Reading Novels

9. Narrative II

131 9 Narrative II If we accept that one of the chief ways in which readers consider the treatment of narrative in fiction will be through accounts of plot and the variants they encounter on the prototypes of plot, we have still to clarify what happens at a local level in the text. What options are available in organizing the narratives that will be read as contributing to the plot? And how are these narratives likely to be structured? Hierarchy of Narratives Within the text of a novel we often discover that there is a hierarchy of narratives. It is common to find narratives embedded in other narratives .The simplest form is where a récit is embedded in discours: the narrator starts by foregrounding the act of writing, the present situation, then proceeds to give us an embedded narrative, a récit set in the past. Embeddings may also be a kind of digression, when the storyteller briefly abandons the main thread of narrative, usually to include a personal history told in the first person. This was conventional in the Spanish picaresque tradition, and was imported into the English novel in the eighteenth century . In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) two of the characters come across an old man who is known as “The Man of the Hill,” and Tom Jones asks him to tell his life-story. The narrator says: “The gentleman then, without any farther preface, began as you may read in the next chapter” (bk. 8, chap. 1). And off we go on a digression for four chapters. The Man of the Hill’s story can be related thematically to the main narrative, but nonetheless is a break in the narrative, and such embeddings came to seem old-fashioned and artificial to nineteenth-century novelists. Trollope reading novels 132 thought that episodes of this kind “distract the attention of the reader and always do so disagreeably.”1 Frame Narratives A more obviously significant use of embedded narrative is found in novels that open with a first narrator, who then gives us a narrative as told by another narrator, which constitutes the main intrigue of the novel. Sometimes the narrator introduces letters or journals; sometimes he or she is described as listening to a long account given by the second narrator. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) starts with the city-dweller Lockwood, who makes a visit to the farm of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood wants to hear what the story of the place is, so listens to the narrative of the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, about the inhabitants, and this narrative includes the story most often considered central to the novel, of Heathcliff and Cathy. Lockwood’s opening narrative can be imagined as a kind of picture-frame around the Heathcliff narrative, and is thus called a frame narrative. The process by which one narrative is embedded in another has been compared to those carved ivory boxes where we can look through one box to see another (and perhaps even further boxes) inside, and such novels are thus often said to have a Chinese-box narrative structure. In the case of Wuthering Heights, one of the most striking things about the Chinese-box structure is the care of the planning. Critics have established that Emily Brontë must have worked out a complex (and almost maliciously confusing) scheme of family relations through several generations . The intricate patterns of repetition, as Dorothy Van Ghent pointed out in her classic essay on the novel, stand in opposition to the immoderate excesses of the central characters.2 The framework of embedded narratives is not a digression here, but integral to our readings of the novel. To talk in this way of texts as “embedded” or “framed” is to project spatial metaphors onto them, and to do so is misleading if it suggests we can actually hold the whole text in a single focus, as we do in looking at a picture. Some kind of metaphorical projection, however, is necessary in order for any discussion to take place, and spatial metaphors retain an important clarifying and mnemonic function in discussion of texts. narrative II 133 Order, Duration, and Frequency When we try to analyze how a narrative is conducted in particular sections of a novel, we can use the convenient categories formulated by Gérard Genette: order, duration, and frequency.3 Order Narratives often come to us in disordered sequence...