The Journal, Part 5
January 7th 2007 12:01
Category: No Category
2:18pm 9 June, 2001
I’ve decided to tackle the experience of a writer the following way:
Teenage girl, who decides to keep a diary because she had a whim of being a writer one day. However, this adolescent phase turns into something more deep, as through her investigation into writing (a talent that she has but is not necessarily certain how to use) she comes across philosophical questions to do with writing (along a postmodern line) that make her reconsider her writing style and challenge conventions set down. The whole journal is an experiment for her, one that ultimately becomes very absorbing and leads her to a very deep exploration of herself, society, notions of identity, and the culture of writing. I want her to start out with a naïve kind of innocence of: “Yes, I’m going to be a writer.” Then realising the intricacies of what the writing & creative process involves.
A new element which I hadn’t paid much attention to, culture, will enter the story. This late teenager girl will be brought up in Australia, and will be undertaking the new 2u and 3u (and maybe 4u?) English syllabus, and will be influenced by the new way of thinking and reasoning that it encourages in her.
I will appropriate segments of my Process Diary and also the assorted pieces of creative writing I have worked on previously
I’ve decided I’m going to try and be a writer.
My teacher keeps saying ‘anyone can call themselves a writer these days’, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t!
Actually I decided to make the writer more mature at the beginning of her experimentation with writing, to make the piece more realistic. I’m going to use complex modes and styles of writing, and it wouldn’t make sense for her to have such an advanced ability if she was uninitiated into the world of postmodern theory to begin with.
3:14pm Thurday June 14, 2001
Of authors, smoke and mirrors
By JANE SULLIVAN
Monday 12 February 2001
IN my teens, when I was going through my Agatha Christie phase, I lost my literary innocence. It happened when I read her novel Endless Night. I remember sitting in the train on the way to school, reading the last page, feeling completely gobsmacked, torn between admiration of Christie's skills and indignation that she'd tricked me. (And here's a warning: if you're going through your Agatha Christie phase, don't read on, because I am about to give away an ending or two.)
The reason I was so astounded was that the hero and narrator of the story, Michael Rogers, who I had assumed all along was in grief and shock over the tragic death of his wife, turned out to be the murderer. I'd done my best to guess who the villain was, of course, but I'd failed because I had no idea you were allowed to break the rules like that.
Once I'd realised what had happened, I went back and skimmed through the novel all over again. It was devastatingly clever, it was like reading a completely new book. All those moments when I'd empathised with the plight of the hero turned out to be totally ambiguous, not because he'd lied - his emotions on second reading still seemed genuine - but because he'd withheld crucial information. He was happy, or sad, or afraid; but what had changed for me were the reasons why he felt that way.
Those feelings came flooding back when I had a look at an intriguing new book, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?. The author, Pierre Bayard, a French psychoanalyst and professor of literature, analyses both Endless Night and the more famous book that preceded it by several decades, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (which I had never heard of when I began my Agatha Christie obsession). As any serious crime fiction buff will tell you, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is celebrated as the novel that made Agatha Christie's reputation - because the narrator turns out to be the murderer.
Even in 1926, she was a brilliant cheat.
Bayard has some astonishing theories of his own about the identity of Roger Ackroyd's real killer - probably nothing to do with what the author intended, but that's another subject altogether. His book interests me mainly because it's a symptom of the new respect for surprise in fiction.
In one way this isn't new at all: surprise has always been the staple of the detective story, and is frequently a strong element in the thriller plot. But in the past it's been seen as one of the less exalted devices in the literary armory, more like sleight of hand than creative genius. The trick was to let the ears and whiskers pop out of the magician's hat and yet somehow persuade your readers not to notice them until the whole rabbit appeared.
Now, however, sophisticated ears and whiskers are popping out all over the place, and any number of experts are waiting to pounce on them. As Bayard reminds us, the intellectuals and writers fascinated by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd alone have included Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Raymond Chandler, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec. It's such a beautiful illustration of all those postmodern theories about the unreliability of narrators and texts.
And now it's not always detective fiction that provides the rabbits. Surprises, twists and double pikes abound in literary fiction, where we wouldn't expect to find the devices of crime writing. It's getting harder and harder for reviewers to discuss new books without spoiling the readerly revelations.
Without giving away the respective stories, I can say that both this year's Booker winner, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, and a runner-up, Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, play in different ways with the notion of the unreliable narrator and the ambiguity that can lurk behind seemingly straightforward first-hand accounts of events.
It's not that the surprises are necessarily devastating - if you've read a lot of contemporary fiction, you can guess well in advance at the kinds of tricks that are being played. What does attract in these books, however, is the delicate irony, the way certain narrative conventions are bent but not quite broken, and the exhilarating sense of danger: who knows how much, if anything, you can take at face value?
