открытый космос

а в 1996 году написать о себе было не то, что трудно, но вообще-таки казалось делом совершенно неприличным. как это так я буду писать о себе? да кто я такая и что о себе возомнила? пусть о себе я помолчу, а если надо будет, другие скажут.
американский университет требовал сочинение "о себе" одним из главных пунктов всупительных документов. что делать? было совершенно непонятно, чего они от меня хотят.
"Наверное, они хотят, чтобы ты похвасталась своими успехами," предположил папа.
никаких особых успехов не было. в феврале, когда работали над этими документами, было уже ясно, что по основным предметам матшколы, математика, физика, я иду на четвёрки. я была третьей в классе по успеваемости, но в школе класс считался плохоньким, и быть третьей в таком классе достижением не казалось. на последнем звонке янина максимовна вручила мне грамоту за успехи в литературе -- когда-нибудь янине максимовне я посвещу поэму роман в стихах эпическую сагу и сборник миниатюр в прозе -- но от этой грамоты веяло тоской. из успехов в русской литературе каши не сваришь. так или иначе, грамота появилась в мае, а в феврале и о русской литературе нечего было сказать.
"напиши, что ты пишешь в сочинениях по английскому. как ты провела свои летние каникулы. как ты помогаешь бабушке в огороде. какие у тебя хобби."
уж не помню, что я там, в результате, написала. вполне вероятно, это был полуфантастический опус о том, сколько килограмов яблок и картошки мы собираем на даче. делиться хотелось только рекордами.
потребовались годы жизни в америке, чтобы понять, чего же американцы добиваются подобными вопросами. дело вовсе не в хвастовстве, желании продать себя подороже, самовлюблённости и пр. дело в нарративе. в повествовании. в америке, где постоянно в одном классе группе компании кампании сталкиваются люди совершенно разных культур стран происхождения вероисповеданий образований убеждений ценностей, жизненно необходимо умение в двух словах быстро объяснить, кто ты такая, откуда вязлась, и что тебе надо от окружающих. чтобы окружающим было понятно, что они для тебя могут сделать. требуется всего лишь умение связать факты, положительные или отрицательные, в некий конкретный рассказ о себе.
меня зовут ольга. родилась и выросла в петербурге, в еврейской семье. училась в английской школе, закончила математическую. на своём пути встретила много трудностей и успела понять, что математика -- это не для меня. учительница литературы янинна максимовна доверила мне провести несколько уроков русской литературы. мои одноклассники так внимательно меня слушали и задавали такие хорошие вопросы, что в результате я мечтаю стать астрономом. если вы меня примете в школу бизнеса, я потом обязательно постраюсь как-нибудь выйти в открытый космос.

H. Porter Abbott's The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Because I have to return this book to the library today and don't want to forget. Abbott introduces a useful term with no precise definition, narrativity.

Narrativity: A disputed term, used here to mean the degree to which a text generates the impression that it is a narrative. Prince coined the term "narrativehood" to refer to the bare minimum required for a narrative to be recognized as a narrative.

Also, this:

Do we need more than one event for there to be narrativity?

She ate lunch. Then she drove the car to work.

In this instance, the additional event does not help a great deal. . . . Narrativity is a matter of degree that does not correlate to the number of devices, qualities, or, for that matter, words that are employed in the narrative.

Brooding, she ate lunch. Then she drove the car to work.

The addition of that one simple word, "brooding," does much to augment narrativity -- that is, the feeling that now we are reading a story. And this may simply be because the word itself is more common to narrative than it is to ordinary discourse. Or it may be because the word gives depth to the character.

Another useful distinction that Abbott makes is between levels of interpretation. He defines three: 1) intentional readings -- that is, trying to recreate the work of the implied author. "The novelist Paul Auster put it simply: 'In a work of fiction, one assumes there is a conscious mind behind the words on the page.'" 2) symptomatic readings -- what does a text tell us about the implied author and the world in which he lived that the author didn't specifically mean to be in the text. A frame different from that with the intention of the implied author; a symptomatic reading can take psychological, feminist, cultural materialist, or any other theoretical lens. 3) adaptive readings. Probably a lot of this happens in writing workshops. I really admire that Abbott highlights the validity of this process -- this is what happens to any attentive and passionate reader. "There is a line one can cross in doing interpretation, on the other side of which one is no longer supporting a reading from an analysis of the evidence but creating a reading by adaptation. But since some degree of creation is a part of all interpretation, finding this line puts us in yet another gray area."

