Experimental Narrative Strategies - Essay Example

Experimental Narrative Strategies In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison explains “It was not a storyto pass on.”1 This simple-seeming, straightforward sentence actually turns very complicated once one truly considers its meaning. It is through Morrison’s deliberate use of the ambiguous in this statement as well as the ambiguous nature of her narrative style that allows her to say so much with so little. This concept of how authors express the incomprehensible is the subject of Catherine Belsey’s theory of a ‘crisis in subjectivity’ or ‘split subject.’ “Entry into language inevitably creates a division between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enonce, the ‘I’ who speaks and the ‘I’ who is the subject of discourse. The Subject is held in place in the discourse by the use of ‘I,’ but the ‘I’ of this discourse is always a stand in, a substitute, for the ‘I’ who speaks.”2 Another theory, brought forward by Julia Kristeva, introduces the concept of a “divided subject, even a pluralized subject, that occupies not a place of enunciation, but permutable, multiple, and mobile places.”3 Morrison’s approach in Beloved expresses an experimental narrative approach that affords a variety of reading levels while still telling the difficult story of a woman who kills her child rather than allow it to live a life of slavery. In this sense, narrative figures as both a primary technical resource and as part of a theme. Other authors, such as Anne Tyler and Alice Sebold, have also used these types of oral, story-telling-type narrative strategies to help illustrate the apparently incomprehensible within their novels. Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant blends story-telling style with a shifting perspective to relate the events of a lower-middle class family over a span of several decades. Pearl Tull, introduced at the beginning as a dying woman of 85, reflects upon her life from the time her husband, Beck Tull, abandoned her and their three children when they were just 14, 11 and 9. As she drifts among her memories, she reveals both the mistakes she’s made as well as the successes she’s had, which have been comparatively few. She realizes she will never know the outcomes of her children’s lives and will never actually see her husband again. Through these complicated memories and perceptions of her life are woven the perspectives of her children, Cody, Ezra and Jenny, as they struggle through their own demons following their father’s departure and work to reconstruct their lives out of the fallout. More than simply telling the story of a dysfunctional family of 1950s America as they grew into the families of the 80s and 90s, Tyler is able to capture the incomprehensible through the complicatedly simple form of experimental narrative. In 1950s middle class America, the only thing a respectable married woman with children could do was to stay at home and care for the children, so when it was necessary for her to obtain employment to support the children, Pearl wore her hat to the new job she’d procured, “giving the impression that she had merely dropped in and was helping out as a favor, in a pinch.”4 This outward pride is expressed throughout the narrative in various ways such as Pearl’s refusal to return to her natal home after Beck left. She “ached for them, but drew herself up and recalled how they had been so sure no man would marry her. She could never tell them what had happened.”5 This same pride prevented her from developing the deeper relationships with her children that she craved as is illustrated just a few pages later when she envisioned herself telling her children they had been abandoned. “But she wouldn’t be able to continue; she might cry. It was unthinkable to cry in front of the children. Or in front of anyone. Oh, she had her pride!”6 Yet, she is also shown to be a very caring, deeply feeling woman, which also often works to her disadvantage. In this same scene of the abandonment, picturing herself telling her children what had happened, Pearl gathers them tenderly around her, putting her arms around them as well as she can, calling them “Dear ones” and heartbroken about what this abandonment means for them. She instead continues to ignore the missing man, changing the subject when the children bring it up until it’s too late to bridge the distance. Also, too busy trying to support the family to do anything else, Pearl is intensely angry at the way in which her children have been deprived and this anger is seen to come out at the children themselves, yet she still manages to raise them all without going too hungry and they all reach societal success. In the process of telling the story of Pearl, Tyler also delivers the stories of Cody, Ezra and Jenny as they grow up and establish, or don’t establish, families of their own. Although portions of the narrative are devoted exclusively to them, they are each seen also through the eyes of their mother and siblings. Cody is seen as a trouble-making, angry, jealous, highly competitive and intensely insecure individual while Ezra is painted as a complete dreamer, out of touch with reality and wishing only to co-exist peacefully with the world. Jenny is constrained, intense and focused, only blossoming toward the end into a more natural, yet still flawed wife, mother and career woman. Pearl herself offers a helpful summary of her children at the beginning of the book: You could pluck this single moment out of all time, Pearl thought, and still discover so much about her children – even about Cody, for his very absence was a characteristic, perhaps his main one. And Jenny was so brisk and breezy but … oh, you might say somewhat opaque, a reflecting surface flashing your own