a very neighborhoody feel: Oh, have you heard about that guy, Jesus? He's getting everyone together for a big dinner in that garden just outside the Eastern Wall tonight. Come, hear him preach! All the stops on Jesus's route in those last few hours before his arrest and trial and crucifixion are known and marked on the map of Jerusalem (although, granted, different Christian confessions mark a little bit different spots for one and the same event), and one could tour Jerusalem with the map that makes all these different stops tracing his route. But we went back up to the old city, past the City of David, and entered through the Dung gate that leads directly to the Wailing Wall. Dave delivered his grandmother's note to the wall, and then we meandered our way through the bazaar to the Christian quarter to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one that supposedly marks the place where Jesus hang on the cross. This was a surprise: for some reason, I've always had the idea that the cross stood on a hill outside the city. Perhaps, because my knowledge of Jesus story comes primarily from two sources: Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical, "Jesus Christ Superstar" and Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita."

We met up with my parents outside the Church (they did not go with the rest of us to the Mount of Olives), together had lunch at a restaurant built into one of the ancient market stalls in the Christian quarter. The restaurant was called "Amigo" but apparently without a reference to Mexican cuisine, and while sitting there I realized what Jerusalem reminded me best of all were the One Thousand and One Night tales, Ali Baba's cave and all the movies like Aladdin, preferably without Robin Williams. We've heard the Moslem call to prayer at least three times in the course of the day yesterday. I couldn't quite tell whether it was coming from one central location or if it was redistributed between several different minarets of the city. Dave tells of his experience of Old Jerusalem and the rest of it on his blog.

After lunch, we shopped. The bazaar is a Borgesian labyrinth, and the merchants take their bargaining very seriously, perhaps not quite like a matter of life and death, but if you bargain them down from 300 shekels to 25 and then still refuse to buy, they will curse you out of the store. Primary rules of bargaining: be sure what you want to buy and how much you are willing to pay for it.

The Dead Sea

Dave and I have been trying to blog every morning on this trip. The only way to do this with all the families around is to get up an hour before everyone else and get right to it. That's what we did yesterday, and the blogging part went well, so well, in fact, that we completed it a lot faster than we thought we did, and, delirious from the lack of sleep, got completely confused about the agreed-upon breakfast time. We got up, blogged, and then Dave ran downstairs to meet our families, while I finished brushing my teeth. I followed him soon afterwards, but didn't find him in the breakfast room. The host seemed to know Dave and to know that Dave was here. "Sit down!" he told me when I tried to ask him if Dave was here and went back up already. There were no other familiar faces at any of the tables. "Sit down!" the host told me and waved his hands at me. So I sat down and started eating. I asked him what time it was, and only then realized that we were early -- about 45 minutes early from the time agreed upon with our families the night before. Dave had been trying to catch me back in our room, but we just ended up passing each other in the elevators. He came back down 5 minutes later, and we breakfasted, and then, after everyone else was assembled, went back upstairs and tried to get online to post our blogs using sketchy hotel Internet.

Dave has been the quiet hero of our trip so far. He's been spending hours on the phone with car rental companies, hotels, tour guides to reserve things in advance, to make sure that everything goes smoothly, and to get reasonable prices. Skype has been coming in very handy when we need to call either the US or Israeli phone numbers, that feature of Skype that allows you to dial landlines for a small fee. Dave's Blackberry with email and GoogleMaps has been an invaluable tool in getting us from place to place. Paper maps help very little: we don't have any that are to scale, and none of the street signs match up to the names found in maps. GoogleMaps lets us make turns based on distances, not on names. But technology aside, Dave's feat has been patience and perseverance in making the calls and asking the right questions in advance. Do we want car insurance? Is there a fee to return the car in a different city? How early can we check in? Do you serve breakfast and is there Internet? The single best way to ensure the success of this trip is to book hotels that provide free breakfast. The family wakes up hungry. The family turns against each other when they don't eat right away.

Yesterday after breakfast we got picked up by a tour bus (reserved the day before) that took us on the tour of Massada and the Dead Sea. Massada is an old fortress that was built by king Herod on top of barely accessible hill on the Dead Sea in case he had to hide from unspecified enemy, built in the Roman style, with baths and roads leading up to it (but maybe without a nearby amphitheater). Later, in about 68 AD, the Jews who rebelled against the Romans made use of it to defend themselves. The Romans laid a 3-year siege and eventually built a ramp to get to the fortress and to breach its walls. When death seemed unavoidable to the people stuck inside the fortress, the men killed their families: all the women and children, and then drew lots to select ten to kill the other men (about 900 of them), and the one to kill the other nine and himself. These events come down to us as related by a Roman historian Josephus Flavius and a 1981 Hollywood miniseries "Masada" starring Peter O'Toole. The movie was filmed on location in 1970s, and from that time the location has inherited a replica of a Roman catapult, some cannon-ball shaped boulders, and a few shots to be inserted in the information video shown to all tourists that come to visit. The video stressed the act of heroism committed by these Jewish rebels in killing themselves instead of letting themselves be killed or converting, and quite chillingly asked us if we were ready to follow their example.

After the visit to Mossada, we went to float in the Dead Sea. It was warm and blue and the water was as salty as ever. Jordan mountains rose on the other side, and once in a while we heard and then saw fighter jets patrolling the border. I got a massage while the rest of the family unit was getting rejuvenated by covering themselves in mud and then rinsing off in the opaque salty waters. I rejoined the group just in time to glimpse Dave's true heroic nature shine in all its glory. A man was calling for help. He and his wife got stuck deep in the mud pit, and they were getting sucked in deeper and deeper. He was a large, fleshy man, and she had her arm in a sling -- she had broken it before and couldn't use it to help herself or her husband. The man was calling for help, and nobody was noticing him until Dave jumped out of the Dead Sea and jumped into the mud pit to start the rescue. Dave's brother Mike joined in the efforts, and together they were slowly able to dig out first the man, who had gotten stuck literally up to his neck, and then the woman, whose main problem was that she couldn't pull herself out. I came in to see only the end of the rescue, but Karen, Dave's mom, told me the details and then the couple themselves came over to ask me to take their pictures as they were all covered in mud.

Leaving the true nature of heroism and heroic deeds to be contemplated at a later time, upon returning to Jerusalem we busied ourselves with finding dinner in town. An hour's walk through what seemed to be a Hasidic-only neighborhood and a ride in three cabs (we were too uncoordinated to manage it in just two cabs) got us to a lovely restaurant called Sima near a bustling bazaar. The day's adventures concluded as merrily as they had begun, with a feast. Dave gives his perspective on the events of this day on his blog.

Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

Travel as a family unit of eight adults presents unusual challenges. Luckily, we have plenty of experience and are ready for it. Several Augusts in a row we've gone on road trips from Seattle to Vancouver and from San Francisco to Sonoma or Mendocino or Monterey with Dave's brother Mike and their parents. With my parents and my brother Kosya we've met up before in Spain, Italy (without my parents), and last year (without Kostya) we celebrated New Year's together in Ireland. The most frustrating part is always the driving, and I'm still not sure how we're going to handle it this time. We were unable to rent an automatic van to hold 8 people, so either we'll have to go with the manual that only Dave's dad and my dad and brother can drive or we'll have to rent two separate cars and split up.