Lovely book. As always, with theoretical texts, I make the mistake of trying to read from the beginning to the end. Ran out of time and got only to Chapter 10. Now have to give this one back to the library -- I think next on my agenda is Umberto Eco's Interpretation and Overinterpretation.

FOGcon and The Fabulist

A little over a week ago, my friend Amber and I went to Friends of Genre Conference (FOGcon) here in San Francisco. I only had enough time to attend a couple of panels, and had to skip even the live action role-playing game based on Hamlet (still waiting to catch up with Amber to see how it went). What I really liked about the panels I did hear ("Race, Class, and Urban Planning," for example) was that they approached writing almost entirely from the thematic point of view vs. issues of "craft." The conversation focused on the problems of contemporary society (for example, gentrification of cities and urban planning projects that cause more harm than good) and how to address these problems in writing (if you're creating an imaginary city, do you think about where the poor people live, or those who have service jobs?). So often in workshops we focus on "how to say something" problems that we forget to address the "what" of what we're saying. I loved the opportunity of reassessing yet again my own approach to writing.

Among other fabulous people at the conference, I talked to the man who edited? published? promoted? The Fabulist magazine. As a fellow editor, I should've known to ask for the man's name, but I got excited about his magazine and forgot to introduce myself or to ask for his name. The magazine has been around for a couple of years (I think), producing in this time two issues. I have seen their calls for submissions, but shied off submitting before reading an issue. Who knows what kind of approach to the fabulous they took? The weird stories that I write are inspired largely by contemporary Russian politics and might not make much sense outside of that context. What The Fabulist proposes to do is to bring together the world of fables, magic realism, and science fiction. Exciting!

I bought the second issue. It intersperses stories with art by the house artist Adam Myers -- a story of his is also featured in the issue. The whimsical art is clearly inspired by the content of the stories. I love the drawing (collage?) called "Knitted, Knotted" that goes with a weird tale by Bosley Gravel. The freaky little devil who emerges from within the body of a wise old woman is a great metaphor and really appeals to my understanding of wise old women. Most stories in the book had a fantastical element to them, but not all. Tram Nguyen's story "Khoa in Chiapas" could easily have appeared in any realist lit mag. Other stories explore fictional possibility of alternative energy, video gaming, plastic surgery; and others, like Gravel's tale, take roots deep in folklore and mythology. The reading experience was very diverse and thought provoking;.

Notable from narrative theory point of view was the way many of these narratives were segmented. Several of the longer stories, including Nyall Boyce's "Gleam" (which I liked a great deal) and Nguyen's story, alternate between different time periods in the life of the same character. Jeremy Adam Smith's story "Centaur in Brass, 2041" unfolds within a single timeline, but alternates the narrative modes in which the main character's story is told. In some segments we have access to the main character's physical reality, in others, we get glimpses of his avatar in the game world, and in third, we get only bits of dialogue as he and his teammates discuss their play by play progress in the game. We very clearly move between the different levels of this character's psyche. And the stories that alternate between the different timelines in the lives of their characters allows one timeline to be a commentary on the action that unfolds in another. This technique is not too far off from a more conventional flashback technique, but by breaking up the narrative into separate segments it forces greater distance between the character's past and future, allowing the two exist in parallel to one another, as if in two separate story worlds. One does not necessarily follow from one another. The causal relationship between the two is the most obvious, but there are other possible ways to interpret the ways the pieces connect.

Character in Grace Paley's "Goodbye and Good Luck"

One area where the creative writing community is frequently at odds with literature and narrative theory students is the attitude toward characters. That characters aren't people is one of the tenets of contemporary literary criticism. Suzanne Keen writes: "your work will at some point or other be read by a critic who adheres to the principle that fictional characters should not be referred to as if they were human." (69). And she quotes at length from Richard Posner:

a critical difference between fictional characters and real people is that the evaluation of a fictional character is made within a framework created by the work of literature, and the framework is an artificial world rather than our real social world. ... We cannot say, without seeming ridiculous, that Pip is a better man than Achilles, or Leopold Bloom than Odysseus, because to make such comparisons requires ripping the characters out of their context and so destroying the aesthetic structure of which they are components.

