On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
In 1933, Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
In today’s world, when a fabricator like James Frey is called on Oprah’s carpet and forced to apologize for passing off his (bad) fiction as memoir … we have little tolerance for experimentation with the truth. (My beef with that whole thing is that Frey was a bad writer. I didn’t care so much that he pretended it was true. I cared that the writing was bad and he was being celebrated for something that was not well-written. This is what Fran Leibowitz warned us about when she said, “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.”) James Frey could not get his book published as fiction, because the prose wasn’t good enough, but once he said it was true, voila, publishers came calling. I was fascinated by that whole thing because it really pinpointed some of the issues in the publishing world, and what “we” care about. We like things to be clear, open, transparent. Everyone must be honest at all times. No TRICKS. We live in a very strict age. We live in a very literal age.
However, things were not all that different back in 1933. In the wake of Stein’s “autobiography,” many people who were described in the book were angered, they felt they were mis-represented. In 1935, a “Testimony Against Gertrude Stein” was published in a French literary magazine. Henri Matisse was the most annoyed, and wanted to make it clear that Gertrude Stein was very peripheral to his world, she was never as fully involved as she claimed to be, and yadda yadda, blah blah blah. People were pissed! Not only were people pissed about appearing in the book, and not liking the portrayal, but outsiders were confused. How can this be an autobiography if Alice B. Toklas didn’t write it? What is Gertrude Stein up to? People don’t like to be TRICKED. People want to know how the magician does his tricks, they want to remove the anxiety of not-knowing.
Jeanette Winterson plays around with autobiography, too. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
Those two sentences get deeper and funnier and trickier the more I think about them. To put those two sentences back to back destabilizes the rules of fiction, of storytelling. The “trust me” is especially delicious, and in the context of The Passion sounds different depending on the context (it shows up throughout the book). It sounds truthful, it sounds manipulative, a cooing in the ear of her latest mark: “Trust me …” as she lifts his wallet from his inner pocket. You just don’t know. And Winterson does not want to choose either way. She REFUSES to choose. People want her to be more literal. “So did your mother really act like that?” You can almost hear Winterson saying, between the lines of Oranges, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
In the little author’s blurb for Oranges, Winterson claims that she ran away to join the circus. I think she might have said, too, that she worked as a “shepherd” as well. The whole thing feels fabricated, and this is her author’s blurb, which we are supposed to trust. It’s fabulous ! (Barbra Streisand, when she made her debut on Broadway, had a similarly ridiculous bio in the playbill, none of which was true. I believe she said she was born amongst the natives in Borneo. Streisand too was a master storyteller, creating a persona out of her own fantasies for herself. People make fun of her long nails, but she grew those long nails because her mother wanted her to go to secretarial school. As long as she had those long nails, she couldn’t type. Those nails are important, those nails are a declaration of independence, a refusal to be limited by what others want for her.)
It should be no surprise, then, to learn that Winterson was so inspired by The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It showed her the possibilities, it showed her that there are no rules. Or those who love the rules and remind you of the rules do not need to be listened to. Do your own thing. Write whatever the hell you want. Do not listen to small people if you are up to big things.
The Autobiography showed Winterson that all bets were off. That literature was much more ferocious and wild and out-there and fantastical than the literary magazines would have you believe. Winterson has much in common with the magical-realists like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but she follows the stars of Stein, and Woolf, and Joyce, and T.S. Eliot … who were somehow, incredibly, able to turn their backs on the gigantic weight of the 19th century form, and mess it up, futz with it, make fun of it, turn it inside out. (It is important to remember, however, that those Modernists knew their literature. They were not just “experimenting” randomly. They knew their Dickens and Trollope and Eliot, they knew them inside and out. It’s like modern dance or jazz. Only when you are familiar with the old forms can you start to create your own.)
This essay by Winterson is a beautiful examination of what Gertrude Stein was up to with that “autobiography”. It’s a very interesting essay about truth, and people’s need for total truth, and how limiting reality is, how limiting “truth” is.
Excerpt from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
Gertrude Stein played a trick and it was a very good trick too. She had, as a precedent, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) but instead of re-making biography into fiction, she pushed the experiment one step further, and re-defined autobiography as the ultimate Trojan horse.