self back at you, giving no hint of her self. And Ezra, mild Ezra: no doubt confusedly tugging at the shock of fair hair that hung over his forehead, considering and reconsidering.7 It is only by seeing each of these children through their own eyes that we get a sense of their motivations – Cody as he pursues Ruth, Ezra as he establishes himself at Scarlotti’s restaurant and Jenny as she marries first Harley Baines, then Sam Wiley and finally Joe St. Ambrose – during these defining moments of their lives, but it is only as they are discussed and figure in the lives of the others that we are able to see more of the ‘I’ who speaks that Catherine Belsey establishes in her theory. Cody’s narrative provides a strong impression of the children’s hostile home environment growing up and his fierce jealousy of his brother based on a perception that it was always Ezra who was loved. “Let it Be was the theme that ran through [Ezra’s] life. He was ruled by a dreamy mood of acceptance that was partly the source of all his happiness and partly his undoing.”8 His actions, while seen as almost saintly by those around him, are shown to be more of a confusion regarding social issues and an overwhelming sense of guilt. His one dream in life is to have his whole family sit down to dinner like a real family, something he is only able to accomplish, the reader assumes, at the end of the book. Jenny presents her own insecurities regarding her ability to succeed where her mother had failed and her psychological progress regarding her own ability to connect with other people as she progresses through three husbands. In switching the narrative focus in this way, Tyler is able to present four fully rounded characters with all the intricacies and dynamics intact between each other. Although narrative is often considered “naïve knowledge, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity,”9 it is precisely because of its indefinable nature that this technique allows the expression of the incomprehensible within the story and Tyler’s way of expressing it with her shifting focus that allows its full development. In no other way could Tyler have provided the depth of detail, the intricate dynamics of the relationships of these four people, the degree to which these personalities interacted with and affected each other, than through the technique of the disjointed, shifting narrative she employed to express her impression of the American dysfunctional family. The reader is able to gain a real sense of these people as living, breathing individuals. “Narrative is often viewed by novelists today as an oppositional technique because of its association with unauthorized forms of knowledge.”10 By focusing first on Pearl’s memories of how she had raised her children to be successful adults, as well as her regrets regarding the mistakes she made in raising them and her concerns about their futures, Tyler introduces us to the world of the Tulls and provides a necessary framework from which all future focus will spring, just as the problems faced by the children spring from this foundation of Pearl’s attitudes, beliefs and concerns. This provides us, as the reader, with knowledge from our own perspectives of what these people are like as we read between the lines of the narrative, make personal connections with the characters and immediately see ourselves or others we know within the people presented before us. In addition, this narrative style further serves to provide the story with structure, following each branch of the family tree as it springs from its root in Pearl, with all her powers of hindsight, to follow Cody, then Ezra, then Jenny, each as separate individuals but with ties that continue to intertwine with the lives of their siblings and mother despite all efforts to extricate themselves. In the end, the entire family is brought together again, at least in some form, with the funeral of Pearl and the reappearance of Beck, tying the narrative, as well as the family, back into a fractured whole. In much the same way, Alice Sebold, in her novel Lovely Bones, is able to express much more through the use of an experimental narrative to portray the thoughts and feelings of a young girl as she gradually lets go of her life and accepts the idea of her death. The novel opens with “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”11 Beginning with this dramatic start, Sebold immediately sets up her narrative style as being one that will tell a story from a first-person, adolescent perspective, but also one that is detached from life somehow, removed from the world of the everyday. Told from the perspective of heaven, Susie shares the details of what happened to her almost immediately, even as she shares her experience of what heaven is like and the people she meets there. However, her family remains completely in the dark, hoping she might still be lost. Gradually, as Susie becomes adjusted to the idea of being in heaven, her family becomes aware that she must have been murdered. Because of her unique position, Susie is able to watch as her family becomes adjusted to her absence and worries about the burden that her younger sister must now carry. “As the story unfolds, it is clear that Lindsay carries the hardest burden, because no one will ever be able to look at her and not think about Susie. By losing her sister, Lindsay is in danger of being robbed of herself.”12 Throughout the narrative, Susie demonstrates both the naivety of a young adolescent in the early 70s as well as the more mature understanding of an adult, which is accomplished strictly through the use of narrative. In demonstrating her innocence as well as the values of her parents she says, “I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and the added fact that he was a