This last quote made me laugh as it brought back a memory from my childhood. When I was in my early teens, I kept a running list of my favorite characters. These were mostly male but some female characters, and while I didn't specifically articulate their qualities I admired, I freely included anyone who I had a crush on, whom I wished I could meet in real life, whom I wanted to be or to be with. Every time I found a new character to love in a book or in a movie (I admitted exceptional movie characters to my list, even though I had a separate running list for my favorite movies.. also a separate list for my favorite ice skaters -- they, too, create very strong characters), I would consider where they fit on my list and reorder the ranks. The character who was never dislodged from the top was Sanya Grigoriev from "Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin (I blogged about this book recently). His compatriots on the list included the boy and girl heroes of Soviet literature, Timur and Zhenya from Alexander Gaidar's pioneer novels, Vasyek and Dinka from Oseeva's fiction; characters from foreign fiction -- Pip, ripped out from his "aesthetic structure" might have made the list at one point -- and D'Artagnan and Aramis were always there; characters from Russian classics, like Pechorin, Shtolz (a secondary character from "Oblomov"), Shubin (a minor character from Turgenev's "On the Eve.") As I grew older, I moved on from admiring the heroes and looked for characters who, I thought, weren't given justice by the author. Shubin, in my opinion, was a very charming and interestingly troubled young man -- Turgenev had undeservedly given him short shrift. I came very close to writing what I now know is called "fan fiction."

I'm not alone in this impulse -- to take characters outside of their textual constraints and force them to interact with other characters. I'm thinking of a Hollywood blockbuster, for example, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that pitted Sherlock Holmes against Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, and Tom Sawyer. (Mostly men; original genres all quite different.) The impulse behind my childhood fantasies and this and similar movies might be "ridiculous" from the literary analysis point of view, but it's clearly a powerful one.

Ultimately though I do believe that characters belong to the text, are functions of the text, they manifest reality only insofar as reality is defined by the text -- while readers read both fictional characters and "real" people by the same (or closely related) process, comparing a number of verbal and non-verbal clues to create their own ideas (fictions) about them in their minds. Characters are different from people -- they are defined by fewer variables -- but the reading process is not altogether different from making a new friend. (I wonder if there are neuroscience studies out there testing this hypothesis. Do we use same or different parts of the brain, meeting somebody for the first time vs. reading a novel?)

One of the most revealing parts of Jim Shepard's workshop, was when he suddenly turned to one of the participants and asked her: "Imagine somebody said to you that your eyes shone like those of a wolfhound. How would that make you feel?" He stared at the woman intently, like he really meant it. We laughed, and then realized that the idea of testing lines of dialogue and flashy narrative phrases on a real situation is not a bad one. Words -- characters -- have power. To compare somebody's eyes to a wolfhound is a violent act. A narrator, using a phrase "her eyes shone like those of a wolfhound," expresses an attitude towards a character -- anger, perhaps, or revenge. The relationship between the narrator and the character is immediately circumscribed by this characterization.

On my friend Genine's recommendation, I've started reading Grace Paley's Collected Stories. The first in the book is "Goodbye and Good Luck." In it, Aunt Rosie is telling a story of her life to Lillie, her niece. The niece doesn't materialize as a character in the course of the story -- there's no description of her and she doesn't have any lines of dialogue -- she mostly functions as a listener, as somebody to whom Aunt Rosie is telling the story. And yet the few phrases Aunt Rosie addresses to her every so often do create a viable character. Let me illustrate by copying out a few of the phrases where Lillie is addressed directly:

Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don't notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary's ear for thirty years. Who's listening? Papa's in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. ...

Don't laugh, you ignorant girl. ...

In those days -- it looks to me like yesterday -- the youngest girls wore undergarments like Battle Creek, Michigan. To him it was a matter of seconds. Where did he practice, a Jewish boy? Nowadays I suppose it is easier, Lillie? My goodness, I ain't asking you nothing -- touchy, touchy ...

