thoughts on narrative

[truepenny]

Found via Caveat Lector (where Dorothea has interesting things to say about narrative in RPGs), these thoughts on the weblog as a medium for narrative.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a theoryhead, but I am passionately interested in the workings of narrative. The great watershed in my academic life was reading Stephen Booth's King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy as an undergraduate, in which he points out that the STORY of King Lear ends after the PLAY is over.

No, really. I know it looks like that sentence is on crack, but it isn't. In the last act of Lear, you can see things winding down, all the loose ends being fitted together. Edgar defeats his evil brother; Goneril and Regan take each other out. Edgar reveals his identity, Kent reveals his identity, Albany confirms our guess that he's a good guy despite his appalling taste in women; they're working out what to do with the kingdom now. It's the end of the play.

And then somebody says, "Um, sorry, but where's the king?"

And then Lear slams back on stage, screaming, Cordelia's dead body in his arms.

There are lots of reasons that the end of Lear is harrowing, but one of them is this sucker-punch. As an audience, we're just relaxing into the formal gestures of closure, thinking, Well, this was a pretty nasty play, but we got through it all right, and then it turns around and rips our metaphorical throats out. It's a brilliant use of the rules of narrative against themselves.

This kind of thing fascinates me. I can talk about it for hours (as heres_luck can attest, since we do it to BtVS all the time). And so I think the question of what the medium of the weblog would make of a novel is worth the pondering. The issue that I particularly wonder about is how would you figure out when the damn thing should stop? The point of a blog is that it's indefinite--it goes on for as long as the blogger desires. But for me, the point of a novel is that it has a narrative arc, that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I'm not sure whether I think that's also a definitional point of a narrative or not. Ponder.

Comments

[embitca.livejournal.com]

Huh. This is an interesting idea and I'd love to see you flesh it out, explore it a bit more because I'm a bit curious what you think.

I'm just thinking about comic books which, unlike novels, are not designed to finish the story. Certainly, there are self-contained arcs, but even those often don't close neatly because the writers are busy setting up the next thread of the story. Ideally, a comic will run for years and years with no end in sight.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's true, and a comment on OnePotMeal adduced the analogy of comic strips, which likewise can run for years and years and years.

And that answers one of my questions. Narrative, in and of itself, does not have to end. And perhaps blognarrative is the true narrative form of the blog, not the blognovel.

But I'm still wondering about pacing ...

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It would seem to me that they have the same inherent strengths and weaknesses as any diary form, and goodness knows people have been writing diary novels since they've been writing novels. Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle would be a good example. You have narrative, you have structure, but you also have breathless urgency, tension through timing of entries, and all levels of narratorial reliability and informedness at different points.

I call it "First headlong" to distinguish it from other forms of first person POV.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's certainly one way to conceptualize the blognovel; although it wasn't quite what I meant, I agree with you that there would be no necessary, inherent differences between that and a diary--although there could be an interesting distinction, in that the diary, as a form, precodes what's written as private for the character writing. Yes, there are exceptions, and people do publish their (at least allegedly) nonfiction diaries, but when we read a novel which is presented to us as a diary, we are reading a document which is private within the fiction (unless another character reads it, as happens in more than one of Diana Wynne Jones's books). A blog, contrariwise, by its nature is public. How a character might construct events in a public forum could vary quite radically from what they would say in their locked diary which they hide under their mattress.

But, in any event, what I was maundering about was the process of PUBLISHING a novel via blog, with the periodic updates of limited length and (as the original blogger pointed out) the difficulty of the entries showing up in reverse chronological order. The obvious comparison is Dickens and the other serializers of the nineteenth century, but you couldn't post a whole chapter of say, Bleak House, to your LJ. Too long. Contrary to the conventions of the medium. Incremental installments, and, as I said, how would you figure out where your novel ended? How does one enact closure in a blog? (I mean, yes, one stops blogging, but that seems a little like the Hemingway method of ending one's career.)

Upon reflection, however, I think that the public vs. private narrative question is more interesting than my original idea, so thanks!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You could publish a novel to a blog, if it had little short chapters, but what would be the point? You couldn't get paid for it, and you'd be losing FNASR, and you might as well put it on an ordinary web page. It wouldn't be a blog, it would be a novel in progress.

A blog as novel, though, say someone starting a LJ and purporting to write about their life, with comments and complexities (it would require enabling comments only for yourself and your alteregos who were characters -- possibly it would work best as about six interlocking LJs) and plot and so on, could come out something like Ryman's 253 or it could work as a novel in a new medium. I don't know -- again you couldn't really hope to sell it -- but it would certainly be interesting.

It could also be done, as you and here's_luck suggest, in an episotolary way by more than one person. But I can't quite envisage buying one on paper or how it would read like that.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, publishing a novel in a blog would be beyond pointless.

The whole quasi-epistolary blognovel thing is a horse of quite a different color. I agree, you couldn't possibly reproduce it as a paper book, but that would be the point of figuring out how to write a blognovel in the first place.

Ooh, and if it were LJ (maybe other blog engines do this, too; I don't know), you (generalized, hypothetical "you," mind--it feels more comfortable than "one") could have the whole added layer of complexity with the varying levels of security. So you'd have some things about a character that SOME of the other characters knew and some didn't. And you could really dig into this whole public/private thing that seems to be disproportionately fascinating to me.

This is so not a project I would ever even start. But it's an interesting mental toy.

shadow unit?

[dancing-crow.livejournal.com]

I was looking along after the DWJ posts and found this. Were you thinking of this conversation, or these sets of issues when you guys started Shadow Unit with the overlapping/interlocking blogs that we the faithful read?

It is riveting to me to find old thinking on current topics!