I've found--at least with these books--that I have to ignore that question entirely, or at best pretend that they're relating events to me specifically. Because so many of the things that happen to my poor protagonists are things they'd never tell anyone if they had the choice. That question also leads me into the Clarissa problem (as she fends off her rapist with one hand and writes her letters with the other): why are they writing these things down? When? In what form? Or who are they telling? Why is that person writing it down? Are they editing? Silently or otherwise? (Like the Flashman books where his sister-in-law or niece or whatever she was has gone through and dashed out all the obscenities.) Are they stopping to ask for clarification, or are they misunderstanding things? Et cetera et cetera et cetera.
So mostly I try not to think about it. With these books. Some other project, I could really get my teeth into it. I know enough about the transmission of manuscript texts and the slippage between oral narrative and textual narrative, not to mention things like bad quartos and so on ...
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 12:05 am (UTC)So mostly I try not to think about it. With these books. Some other project, I could really get my teeth into it. I know enough about the transmission of manuscript texts and the slippage between oral narrative and textual narrative, not to mention things like bad quartos and so on ...
Right. Some other project. Ahem.