Yesterday, the challenge was that we needed to get from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and meet up with my family who were arriving to the airport located on the highway between the two cities. My family arrived from St. Petersburg at 6 am, and originally were going to come to our hotel in Tel Aviv to get a couple of extra hours of sleep. But because of the van situation, we've had to ask them to take a taxi straight to Jerusalem. They got to the hotel fast, and way before the check-in time, so my brother set up his office in the lobby of the hotel, charging all of his devices: a phone, a mini notebook, and a camera; and my mom went to sleep on one of the couches. Meanwhile, the American party woke up in Tel Aviv, breakfasted on the veggies and spreads, and then was presented with a challenge of packing five suitcases and ten carry-on items into an Israeli "midsize" car, a small Hyundai with barely five seats and a little trunk. Long story short, we did it.

Another challenge was navigating the streets of Jerusalem to get to our hotel. I was the navigator, and I had two separate paper maps, Dave's blackberry with GoogleMaps that could triangulate the cell towers to determine our location, and direction that a hotel employee dictated to us. None of these matched up. In an hour's time, I could not figure out the location of our hotel on any of the maps, including Google's. Google kept thinking that we wanted to go to St. Georges church, when what we really wanted was to go to a hotel on St. Georges Street. We assumed the two were close, but were not entirely comfortable with the assumption. The problem (or one of the problems), as I understand it is this: street names are in Hebrew. All maps and street signs mark them in Latin alphabet as well, but I think some of them transliterate the Hebrew names and others translate. Another problem is that Jerusalem is 4 millenia old and is a kind of town where people seem to navigate by landmarks. When you see King David's tomb, turn right, when you see St. George's church, turn left, that kind of thing.

Our hotel was just outside the old city walls, and that helped. From the estimate I had given my parents from Tel Aviv, we were only an hour late. Meeting up with them was a prize deserving of most challenges. We drove up to the steps of the hotel, where they met us and helped to extract the five suitcases and ten carry on items and five people from the bowls of the little Hyundai. We hugged and kissed and parted ways: Dave and I had to return the car that we had rented expecting to pick up the van in Jerusalem. There would be no van now, but we don't need to drive while in Jerusalem, so we can postpone the decision for a couple of days. Kostya went with us to Budget's office, while Dave's parents, Mike and my parents were tasked to work with the hotel concierge to find us a guide who would take us around Jerusalem that afternoon.

The most mundane task can become an adventure in a foreign land, as we were reminded when we got a parking ticket while standing in line to return our car to Budget's office. Granted, there was a sign on the window of the office that we were supposed to "watch" our car, but it didn't say that we had to watch it from the inside. And it didn't say that we would have to be watching it for an hour before one of the Budget service assistants would come to take our keys and inspect the vehicle. But no matter. We caught up with Kostya, who was telling us about the recent snowstorm in St. Petersburg, rumored to be the largest snowstorm in 50 years. For several mornings in a row he'd had to dig out his car from the snow with a shovel and then drive back and forth before being able to get out of the trench.

By the time we got back to the hotel, we had our Jerusalem guide ready to go, and without too much further ado (although there was some ado as my parents were finally able to check into their room and rushed to brush teeth and change clothes), we went out into the streets of the ancient city. We started with the Arabic quarter, had the best falafel in town in one of the shops on the bazaar, walked along Via Delarosa where Jesus walked with the cross, got an amazing view of the central Mosque (that used to be the First and then the Second Jewish Temple) from the place where Pilates held his trial of Jesus and that is now a school, then walked to the Wailing wall, then walked through the Jewish quarter, then the Christian, where we saw from the outside the cathedral constructed by the Crusaders where Jesus's coffin is supposed to be (and you can see it if you go inside), and after that walked back to the hotel, had dinner and collapsed in our rooms immediately.

Jerusalem is worth a lot more words than I've given it here, and I will undoubtedly write about it at a later date. Dave gives additional details about our visit in his blog.

Tel Aviv on Saturday

Yesterday began with two plateful of olives, olive and eggplant spreads, a variety of yoghurty dips or spreads, tomatoes and cucumbers, salted fish, a selection of chocolate croissants and a large cup of what tasted like instant coffee. Dessert was halvah, dried prunes and apricots. The variety of fresh vegetables here seems superior even to our California wintertime selection. And the diet seems to be very attuned to the needs of our digestive systems.

During the first part of the day, we meandered through the different neighborhoods of the city. For the most part, the city seemed deserted (Shabbat!), and the few families we came across seemed to be headed in the direction of the beach. The city's neighborhoods seem varied in affluence and religious and lifestyle affiliations, and eventually we stumbled onto the enclaves of active weekend activity. On the Rothschild Boulevard, many cafes were open and busy with customers. We walked by Max Brenner's chocolate caffee -- two or three Thanksgivings ago we had a very memorable lunch at its sister caffee in New York City, Chocolate by the Bald Man. We were thinking of going into this one, looking at its store, but got spooked by the security guard who stood at the entrance and made a move to take Dave's backpack away from him. Later we realized that every sit-down restaurant here seems to have a security guard on staff, but at the moment we were just confused -- why is some scruffy, beat-up looking man asking for Dave's bag?

Later we went into a very cute family-friendly neighborhood Neve Tzedek, where young and old congregated between an ice cream shop and a community center. Kids and adults alike all seemed to have an ice cream cone in hand. But we resisted the temptation -- we were heading to Old Jaffa, an ancient city that's now within the limits of the modern Tel Aviv. Dave's cousin recommended a hummus shop there for lunch, and we were saving room.

We definitely need to come back to Old Jaffa with a tour guide later in the trip. Without a guide, any city, no matter how ancient, seems to be just a conglomeration of old walls and market stalls. But the experience of walking around here blind to the historical significance of all that we see is a valuable experience in a different way. It lets us pay attention to the rhythms of the contemporary lifestyle in the city, to play with the idea of how it would be to actually live here. The thing to do in Old Jaffa on Saturday afternoon seemed to be getting a grilled sesame seed bread stuffed with yoghurt spread, cheese, and a selection of olives and mushrooms and corn to your liking. We got it to go and walked out on the beach-side promenade to eat on one of the benches.

The beach turned out to be the right place to go. At least, everyone else had the same idea -- the entire population of Tel Aviv was promenading along the beach. The sun was shining like on the best days in San Francisco, but the sea was still chilly and the most interesting thing to do seemed to just sit there and take in everything going on around us for a while. To the left of us there were the mysterious walls of the Old Jaffa. On the beach right below us somebody was walking a horse. On the beach to the right of us people were playing volleyball and other types of ball that we didn't immediately recognize. One game looked like ping pong without the table. Along the promenade in front of us, large families walked leisurely in both directions. Lots of Russian spoken. Some English. Spanish. French. Baby talk. Hebrew, of course.

See Dave's blog for what we did the rest of the day.

SFO-TLV

Adventures start before we leave San Francisco. We stay up all night to pack, and actually manage to zip our suitcases two minutes after the cab arrives. The only thing that we run out of time to do is mail an annual Hanukkah card to Woody Allen. Dave has it ready to go, so the only thing we need is to find a mailbox at the airport. This goes without a hitch. There are mailboxes on both sides of the terminal.

We're flying to Tel Aviv through Philadelphia that's been under "travel advisory" all week due to snow. The night before we decided to book ourselves on an earlier flight to Philadelphia -- just in case. Now that we're at the airport, USAir is looking for volunteers to give up their seats for a $500 voucher. $500 to fly on the flight we were originally going to take? We line right up. While we wait in line, Dave gets recognized by somebody he'd lived in the dorms with 15 years ago.

