thoughts on narrative
Dec. 31st, 2002 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyFound 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2002-12-31 01:34 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2002-12-31 03:14 pm (UTC)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 ...