neighbor and had talked to my father about fertilizer, rooted me to the spot”13 about the night she was kidnapped by Mr. Harvey. Despite the oddness of meeting her neighbor in a dark field, the fact that he was wearing cologne, the idea that he knew her name and her relationship within her family, Susie didn’t suspect anything. Despite the idea that he had led her to a hiding spot or that he was looking at her in a strange way even with her bulky clothing, she still thought of him as harmless until he makes it clear to her that she is never leaving alive. Her heavenly musings – “I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn’t. Why didn’t I? Franny said these questions were fruitless: ‘You didn’t and that’s that. Don’t mull it over. It does no good. You’re dead and you have to accept it.’”14 – reflect a deeper understanding, a necessary hindsight to adequately reflect the naivety of Susie when she was alive versus the more observant, more astute, more knowledgeable Susie to whom we’re listening. Her unique perspective, from the duplex she shares with her friend Holly, allows Susie to look in on her family, tracing each family member through their actions and reactions, living vicariously at times through her sister and finally learning to let go and let them make their own way. Through her unique perspective, she is able to provide clues as to their motivations, confusion, anger and hurt in ways that would not be otherwise believable. “There are moments of poignancy as Susie learns of a love note she never got to read, vicariously experiences high school by watching Lindsey, and sees her little brother struggle to remember the big sister he’s lost. Susie tells these stories tenderly, but without sentimentality.”15 This detachment while still attached is only made possible through the unique narrative angle of our protagonist. “The earth-rooted events Susie watches and relates, but cant control, are real and heartbreaking. The eventual acceptance, Susie of her life in heaven, and her family and friends of their lives on earth without her, is exactly as it should be. Stone, ripples, then calm.”16 Just as Tyler does with her narrative, Sebold’s narrative demonstrates the various ways in which the family is dismembered just as the protagonist was dismembered, yet also shows the metaphysical ‘lovely bones’ that grow out of this in the form of personal relationships and family structures. Thus both Alice Sebold and Anne Tyler are able to use experimental narrative techniques to express the incomprehensible by providing a context in which the reader can incorporate their own experience, understanding and accepting the perspective for what it is and gaining a greater understanding of the story because of it. By taking the unique perspective of a soul in a distinctive version of heaven, able to look down on family and friends with both the innocence of youth and the maturity of experience, Sebold provides insights into characters and relationships that could not otherwise be obtained. Similarly, by shifting the focus of the narrative throughout her various characters, Tyler is able to develop four unique stories regarding four fully rounded characters while making profound silent statements regarding familial relationships in trying times. These techniques bring the incomprehensible to the forefront, creating stories that should not be “passed on.” Footnotes 1 Morrison, Toni. (1987). Beloved. New York: Plume Books, p. 274. 2 Belsey, Catherine. (1980). Critical Practice. London: Methuen, p. 85. 3 Kristeva, Julia. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Leon S. Roudiez (Ed.). Thomas Zora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, p. 111. 4 Tyler, Anne. (1982). Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 15. 5 Ibid, p. 11. 6 Ibid, p. 15. 7 Ibid, p. 33. 8 Tyler, (1982), p. 266. 9 Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Colin Gordon (Ed.). Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham & Kate Soper (Trans.). New York: Pantheon, p. 82. 10 Clayton, Jay. “The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction.” American Literary History. Vol. 2, N. 3, (Autumn 1990), pp. 378. 11 Sebold, Alice. (2002). Lovely Bones. Boston: Little Brown and Company, p. 5. 12 Clark, Judi. (June 26, 2002). “Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.” Mostly Fiction: Book Reviews. 13 Sebold, (2002), p. 6. 14 Ibid, p. 8. 15 Brown, Mary Daniels. (January 23, 2004). “Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.” Notes in the Margin. 16 D’Auray, Terry. (July 8, 2003). “The Lovely Bones: Alice Sebold.” The Agony Column: Book Reviews and Commentary. Rick Kleffel (Ed.). References Belsey, Catherine. (1980). Critical Practice. London: Methuen. Brown, Mary Daniels. (January 23, 2004). “Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.” Notes in the Margin. Clark, Judi. (June 26, 2002). “Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.” Mostly Fiction: Book Reviews. Clayton, Jay. “The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction.” American Literary History. Vol. 2, N. 3, (Autumn 1990), pp. 375-93. D’Auray, Terry. (July 8, 2003). “The Lovely Bones: Alice Sebold.” The Agony Column: Book Reviews and Commentary. Rick Kleffel (Ed.). Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Colin Gordon (Ed.). Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham & Kate Soper (Trans.). New York: Pantheon. Kristeva, Julia. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Leon S. Roudiez (Ed.). Thomas Zora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Morrison, Toni. (1987). Beloved. New York: Plume Books. Sebold, Alice. (2002). Lovely Bones. Boston: Little Brown and Company. Tyler, Anne. (1982). Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Read More