"RIT?" she asks.
"What?" We have stayed up all night, and Dave's reactions are a little delayed.
"RIT 1994?"
"Yeah. Yeah."
"Hillel House?"
"No."
"Biotech?"
"No."
"Fish C West?"
"Yeah."
"Did you know Amy?"
"Yeah! Did you live in Fish C West?"
"I was friends with Amy."

She is vague about it, and Dave doesn't feel comfortable asking, but it is possible that in 1994 she was a man. Fish C West was a predominantly male floor. The conversation doesn't get a chance to develop because we have to deal with the ticket situation. We are too brain dead to even ask her if she lives in San Francisco or back East or ask her for her email address or if she's on Facebook. Dave thinks he can find her friend Amy on Facebook. At the end, USAIR doesn't need us as volunteers and we end up on the earlier flight. We pass out the minute we get on board.

We get to Tel Aviv 20 hours later. Even the 11-hour flight from Philly to Tel Aviv feels like it's not nearly long enough. We eat boiled chicken and chocolate mousse, nap, I finish one book (Octavia Butler's "Fledgling" -- amazing), work on my computer until the battery runs out, start a movie ("State of Play," a thriller with all kinds of names and Robin Wright Penn) -- and that's about it. The flight is over before I even get a chance to finish the movie. It's warm here and the air smells good, maybe olives and sage. We get a car, drive into the city, go for a walk on the beach. The sun has just gone down, and we don't dare to dive in.

Later that evening we have dinner at the house of the family we met as a result of our trip to Hungary earlier this year. They own a pomegranate farm an hour south of Tel Aviv, and they serve us the few pomegranates remaining from the last harvest for dessert. Dave writes more about this part of our trip on his blog.

The Great Los Angeles Times of 2010

As I am transitioning into my travel writing mode again, here's a fun video that shows the future of magazines:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

This technology totally reminds of the electronic newspapers that Robert A. Heinlein invented in his 1957 novel, The Door Into Summer. Here's the passage where he describes an edition of "the Great Los Angeles Times, for Wednesday, 13 December, 2000":

Newspapers had not changed much, not in format. This one was tabloid size, the paper was glazed instead of rough pulp and the illustrations were either full color, or black-and-white stereo -- I couldn't puzzle out the gimmick on that last. ...

I could not find out how to open the durned thing. The sheets seemed to have frozen solid.

Finally I accidentally touched the lower right-hand corner of the first sheet; it curled up and out of the way...some surface-charge phenomenon, triggered at that point. The other pages got neatly out of the way in succession whenever I touched that spot. (122)

Uncanny, I think! O Robert Heinlein! The inventor of so many good things!

Quoted monologue

I love being able to answer my own questions. In one of the recent posts, I was trying to analyze a Clarice Lispector story "The Imitation of the Rose," the passage from it where the narrator abruptly switches pronouns from the third to the first-person and introduces the character's voice into the narrator's speech without quotation marks:

"But anyone can repent, [Laura] suddenly rebelled. For if it was only the minute I took hold of the roses that I noticed how lovely they were, for the first time, actually, as I held them, I noticed how lovely they were. Or a little before that? (And they were really hers). And even the doctor himself had patted her on the back..."

The questions I asked about this passage basically had to do with trying to figure why did the author choose to switch the narrative situation so fleetingly here -- if this is even a true "switch" and not the character's direct discource, save the quotation marks.

The fourth chapter of Suzanne Keen's book is called "People on Paper: Character, Characterization, and Represented Minds." Here Keen provides a very precise technical answer to my question about Lispector's narrator. In this chapter, Keen relies on Dorrit Cohn's influential texts Transparent Minds, where Cohn distinguishes three modes of representation of a character's consciousness on paper: 1) psycho-narration; 2) narrated monologue; 3) quoted monologue. I will leave the discussion of the first two for another post; it's the third one, quoted monologue, that interests me today.

Here's how Keen summarizes Cohn's explanation of quoted monologue:

Quoted monologue, ... presents the character's mental discourse (with or without quotation marks and tagging) by shifting from the past tense of narration to present tense and from the third person of narration to the first person of thoughts. ... The entire thought could be plausibly spoken aloud without alteration. (61-2)

Keen continues to say that extended passages of quoted monologue are called interior monologue or stream of consciousness and that quoted monologue as a technique is strongly associated with modernist prose. I suppose, Lispector could be called a modernist writer, so this makes sense. And it's great to know a formal name for this method because I can then use it to further search theory books (how about Cohn's Transparent Minds?) to try to answer my questions about Lispector. Because I think Lispector uses quoted monologue in "The Imitation of the Rose" not because she wants to allow us a more authentic experience of her character's interiority, not in order to bring us deeper into Laura's own mind, but to better illustrate the way Laura's mind is disintegrating, her loss of interiority, her loss of selfhood.

The reader as a character

In the 54th volume of "Fiction" magazine that I bought this summer in NYC and have just finished reading, there's an excerpt from a 1981 interview with Max Frisch. Mark Jay Mirsky, an editor of "Fiction" and a professor of English at City College of New York, invited Frisch, a renowned Swiss novelist and one whom I greatly admire , to give a series of lectures and Q&A sessions with the students of the department. (In his introduction to the interview, Mirsky mentions that, apparently, Frisch and his wife Marianne helped start "Fiction" and Marianne is still its European Editor).

The interview is fascinating -- if hard to read because Frisch's English was not very straightforward -- especially where Frisch touches upon narrative theory. At one point, he's asked to elaborate his previous statement that he "invents a reader." Here's his answer (I'm heavily editing for clarity):

I would say it's not that I'm inventing a portrait of the reader, or even the age of the reader, . . . I am thinking, very vaguely, of somebody of my cultural background. I am not thinking of a Japanese or a Latin American person because I don't know [them]. So that's the first choice. . . . If you're writing for somebody, who you are afraid of, or who you want to show how bright you are, or whom you consider an idiot so that you have to teach him, this makes your style. I said last time that Tolstoy, for instance, treats me as a partner. Other writers, very good ones, treat me as a reader. If I am intelligent enough to understand them well [and good], if not it doesn't matter. They are not partners you know. That's the invention. But you shouldn't think I have a special person in mind. But [you] might also ask if it is mostly a male reader or a female reader? And I would have to think about that; I think sometimes I'm thinking of female readers, because I know I don't understand them.

First, Frisch starts out talking about the implied reader he addresses in his novels: a person roughly of his own age and cultural background. Second, he analyzes texts of other writers (Tolstoy specifically) and the way Frisch himself negotiates his position as a real reader vis-a-vis the implied reader of these texts. Perhaps what he's saying is that reading Tolstoy, he's participating in the process as an authorial reader -- and somehow Tolstoy is encouraging an authorial reading of his work. And, third, coming back to the notion of the implied reader Frisch himself envisions when he writes, he's not sure whether or not it's a male or a female reader.

I'm not making very much progress with Peter Rabinowitz's text, Before Reading -- I am approaching it as a dictionary to find concise definitions of terms, and this is not a good way to work with a theoretical text. But I'm starting to understand something. Rabinowitz introduces the notion of authorial audience:

An author has, in most cases, no firm knowledge of the actual readers who will pick up his or her book. Yet he or she cannot begin to fill up a blank page without making assumptions about the readers' beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions. As a result, authors are forced to guess; they design their books rhetorically for some more or less specific hypothetical audience, which I call the authorial audience. (21)

An authorial reading is the kind of reading where a reader attempts to align herself with the point of view of this authorial audience.

