WEEK 3 FICTION
M. 09/05. No classes: Labor Day holiday, campus closed.
W. 09/07. Chapter 4. Setting: read this chapter's introductory material (163-69). Anton Chekhov. "The Lady with the Dog" (169-80).
Go over a few of the main points in the introduction: round or flat characters, dynamic or static. Aristotle's drama theory has it that action reveals character, but of course in modern times, we've come to focus on character as primary, not secondary as he would have told us it should be. That's bourgeois individualism at work, as opposed to a more ancient, collective way of defining the individual person as the sum of his or her functions and responsibilities in a community. But note that these two "ways" still operate side by side – we know that our striving for full individuality is partly an illusion, and good authors know that, too.
Round isn't necessarily better, though sometimes it is. Roundness doesn't always connote the scriptor's empathy or agreement with a given character – you get a pretty strong sense of who Madame Bovary is, but in the end her stab at full individuality seems to get crushed by external circumstances and moral standards. Maybe the same goes for Anna Karenina, though I get the sense that Tolstoy is sympathetic to her plight and her desires. (Levin in War and Peace an example of a dynamic character even though a relatively minor one.) It's worth keeping in mind that sometimes we express our "individuality" in strikingly banale, conformist ways – and authors can take any number of views of such attempts, no?
The authors mention Dickens' caricatures – parodic presentations can sometimes "limn" people in a way that makes us understand them better than if they were served up "round" in all their rich sordidness or glory. You can learn a lot from exaggerations and outlines, or silhouettes, and it's fairly easy because there aren't many details to sort through. More broadly, the fact that a master artist can create a character with a few strokes of the pen or keyboard speaks to the power of the imaginings, expectations, and assumptions we ourselves bring to any reading we do. It doesn't take a million words to bring the sense of a person to life for us.
One of the main ways we get a handle on "character" in fiction and even in real life is classification, which in truth is pretty much the way we deal with everything. Nietzsche on the way substantives invariably deceive us; well, we may flatter ourseves that we judge people by their actions, but it seems more accurate to say that we mostly delineate people as "who they are" by means of categories: we make them fit into some kind of pattern or group. Nearly everybodys see the problems that can arise from this operation of defining and reducing to order the acts and utterances and gestures that make us who we are. Race and ethnicity are among the most troubling of all categories, and Morrison's story is dedicated to making things hard for readers with regard to that category. On the one hand, the story's backdrop demands that we consider race – Civil Rights, busing, and so forth – but on the other, it at least partly frustrates our attempts to sort out "who's who." It makes race seem like a preoccupation, an interpretive device – but that's sort of the point, I think. We keep wanting to blurt out, "Oh, so Twyla's black or Roberta's mother must be white because –".
Group Work:
Freytag: exposition, rising action, climax or turning point, falling action, conclusion. Try that at least briefly, then move on to the main article, which is to consider how best to come at the issue of character delineation and interpretation in Toni Morrison's short story: given that Morrison more or less brackets out race as a defining characteristic, how does she make her narrator define Twyla and Roberta? What do we learn about their situations their habits of thought, speech and action, that makes them come to life for us? And finally, what can we discern about race in this story? Is it completely gone, or are there some moments that seem fairly straightforward in that regard?
Setting (163-69) and Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog" (169-80).
Go over the highlights in the intro briefly. Then
The setting seems to be important because both characters are in a liminal state, somewhere between their normal, anchored state and free-floating or open to experience. Place and experience seem closely interrelated here, though one doesn't want to be rigid about such assertions. I mean that sometimes we can say, "this or that experience was made possible or encouraged by this or that locale," but for me, this story is at least as much about character as place. There's a defamiliarization effect to consider – the male protagonist finds Yalta a suitable place to seek an affair with this attractive young woman, Anna Sergeyevna, then finds his old haunts in Moscow at first comforting, then discomfiting when the memory of her doesn't fade as he had expected it to.
Group Work:
There are three main settings – the resort locale Yalta, the capital Moscow where Gurov lives, and S--, where Anna Sergeyevna lives with her husband of two years. What does each setting open up and shut down for the main characters – what does each setting encourage, discourage, or change for them as they pursue and reflect upon their lives and their mutual affair? At what points does the narrator slow down and offer us a strong or dilatory description of the surroundings, and why so at that point?
For further discussion, refer to the audio mp3 file of my comments in class, available from www.ajdrake.com/wiki.