We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and the self-portrait. (Reflect a while on what the Post-Impressionists did with those.) One is the representation of someone else’s life, and the other is the representation of your own. We shouldn’t have to worry about form and experiment, and we can rest assured that the writer (or the painter) is sticking to the facts. We can feel safe with facts. You can introduce a fact to your mother and you can go out at night with a proven fact on your arm. There we are; a biography in one hand, and an autobiography in the other. A rose is a rose is a rose.
Suppose there was a writer who looked despairingly at her readers and who thought: ‘They are suspicious, they are conservative. They long for new experiences and deep emotions and yet they fear both. They only feel comfortable with what they know and they believe that art is the mirror of life; someone else’s or their own. How to smuggle into their homes what they would normally kill at the gate?’
Bring on the Trojan horse. In the belly of a biography stash the Word. The Word that is both form and substance. The moving word uncaught. Woolf smuggled across the borders of complacency the most outrageous contraband; lesbianism, cross-dressing, female power, but as much as that, and to me more than that, she smuggled her language alive past the checkpoints of propriety.
At similar risk, although Stein is not close to the genius of Woolf, the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is an act of terrorism against worn-out assumptions of what literature is and what form its forms can take. Modernism fights against fixity of form, not to invite an easy chaos but to rebuild new possibilities. Art cannot move forward by clinging to past discoveries and the re-discovery of form is essential to anyone who wants to do fresh work. Stein knew this as well as Picasso knew it and although she was not as able as he to devise new solutions, she perfectly understood the problem. That in itself makes her a significant writer. The Autobiography has been described as a retreat from her experimental style but it was no more a retreat for her than Orlando was a compromise for Woolf. Both writers identified and exploited the weak-mindedness of labels. The Autobiography is not Gertrude ghosting Alice, it is Gertrude refusing to accept that real people need to be treated really. She included herself. Gertrude Stein made all of the people around her into characters in her own fiction. I think that a splendid blow to verismo and one which simultaneously questions identity, the nature of truth and the purpose of art. Had anyone said to Matisse ‘I don’t like that’ or ‘Your painting is not a proper record of that house/fruit bowl/guitar’, Matisse would have laughed in his face. Why then is Matisse complaining that Gertrude has not made a proper record of him?
It was not necessary to agree with the focus of any of Stein’s work, or to like it, to know that she was a committed experimenter and that to her, nothing was sacred except the word. Stein never pretended that Toklas had written the book, and even though Stein is named on the jacket as the author, the last paragraph is still one of the wickedest most delightful paragraphs in English literature:
About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do? I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.
How could she? The cheek of it. It is an explosion of eighteenth-century wit and Modernist sensibility. The world turned upside down. Poor Matisse. Made into a fiction and determined to behave like a fact. What would he have said if Stein had rejected the portrait painted of her by Picasso when Picasso blanked out her head?
By refusing to recognize Gertrude Stein’s literary adventure her accusers were forced into writs of authenticity. A fact is a fact is a fact. Or is it? Stein was not writing a faithful account of her Paris years, she was vandalizing a cliche of literature. Autobiography? Yes, like Robinson Crusoe. Why not daub with bright green paint the smug low wall of assumption?
Manipulation really requires the right touch. I remember reading Atonement and feeling like my trust as the reader had been betrayed when we find that the romantic middle portion of the book was actually just made up by the guilt-ridden little sister. The “true story” was sadder and smaller. I don’t recall any hints that I shouldn’t invest in what was going on, in what the characters were experiencing. Briony became a mega-bitch for betraying her sister and Robbie in the novel, and then me, the reader. I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know if that was part of the story there. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein gives the game away to the reader at the start.
//We live in a very strict age. We live in a very literal age.//
We do, but do you think it’s ever different except in hindsight? I think Ages do have Spirits, but I also think that they’re like supertankers – they take a long time to go in any new direction. The Modernists did what they did, and then it took 10-20 years to get their books and poems past the censors in the US. Elvis and The Beatles did what they did, but their records were also burned. Perhaps cultural history is like regular history: written by the victors. I wonder who will win the history of today.
