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The Art of Fiction (27-50)

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27 - TELLING IN DIFFERENT VOICES

Fay Weldon – Female Friends (1975) → Polyphonic medley of styles/voices. Gap between subject and style. Pastiche

Summary narrative : contemporary (irony, pace, pithiness), usefull when lot of characters/long period of time. Attention : monotony in vocab + syntax

Mikhail Bakhtin : prose called « polyphony » or « dialogism »

Traditionnaly prose = « monologic » - sigle vision/interpretation/style

VS « dialogic » (rare before Renaissance) . Uses free indirect style (better for emotions and thoughts)

« double-oriented discourse » (ex : H. Fielding – Tom Jones) the language simultaneously describes an action, and imitates a particular style of speech or writing = style incongruous, irony.

« His categorization of the various levels of speech in novelistic discourse is complex, but the basic point is simple: the language of the novel is not a language, but a medley of styles and voices, and it is this which makes it a supremely democratic, anti-totalitarian literary form, in which no ideological or moral position is immune from challenge and contradiction. »

28 – A SENSE OF THE PAST

John Fowles – The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) → « timeless » = we cannot know when it was writen. Fictional realism (important since 2 centuries)

Linked with the moment of the writing (interpretation). Victorian novels. Sir Walter Scott (Waverley/The Heart of the Midlothian – 1814-1816).

Historical novels – culture, ideology, manners, morals (way of life)

Old past : cannot be represented as good as the contemporary authors, but can add a new perspective thanks to the time when it is writen.

Clothes = good representers

« Metafiction » = Imagining a story but presenting it has historical reality.

29 – IMAGINING THE FUTURE

George Orwell – 1984 (1949) → Use of present characteristics of society to express how the life will be different in the future. Could be in present be some informations (« the clocks were sticking thirteen ») show us the world is another one than ours.

Future tense : impossible to orientate one self in time and space. Past tense is better, natural.

Not historical novel → prophetic novel but use of the past to give the impression of reality.

To show the future : enigmas (words, informations...). Invoking/modifying/recombining real images.

Popular science fiction, for instance, is a curious mixture of invented gadgetry and archetypal narrative motifs very obviously derived from folk tale, fairy tale and Scripture, recycling the myths of Creation, Fall, Flood and a Divine Saviour, for a secular but still superstitious age.

Objective : not reflect social reality but paint picture of a possible future.

30 – SYMBOLISM

D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love (1921) → Train = industry

Symbolism : plurality of meaning (ambiguity, hard to find the right correspondance). Started in France (fin XIX) with Beaudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé. Use of figures of speech.

« Make a spade a spade before making it a symbol »

31 – ALLEGORY

Samuel Butler – Erewhon (1872) → = Nowhere. Imaginary country. Analogies full of humour

Allegory : form of symbolic narrative. (Best exemple : J. Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress virtues and vices personnified – Christian struggle). Dreams. Or stories from a character to another (ex Arthur et l'histoire du petit ourson). Technique of defamiliarization.

Extended allegories : didactic/satirical fables (Gulliver's Travels, Animal Farm)

32 – EPIPHANY

John Updike – Rabbit, Run (1960) → Huge intensity in the moment. He plays golf and understands at that moment why he left his wife – religious transcendance.

Epiphany = a showing « when the souil of the commonest object seems to us radiant ». Christiannity = the showing of the infant to the 3 Magi. Transcendantal significance, close to lyric poetry (= rich in figures of speech/sensitivity/metaphoric speech)

In modern fiction : climax or resolution.

33 – COINCIDENCE

Henry James – The Ambassadors (1903) → « a chance in a million » a man sees his son on the lake.

Used a lot in Victorian fictions, especially for the moral side of the story.

Hard to « get away with » in the respect. (need to be disguise/justified)

Accepted in comedy

34 – THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day (1989) → Unreliability of the narrator is the only intersting thing in the story. Steven et les nazis – dernier commentaire de bizuth.

Cannot be 100% unreliable. Novel = work of fiction (normal).

Purpose : gap between appearance and reality + how human mental works.

35 – THE EXOTIC

Graham Greene – The Heart of the Matter (1948) → Greene wartime service for MI6 in Sierra Leone, ref to J. Conrad (an expat)

A lot between imperialisms. The mediation of an "abroad" to an audience assumed to be located at "home".

36 – CHAPTERS ETC.

Tobias Smollett – The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) →

Laurence Sterne – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-67) → « a pretty story ! Is a man to follow rules – or rules to follow him ? » … "that chapters relieve the mind - that they assist - or impose upon the

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