The authorial audience's knowledge and beliefs may even be extracommunal—that is, not shared by any community (and we all belong to several) of which the actual reader is a member at the historical moment of reading (what current community shares the belief in Zeus characteristic of the authorial audience of the Odyssey?). But these authorial audiences, whatever their distance from actual readers, certainly have their own engagements and prejudices. To join the authorial audience, then, you should not ask what a pure reading of a given text would be. Rather, you need to ask what sort of corrupted reader this particular author wrote for: what were that reader's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, and stampedings of pity and terror? (26)

All this quoting means I'm still very confused. But it's good to know who specifically Frisch was thinking in terms of his "authorial" audience. Not the Japanese or Latin Americans, but bourgeois and university-educated, perhaps, with special interest in Marxism, probably with first hand experience in the WWII, and maybe women. Or maybe not.

The narrative of dreams

Closing off a chapter dedicated to Narrative Situation, Suzanne Keen provides a list of questions to ask about each story -- the way to start thinking about stories in terms of narrative structure. I'll paraphrase without quoting:

* Who is the narrator? (What is her or his relationship to the implied author and to the characters of this story? Who's doing to the seeing and the perceiving of the events of the story?)

* Does the narrative situation change in the course of the story? (Are there multiple narrators? Changes in the degree of omniscience?)

* What does the implied author get out of each narrative situation? What does the implied author get out of varying the narrative situation? Out of not varying the narrative situation?

I'm reading a short story by Lydia Davis, "Five Fictions From the Middle of the Night," published in the Tin House's 10th anniversary issue. They are five short-shorts, each of them with their own separate title, "Swimming in Egypt," "The Schoolchildren in the Large Building," etc. Two of these ("Egypt" and the fourth piece, "The Piano") are told using the first-person plural pronoun, "we." (As in, "We are about to buy a new piano"). But because these pieces are united under an encompassing heading ("Five fictions..."), we easily understand that the narrator in all of these five pieces is the same. Indeed, there's no change in narrative situation happening here -- just the change in a pronoun.

If it's not entirely clear at the end of the first piece (it describes a scuba diving trip in the Mediterranean), by the end of the second piece (where the narrator ends up in a bathroom that's also an elevator) it becomes obvious: these five stories are dreams, five entries from a dream diary. The fact that the narrator chooses to call them "fictions" (here's an interesting side question: to whom do story titles belong, to narrators or implied authors?), the narrator is inviting us not to interpret them in terms of psychology, but to read them in terms of story structure. Indeed, we do not know when or in what order and at what interval from each other these dreams were dreamt -- or if in writing them down the narrator modified them. Or if these are, indeed, dreams at all -- the name "fictions" implies that they are composed consciously and with a specific goal in mind.

Indeed, simply by calling these dreams "fictions," the implied author hands off the dreams into the hands of her narrator. Dreams are essentially non-fictions -- and am I right in generalizing that when we read non-fiction, we automatically assume that the narrator and the implied author are one and the same person? Maybe this is not always the case, but in the case of dream diaries it seems to hold. So. Here's the way I choose to read Lydia Davis's story: there's a complicity here between the implied author and the narrator. They are working together at trying to hide something from us while at the same time implicating us in the mystery. Did the implied author actually dream these dreams? Or are they a skillful work of a narrator, a work of fiction, of constructing fiction in such a way that forces us to assume that the implied author dreamt these dreams?

More importantly, what is it that the two are trying to hide from us? What is the disturbing emotional content that they are afraid is true but don't want to admit to be true? I think it has something to do with the perception of self and self-worth. I think it has something to do with the notion of authenticity, as demonstrated by obscuring the space between the narrator and the implied author.

You are sleepy and tired

A poet I met at Skidmore, Jen McClanaghan, has a poem up on AGNI online, "Greatest Show on Earth." I love how in this poem the most mundane tasks reveal their true nature as acrobatic performances. Also interesting how the speaker of this poem uses second person to address herself and her audience. Narrative theory as it applies to poetry is way beyond my competence at the moment, and I wasn't even planning on touching the second person narrative today, but maybe why not?

"Narrative theory has a weakness for atypical narrative strategies and borderline cases, and it can emphasize the unusual at the expense of accuracy about the ordinary," reports Suzanne Keen (45) initiating her discussion of the second-person narrators. I wonder if one could call second-person "atypical" these days -- as a line editor of a litmag, I do see it quite often. The most interesting examples of it I've been encountering lately use "you" in the imperative, as in the command or instruction mode. One of the fellow students at Skidmore this summer, David Roth, wrote a fun second-person story, the main character of which was a girl on a debate team in high school who communicated with herself in a constant stream of instructions and commands. The usage of the second-person was very much a part of this character's attitude toward herself.

In terms of narrative theory, however, it's important once again to rememeber to separate the second-person pronoun "you" from the narrative situation. Does the narrator exist within the story world or not? Does the narrator have access to the consciousness of multiple characters or use a single focalizer? Who is the "you" addressed by the narrative? It can be the narrator herself as was the case with the narrator of David's story. It can be a character of the story, and "you" used instead of the character's name -- Keen's example is Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, which I haven't read. In a way, epistolary novels can work as this type of narrative. And, of course, by "you" the narrative might try to address the reader -- the implied reader -- as in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Of course, even in this case, the implied reader can't help becoming a character. I've started reading this novel about 3 years ago and am still on page 30. But I can already tell, it's a good one, worth imagining yourself as a character of :)

Keen writes, "As both James Phelan and Robyn Warhol observe, the more fully charaterized a narratee becomes in a fiction, the greater the sense of dissonance felt by the reader (whereas the less fleshed-out the narratee, the more willingly a reader may comply with the imputed identification. (46)" Reading the first 30 pages of If on a Winter's Night, I remember feeling as though the author (the implied author) was trying to tell my fortune in a chrystal ball. The most important trick of a skilled fortune-teller: deal in generalities. You are reading this blog post. The screen in front of you is pale brown with a flowery dark brown background. You find this post too long and browse away. You won't leave a comment.

Burying the dog

Over the weekend, I finished reading both Clarice Lispector's Family Ties and John Hawkes' The Blood Oranges. Thinking about these two books as a comparatist, there's probably a very rich field where the interests of these two texts intersect -- and it might have to do with existentialist philosophy, or maybe with the philosophical concept of Appolonian and Dionysian. Or at least the area where existentialism (closer aligned with Lispector's stories) and Appolonian and Dionysian (Hawkes) intersect. But leaving all of this aside, there's one plot point where the two texts are in direct dialogue with each other: both stage a burial of a dog.

In both cases, issues of ownership are involved. In The Blood Oranges, Cyril is telling the story, but the dog really belongs to the other couple, to their young daughter Meredith. And yet Cyril is the one digging the grave. In Lispector's story "The Crime of a Mathematics Professor," the man is burying a stray -- while he had abandoned the "real" dog, the one he used to own.

In both cases, the place of the burial plays a very prominent part of the story: "So now the sonorous gloom of the trees had given way to the clear light of the empty beach. We were standing motionless together between trees and sea with the soft blue sky above us and, at our feet, the small and heavy casket stark on the sand. (The Blood Oranges, 216)"

"When the man reached the highest hill, the bells were ringing in the city below. The uneven rooftops of the houses could barely be seen. Near him was the only tree on the plain. The man was standing with a heavy sack in his hand. ("The crime...,"139)"

(Note: when burying dogs, presence of at least one tree seems to be essential.)

