The Traditional Narrative Structure Of Thomas Hardy English Literature Essay

The Traditional Narrative Structure Of Thomas dauntless English Literature EssayIn order to assess the validity or otherwisewise of Thomas toughs assertion, we first need to consider whether or not any such construct as traditional tarradiddle structure potful properly be said to exist and, assuming that it does, provide a definition of what this structure might be. This is not as straightforward as it whitethorn appear. For matchless thing, there are many different traditions in world literature and therefore many different cin one casepts of traditional news report structure. It would be unwise, for instance, to flack to assert that the storytelling devices employed by the anonymous authors of the stories later compiled as The 1,001 darks or The Arabian Nights Entertainments complied in tot ally respects with the narrative strategies pursued by Dickens, Trollope, Defoe, Austen and the other put outrs of the novel form as it has been understood and developed over the past two hundred years within Western society.It is possible to understand from Hardys tale the kind of narrative structure that he had in mind, the progression from event A to B to C suggested by the regular formulation of receivening, middle and end. That Hardys instruction should exhibit a strong implied attachment to this sort of narrative structure is in no way surprising, for it was an important aspect of his writing.However, there had already been changes to what Hardy considered the traditional narrative style. Narrative trickery of one kind or another had been apparent in many authors extends. Experimentation with form began very azoic on in the novels t to each oneing. Indeed, it is arguable that such experimentalism had been present in the English novel since its earliest days. Samuel Richardsons Pamela or Virtue Rewarded , for instance, arguably one of the first novels scripted in English, may conform to the beginning-middle-end formula looked upon so fondly by Hardy o ne hundred years later, plainly it is far from being a standard third party text. The book is an epistolary novel, which is to say that it consists of a series of interlinked texts, purporting to be letters indite by the novels protagonist and no less than five dollar bill other correspondents, each of whom has his or her unique literary style, psychology and point of view.Richardson was not the first novelist to adopt this epistolary approach. Other writers, both in France and England, had preceded him. Yet there is no doubt that Richardson displayed a profound and unprecedented facility with the form. In Margaret Drabbles words, he raised the form to a level even unknown and transformed it to display his own particular skills.1And Richardson was not the only English novelist to have departed sharply from Hardys norm during the English novels formative years. His smartness and willingness to experiment with form had been equalled by several other writers, most importantly La wrence Sterne. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, published in several parts between 1759 and 1767, stands out as a paragon of unconventionality even today. Its many stylistic novelties and tricks of form include flashbacks, typographical eccentricities, missing pages and multiple perspectives. Not for nothing has it been referred to as the progenitor of the 20th century stream-of consciousness novel2The traditional narrative structure that Hardy had in mind had, therefore, been altered and subverted from within for many years prior to the place of his own literary career. It is, nonetheless, true that the notion of a novel having to possess a beginning, middle and end had become firmly embedded in the psyche of most commentators and writers by the late Victorian era. Hardy suspected that the dominance of the traditional narrative structure was under threat by the time he abandoned novel writing around the beginning of the twentieth century.The Age of Realism, in many wa ys the last great affirmation of the Enlightenment, with its impressively self-confident faith in reason and in reasons access to the real, drew to an end as the nineteenth century began to spill into the twentieth,3writes Andr Brink in his overview of the novels long development as a formIn a turmoil of uncertainty prefiguring Eliots later wry conviction that human kind/ Cannot bear very more than reality, Modernism was born. A remarkable revolution swept through all the arts. The faith in representation, which for so long had shaped Western culture, was wavering and, in Santayanas famous phrase, mankind was starting to dream in a different key4Both novels, Italo Calvinos If on a Winters Night a traveller and One snow geezerhood of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez are arguably experimentations into a different style of traditional narrative fictions, that are far removed from what Hardy had in mind.If on a Winters Night a Traveller is probably Calvinos best known novel, publi shed in Italian in 1979 and translated into English by William Weaver in 1981. Since then it has become firmly established as a classic of post-modern fiction. An examination of the books form quickly explains why.Far from being a conventional narrative, in which events are described from the outside by an omniscient narrator and everything proceeds smoothly from an initiating incident to a denouement, the novel has a bewitching and playful form. It is self-reflexive, in that it is a book about a endorser who is trying to read a book called If on a Winters Night a Traveller. The first chapter and each subsequent alternate chapter are written in the second person. They form a linking narrative between the intervening, even-numbered, chapters, which all purport to be extracts from various books which the reader tries, at different times, to readYou are about to begin information Italo Calvinos new novel, If on a Winters Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thou ght. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door the TV is always on in the next room.5One prominent way in which If on a Winters Night a Traveller resists traditional narrative structure is by violating boundaries of the structure. These are the boundaries comprised by the inside and the outside of the novel. If on a Winters Night a Traveller resists these boundaries because its premise is a readers attempt to read a work entitled If on a Winters Night a Traveller, whilst being aware that the narrative is instructing the reader to read and how to. This external, authoritative narration in the narrative has the effect of rupturing any traditional narrative sequence in tho ways. It causes there to be various acts of reading, both within and without the text, which are out of synch with each other. A key example of this is Calvinos statement that, You are about to begin reading Italo Calvinos new novel If on a Winters Night a Traveller.6Not only is the readers identity dest abilised by the fact that the you may refer to the reader outside or the reader inside the text in a way not common in traditional narrative, but also the acts of reading are temporally disrupted You are about to begin reading Italo Calvinos new novel If on a Winters Night a Traveller, the boundary of narrative, narrator and reader is broken, the reader is being instructed by the narrative to read. Another key example of the boundaries, set out by traditional narrative is the set of scam orders, orders directed at us, the reader, to physically move our bodyStretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, or two cushions, on the weapons system of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up if not, put them back. straight off dont stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.7This address to the reader has the effect of pulling the reade r into work. This is very practically a departure from Hardys view of the traditional narrative form. However, this is not to say that there is not a traditional narrative thread binding the work together. As the book continues, a clear, if unconventional, story begins to take shape. The reader, who is referred to and addressed throughout the novel becomes the protagonist in a convoluted narrative that revolves around an planetary conspiracy involving fraud, a mischievous translator, sinister government agents and a number of other elements. in that location may not be a traditional plat embedded in the book, but there is definitely a plot and it is one that has enough narrative muscle to keep a reader enthralled. There is a clear sense, throughout the book, that the author is solicitous to the reader and eager to retain his or her interest. This desire to aid the reader is borne out by something Calvino once wroteMy working method has more often than not involved the subtractio n of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.8If on a Winters Night a Traveller also highlights the problems of the one dimensional aspect of traditional narrative structures. If on a Winters Night a Traveller resists linearity. Traditional narrative structures are mentioned only in the consideration of their non-appearance, complaints such as that of chapters interrupted right at the climaxlets hope we get to the end satisfactorily.9Here the vocabulary of traditional narrative climax and straightforward ending, though present is subverted. Calvino comments on his own narrative throughout and his most clear comment on this particular form of resistance to traditional narrative structures occurs when, making explicit the sexualised connotations of interrupted climax, and satisfying ending, he describes howLovers reading of each others bodies differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges swinging phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?10One Hundred geezerhood of Solitude could loosely be described as a family saga. It deals with the varying fates of numerous individuals drawn from seven generations of one South American family, but it is in not a type of narrative. The book includes multiple time-frames and numerous supernatural elements, including ghosts and prophecies , all of which are treated in a matter-of-fact fashion by the novels many characters. This makes it a clear embodiment of magic realism and it has, indeed, been identified by many critics as the quintessential magic realist text.11The American science fiction and fantasy author Gene Wolf, for instance, has said that Magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish,12while the British fantasy author Terry Pratchett has said that it is like a polite way of saying you write fantasy13. Despite the difficulty many have experienced in pointing out its exact nature, however, the term continues to have resonance for many readers and One Hundred Years of Solitude continues to be seen as its most characteristic text.What is it about this book that qualifies it as magic realism and in what way is its narrative decided from Hardys cherished mode of traditionalist storytelling? The books difference is undoubtedly the mythic and timeless quality Marquez brings to bear in his treatmen t of the fictional town of Macondo and its multi-layered connection with the Buenda family, whose patriarch, Jos Arcadio Buenda, is also Macondos founder. Macondo is, in a way, a leading character in the novel and even so its geography and character remain remarkably opaque throughout. As Ian Johnston has pointed outThere is something clearly magical