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream. ...

So now, darling Lillie, tell this story to your mama from your young mouth. She don't listen to a word from me. ... Give me a kiss. After all, I watched you grow from a plain seed. So give me a couple wishes on my wedding day. A long and happy life. Many years of love. Hug Mama, tell her from Aunt Rosie, goodbye and good luck.

One reason these bits of dialogue function so effectively as characterization of Lillie is that aunt Rosie uses her as a mirror; in Rosie's eyes, Lillie is clearly a younger version of herself. If we don't know what Lillie looks like (and it's easy to picture her as a slimmer and even more pink-cheeked Rosie), we know what she must think of Aunt Rosie: she's eagerly listening to a rather long and elaborate story, and so she must by fascinated by Rosie, perhaps, admire her; but she's also capable of laughing at aunt Rosie, so she must also find her somewhat ridiculous. The little we know about Lillie turns out to be enough to create a complex, multifaceted character.

Narrated monologue or free indirect discourse

I've written about psycho-narration before, and I've come up with a couple of examples of quoted monologue here and here. In addition to these, Dorrit Cohn and Suzanne Keen after her suggest the third mode open to third-person narrators when they attempt to represent a character's inner psyche: narrator's monologue or free indirect discourse. I've left the discussion of these to the last, because I remember having a lot of fun with this idea in class -- and because I was also trying to come up with good examples of this mode in recent fiction.

First, the definition. "Narrated monologue presents the character's mental discourse in the guise of narrator's discourse," Keen reports. This is what makes it fun -- we receive two voices in a single phrase, frequently leaving us uncertain what the relationship between the narrator and the character is: what does the narrator think about the character? is the narrator treating the character's thoughts in good faith? is the narrator indirectly making fun of the character? Narrated monologue does this by retaining the tense and person (third) of the narration while at the same time allowing the feel of the character's inner speech to come through--the word choice, the sentence structure might be borrowed from the character's own diction. "Reading narrated monologue gives the impression of the words and modes of expression of the character, while retaining the tense and person of the narrator's language," summarizes Keen.

The difference between narrated monologue and free indirect discourse is largely formal: narrated monologue turns into free indirect discourse when it omits tagging, words like "he thought." On a historical aside, Keen reports that this technique is considered "one of the most significant innovations in the nineteenth-century novels, though some critics have spotted it in earlier texts."

Perhaps, this is just due to my inattentiveness (what do I pay attention to while I'm reading??), but trying to find definitive examples of this technique in the recent magazines turned out to be rather difficult. One good example I did find, comes from Sona Avakian's story "Artichoke Hearts" in Instant City's volume 5. The main character of this short story, Harry, is addicted to smoking, so much so that even when his wife and his daughter threaten to cut him out of their lives unless he quits, he's unable to comply. The narrative mode is very interesting, because while the events are told as if seen through Harry's eyes (Harry serves as the main focalizer for the heterodiegetic narrator), the narrator is not necessarily sympathetic to Harry. The narrator never breaks the fourth wall and tells us directly that Harry is a selfish old man, no, nothing like that; instead, we're able to surmise this purely through the way the story is narrated.

Free indirect discourse seems to be key here. On the one hand, the narrator puts us very close inside Harry's mind. For example, at one point Harry goes to see a performance by a traveling circus and reminisces. The narrator tells us: "And each booth filled him with a longing for the good old days. Days when cars had ashtrays in the back seat and you could smoke in the hospital when your mother was dying." The second sentence is narrated monologue without tagging: this is Harry thinking about ashtrays in the back seats of cars, Harry remembers smoking in the hospital. And this memory clearly brings Harry pleasure, because the narrator also reveals (in a bit of psycho-narration) that Harry's longing for the "good old days," key word being "good." We get another affirmation of how much Harry enjoys these memories when he becomes attached to one of the circus performers and repeatedly goes back to see her.

