The Puzzle (my dissertation's film trailer/preview)

At the heart of the English novel there's a formal puzzle. The puzzle is: Where did the third person narrative voice come from?

In some ways, of course, the third person narrative voice has always been with us. For as long as we have related our own lives in narrative we have imagined and related the lives of others, so it would be disingenuous of me to point to the eighteenth century and say ‘here! This is where it began!’ And yet the third person narrative voice in a novel is something without which one cannot imagine nineteenth century literature, and something which rarely appears in the first fifty years of prose fiction printed after the restoration of Charles II in 1660. It has come from somewhere other than the Bible, and yet it is neither common, nor a prerequisite in early works of extended prose fiction. An avid reader will notice that the third person narrative voice draws on techniques developed from spiritual autobiographies and partisan news-papers in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, and is deeply indebted to the conduct books of the seventeenth century, specifically to their ‘improving’ stories of model children and servants, but that's not the whole story. So what do I think? I think that the third person narrative voice develops and proliferates in the single essay periodical that dominates print culture in the first twenty years of the eighteenth century, and this is absorbed from the voices of the Tatler and the Spectator into the later periodicals written by Johnson, and the novels of Fielding, Haywood, Sterne, Burney and Austen. That's my big claim, and that's why I'm going sit at a desk and write for the next twelve months.

I've always been fascinated by the flips between narrative and discursive voices, the moments when you can tell the narrator has moved from relating the story, to talking about the story. I've always felt a strong interest in questions of voice and authority in prose fiction, and the eighteenth century was the first place (reading backwards, as a kid) that I noticed the third person narrator flicker and twist like fish in a shoal. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't - unlike the sturdy leviathan forms of the nineteenth century, sometimes the eighteenth century's narrative voice groups together in one direction for a moment, to scatter completely the next. I see shoals, I see Venn diagrams, and I see patterns that aren't quite emergence and aren't quite rises, but are tried and dropped and sometimes tried again. At the end of the century, there is a third person narrative voice, and at the start of the century there isn't, quite. So it has to happen somewhere.

The problems with writing narrative about the origins of the third person narrator are many, but I am chiefly concerned with this one: I just can't know what it was like to read English in a time when the third person narrative voice was not a prevalent form of storytelling. Just as a contemporary music fan can't know what music sounded like before rock and roll, however passionate about baroque music she may be, so I can't tell what reading was like before the third person narrative voice came to dominate realist fiction.

It is helpful to consider the century between 1660 and 1760 as a liminal period for extended prose fiction in English, during which time many different types of narrative voice struggled for prevalence in print, so I plan to pay attention to some of the failed narrative voices which now read as quirks and oddities of the time. It is interesting to speculate what English Literature might look like had some of them caught on, but at this stage it is more important to note that literature altered in meaningful ways when the third person narrative voice was the most successful formal feature of eighteenth century prose fiction. The eventual success of the third person narrative voice altered literature and literary studies so completely that it is worth examining why and how this particular narrative voice emerged as dominant.

Also, while a detailed discussion of narratology will follow, that school of thought seems caught between two poles. In this project is not invested in privileging the story at the expense of the storyteller, nor the storyteller at the expense of the story. My interest lies in the postures and voices that the storyteller uses to tell the story. This conversation is about the act of narrating, rather than individual narratives or narrators. In fact, this conversation hangs on a story.

Wilder Shores

Check out the UCLA library's special collection "Wilder Shores: Lady Travelers of the 18th and 19th Centuries."
I am trying to design a board game in my head, where one is Lady Mary Wrotley Montagu, and goes to Turkey. Dallying in the seraglio for too long means you miss a turn, getting your letters published is plus ten points, and the first one to fall out with Pope AND bring smallpox vaccination to Britain wins the game!

Braiiins!

If you're reading this blog because you enjoy eighteenth-century literature, then the chances are that someone will have already brought this to your attention - but if not, permit me to be the first to say: Jane Austen's novels - but with Zombies.
Seriously!

The book is called "Pride and Predjudice and Zombies." Considering my fascination with all things zomboid this book could well have been written with me in mind. Goodness, if 'someone like me' is somehow a deographic, does that mean there are lots of us? If you're a kindred soul, here's how to spot me; from now on, I'll be keeping my lacy bonnet next to the cricket bat and my Max Brooks library.

Stay safe out there, folks. I can hear groaning and shuffling from the library stacks...


A dignified nod to A Lady and Old English In New York for the link.