In crime fiction, it's the identity of the killer that's open to question. In literary fiction, it's the identity of almost everybody. As in popular fiction, the mysteries tend to revolve around family secrets: incest, abuse, repressed memories, revenge and habitual concealment. At least two recent novels by Australians feature male characters who turn out to be secretly female.
Even those books which you would expect to owe almost everything to the beauty of their language have the obligatory little twist in the tail. I found one towards the end of Andrei Makine's mesmerising Le Testament Francais, a revelation that throws into question some of the narrator's most poignant memories; and there are a couple of twists in Alessandro Baricco's Ocean Sea, a book that relies heavily on poetic prose for its effects.
I wonder how far this trend is going to go. Will we see fiction where the implicit trust between writer and reader has broken down to the point where we cannot believe what is on the page at all? Or will it just get to the point of weariness, where we all begin to yearn nostalgically for the straightforward narrative, the book you can't put down, where for once all is exactly as it seems?
Unreliable narratives create suspicious readers. James Thurber once wrote a piece about a crime novel fan, a woman who had read Macbeth and became convinced that Shakespeare was hiding something. She worked it out in the end: Macbeth had been framed, and the real murderer was Macduff.
Thurber meant his piece as a parody, but I'm not so sure. I reckon she was onto something, that woman. I have a feeling I have still more literary innocence to lose.
From www.theage.com.au
I thought this article brought up the issues of readings from multiple perspectives, which interest me.
I’m still searching for my unique, distinctive writing style. Crime fiction has characterised itself by persistent innovation within its genre. I wonder how far self-reflexivity can go, and how much of it is too much?
The movie Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, uses voice-over narration and film techniques to create a text which is so postmodern that it’s very hard to follow. The movie is designed to be confusing, but its weakness is that it overcomplicates what is already a highly complicated concept. While it really sends a deep and meaningful message about fragmentation, the movie itself is excessively fragmented, to the point of this fragmentation being overdone.
Yes, everything is constructed. It seems that self-reflexivity depends on shock and confrontation tactics, where the writer is working against the reader, relying on unpleasant on the behalf of the reader to bring the message home. I’m pondering on how to create a text in which the reader to have access to the self-reflexivity, and while it surprises, creates an enthusiasm for learning and further discovery with the text.
I’ve decided to tackle the experience of a writer the following way:
Teenage girl, who decides to keep a diary because she had a whim of being a writer one day. However, this adolescent phase turns into something more deep, as through her investigation into writing (a talent that she has but is not necessarily certain how to use) she comes across philosophical questions to do with writing (along a postmodern line) that make her reconsider her writing style and challenge conventions set down. The whole journal is an experiment for her, one that ultimately becomes very absorbing and leads her to a very deep exploration of herself, society, notions of identity, and the culture of writing. I want her to start out with a naïve kind of innocence of: “Yes, I’m going to be a writer.” Then realising the intricacies of what the writing & creative process involves.
A new element which I hadn’t paid much attention to, culture, will enter the story. This late teenager girl will be brought up in Australia, and will be undertaking the new 2u and 3u (and maybe 4u?) English syllabus, and will be influenced by the new way of thinking and reasoning that it encourages in her.
I will appropriate segments of my Process Diary and also the assorted pieces of creative writing I have worked on previously
I’ve decided I’m going to try and be a writer.
My teacher keeps saying ‘anyone can call themselves a writer these days’, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t!
Actually I decided to make the writer more mature at the beginning of her experimentation with writing, to make the piece more realistic. I’m going to use complex modes and styles of writing, and it wouldn’t make sense for her to have such an advanced ability if she was uninitiated into the world of postmodern theory to begin with.
3:14pm Thurday June 14, 2001
Of authors, smoke and mirrors
By JANE SULLIVAN
Monday 12 February 2001
IN my teens, when I was going through my Agatha Christie phase, I lost my literary innocence. It happened when I read her novel Endless Night. I remember sitting in the train on the way to school, reading the last page, feeling completely gobsmacked, torn between admiration of Christie's skills and indignation that she'd tricked me. (And here's a warning: if you're going through your Agatha Christie phase, don't read on, because I am about to give away an ending or two.)
The reason I was so astounded was that the hero and narrator of the story, Michael Rogers, who I had assumed all along was in grief and shock over the tragic death of his wife, turned out to be the murderer. I'd done my best to guess who the villain was, of course, but I'd failed because I had no idea you were allowed to break the rules like that.
