The Traditional Narrative Structure Of Thomas Hardy English Literature Essay

The Traditional Narrative Structure Of doubting Thomas Hardy English Literature EssayIn order to assess the validity or other than of Thomas Hardys assertion, we first need to consider whether or not any such construct as conventional fib structure can properly be said to exist and, assuming that it does, succeed a definition of what this structure might be. This is not as straightforward as it may appear. For star thing, there be many antithetic traditions in knowledge base literature and therefore many different concepts of traditionalistic narrative structure. It would be unwise, for instance, to tone-beginning to assert that the storytelling devices employed by the anonymous authors of the stories later compiled as The 1,001 wickednesss or The Arabian Nights Entertainments complied in all respects with the narrative strategies pursued by Dickens, Trollope, Defoe, Austen and the other writers of the reinvigorated take as it has been at a lower adornstood and developed over the past two hundred years deep down Western society.It is possible to under can from Hardys statement the benign of narrative structure that he had in mind, the proficiency from event A to B to C suggested by the regular formulation of beginning, middle and expiry. That Hardys statement should indicate a strong implied attachment to this sort of narrative structure is in no way surprising, for it was an measurable 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 app bent in many authors works. Experimentation with form began very early on in the new(a)s development. Indeed, it is arguable that such experimentationalism had been present in the English novel since its earliest days. Samuel Richardsons Pamela or chastity Rewarded , for instance, arguably one of the first novels create verbally in English, may conform to the beginning-middle-end for mula looked upon so fondly by Hardy one hundred years later, alone it is farthermost 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 written by the novels protagonist and no fewer than five other correspondents, each of whom has his or her unique literary style, psychology and point of fascinate.Richardson was not the first novelist to adopt this epistolary mount. Other writers, both in France and England, had preceded him. hitherto there is no doubt that Richardson displayed a profound and unprecedented facility with the form. In Margaret Drabbles speech communication, he brocaded the form to a level hitherto unknown and transformed it to display his own grumpy skills.1And Richardson was not the whole English novelist to have perished sharply from Hardys norm during the English novels formative years. His inventiveness and willingness to experiment with fo rm had been equalled by several(prenominal) other writers, closely importantly Lawrence 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 atomic number 6 stream-of consciousness novel2The traditional narrative structure that Hardy had in mind had, therefore, been altered and subverted from in spite of appearance for many years prior to the start 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 infix in the psyche of most lectors and writers by the late Victorian era. Hardy suspected that the dominance of the traditional narrative structure was under threat by the time he ab andoned novel writing around the beginning of the twentieth century.The Age of Realism, in many ways the last great affirmation of the Enlightenment, with its impressively self-confident creed in reason and in reasons access to the touchable, drew to an end as the nineteenth century began to shed into the twentieth,3writes Andr Brink in his overview of the novels abundant development as a formIn a tumultuousness of uncertainty prefiguring Eliots later wry conviction that human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality, contemporaneity 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 key4 some(prenominal) novels, Italo Calvinos If on a Winters Night aTraveller and adept Hundred age of seclusion by Gabriel Garcia Marquez are arguably experimentations into a different style of traditional narrative fictio ns, that are far required from what Hardy had in mind.If on a Winters Night a Traveller is probably Calvinos ruff known novel, published in Italian in 1979 and translated into English by William Weaver in 1981. Since thence it has become firmly established as a classic of post-modern fiction. An examination of the books form quickly explains why. farther from being a conventional narrative, in which events are expound from the outside by an omniscient cashier 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 reader 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 back up 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 read Italo Calvinos new novel, If on a Winters Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the brink 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 conscious(predicate) that the narrative is instructing the reader to read and how to. This external, authoritative narration in the narrative has the solvent of rupturing any traditional narrative sequence in move on ways. It causes there to be various acts of construe, both within and without the text, which are out of synch with each other. A key pattern 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 destabilised 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 as well 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(prenominal) key example of the boundaries, set out by traditional narrative is the set of short orders, orders tell 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 arms 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. Now 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 reader into work. This is very much 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 international conspiracy involving fraud, a mischievous translator, sinister government agents and a number of other elements. There may not be a traditional plot embedded in the book, but there is certain(prenominal)ly a plot and it is one that has enough narrative heft 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 interes t. This desire to aid the reader is borne out by something Calvino once wroteMy work method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to gain 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 context of their non-appearance, complaints such as that of chapters interrupted right at the culminatelets hope we get to the end satisfactorily.9Here the vocabulary of traditional narrative climax and satisfying 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 occu rs 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 cooccurring 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 rhythmic 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 frigid direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?10One Hundred Years 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 typ e 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 mentions. This makes it a clear incarnation of magic naive realism and it has, indeed, been identified by many critics as the quintessential magic realist text.11The American perception 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 experience 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 shareistic text.What is it about this book that qualifies it as magic realism and in what way is its narrative distinguishable from Hardys cherished mode of traditionalist storytelling? The books difference is undoubtedly the fab and timeless quality Marquez brings to bear in his treatment 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 in so far 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 meet whatever the imagination of the author presents to us.14The capacity of the imagination to which Johnson alludes is immense, and so the might 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 acc ept and even fail to question events that could not possibly take place in the real world that give One Hundred Years of Solitude its unique flavour. An splendid 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 drip mold of blood came out under the door, crossed 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 on the Street of the Turks, cancelled a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buenda house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlour, hugging the walls so as not to speckle 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 Au reliano Jos, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen 16The blend 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 after invasion, birth after birth, devastation after death). Only Macondo seems stable, in the end, and yet even Macondo blows away to nothingness in the final, apocalyptic chapter, go forth 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 cogent 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 livery at an event held in New York in 2003. Fo cusing on the quality of his prose and on his approach to narrative, Grossman said of MrquezHe is a master of physical observation Surfaces, appearances, external realities, spoken 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 dodge that he uses to stunning effect.17One Hundred Years of Solitude also resists traditional narrative structures with its coition 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 affected is through the names in the novel. Sprea d over several generations, there are three women with a given name Remedios, five male characters with the forename Aureliano, and five characters sharing both a forename and a nickname Jos Arcadio. What should be a straightforward, linear piece of historiography is made more complex and convoluted by Marquez. It becomes ill-defined 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 change 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 presence of the character having the flashback many another(prenominal) 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 exceeding instant Melquiades final keys were revealed to him and he saw 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 t he traditional narrative structure utilised by Thomas Hardy and yet neither Marquez nor Calvino is willing to jettison the idea of narrative or deny their readers a satisfying run across with the elemental power of storytelling. These texts resist traditional narrative but they do not reject 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