And
I’m telling you stories. Trust me. also gives the game away. “My purpose is not to convince you that these things literally happened to me.”
I think her point is though: Who can say? Winterson thinks fairy tales are truer than reality. With her, you’re never quite sure. It’s not meant to be literal. In The Passion, the lead character loses her heart – literally – to a wealthy woman who comes into the casino. She falls in love instantly. The next day she places her hand on her heart, and cannot feel it beating anymore. She then breaks into the woman’s mansion at night, to go retrieve her heart – which she finds beating in a velvet box.
She means to say: This really IS what love feels like. It is presented as part of the factual story – and the whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that The Passion is also a sort of historical fiction – Napoleon and Josephine are characters in it.
So it’s a mix of things. It’s not that it’s a game – Winterson is dead serious.
//She then breaks into the woman’s mansion at night, to go retrieve her heart – which she finds beating in a velvet box.//
And now I remember why I loved this book. I must read it again!
Helena – I know! It’s been years for me since I’ve read it – I’m almost afraid to re-visit it I love it so much.
So excellent!
I think my overuse of “giving the game away” was a poor choice. I have nearly perfect attendance in the school of Myths Are Truer Than Reality – that is one of the things that draws me to Jeanette. That kindred spirit.
I’m sure you remember in the “People” section of Aspects of the Novel Forster quotes a French critic who talks about how every person has two sides: the historic and the fictional. The historic is the “what did this person do and say.” And the fictional is the “what did this person dream, feel, love, hate, fear, desire.” These terms are meant for real people, not just characters. But they can be applied to characters, if we remember the particular meaning of “fictional” here. With Jeanette, I think it’s simple enough to see that she mostly cares about the fictional part of people. She has to have people do and say things, but its the fiction – the inner life – that is the priority for her. Or, it was simple enough for me. Clearly not for everyone, given some of the responses to her work.
So I agree, she not playing a game with this, this is what is important to her.
Wow, perfectly put!!
I think Jeanetter Winterson, too, does not want to be “nailed down” by literalists- those who want all work to be autobiography-or those who love to fact-check, mistaking Wikipedia articles for Truth.
So Winterson, in a way, refuses to play the game. Like V. Woolf refused.
Interesting stuff!
Mutecypher – Thanks for this! Yes, I think every age has its strict-ness, that’s for sure!! James Joyce’s Ulysses was treated like a bomb going off – nobody knew what had happened to their old forms that they loved/knew so well. He couldn’t go THAT far, could he?? Well, yes he could!!
But the literal-ness of our age, and what we want from our artists, is extremely different now than it was in the past. There is a total conflation of art and biography. There is a suspicion towards artists – that they might be trying to pull a fast one on us. Winterson is always like, “Yes. I AM trying to pull a fast one. I’m a trickster. That’s the whole DEAL.”
Funny, I had a totally different reaction to Atonement. I didn’t feel betrayed at all. Or … I think we are meant to feel betrayed. Briony did what she did, and then tried to “atone” for it in her fiction – which, of course, does not eradicate what she did, or make things turn out well. But this is what we put on fiction – the “happily ever after” we all hope for. So I was devastated by the realization that that section of the book was a fabrication. I wanted so badly for it to be true.
In the movie, Vanessa Redgrave (who plays the elderly Briony) is given a sort of Oprah-esque confessional moment – which really speaks to what I was really trying to get at – the literal-ness of our time. That confession does not exist in the book. Because atonement – the title of the book!! – is not possible. But boy do we now love people coming on television and baring their souls, and we think that’s true, and we think that makes it okay. (“We” as in the general we.) I thought adding that coda was kind of gross. Like – no. In the book, Briony has to suck it up and eat the pain of what she did and her silly little childhood that ruined people’s lives. She has to live with that.
I found it soul-crushing!!
I was surprised at my extremely negative reaction to Atonement, so I read another novel by Ian McEwan: Amsterdam: A Novel. I wanted to give the guy another shot since he’s held in high regard. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but the “joke” or the Alanis Morisette version of “ironic” for the upcoming ending became obvious to me about half way through and the thing became an annoying slog to finish. Some people just rub me the wrong way, and when everyone else likes them, I have to think the problem is me. Oh, well.