Hawkes' Cyril digs the grave too deep, while the Mathematics professor -- too shallow. Cyril has the dog buried in a child-size casket, while the Mathematics professor takes the body out of the sack and dumps it in the grave, studies its strange features afterward. In comparison, the difference between the two texts becomes apparent -- more so than it was when I read the texts individually -- Cyril obviously wants to bury this dog, while the Mathematics professor is not ready to let go of his.

At the end of Lispector's story the Mathematics professor very specifically changes his mind: "[The mathematics professor] must not be consoled. He coldly searched for a way of destroying the false burial of the unknown dog. He then bent down, and, solemn and calm, he unburied the dog with a few simple movements. (146)"

Before the dog of The Blood Oranges is buried, little children also attempt lifting the lid of the coffin and exposing the body, but they never succeed. Cyril's desire to bury the dog comes across most clearly when he finishes digging the grave: "Deeper than necessary, higher than necessary, stark. Already my chest and arms were drying and I did not regret the magnitude of those expressive scars on the beach. (222)" Moreover, once the grave is dug, a shepard comes by and he has another dog with him, a would-be replacement dog. It's very important for Cyril to distinguish this dog from the one they are burying: "It's a different dog," he explains to the young girl, Meredith. "He's a lot younger than yours. Besides, he's got that white star on his chest. Listen, if you pat his head a few times, he'll leave you alone. (223)"

Take these two different dog burial scenes and write a comparative paper about them. Or your own dog burial story.

Shifting narrative situations

I am a contrarian at heart. (No, I'm not!) Maybe this is why I love the parts of Suzanne Keen's book where she challenges conventional workshop wisdom. Here, for example: "No matter how firmly creative writing handbooks enjoin aspiring writers to stick to the contract they establish with their readers, and avoid shifts in narrative situation, in published writing, narrative situation is as often as not manipulated and altered during the course of the story's unfolding. As Brian Richardson remarks, 'contemporary fiction is replete with a polyphony of competing narrative voices; even where the narrator's speaking situation seems fixed, the proliferation of alternative voices threatens to destabilize that situation.' (48, bolding added)"

I love reading writers who don't conform to the most basic rules. Like a narrator who switches from using third-person pronouns to the first-person pronouns and back in the space of one paragraph. I'm reading Clarice Lispector's "The imitation of the Rose," where the heterodiegetic, covert narrator is fully immersed in the perspective of the main character, Laura, whose personality is clearly disintegrating. The narrator forces her audience to participate in this disintegration by using the first person to project one of them onto the reader's own psyche. "But anyone can repent, [Laura] suddenly rebelled. For if it was only the minute I took hold of the roses that I noticed how lovely they were, for the first time, actually, as I held them, I noticed how lovely they were. Or a little before that? (And they were really hers). And even the doctor himself had patted her on the back..."

A simpler way of reading this paragraph, I suppose, is simply imagining the quotation marks around the "I" phrases: this is Laura's direct speech, thinly disguised by dropped quotation marks. Yet, personally I encountered this "I" in the narrative as a mild shock (even though I was told to expect it in the preface of the collection "Family Ties"). A fleeting thought -- I? Did I just take hold of the roses? Then, immediately, a flash of understanding, of course, not I, the character, confusion caused by my inability to interpret the I without quotation marks, having been lulled by the third-person pronounces and the presumption of the existing contract with the author.

Another neat switch in narrative situation I noticed in Lispector comes in the title story of the collection, "Family Ties," also told by a distant heterodiegetic covert narrator, who uses the wife of the story as a focalizer, but then 2/3 through the story switches perspectives and tells the rest of the story through the husband's consciousness. It's a short story, 10 pages total, and they always insist in workshop not to switch point of views like this. Or if you absolutely must, introduce a section break! Why? A certain workshop sensibility I suppose. In this story, this switch is integral in showing what the story is about: "Family ties." To what extent the husband's and the wife's understanding of their own selves is a projection of the other's opinion -- in a way these characters don't seem to exist when they are outside of each other's line of sight.

Ludwika's perspective

Another way of doing this blog -- another point of entry into narrative theory -- might be as commentary to fiction that I'm reading. I have already used The Blood Oranges and Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs as examples -- but maybe I should take a closer look at short stories. I think more than 60% of all the reading that I do involves reading short stories in online and print magazines. They should provide plethora of examples.

Take this story, for example, "Serce Szopena" by Olga Tokarczuk, published in the English translation by Jennifer Croft as "Chopin's Heart" in eXchanges, a Journal of Literary Translation from University of Iowa. It is a powerful little piece that manages to weave the posthumous Chopin mythology into a story about his sister Ludwika, who had to transport his heart (the physical organ) so that it could be entombed in a church in Warsaw. (Indeed, when we were in Warsaw earlier this year, the church was pointed out to us).

The story is told by a narrator who exists outside the story space (heterodiegetic) and is dissonant in time from when this story takes place. But limited or omniscient ("authorial" or "figural" in Franz Stanzel's terms)? The narrator displays a certain degree of personality: first, she cites a Wikipedia page (I find it interesting that the translator chose to substitute a French quote where in the original Polish text there stands a quote in English), and later in the same paragraph accuses one of Chopin's biographers of lying. On the other hand, most of the story starting with the second paragraph ("Now Ludwika, freezing and exhausted, is driving off in a stage coach") is told as seen through Ludwika's eyes. The narrator has access to Ludwika's interiority, her thoughts and feelings: "Ludwika felt no sadness, having used up and cried out all her sadness already—but she did feel anger."

Suzanne Keen writes: "The most central fucntion of a character in narrative situations, ..., lies in a character's role as a 'reflector' (Genette's 'focalizer,' Chatman's 'filter')."

Is Ludwika's consciousness -- the only one that the narrator has access to? Is the narrative limited to her perspective? Good question. Halfway into the story, there's an episode where Graziella, one of the singers at the funeral in Paris, recounts how she lost her leg. Her story is narrated as reported speech, not as direct dialogue. Who's providing the commentary, such as: "Graziella's misfortune was being in the wrong place at the wrong time"? Are these Graziella's own words, as heard by Ludwika? Is this information filtered through Ludwika's consciousness? Or is this the editorial commentary by our narrator who has already accused another character of lying? Does our narrator have direct access to Graziella's interiority? What is the degree of her omniscience?

I am leaning to the opinion that the narrative sticks to Ludwika's consciousness even in the episode with Graziella. I find nothing in Graziella's words that could not have been said in direct speech -- and the main purpose of using indirect speech here is, perhaps, condensation of information that in dialogue form would take up a lot more story time. I believe that the heterodiegetic narrator of Tokarczuk's story (as translated by Croft) uses a single focalizer, Ludwika, throughout the story. The story is told from Ludwika's perspective.

Keen comments: "Discussion of a narrative fiction's perspective adds the dimension of character-centered perception that is implied by the popular term 'point of view.' In addition to the colloquial slippage between 'point of view' and 'opinion,' the term has other limitations. At least metaphorically, it makes a priority of the character's eyes and gaze that may not adequately capture the matrix of thoughts, sensations, memories, preoccupations, and interests that comprise a 'reflecting' character's 'perspective,' though perspective (and focalization) both also suggest lines of sight. (44-5)"

"Limited" point of view

In creative writing workshops, the terminology we use to describe a narrator's voice seems to be determined primarily by the pronoun that the narrator uses. Third-person narrators can then further be described as "limited" to the point of view of one central character. We also talk about the shifting point of view, and whether this is a good or а bad thing.