So on the one hand, we know that Harry's attachment to the cigarette smoking is very earnest and goes to the very depths of his psyche -- it seems to be all that Harry ever thinks about; and on the other hand, we get a chance to see that the narrator disapproves because these flashes into Harry's mind are so brief that they seem to function like quotes taken out of context. When these flashes repeatedly come at the end of a paragraph, for example, at the time when we're expecting a minor revelation, the narrator seems to set up Harry's thoughts as punchlines to the jokes about the man himself. For example, when Harry is considering the hypnosis treatment, the narrator reports: "He looked forward to being put in a trance. If nothing else, maybe he could ignore Arla and Jennifer better." You can almost hear the drum roll at the end of this paragraph. The last sentence seems to be lifted almost exactly from Harry's own thoughts. However, this is reported to us still in the narrator's discourse. And if Harry's thinking this in earnest, the narrator's stance in reporting this is very coy.

Keen explains that "most theorists consider [narrated monologue or free indirect discourse] a double-voiced kind of discourse." It allows us to glimpse deep within the character's mind and at the same time makes us aware of the subtle commentary by the narrator.

Nothing good can come to the character who's the butt of a joke for his narrator -- and certainly nothing good comes to Harry.

I'll keep looking for more examples of FID, there's got to be loads of it out there that I'm simply not seeing. It's too easy to read without paying attention to any of this.

Psycho-narration

As writers, I feel, many of us are obsessed with finding more immediate ways to represent our characters' interiority. Not only what they are thinking, but also what they are feeling, what physical and emotional experiences they are going through at the moment of crisis. This interest in interiority of experience is certainly a matter of the style currently in vogue -- Suzanne Keen reports that "some commentators see the focus on represented consciousness in modern literature as a symptom of a crisis of privacy" (63). I will leave the underlying philosophical discussion alone for the moment being, and limit myself to practical matters. We're interested in representing consciousness -- how do we do it?

Keen uses Dorrit Cohn's book Transparent Minds for her discussion of this. I've already mentioned this before, and since this is a key point, I will inevitably come back to this in the future from another angle. For now, let me repeat again the three ways Cohn sees narrators employing (and this discussion applies to third-person narrators, both authorial or figural) to describe the interior world of their characters: 1) psycho-narration; 2) narrated monologue; 3) quoted monologue. I have already briefly discussed quoted monologue in a reference to Clarice Lispector's story "The Imitation of the Rose," so now I'll pause on psycho-narration. The thing about quoted monologue is that I don't really think it's very much in vogue at the moment -- reading stories for Narrative Magazine, I'm by far more likely to encounter a first-person story than a third-person story that uses quoted monologue.

Psycho-narration basically describes those instances when a narrator tells us what a character thinks or feels. A narrator can tell us what a character thinks of feels at any given moment or over a long period of time, in general; these thoughts and feelings can be acknowledged by the character on the conscious level or not, the narrator has access into the character's subconscious psyche. Keen also reminds us that psycho-narration is very effective at representing what a character has not thought or felt. The example she gives: "She forgot to call the allergist for the third day in a row" (60).

Psycho-narration preserves the narrator's voice, the narrator's access to the usage of metaphors and other figural language; it certainly preserves the tense of the narration and the third-person perspective.

Almost any story I read today uses some form of psycho-narration. Here's an example from the magazine I'm reading at the gym this week, "Black Clock," No.11, short story by Susan Straight called "Alfonso":

A rat ran across the phone wire above his head just when he stepped behind the dumpster at the back doorway of Los Tres Chochinitos. He ducked, but the rat leapt into the branches of the tree across the alley, and he could smell the rotting fruit on the ground. Nectarines. It was August. Damn -- the rat was leaving Los Tres for dessert.

I love this example, because it's got both, psycho-narration and quoted monologue. This phrase "he could smell the rotting fruit" is psycho-narration because it gives us access to Alfonso's sense of smell in the voice and tense of the narrator. And the last sentence of this passage, "Damn -- the rat was leaving Los Tres for dessert," is a very good example of quoted monologue -- the word "damn" indicates Alfonso's thinking in the first person, and the entire line is something that Alfonso might actually say. The part of the sentence after the dash is in the past tense -- so I think technically this is narrated monologue (I save the discussion of narrated monologue for next time), but the word "Damn" set off between a period and a dash -- this one word, I believe, qualifies as quoted monologue.

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.

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.