To address what you wrote above and below, I have two sentiments at war within me. One is ‘human nature has not changed through history.’ And the other is a lot like the H.L. Mencken quote you used in “Epic.” For whatever reasons, the puritans do seem to have the upper hand at this point. And it’s odd that so much entertainment is fantasy, from comic books and science fiction and actual fantasy – yet things are taken so literally. What feeds the spirit of an age? Do our immature entertainments stunt our children’s mental growth by not requiring them to work to find a meaning behind the actions – when the meaning is as simple as “stop the bad guys?” I imagine you’ve seen surveys that show parents are far more disapproving of a child marrying a person from another political party than of marrying outside the family’s religion. It’s never been that way, for as long as surveys have been taken in the US. We adults seem to have some odd infection that only allows empathy in a small number of ways. And then everyone else is evil/stupid.
I made my comment on a day when the sentiment “human nature hasn’t really changed” was winning. Today, I think “those damn puritans” is winning. I don’t know if you saw it, but there’s been a lot of fuss about Louis C.K.’s opening monologue on the season finale of SNL. He made some jokes about child molesting. I don’t usually watch SNL, but I did after hearing about the fuss. I thought the jokes were very funny, poking fun of how we act now versus how people acted in the ’70’s. Now, I’m sure that his monologue would have generated a backlash at any point in SNL’s history – someone would have said that you can’t joke about such a terrible thing. But today, I worry about the consequences for the guy. I’m hoping he just says FY to the prisses and moves on.
I’m thinking that we can just blame Scientology. Works for me.
Oh definitely.
Xenu is at the heart of all of it.
Yes, I had heard that about Louis CK – it’s weird, there’s an empty ritualistic feeling about such situations now. “Someone says something ‘bad.'” “Twitter goes APESHIT.” “Forced apology to follow.” “Twitter then critiques the apology.”
Honestly, don’t these people have anything better to do?
The humorlessness is a terrible symptom of our times and comedians are often on the front lines. I treasure those who say Fuck You. There’s also this recent nonsense – somehow related – of students declaring they can’t read Ovid because they find it “triggering”. Ovid is the latest one – but there’s been a lot of them – students at Oberlin asking for “trigger warnings” on books, etc. This is an extremely personal topic and people take it personally – but I think those who take it personally should not be dominating the conversation. If it’s PERSONAL to you, then see your doctor about it. I don’t mean that in a bitchy way. You are in a classroom to learn. Literature is often confrontational and painful. If you can’t handle it, then that’s fine, but don’t ask the university to gear its entire program around your sensitivities. This is ridiculous.
I honestly think such people should not be in a university setting. Get out of the damn way and let the grown-ups read and have discussions. Maybe be in a profession where reading is not a requirement then. Or critical thinking. Or curiosity.
This yearning to be congratulated and pampered for your fragility is extremely new. Yes, people should not be stigmatized for mental illness/struggles – and God, I know that from the inside – but let us not require the rest of society to be AS sensitive as the most sensitive among us. If you can’t read Ovid without being triggered (and yes, it’s sexy sexual erotic stuff) – then that is something to be talked about with your psychiatrist. It is not something that belongs in a university classroom.
It’s one of those weird things where the evangelical Puritan types join hands with the Social Justice Lefty types. Everyone’s offended. They want the rest of the world to adjust their behavior so that they can walk around never being offended.
I can’t handle movies where gigantic spiders run rampant over the landscape. Even just typing that sentence freaks me out.
But I don’t require that those movies not play in theaters or that those movie posters not be put up in subway stations. Yes, I get PANICKED when I see posters for Arachnophobia or anything else – and have a terrible moment of phobic-dread when I am AMBUSHED by one in a subway station or going by on the side of a bus. But, deep breath, world not set up for my comfort, I move on.
This should be the message. This should be the conversation. We live in a free society and that needs to go both ways.
That Ovid thing really made me grind my teeth. Now, we don’t know what the professor may have said to the student, but “perhaps you should take this class after you’ve dealt with these things” seems like the obvious thing.
