Of Nuance and Narrative

Prompt of the Day #12

Pick a fairytale that you connect with and retell it as if you are a narrator at a dinner or function. Imagine the setting you are in, think about the story and what it may mean or symbolise, now consider the audience you are recreating the scene for. Reinvent the story in your own words. 

Depending on what critic you're reading, the house of fiction has a million windows or a punitive number of doors. This is the metaphor applied to narrative perspective - we can read a piece of fiction in a variety of ways, we can approach it from many angles, but when you're writing it you can only write from a perspective. This is the narrative voice. Whether that voice is your own, a fictional first person, the third person limited, third person unlimited etc. You could probably write in the first person plural, though perhaps it would feel like a royal 'we', and I can think of a few children's books and 'adventure quest books' that are written in the second person but there's a leading voice in that case, which makes me hesitate to cast judgement on how well it's ever used. 

My point is that the way you present your story, your narrative style, is the foundation of everything you write. Most of the critics I'm thinking of apply this view to stories and novels, although I'd hasten to add that it is just as vital in poetry. If you wield your narration well you can write just about anything without recourse. 

"But what on earth does that mean?" You may very well be asking. I will try to reply.

Narrative is a story. It's the form of narration, which is how you tell the story. And no matter how hard you try, it will always have a 'narrator' lurking in some corner of the subconscious text. Even if the touch of the 'author' is as fleeting as a love on the dancefloor, that voice is still coming through. Narrative is how you stitch it all together, how you weave your words into a pattern which turns into a tapestry of tales. You can do this like Balzac who saw himself as a 'historian' depicting the actualities of contemporary French society and frequently breaking into unexpected, decidedly 18th Century style commentary; you can do this like the Father of Modern Narrative: Flaubert who was concerned about 'writing a book about nothing' and whose presence in his works is hardly detectable. You could write like Nabokov with complex unreliable narrators such as those from 'Despair' and 'Lolita', or like George Eliot with her reliable, third-person omniscient narration. Or you could be writing the next modern epic, puzzling many of these aspects together as Joyce does to some extent in Ulysses. 

Which ever you decide, narrative style is a crucial aspect that you need to develop. You don't have to maintain a single style though all of your work, nor even continue it through a single poem, story or novel. 

Lemony Snicket - Will You Ever See His Face?

Lemony Snicket uses a Dickensian style of narrative through his authorial persona, he has developed a narrative voice and has crafted his own space within his fictional world to great amusement and success. His style also allows for a sense of authorial reliability, albeit with a tinge of reluctance, whilst also conveying the author as far from omniscience. Journalistic, investigative language creates this effect. But if you read the Odyssey there's a sense that we cannot always be certain what is truth and what is rumour when it's not Odysseus' voice narrating his tale. Throughout the epic, examples of how other 'bards' have told the tales of Greek heroes returning home, including the eponymous hero, have distorted reality - thus we see examples of both reliable and unreliable narration.

It doesn't really matter whether you want to be 'part' of your narrative or not - nor does it matter if you want to fashion yourself after a favoured writer or if you want to create a style that's uniquely yours. What's important is to develop the write style for your poem or prose. Using the first person might mean that you limit the amount of action your character can follow and therefore require a lot of explanation. Using the third person omniscient might seem too antiquated for a tale set in the modern world. If your work is meant to be 'light reading' or 'pleasure reading' maybe you don't want to create an unreliable narrator, or you might benefit from exactly that if you want an active readership, as you might if you were engaging them in a mystery or something similar. 

The nuances of language and storytelling are captured when a reader engages with the narrative. It's the little things that become striking when it's well done. So turn your work into something literary and exciting. Develop your own narrative style. 

Of Explorers and Elements

Prompt of the Day #4 

Imagine that you or a character has just come home from the longest journey they've ever made. Think about their immediate reactions to being home - relief, joy, worry, distaste -  think about how they might narrate their story to friends and how it might change over time. How do they feel after the initial return - content, restless, excluded, changed?

When Homer wrote the Odyssey, the protagonist, Odysseus has set sail from Troy after the happening of the Illiad, and is trying to return to his native Ithaca after ten years of war with the Trojans. His voyage, which should have taken a couple of weeks, takes him ten years. In those ten years he battles monsters, listens to Sirens, meets and 'befriends' two beautiful Goddesses: Circe and Calypso, blinds a Cyclops, travels to-and-from the Underworld, loses all of his comrades, wanders from civilisation to civilisation and eventually returns to discover his wife is being pressured by a bunch of irksome suitors trying to usurp him from his rightful throne. As an epic poem it has been one of the most influential pieces of literature in Western canon, inspiring hundreds of writers from the other much lauded Classic: Virgil, to Shakespeare and James Joyce. In fact, poets such as Tasso and Spenser, who both wrote Christianised epics, followed very closely to the themes and even the language of Homer, recreating almost the entire Odyssey albeit with characters plucked from morality plays. Similarly, if I was going to bore you into a blob of vapid expression, I would list the huge number of poets that have taken twenty lines of the Odyssey (or the Aeneid) and turned them into page long poems. 