Once I'd realised what had happened, I went back and skimmed through the novel all over again. It was devastatingly clever, it was like reading a completely new book. All those moments when I'd empathised with the plight of the hero turned out to be totally ambiguous, not because he'd lied - his emotions on second reading still seemed genuine - but because he'd withheld crucial information. He was happy, or sad, or afraid; but what had changed for me were the reasons why he felt that way.
Those feelings came flooding back when I had a look at an intriguing new book, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?. The author, Pierre Bayard, a French psychoanalyst and professor of literature, analyses both Endless Night and the more famous book that preceded it by several decades, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (which I had never heard of when I began my Agatha Christie obsession). As any serious crime fiction buff will tell you, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is celebrated as the novel that made Agatha Christie's reputation - because the narrator turns out to be the murderer.
Even in 1926, she was a brilliant cheat.
Bayard has some astonishing theories of his own about the identity of Roger Ackroyd's real killer - probably nothing to do with what the author intended, but that's another subject altogether. His book interests me mainly because it's a symptom of the new respect for surprise in fiction.
In one way this isn't new at all: surprise has always been the staple of the detective story, and is frequently a strong element in the thriller plot. But in the past it's been seen as one of the less exalted devices in the literary armory, more like sleight of hand than creative genius. The trick was to let the ears and whiskers pop out of the magician's hat and yet somehow persuade your readers not to notice them until the whole rabbit appeared.
Now, however, sophisticated ears and whiskers are popping out all over the place, and any number of experts are waiting to pounce on them. As Bayard reminds us, the intellectuals and writers fascinated by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd alone have included Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Raymond Chandler, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec. It's such a beautiful illustration of all those postmodern theories about the unreliability of narrators and texts.
And now it's not always detective fiction that provides the rabbits. Surprises, twists and double pikes abound in literary fiction, where we wouldn't expect to find the devices of crime writing. It's getting harder and harder for reviewers to discuss new books without spoiling the readerly revelations.
Without giving away the respective stories, I can say that both this year's Booker winner, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, and a runner-up, Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, play in different ways with the notion of the unreliable narrator and the ambiguity that can lurk behind seemingly straightforward first-hand accounts of events.
It's not that the surprises are necessarily devastating - if you've read a lot of contemporary fiction, you can guess well in advance at the kinds of tricks that are being played. What does attract in these books, however, is the delicate irony, the way certain narrative conventions are bent but not quite broken, and the exhilarating sense of danger: who knows how much, if anything, you can take at face value?
In crime fiction, it's the identity of the killer that's open to question. In literary fiction, it's the identity of almost everybody. As in popular fiction, the mysteries tend to revolve around family secrets: incest, abuse, repressed memories, revenge and habitual concealment. At least two recent novels by Australians feature male characters who turn out to be secretly female.
Even those books which you would expect to owe almost everything to the beauty of their language have the obligatory little twist in the tail. I found one towards the end of Andrei Makine's mesmerising Le Testament Francais, a revelation that throws into question some of the narrator's most poignant memories; and there are a couple of twists in Alessandro Baricco's Ocean Sea, a book that relies heavily on poetic prose for its effects.
I wonder how far this trend is going to go. Will we see fiction where the implicit trust between writer and reader has broken down to the point where we cannot believe what is on the page at all? Or will it just get to the point of weariness, where we all begin to yearn nostalgically for the straightforward narrative, the book you can't put down, where for once all is exactly as it seems?
Unreliable narratives create suspicious readers. James Thurber once wrote a piece about a crime novel fan, a woman who had read Macbeth and became convinced that Shakespeare was hiding something. She worked it out in the end: Macbeth had been framed, and the real murderer was Macduff.
Thurber meant his piece as a parody, but I'm not so sure. I reckon she was onto something, that woman. I have a feeling I have still more literary innocence to lose.
From www.theage.com.au
I thought this article brought up the issues of readings from multiple perspectives, which interest me.
I’m still searching for my unique, distinctive writing style. Crime fiction has characterised itself by persistent innovation within its genre. I wonder how far self-reflexivity can go, and how much of it is too much?
The movie Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, uses voice-over narration and film techniques to create a text which is so postmodern that it’s very hard to follow. The movie is designed to be confusing, but its weakness is that it overcomplicates what is already a highly complicated concept. While it really sends a deep and meaningful message about fragmentation, the movie itself is excessively fragmented, to the point of this fragmentation being overdone.
Yes, everything is constructed. It seems that self-reflexivity depends on shock and confrontation tactics, where the writer is working against the reader, relying on unpleasant on the behalf of the reader to bring the message home. I’m pondering on how to create a text in which the reader to have access to the self-reflexivity, and while it surprises, creates an enthusiasm for learning and further discovery with the text.
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