I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but the Oberlin College choir posted a song about a recent controversy involving Christina Hoff Sommers coming to their campus. It’s pretty funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxCSy7tpUME
Some students are pushing back, so there’s hope.
I don’t like spider either. Shelob – oh man! Those sideways mouth parts. I’d rather be eaten by lions than any of the tiny things that crawl around.
//This yearning to be congratulated and pampered for your fragility is extremely new.//
I watched Tales of Hoffmann on TMC this weekend. I do think that wanting to be congratulated for having “deep feelings” was a part of, the worst part of, Romanticism. But I also think Hoffmann was satirizing or mocking that with the foolishness of the character “Hoffmann.” Then, I think the desire was to take on some of the glamor of the artist, without having to do the hard work of actually creating art.
I don’t know what people who demand accommodation for their feelings are trying to get. Is it just power, do you think? Just supreme passive-aggressive behavior?
Yay, you saw Tales of Hoffmann!!
Good point about the Romantics!
I’m honestly not sure what is happening. If you spent all your time on Tumblr, you would think that the majority of the people in this world were fragile wrecks suffering from PTSD and a host of other ailments that they list in their sidebar, by way of introduction.
It’s almost like a badge of honor, maybe? I think there’s also peer pressure involved – and a certain amount of group hysteria, as mean as that may sound. There is pressure on the group – and pressure to be as sensitive as you possibly can be – and “not being able to handle things” means you have “cred” in that specific sub-set. My nephew, who’s a teenager, tells similar stories from his high school.
But these are sheer anecdotal evidence – and the world is NOT Tumblr (thank goodness) – but something is definitely going on.
“I’m the most sensitive.” “No, I am!” “I get triggered by EVERYTHING.” “I can’t even leave my house!” And in certain worlds – the online Tumblr world – is totally 100% supportive of all of this. And that’s fine – your friends (online or otherwise) should be supportive. Although sometimes saying, “Toughen up” is not evil or cruel – it’s HELPFUL. So then when these kids hit the university setting, they are totally expecting the world to conform to that super-supportive cotton-ball-enclosed emotional womb.
I tend to think of it as a form of group hysteria, frankly. I’m sure Paglia has a lot to say about it – as she did about the date-rape frenzy that swept universities in the late 80s/early 90s.
Joan Acocella wrote a fascinating book (that I’m sure many people would find “triggering” – ha) called Creating Hysteria – about this phenomenon of peer pressure and cultural expectation basically creating “hysterical” environments. She was interested in the phenomenon known as “hysteria” – these women FLIPPING OUT in mental asylums, etc, in the 19th century – and what the hell was going on with that. Were these women all really sick? Why did this phenomenon vanish so suddenly?
She also looks at more current examples – like the “Satanic ritual” thing that took over the planet in the 1980s – along with the “repressed memory” trauma therapy – that can actually CREATE trauma through the powers of suggestion.
I honestly think there’s some of that going on these days – and someday someone will write a book about it. But we’re in the thick of it now and even suggesting that someone’s “lived experience” may not be entirely kosher is tantamount to treason. You have traumatized the victim all over again. And etc. It’s an endless parade of trauma.
I just go to Tumblr for the porn. Sounds like I should keep it that way.
hahahahaha
Definitely.
Time for another revival of The Crucible.
Just another thought: My sister teaches middle-school – English/reading. She says that the kids today (as opposed to earlier – she’s been teaching a long time) do not at all understand “inference.” They can’t get it, they can’t make that leap at all. The hit books for the “kids today” – like Hunger Games – as gripping as they may be plot-wise, do not contain much metaphor, or simile, or irony – it’s all TEXT. And so the kids get completely confused – INSTANTLY – if all is not immediately clear. She really really has to work with them to understand metaphor, inference, subtlety, subtext. This is new, in her experience. Every generation has its challenges!
Maybe there’s something here too about the “unreliable narrator”. ??
I’m finally reading The Good Soldier and it’s so good. And within one paragraph I could tell that the narrator was not to be trusted. In any detail. In anything. I still don’t know how it will all turn out – but the voice of that book!! So “modern”, to lack a better word. Faltering, filled with parentheticals, insecure, but bragging at other points, dangerously clueless, privileged and yet somehow aware that he and his ilk are a bit silly … But just not trustworthy, not trustworthy at all.