about the world of Macondo it is a state of mind as much as, or even more than, a real geographical place (we learn very little about its actual physical layout, for example). And once in it, we must be prepared to collide with whatever the imagination of the author presents to us.14The capacity of the imagination to which Johnson alludes is immense, and so the ability to enforce a willing suspension of disbelief in the mind of the reader that co-exists with it15. It is Marquezs ability to make the reader accept and even fail to question events that could not possibly take place in the real world that forget One Hundred Years of Soli tude its unique flavour. An excellent example of the kind of trick Marquez plays repeatedly, comes early on in the novel when an act of suicide is followed by a physically impossible perambulation by a trail of bloodA trickle of blood came out under the door, cut through the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the way of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, make a right angle at the Buenda house, went in under the closed door, go across through the parlour, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amarantas chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jos, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen 16The blending together of the real with the imagined, the plausible with the impossible, is what characterises the book throughout. Time becomes a blur, characters reflect the personalities of long dead ancestors or unborn descendants, history and chronology are obscured by the interplay of broadly similar events (invasion later invasion, birth after birth, death after death). Only Macondo seems stable, in the end, and yet even Macondo blows away to nothingness in the final, apocalyptic chapter, leaving the reader uncertain regarding the status of everything that has happened.And yet, all of this has to be set alongside the extremely detailed and persuasive nature of Mrquezs writing. He may be concerned with the fantastical and the fabulous but he also a sharp-eyed literary observer. The translator Edith Grossman made exactly this point when she gave the keynote speech at an event held in in the buff York in 2003. Focusing on the quality of his prose and on his approach to narrative, Grossman said of MrquezHe is a master of physical obs ervation Surfaces, appearances, external realities, utter words everything that a truly observant observer can observe. He makes almost no allusion to states-of-mind, motivations, emotions, internal responses Those are left to the inferential skills and deductive interests of the reader. In other words, Garca Mrquez has turned the fly-on-the-wall point of view into a crucial aspect of his narrative style in both fiction and non-fiction, and it is a strategy that he uses to stunning effect.17One Hundred Years of Solitude also resists traditional narrative structures with its relation to traditional boundaries of, and within, narrative. If on a Winters Night a Traveller contravenes boundaries One Hundred Years of Solitude goes further by collapsing these traditional boundaries. A very significant way in which this is bear on is through the names in the novel. Spread over several generations, there are three women with a forename Remedios, five male characters with the forename Aure liano, and five characters sharing both a forename and a surname Jos Arcadio. What should be a straightforward, linear piece of historiography is made more complex and convoluted by Marquez. It becomes unclear exactly which characters of the names Aureliano, Remedia or Jos Arcadio are interacting at certain points in the narrative. One such example is that of Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula, in the rooms where Colonel Aureliano had also made love, made mad love on the floor of the porchthey were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.18One Hundred Years of Solitude often resists traditional narrative structures at the same time as drawing attention to them. One key example of this is the flashback with which the novel begins. As a traditional narrative structure, the flashback has a very definite sense of the present through which the past is framed. However, Marquez resists this traditional structure by destabilising this present tense, and the fr ont of the character having the flashback Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember19The suggestion of a traditional flashback is preserved in the act of remembering, yet Marquez resists the traditional structure of the flashback by locating it into the future , Many years later, was to remember, a ruptured linearity which is, in a further resistance to traditional narrative structures, explained only at the end of the novel, when Aureliano finally realises that the parchments he discovered are a prophecy of the novels events at that prodigious instant Melquiades final keys were revealed to him and he truism the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of mans time and space.20Both One Hundred Years of Solitude and If on a Winters Night a Traveller depart quite radically from the traditional narrative structure utilised by Thomas Hardy and yet neither Marquez nor Calvino is willing to jettison the root word of narrativ e or deny their readers a satisfying encounter with the elemental power of storytelling. These texts resist traditional narrative but they do not disavow or repudiate narrative itself. On the contrary, they provide meaning and pleasure by taking the novel further and beyond the structure in which Hardy worked in. Both writers resist traditional narrative structure by rupturing the linearity of the narrative and creating problems of time and engagement of the reader.Bibliography