Edited to add: Alice of BenandAlice fame has also sent it to me. I think she's heard the zombie noises from the 10th floor of the stacks.

"From My Own Apartment"

I have a cough.
Woe!

It's not severe, it's just irritating. Also, I suspect I'm feeling far sorrier for myself that the actual cough should permit, and that irritates me even more - and then I cough, and begin again. It's a good job I have a comfy sofa and a portable edition of The Tatler, at the moment.

One of the pleasant aspects of spending Friday night in was trying a new recipe. I find that grey January skies and irritating colds both call for liberal applications of ginger, and so these triple ginger cookies are coming with me to a party tomorrow night.

Well, not quite all of them.

'Comics: The Mental Health Break', or, 'Dangerous Books For Girls'

I was sent gifts via Amazon. They were two books which contained the first 16 comics from the series "The Authority." They're good.

I have spent the last four or five months looking for books (whether picture books, text-based children's books, or young adult novels) in which there are heroines that behave like the women and girls I know now and knew growing up. It's something to do with the amount of nieces I have accumulated, and how much they like books. I want to find books that I could give them in a couple of years in which they will see girls like them, and women they might think are pretty cool.

When I was growing up no girls behaved like the girls in Enid Blyton's stories. We discounted Blyton's girls as incredibly silly, old-fashioned, and probably timid - and I turned the pages of The Castle of Adventure following the exciting things that the boys did: crawling through tunnels, catching crooks, and taming wild animals. While the girls in Narnia had things to do that were equally important as the boys, I remember feeling irked that they didn't get to do any fighting. For us, fighting (with sticks for swords and glorious knightly names and loudly yelled speeches, enormous dragons to be fought, rescued, or tamed) was so much fun that it seemed just silly that Susan and Lucy didn't get a go. Especially since the swords were so beautifully described. C.S.Lewis has such a gorgeously martial prose that we read it again and again, thrilled by armour and trumpets and good bashing evil into the ground, just as it should. In the versions we told each other the girls got swords too.

I didn't discover Philip Pullman's wonderful His Dark Materials until I was an adult, but I recognised Lyra at once, and I knew that I would introduce her to my nieces quite happily. I also discovered Robin McKinley last November, which felt like being given an enormous pot of money and being told I could only spend it on fun things. Her reworkings of popular myths and fairytales with real girls and women, rather than princesses who do impenetrably stupid or miserable things, made me love her books at once. Sunshine is a vampire novel which I am lending enthusiastically to friends at this very moment. It's an utterly spot-on re-imagining of 'Beauty and the Beast.'

How does all this tie in to a very pleasant Saturday spent reading comic books? Jenny Sparks.
I never read any comics as a child apart from Asterix and Tintin (both stolen from my brother. I think comics were for boys in the family imagination, like stories about ponies were for girls). When I started to read comic books about two years ago, I was fascinated by the genre of the graphic novel, it seemed such a clever way to write serialised fiction for people familiar with television and film. The ephemeral and the serial nature of a comic means that the narrative must be absolutely gripping, but can also evolve slowly, with depth and complexity.
I haven't liked everything I've read, and often I have liked the story but not the style of the artwork - Watchmen is one example of this. It was so garish and ugly that I found the story all the more horrible as a result. And it was horrible enough to start with. Brilliant, but horrible.
I was given classics to try - V for Vendetta, Watchmen, 300, Crecy, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Sandman, and I was struck by how incredibly clever this genre is, how incredibly self-aware and yet lacking in pretension. There is something very pleasing about narrative forms which are so unashamedly plot-driven. It's great weekend reading. By this I certainly don't mean these lack sophistication - quite the reverse. Some question the comic as a genre, lots question the politics of superheroes; asking what they mean, and what they should mean. Watchmen in particular pays attention to the strangeness and the sexism inherent in the phenomenon of the superhero. There is a strange gender imbalance in comics, however, and more implausibly-breasted women in tiny scraps of spandex than anyone could ever need. I have commented on this quite frequently, and it has played a part in my wider discussion of the still-rather-male nature of quality geekery. So The Authority was sent to me as a gift, on a hunch that I would like it and as a possibly addition to my list of books I'd want to give a nine year old girl. It was recommended to me as "a comic which will pass Bechdel's test." To my delight, it does.