Humbert Humbert of course is the Grand Pooh-Bah of unreliable narrators. Gillian Flynn had a lot of fun with that in Gone Girl, too. You are led through the story by a consummate sociopathic liar. Bah, get me away from these people!!
I was thinking about unreliable narrators, but I didn’t talk about them because I thought the narrator in Atonement was presented as the good old omniscient one. And there was no pulling back of the curtain until the point that annoyed me. Unreliable narrators are so common that I think most experienced readers turn up the skepti-meter as soon as “I did such and such” appears. But it can be a shock for inexperienced readers when they first encounter an unreliable narrator.
Tricky-fun stuff.
// But it can be a shock for inexperienced readers when they first encounter an unreliable narrator. //
Definitely. It up-ends the entire endeavor!!
Like … how DARE you.
Like, I’m reading Good Soldier, and I’m 60 pages in and I am already yearning – desperately – for somebody else to weigh in. Ha. There are three other main characters in this love quadrangle – and I am only privy to the narrator’s view of all of them – but I don’t trust him in the slightest. It’s fascinating and infuriating!!
I’m trying to think back to my first encounter with an unreliable narrator – and the first thing that came to mind was Robert Cormier’s “I Am the Cheese” – a YA book that we had to read in 8th grade.
Have you read it?
The reality, as presented by the first-person narrator, is completely decimated in the final section of the book when you realize what has been really going on.
I was crushed by it. Heavy stuff for a 12 year old!
I haven’t read it. I’m trying to recall my first unreliable narrator. I can’t, but I do remember a shock at learning about it. Kind of an awe, “wow, you have to be really alert when you read! The narrator might be wanting to convince me of something that didn’t really happen even within the confines of the story. Another layer of complexity to unravel!” Peanut butter AND chocolate!
Right! You can’t trust ANYONE then. Huckleberry Finn didn’t pull this shit!
Up there with unreliable narrators, in terms of defying the expectations of inexperienced readers, is the realization that the protagonist may not be the hero.
I shake my head when I see some dopy YouTube of someone getting upset about a terrible story from the Bible. Just because it was done by a patriarch, doesn’t mean God was happy with it. Abe was a real dick a lot of the time, same with David. I don’t know why God loved them, but He didn’t love them because of Every Little Thing they did. And yet this idea seems impossible to grasp by so many. “Everything in the Bible is something that those stupid Christians think they ought to be doing.”
When I taught 8th grade I often reminded myself that everyone grows up eventually. But that’s a belief, taken on faith.
Boy this unreliable narrator stuff has my head spinning. I think the most fascinating examples are those where we NEVER really know. I’ve always counted Burr an example (and, given he was an actual person and a well-known one at that, a pretty bold one). I mean he’s one of history’s bad actors explaining why he wasn’t really a bad actor at all. We really shouldn’t trust him…and yet on strictly historical grounds there’s nothing you could exactly DISPROVE. (I’ve seen several conservative historians be asked about the book in interviews or Q and A seessions and they invariably go on about how they felt about Vidal personally or politically…and then always end with “but his history is very good.”)
But, to me, the most interesting “unreliable” narrators are honorable grownups recalling childhood. We know they aren’t lying or prevaricating (after the manner of Humbert Humbert). We just don’t really know how well they remember. That doesn’t apply to Huck or Holden Caulfield, because they’re remembering in something close to real time. But how much or well does Scout Finch remember decades later, or Mattie Ross in True Grit or the little boy in Shane (all books I think are vastly under-rated as “literature” because they seem much simpler than they really are…and, in the case of TKAM at least, can be very conveniently taught that way)?
You’ve got me intrigued by The Good Soldier, though. Somehow I’ve always had an impression of Ford Madox Ford as a bit of a stick in the mud. Seems I might have been gravely misinformed!
Anyway thanks for the fascinating discussion all around. I needed something to get my heart started today.