In terms of Narrative theory, Suzanne Keen puts it this way: "A personified, overt narrator who exists inside the story world with the characters about whom he or she narrates is perhaps the most logical bearer of the term 'limited,' since the circumstances of the narration would usually imply that such a narrator could not exercise omniscience, having good excuses for not knowing everything, or even for withholding information. (41)" Personified, overt narrator who exists inside the story world? Keen's example is Iris Murdoch's Philosopher's Pupil, which I haven't read. I'm thinking about Pushkin's Belkin stories -- but I must come up with better examples. Reading for narrative mode is a special kind of reading.

Also, I find it interesting that Keen, while noting the, well, limitations, of the colloquial ways of describing narrators, only in passing mentions the more technical terms introduced by Gerard Genet. Keen's book is meant for both, literature and creative writing students, but still, she shies away from using more specific vocabulary. (Professor Peel reminded us that every narrative theorist comes with her own vocabulary. As long as you define your own set of terms in your own words or with an appropriate reference, you'll still get an A). Personally, I like Genet's terms: heterodiegetic narrator exists outside the story world, and homodiegetic narrator writes from the insider's point of view, takes part in the story world, exists within it.

Was it Genet or a later theorist who suggested that these terms are not an opposing binary but rather a continuum of all the possible modes? I like this notion of continuum.

And a limited third person narrator? I think we frequently apply this term to both, heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators, and confuse ourselves about what our narrators can or cannot do as a result. I have seen this fluidity in terminology result in hurt feelings in workshop situations.

Narrative theory on the web

My brother shared this comic strip with me. It's called "Movie Narrative Charts" and it's from xkcd.com.


I love the "12 Angry Men" box. Haven't seen "Primer"(?) so don't know what that's about. And also the little spike in Jabba the Hut line that shows changes made in the remastered edition. (Click on the picture to see the bigger version with chart details. It's strangely fascinating).

Authorial reading

This post grows out of a minor mystery in my notebook. Looking closer at the role of the implied reader in a text, professor Peel cited theorist Peter Rabinowitz in order to introduce a further distinction: a model and an authorial readers. Both terms in my notebook are grouped under the heading of implied reader, which, at first, I took to mean that both types are projections of the text and have little to do with the actual process of reading. To use notebook shorthand, a model reader is the one who believes everything, is immersed in the story world, and an authorial reader knows that it's fiction.

Here are some examples prof. Peel used in class. In The Canterbury Tales, the model reader's role is to like or to dislike the pilgrims. Meantime, the authorial reader notices the complex structure of the text and wonders how it's done. More specifically, in the Shipman's Tale, the model reader wonders who "won" and believes that the monk and the couple existed; while in the authorial reader notices the ingenious plot influenced by other writers (Boccaccio). In Lardner's Haircut, the model reader's task is to distrust the barber; while authorial reader might notice the dramatic irony of the narrative. In Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the model reader believes in the existence of Omelas, the authorial reader is the one who is actually given the option to imagine or create the Omelas.

The sense of mystery came from rereading Suzanne Keen's discussion of Rabinowitz's model. This is how she explains his concept of authorial reader: "an actual reader who actively attempts to enter the implied readership projected by the text and live up to the expectations projected by the text. (35)" First of all, as a definition, this seems closer to prof. Peel's notion of the model reader rather than the authorial. Moreover, this definition does not place authorial readers squarely within the properties or projections of the text, as a special case of the the implied reader role; but rather talks about an authorial reader as a kind of a real reader. This difference, however, seems insightful: it seems to bridge the gap between the real reader and the implied, attempts to describe the way the real reader behaves vis-a-vis the world of the story and the implied reader -- there's a contract to negotiate there, to choose what role you're going to play, the one of a wizened critic or the one of a novice ready to be enticed.

To solve the mystery and figure out what Peter Rabinowitz actually said about model and authorial readers, I used Scholar.Google to find and download a copy of Rabinowitz's 1998 book, "Before reading : narrative conventions and the politics of interpretation." I didn't get very far in reading it, but I'm hopeful. James Phelan says in the Forward, "The reading of Rabinowitz's title refers to what he calls "authorial reading," the activity by which actual readers seek to enter an author's hypothetical, ideal audience. (ix)" This explanation seems very closely aligned with Keen's in that it talks about the "actual" readers. But here's the next question: what does Phelan (and Rabinowitz, I suppose) mean when he talks about the author's "hypothetical, ideal audience" and what kinds of "expectations projected by the text" does Keen expect the authorial readers to "live up to"? Is that an expectation to do a critical reading or is it an expectation to have the reader fully immersed in the story world?

Keen does not provide specific examples; and I'm sure Rabinowitz does but I will have to read 280 pages to get to the particulars. For now, I'll go with professor Peel's distinctions between model and authorial. As a model reader of my notebook, I am fully immersed and learn from it, and as an authorial reader, I second guess everything it contains. As a model reader of The Blood Oranges, I am immersed in the Greek countryside and the intricacies of the double affair. Attempting to be an authorial reader of this novel I could never be an author of, I am trying to figure out what mythology I need to know to decode the metatext.

Regrouping

Narrative theory is infinite. It is infinite in terms of texts written in and around it, in terms of people who every day write it and about it, in terms of narratives that it attempts to describe. And even if it might still be finite today, it is certainly infinite in terms of all the stuff that will be based on it in the future. However, since in its origins narrative theory is very closely tied to formalist and structuralist theories, it reveals itself in a series of well-ordered manuals, each of which attempts a certain degree of comprehension. It feigns a sense of order, a sense that it (as well as the narratives that it describes) has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This order is a total illusion, perpetuated by the fact that, when done in a book form, narrative theory must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not so in a blog. The way to handle something infinite in a blog is to break it into tiny, minuscule fragments that will take me no more than 20 minutes to write and will relate to other kinds of writing I'm doing that day.

Having said the above, I now have only 5 minutes to proceed. Here's another problem with Narrative theory: it's a catch-all. It's a kind of a theory that exists within a much larger theoretical and philosophical framework, and is usually used within these frameworks to make a point that has very little to do with narrative theory itself. Narrative theory is a tool. It's important because it's useful. Narrative theory itself might just be a sort of giant dusty volume of obscure terms. (This is not true.) I'm only complaining about this because I don't really know how to even approach transcribing my notes. Each term I use sets of the need to explain a bunch of related (syntagmatically and paradigmatically) terms. Do I enter it from placing it in the context of formalism, structuralism (I sort of already did), New Critics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist theory, reader-response criticism, post-colonialism, etc? Do I enter it with trying to define crucial terms (the way I first set out about doing it)? Do I start from posting appealing quotes by different theorists and then providing some sort of a discussion about it?

The answers must wait for another day.

Russian lit blog

Just came across a very neat blog, Lisa Hayden writes about contemporary Russian lit available in translation. Here's her 2009 selection round-up of titles:

Rasskazy on Amazon
Life Stories on Amazon
Boris Akunin on Amazon
Do Time Get Time on Amazon
An Awkward Age on Amazon
There Once Lived a Woman... on Amazon
Night Roads on Amazon
The Dacha Husband on Amazon
Memories of the Future on Amazon
A Jewish God in Paris on Amazon
The Stranger (The Labyrinths of Echo) on Amazon
The Golden Calf on Amazon
The Little Golden Calf on Amazon

Rasskazy sounds like a very interesting anthology, Akunin is contemporary classic, "The Stranger" by Max Frei is important, and of course The Golden Calf -- well, the fact that there were two translations of it this year alone means a lot!

Existing within the story world

Spent the week of Thanksgiving commuting between New York and Philadelphia, visiting friends and family. Two of the major cultural highlights of the trip, an Arshile Gorky exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a Coen brothers' movie, A Serious Man. Also watched The Men Who Stared at Goats, very funny in the right mood.