There's a good review here, which situates it well within the genre. I am still ignorant of the wider genre, but for my immediate quest it's a great find. These are women who don't function as part of anyone else's story, but who are the story. Apart from the leader, Jenny Sparks, there are two other women on the team: an engineer called Angie who has nine pints of nano-tech blood which means she can literally merge with machines, and who is gleefully scientific, and a Tibetan woman called Shen who flies around the place sorting things out in a mischievous-yet-calm manner, and has a very decided opinion about civilian casualties in superhero wars. These women are good, and they give evil people (and equivocating bureaucratic evil-ish folks) a sound bashing - and, says my nine year old reading self, why shouldn't they? I don't think I used terms like "agency in the plot" as a young girl but I certainly I knew when the girls just hung around in stories waiting for something to do - and I didn't like it. That's not a worry here.* They aren't always nice, either - in fact they are rather like the women I know... only with more obvious superpowers. They get to join the list.

Suffice to say, the part of me that would have loved this storyline when I was nine or ten is loving it still, and I had a very fun Saturday. However, as the oldest of my nieces is still too young for any of these books, I have just pre-ordered Neil Gaiman's "Blueberry Girls." We're looking forward to it a great deal.


*There are three men on the team, who do interesting superhero things that also don't revolve solely around strength. Two of them happen to be gay and in a couple, but as I didn't care for much about "loveydovey stuff" as a nine year old, I'm pleased it doesn't intrude on the narrative much. They're just there, and together, and yes, my nine year old reading self would shrug, why wouldn't they be? Now, more explosions, please?

In which we remind our gentle readers, that there are times when it's actually fun.

The nature of your blogger being as it is, you will find more posts here that show her struggling and complaining than any other kind. A friend has summarized this "I cannot believe I am complaining about my privileged existence" feeling with the phrase "Math is hard!" (The curious may wish to read the history of this phrase, and then spit upon any Teen Talk Barbies they may find.)

And yet. And yet. There are moments when this stuff is really, really fun. I recall a time during the writing of my dear little MA dissertation, I was chatting outside the Radcliffe Camera to the extremely affable academic who tried to teach me History of the Book. (My ignorance in this matter being my own failing, not his). "I'm actually rather enjoying it" I ventured, shyly, about a month into the three months of dissertation writing. "There are no distractions, and I'm just doing what I wanted to do when I got here."
"Oh, well then," he beamed. "You're very lucky. Most people say they hate the actual writing part. Good for you."

I've thought back to those words plenty of times this year, and mentally kicked myself for my innocence, my foolishness, because ye gods, math is so hard! Distractions involve teaching, socialising, pointless musing, and Other Dramas, and actually getting to sit and write has felt like something so fraught with expectation and paranoia that I couldn't believe I'd ever thought this was an enjoyable experience.
And so this week I thought I should make a public record of the fact that I find myself really, really enjoying writing. Honestly, I wake up in the morning and then write a little bit, I read The Tatler and the Female Tatler a little bit, and sometimes I read books about them. In the afternoons I do other jobs, I teach, I make notes. I am also reading Richmond P. Bond's lucubrations on the subject. I read words like 'lucubrations' on a regular basis.

It is immensely pleasurable.

Write!

"Write", all the writing manuals and meetings about chapter-writing have told me. "Write!" Write if you feel like you have a cold coming on and would rather be in bed, write if events of extreme national and/or personal importance are happening and you'd rather be reading news, write if your legs fall off, write if your laptop is on fire, write if your brain really isn't in the mood and would rather veer off into unsettling daydreams about what Battlestar Galactica would be like if set during the war of the Spanish Succession, or if all the cast had German accents....

Write! Get it written! Write it!

In the morning I wake up, make a pint of green tea, and sit at my table, gummy-eyed and straggly-haired, and I write two pages or more before breakfast, before a shower, before I turn on my desktop with the internet access, and greet the world. Now I know I shouldn't woo the muse with soft music and candles, I know that these thoughts come better when I have a routine, and I know that if I can write two pages before 10am I can spend the rest of the day looking things up, teaching, or doing whatever it is I need to do that day.

This morning four men crowded into my kitchen (who would have thought it was possible in Manhattan to even get four people in a kitchen? I'd never managed it myself) to check the pipes. I nodded to my lovely building superintendent, and sank deeper into the tea. But somehow they distracted me after half a page, and I made the mistake of reading backwards to try to figure out what is going on, and now I'm feeling too pernickity and unsure of the points I am trying to make to be able to make them. Which makes me want to go back to bed with a big fuzzy sweater and an edition of The Tatler.
But I am resisting the impulse. I will write!