Stories told by children are interesting – or then there is the case of Sound and the Fury, told in part by a mentally disabled man – but of course he does not introduce himself as a narrator with “Hi, I am mentally disabled” – but Faulkner launches us into what life is like for Benny, through Benny’s eyes. It’s not that it can’t be trusted really – but that you really MUST succumb to the viewpoint of the narrator. There is zero omniscience. I guess if the Modernists could be said to have done anything – it was to destroy the comforting feeling of omniscience in a narrative. Ford Madox Ford was early in that – The Good Soldier was 1914, I think? He does similar stuff that James Joyce was up to -not just in Ulysses, which came later, but in Portrait of the Artist – especially that first chapter which is told from the point of view of a 6 year old boy. But the 6 year old boy does not know to say, “Hi, I’m 6, judge me accordingly”. The story just starts, with a sing-song-y voice that is all about “moo cows” and “moons” … and you have to go with it. Virginia Woolf, too. Gertrude Stein, as written about in this essay.
it’s a fascinating thing. First-person narration in these contexts. Dostoevsky explored it a little bit – Notes from the Underground sound like the ravings of an absolute maniac in the very midst of a nervous breakdown. (And it’s so funny, too! Because of course insecurity to that degree seems positively ridiculous from the outside!!)
But The Good Soldier is interesting because he tells the story – and the first line is, “This is the saddest story I ever heard.” But … but … already that’s not quite true. Because he didn’t HEAR the story, he LIVED the story. The narration is filled with little glitches like that, and it’s really quite amazing!!
That link in the post to the AS Byatt essay about Ford gives some good background on him – he wasn’t a stick in the mud at all! – :) maybe it’s the name that gives that impression. :) He was this insanely articulate guy OBSESSED with language.
I think you’re right about the name…that and the fact that there was a Masterpiece Theater version of the The Good Soldier…and the fact that it was called The Good Soldier. Made it all sound like he was bound to be a pretty good Post-Victorian fellow (and why read that when there were so many great actual Victorians to catch up with). I might have to follow you into addressing this gap!
Now I can’t be certain since I haven’t finished it yet – but at least in Part 1 what I am getting is that Ford Madox Ford has the Victorian era in his “sights.” It feels like the book (may? I don’t know?) be about the crumbling of certainty that that world had provided – at least for the people like “the good soldier” of the book and all the other characters. Like, the characters are Victorian, but the tone is insistently modern and anxious and hesitant … and so all certainty is called into question. This is true in the particulars of the plot (it’s about a love quadrangle – two couples – ) – where marriage, which is supposed to be so “set” and WAS “set” – has the capability of falling apart, shocking everyone. But then, too – in the larger context – the book was published in 1914 – the year the old world really started dying, after Gavrilo Princip did his thing. And all of the certainties of that very specific world, people of a certain class, empires, etc. – entities like monarchies and nation-borders and alliances – completely shattered. So the book seems to be working on multiple levels – personal and historical.
I’m just guessing – since I haven’t finished it yet – but that’s the vibe I’m getting so far!
Sounds like my meat! I’ll very much look forward to your impressions upon completion…
Not sure if I’ll write about it. Never can tell.
But I am absolutely loving it. I’m about halfway through now.
Example of unreliable narrator:
He spent all of Part One talking about how inseparable he and his wife were. She was ill. He took care of her. They were never ever ever apart. He keeps saying it, and you just assume it’s true, because he keeps saying it and he’s narrating his own story.
In Part Two, suddenly, in one paragraph, after describing some new twist in the story – he says, essentially, “I know I told you she was never out of my sight. But actually, she was out of my sight all the time.”
HA.
So he has led you down the wrong path – basically painting an un-true picture – to make himself LOOK better (“I was always at my wife’s side, look at how much I cared for her”) – until finally he has to tell the truth. But the damage is already done – I already don’t trust anything he tells me.
It’s hilarious in a way. I’m really enjoying it!
I see that Ian McEwan gave a great commencement speech at Dickinson College.
Transcript : http://time.com/3883212/ian-mcewan-graduation-speech-dickinson/
I may need to read a third novel of his. Damn.
The only other one of his I’ve read is Enduring Love (made into a movie as well – which I haven’t seen) – and it is very freaky and creepy, as I recall. It’s been years.