On the airplanes, read Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs." I am not familiar with her previous work and bought the book on impulse, after reading the first two pages. I think I was immediately mesmerized by the quality of visual details (the birds in the first paragraph) and the precision of documented emotional responses. ("I liked children -- I did! -- or rather, I liked them OK.") This novel is, at heart, a Bildungsroman, a "fictional autobiography," a novel of development of the central character who narrates her own story, Tassie Keltjin (the name comes, I suppose, from "Celts" and "jins"as in "jinns"?). Right after 9/11, Tassie is a 20-year old college student, a daughter of a Midwestern farmer. She finds a job babysitting an adopted child of a chef, Sarah, and a scientist, Edward. The plot develops from there.

If I were speaking in a customary shorthand, I would characterise Tassie as a first-person narrator. But simply providing this label does not go very far in describing Tassie's characteristics as a narrator. As Suzanne Keen points out, "The use of the pronoun alone does not make a first-person narration. Instead, first-person narration, or self-narration, indicates those narratives in which the narrator is also a character, where the narrator and characters coexist in the story world, and the narrator refers to himself or herself as 'I.' (36)" The terms "first-person" and "third-person" are so misleading in terms of their function in narrative theory that every theorist seems to use his or her own language to deal with narrators. (I want to get to Genette's terminology as soon as possible -- but not now).

First of all, what is very important to note is that Tassie, the narrator, exists and acts within the world of Moore's novel. She organizes and controls the discourse or the sujet -- while at the same time, she cannot control the fabula: the fabula is her biography, the story of her life. This is something that can only be attributed to the conceit of the implied author. But Tassie does choose which events she tells and in what order; her storytelling choices reveal her to us as someone different from Tassie-the actant, the character within the story.

For most of the novel, Tassie acts as a very overt narrator: she uses pronoun "I" to give her opinions and points of view about the story she is narrating. Interestingly enough, several of the most poignant parts of the novel come when Tassie ceases to act as an overt narrator existing within the world of the story but assumes a position of a covert narrator telling a story she was not a part of (traditionally termed a "third-person" perspective). Four sections are narrated as an overheard dialogue (and Tassie plays the role of somebody who merely reports it), and two sections have to do with the summary of her employers' past -- narrated by her boss Sarah and only re-narrated (summarized) for us by Tassie. Tassie retells the story she is told -- and we, as readers, are with her, experiencing this inside story as a major revelation.

A very important feature of her narration is that it is dissonant to the events in the story, Tassie starts the telling long (but not too long) after all the events have already occured. This kind of a dissonant narration allows her to highlight the way she is maturing, the way she is growing through these experiences. By looking back on her own younger self, she has the opportunity to sometimes overtly step in as a narrator and draw our attention to the way time changes our perspectives on our actions. In fact, the novel concludes with a very overt narrative statement: "That much I learned in college."

In my next post, I will try to address a certain quality of this novel that I experienced as a problem; specifically, what I experienced as a credibility problem of using Tassie as a narrator, a problem that I identified as a too overt an imposition of an ideology by an implied author. I don't know if I have introduced enough terms in my theory discussion to achieve this, but I will try.

A footnote: All of these terms (overt vs. covert, dissonant vs. consonant, existing within or outside of the story world) were developed by structuralist theorists who presented them usually in terms of binary oppositions. However, lately, most of these, I think, have been reimagined in terms of scales and degrees. There are more or less overt narrators. And almost every act of narration is dissonant (separated in time) from the narrated events -- it's a matter of exactly how much time. (Although I have not read Don DeLillo's White Noise rumored to be be narrated in complete consonance with the events as they occur).

The implied beings

Back in Professor Peel's class, I experienced narrative theory as a series of revelations. My books are heavily marked with stars and exclamation points. One of the biggest OMG's is on page 33 of Suzanne Keen's book, where she quotes Seymour Chatman's paradigm for narrative structure (From Story and Discourse, pg 151):

real author --> || implied author --> (narrator) --> (narratee) --> implied reader || real reader

Compare this diagram to the one that Mansfred Jahn outlines on his website:


Jahn explains this "Chinese boxes' model" as being "standard structure of fictional narrative communication." He highlights something very crucial about this, that the communication between the real author and the real reader happens in the world of non-fiction, where I go to the library and select a book "The Blood Oranges" by John Hawkes that was recommended to me by my friend. What interests me about the author is not so much the story of the novel, but how this novel (or comic lyric poem in prose, as it has been described by critics) fits in with the world of American letters. I'm reading this fictional novel in search of non-fictional information, in search of the Hawkes' ideological and subjective position, his relationship with the academy.

However, where Jahn's diagram is crucially different from Chatman's -- and where the major revelation lies for me -- is that within Jahn's second box with "the level of fictional and metaphictional discourse" there needs to be another pair of figures: Chatman's "implied author" and "implied reader." The author and the reader that are the properties of the text, and do not exit in the world of bookstores, libraries, and university campuses.

Keen writes: "The author is the actual historical person who wrote the text." John Hawkes the novelist, as Wikipedia's disambiguation page helpfully suggests, was born in 1925 and died in 1998, and was a "postmodern American novelist," and was also many other things: for example, an influential teacher. On the other hand, Keen continues, "The implied author is the version of the author projected by the text itself and sometimes also conditioned by our knowledge about the actual author's life and career." John Hawkes, the author of The Blood Oranges, seems to be a middle-aged man, with some experience of life abroad (or at least in Italy), likely without much (or deep) knowledge of contemporary foreign languages (foreign language is represented in the novel by two words "croak peonie") but some knowledge of Greek and Latin, with a keen interest in human sexuality, ancient mythology, and flower symbology.

This implied author directs his discourse to the implied reader, who according to Keen is also "a projection of the text, and differs in every instance from actual readers, many of whom will not exactly match the profile suggested by the text. (35)" I, the real reader, who got Hawkes' book from the library am very different from the reader to whom I feel this text is speaking. I do read English, the language of the implied (and real) author. I am not, however, a man, and I am not particularly well-versed in ancient mythology -- and so far the combination of the two provides the biggest difficulty for me in the reading process, as I feel that the implied author is directing this text to a male reader with basic knowledge of the myths of Eros? some sort of headless white bull -- whose origins in myth I have to trace. I am not concerned about my virility or the ways of seduction. On the other hand, I am interested in ways of examining the relationship between sexuality and death -- and here's where I feel that I do coincide with the implied reader. I also feel that the implied author is offering the implied reader a quasi-philosophical puzzle, and this aspect of the text I am also interested in.

To highlight the distinction between the real and the implied, Keen notes that the historical, real author -- Charles Dickens in her example "lived, suffered the indignity of the blacking factory, wrote, made loads of money, left his wife, went on readering tours, and died exhausted, whereas the implied author, 'the Dickents of Bleak House (1852-53),' perpetually experiments with a mixture of first and third person, continues to employ characters to do his bidding and permanently abides in the realm of the present tense. (34)"

The real, historical author exists in time, usually the past. The implied author always exists in the present.

Interestingly enough, the parallel statement is not true for the real and implied reader. I suppose, the real, historical reader always exists in the present moment of the reading. The implied reader, as a property of the text, can live any time and any place -- depending on the attitude of the implied author about it. The implied reader of The Blood Oranges seems to be an immortal being who lives forever -- but also at the same time, a 1970s male scholar of literature and philosophy who reads in English (this list of characteristics is not meant to be exhaustive and depends on who is doing the analysis and for what purpose).