The influence of the Classical Epic is phenomenal and it is characterised by voyage. Not just any voyage mind you, but long, never-ending, traumatising, life-destroying, character-building voyages. Christopher Booker even acknowledges this as an archetypal example of one of The Seven Basic Plots: Voyage and Return. Many fantasy novels are based on this idea - take the Lord of the Rings, or the Belgariad as examples. In these, 'The Quest' may start as the general premise, they may have to 'Overcome the Monster', there may even be hints of Comedy, Tragedy, Romance etc but ultimately the 'Voyage and Return' is the overwhelming plot for the story. Why? Because a voyage, like an epic, can encompass hundreds of different ideas and emotions and can reflect both literal and metaphorical transformation. With Odysseus, he desperately wants to go home, but he has to overcome dozens of trials in his wanderings. With the Red Cross Knight or the Knight of Termperance (The Faerie Queen, as inspired by Homer), these figures have to encounter the thing that most tempts them, their apposite character, in order to really become the embodiment of a virtue. Voyage, in allowing a character to travel from place to place, also allows them to develop through obvious challenges, to triumph and fail and gives the writer free reign to examine a plethora of human emotion.

The Return is equally important. Of course, the joy of arrival for Odysseus is somewhat dampened by the fact that he has to disguise himself in order to judge the loyalty of everyone he has ever known - the slave woman that nursed him as a babe, his wife, his father etc. Furthermore, he has returned to discovered he is MPD and his wife is being heckled by a number of lascivious old aristocrats. He promptly smites them, intending to remind you of how he is both Odysseus the Wanderer but also a hero of Troy but he still has to go through the trial of Revelation and after all this, he finally, truly 'Returns'. Inspiration, can come from the different monsters he fights (ie. The Lotus Eaters), the different people he meets (ie. Circe), the great and ridiculous 'weeping', the moments of intense ekphrasis... the list goes on. 

Tennyson's poem 'Ulysses' is one example of how a writer uses a classical text to inspire his own writing. Tennyson, despite not having such a helpful manual as Booker's explanation of plot, considers the character of Odysseus/Ulysses and using the voice of the hero himself, imagines what the man thought of his life twenty years on from The Return. So if this is the traditional timeline for Odysseus:

Then add another twenty years on with Odysseus back as king of 'barren' Ithaca and you can imagine how he might be feeling. He had ten years of war, ten years of voyaging and then the following years of peace. Tennyson, who also rewrote the scene with the Lotus-Eaters, created a scene where Ulysses seems to want to return to the life he lived as a traveller, as famous hero surrounded by myth instead of fact. Yet the narrator also seems reminiscent of the Sirens, who promised him both fame and 'knowledge ... beyond human understanding', often described as mantric truths. This is Tennyson's 'gray spirit yearning in desire/ To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human knowledge.' His creation is one that is no longer content with the 'still hearth' and 'barren crags' or the 'aged wife' he fought for in the original epic. This is a character who seems to have carried the temptations of the Siren song home with him, has become obsessed with it, who has romanticised the 'dark broad seas' so that even Charybdis's gaping mouth and Circe's idyllic island become an equally enticing adventures. 

It's almost as if Ulysses is going through a mid-life crisis. As the fear of being 'made weak by time and fate' juxtaposed to the idealised 'old days', remains emphasised throughout the poem, we initially imagine that this character is sincerely desirous of the travelling life because he is ageing, realising his increasing impotence as his son takes over the rule of Ithaca. Yet, due to the hints towards the sirens that he alone heard, we are also encouraged to doubt, to read with a pinch of scepticism, a slither of active readership. Why  are the 'gulfs' that  'wash ... down' and the 'Fortunate Isles' are juxtaposed against each other as similarly lauded adventures? Is the poem really about literal travel? Does he really want to return to a 'newer world' or are the references to age, the 'end', seeing 'the great Achilles' actually suggesting that Ulysses is ready to embark on the last adventure, into death itself? Or does the final sentiment that determines 'not to yield' imagining that he is desperate to cling to life, to return to life? Does the siren song promise him an escape through life or through death? And is Tennyson being serious with all of this? These are all questions that we can play with. 

Tennyson, doesn't just use very deliberate allusions linguistically but he also uses meter to emphasise the conflicting rationales behind the narrators opinions. This is particularly evident with the use of spondees in the lines, slowing them down as if the narrator is luxuriating in them, emphasising the sense of idealism, whereas the following line uses a trochiac opening to accentuate the feverish fervour of his excitement. Against a predominantly iambic poem, lines like these are striking, lending a sense of strangeness that suggests that maybe the character is not entirely in his right mind. 


You can read a poem like this in dozens of different ways. I tend to read it ironically. But what we all have to see is how Tennyson uses a familiar trope and a well-known story and develops it into his own, expressing something that is ultimately very personal and unique to his time. A new perspective on a hero can usurp  convention. In this case it's the opinion that once the story is concluded, the voyage complete, the return celebrated, things will right themselves. In the case of the Odyssey, we're even guaranteed an end to his tribulations through the use of deus ex machina. Yet Tennyson's poem reopens the page for us.

When you're creating a character, think about how you're developing him/her. Consider what journey your character is going to go on, whether it be literal or internal and think about what sort of person they are, not only in the past but in the future. 


Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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