Fabula (and sujet)

My friend Evelyn shared with me another great article, Jim Shepard remembering his teacher John Hawkes. Jim is, as always, hilarious. I am, at the moment, reading (on Evelyn's recommendation) John Hawkes' novel, "The Blood Oranges." I am also reading Clarice Lispector's "Family Ties" at the same time. I'm not sure which of the two is more work :). But lots of fun, of course, and makes me want to read more theory.

John Hawkes has been described as a "fabulist" writer alongside Italo Calvino, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and maybe "new wave fabulist writers" like Kelly Link and Cory Doctorow. "Fabulist" in this case is related to the word "fable," originally, a didactic tale where antropomorphised animals and inanimate objects deliver a moral lesson (a la Aesop), and lately, a myth-based story with supernatural happenings.

However, insofar as frequently "fabulist" writing comes with its own aesthetic of language use (University of Louisville, for example, even has an annual prize given "for a work of fabulist fiction written in the vein of Italo Calvino"), it has a very interesting relationship with one of the basic terms of narrative theory, fabula.

The term "fabula" is best explained together with a paired term, "sujet": or "story" and "discourse" in the terminology used by other theorists. Basically, "story" or "fabula" is what a text is about, and "discourse" or "sujet" is the way the reader enounters the text on the page, the words within which the "fabula" is contained. In the words of a structuralist theorist Gerald Prince, "fabula" is the "what" of the text (what you imagine what really happned) and "sujet" is the "how" of it (how the reader first encounters it).

Suzanne Keen writes that sujet "indicates the words of the narrative as they are actually presented, including -- as they occur page by page -- any digressions, repetitions, omissions, and disorderly telling. (17)" She explains fabula as representing "the whole narrative content as (re)constructed in a reader's imagination."

So, if I were to summarize the fabula of Hawks's "The Blood Oranges" (or the first 50 pages of it that I've read so far), it basically goes like this: there were two married (American?) couples, Cyril and Fiona and Hugh and Catherine, residing somewhere in Italy. Fiona had an affair with Hugh and Catherine with Cyril, but later, under some vaguely mysterious circumstances Hugh and Fiona died, and now Cyril is living alone with a maid Rosella and every week visits Catherine who refuses to talk to him.

The sujet of "The Blood Oranges," however, starts at a very different place: Cyril, a quasi Don Giovanni, ("I took my wife, took her friends, took the wives of my friends and a fair roster of other girls and women, from young to old and old to young, whenever the light was right or the music sounded") is living alone in a villa with a "South European maid" Rosella, who is the only woman to date to refuse to sleep with him. Then, through a series of flashbacks and digressions, sujet meanders to tell us the back story, the fabula, I summarized earlier.

The terms "story" and "discourse" are in some ways more descriptive that "fabula" and "sujet," and in other ways very confusing -- simply because talking about the story of a short story might seem quite confusing. The terms "fabula" and "sujet" are borrowed from the work of Russian Formalists -- and if as I go along, I read enough books, I might be able to figure out again who borrowed them and from whom. The Russian word "fabula" does not mean "fable" (the word for "fable" is "basnya"), but is a more recent adaptation from (English? Latin?) that has been always used as this specific literary term.

So I wonder if there is any specific characteristic of the relationship between fabula and sujet in the stories and novels of the "fabulist" writers, if by calling them "fabulist" and ascribing them a specific aesthetic, we're making a statement about fabula and sujet of these novels. It seems, we're certainly making a statement about fabula: it is myth based, and certain supernatural things are possible. Sujet? Maybe in so far as some of the post-modern fabulists (Calvino, Hawkes) use hyper aware narrators to construct their myth-based tale. I wonder if someone has already written a dissertation on hyper aware narrators in fabulist fiction :)

Approach to theory

For a long time now I've been meaning to start reading, thinking about and blogging Narrative theories. More than anything else, I'm interested in it as a source of inspiration -- a tool set for accessing different voices and creative approaches to stories. A very important second goal is that Narrative theory provides a language for communication with the other writers, language that can be helpful to attenuate and pinpoint the unique aspects of a writer's voice, language that I can then introduce in a workshop setting to better explain my reading of another writer's story.

As a way to approach this ever widening field of study in the blog format, I think what I'm going to do first is to go through my notes from the Narrative Theory class I took with Professor Ellen Peel a couple of years ago and look through some of the the books that we used during that class. I'm hoping that this will be a good starting point from where I can branch out into reading and reflecting on different types of theoretical and critical texts. Reading theory is a demanding exercise, but one that seems to me to hold the greatest potential for a writer to keep increasing the level of awareness of her own subjective position and goals in writing, of reaching new depths (or lengths) of meaning.

Professor Peel, in her very systematic approach to teaching, started the conversation from discussing the definitions of crucial terms: fiction and narrative.

Fiction: from Latin "to fashion" or "to form" is related to "feign" -- or to pretend. In this, fiction is frequently contrasted with fact; the "truth value" of fiction is always in question. Fiction is not a lie, but it makes a different type of truth claim than fact. Fiction is not claiming that it's true, but it's not entirely a lie either. Fiction in its non-factual nature is a relatively recent distinction: fiction vs. history. Sometimes, the easiest way to define fiction as a genre is to contrast it with other genres: fiction vs. poetry vs. drama -- well, fiction is written in prose and not acted on stage.

Narrative: in its most basic, sparse definition, "narrative" is an account of events. Suzanne Keen quotes in "Narrative Form" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) the definition of "narrative" from Oxford English Dictionary as referring to "the inquisitive Scottish law, where narrative means 'that part of a deed or document which contains a statement of the relevant or essential facts'," -- and that the word entered common parlance in the middle of the 18th C.

Interestingly enough, one might construe the definition of "narrative fiction" as being "the shaping of facts." And, of course, "narrative" does not have to be "fictitious." History is also a form of narrative -- and I guess so are some types of poetry.

In any case, narrative is an account of events, often opposed to lyric, where lyric tends to be about a single moment, not happening in time. Implication of this is narrative does happen in time and that time is one of the basic aspects of what we study when we study narrative.

Since events need to be told in some way, there needs to be a narrator. A further implication is that if there is a narrator, there also needs to be a narratee (or addressee, the exact term used depends on a given theorist): someone who is hearing the story. (This is a kind of postulate that really sets off my imagination. Must there be a narrator and a narratee? Can't we think of stories that break these rules? Christa Wolf's "Kassandra" comes to mind. She tells her story ostensibly to be forgotten. She tells her story exclusively in her mind. Her only possible narratee is herself -- but then, of course, it is a narratee.)

At the end of every chapter of her book, Keen provides a list of some excellent reference materials in narrative theories. I hope to have a chance to review some of them as I go along. Here's one, for example, Manfred Jahn's website, Narratology: A guide to the Theory of Narrative.

Here's what Jahn provides in terms of a definition of narrative: "For a simple answer let us say that all narratives present a story. A story is a sequence of events which involves characters. Hence, a narrative is a form of communication which presents a sequence of events caused and experienced by characters. In verbally told stories, such as we are dealing with here, we also have a story-teller, a narrator. This getting started section will mainly focus on narrators and characters." -- By "verbally told stories" Jahn also means novels. At least, his very first example comes from "Catcher in the Rye." In other words, his "verbally" does not mean "orally" -- the way I read it at the first glance. But it does highlight the important aspect of narrative: oral account of events or written, there is a difference. And there's certainly a difference when it comes to the question of narratee.