Narratives Contemporànies

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (20/02)

Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
All texts have 3 things in common: theorization of contemporary, textualization of memory, first
person narration and its implications on the contemporary, memory and the reader.
Preliminaries: contemporariness, narratology, memory
Elements of contemporariness
Freedom, inclusivity, polarity, ecologism. Zero perspective (we don’t have distance because we
are living in the contemporary, to have perspective we need the whole picture. It’s difficult to
make history, to be a historian (as in Midnight’s Children), making history is making fiction),
liquidity (feeling that everything is happening very quickly), immediateness (being at the same
time, everywhere), virality (exposed to a huge number of people social media), communication
(huge change, affecting the way we see ourselves), globalization (related to the other elements,
we are living what’s happening on the other side there’s over-information that has an effect on
how we see things, there’s numbness, that causes paralysis of choice, too many choices that we
can’t choose, excessive information creates not being able to form your own opinion rapidly
although we need to, there’s a pressure to decide to choose an opinion), fake news (too much
information that we don’t know what or what’s not true), content creator (importance not on the
content but on the agent, the narrator), cancel culture, change in corporeality, scrolling (no
separation of types of information, there’s all types of information altogether, it keels desire, it
has everything so you don’t need to desire it, we do not have so much attention span, it affects in
many ways, like the way of teaching so as the students concentrate), algorithm (not alone or
misfit, there’s people who have the same interest), all related to capitalism (all must be new,
narcissism, excessive information, change in corporeality…), pandemics (narcissistic attitude
about not worrying because we don’t think we’re going to suffer it), narcissism (because we see
all through a screen so we do not think it’s real, it dehumanizes our response to what’s
happening), change in narration and storytelling (time, patience, unreliable narrator, not too
much information because the reader loses focus, narrator has to ignite the desire of the reader to
keep on reading, difficult now because we have all we want in an immediate way), using irony
and parody to deal, binge (concept of binging, consuming culture, “next episode”, not having the
desire to wait).
When does the contemporary begin? Why? It begins in the 1960s with youth culture. Youth
culture: the hippies (Woodstock, free love…), The Beatles (when people understand there is a
merket for young people, there’s liberation, then it transforms into hippie movement, the
liberation of the women, contraception, sexual liberation, moving to the idea of general
freedom). 1979 Margaret Thatcher begins, The iron lady era, important time because is the first
time a woman becomes prime minister. The first thing she does is to star privatizing all services
(conservatist party), she has the support of Reagan (president of USA at the time). The iron lady,
name previously used from a method of torture. Called like that from people against the party
and then she names herself this nickname and gives it a new meaning. “The only way is the right
way” “The lady is not for turning” an important line that talks about how Thatcher never changes
her decision. Miners’ strike, people died of hunger strikes but she was not up to for negotiation.
One of the consequences of her government is the division between the north and the south. She
promotes the southern areas (near London) and degrades and forgets about Northern England.
Absolute poverty on the north and promotion of richness in the South. US politics were going on
the same direction, conservatism. 1990s, the creator of the www and the Spice girls (Cool
Britannia, English proud of themselves). Tony Blair (change on government, liberate party).
From Rule Britannia (Wueen’s boats) to Cool Britannia. Trainspotting (north south division,
junkie culture). 4 weddings and a funeral. For the 1 st time Europe sees England as cool because
of these pop culture. Pride and Prejudice BBC series (first adaptational impact of p and p).
Bridget’s Jones diary. Princess Diana’s death (it has an impact on British culture, there’s a whole
crisis when reacting to it, there’s a burst of emotion unexpected from Britain, there has to be
grieve, the rate of approval of the monarchy goes down after she dies, one of the reasons is
because Tony Blair talks to the Queen and tells her that the monarchy should approach the death
of Diana). 2000. The London Riots (2011, related with Thatcherism, it comes from the arresting
and death of a black young man, the whole London, Manchester, Sheffield… protest, react
against the police brutality and with what happens with the differences between north and south,
black and white and rich and poor). The Olympics (Britain becomes an exposition to the world
again, rearrangement of how they expose to the world). Brexit (result of a public referendum, it
is a result of a democratic consultation and a result of a tense relation with Britain and Europe,
we still don’t know, fully, the consequences of Brexit).
Literary theory of the contemporary
Every that happens after structuralism is called poststructuralism (contemporary).Narratology:
How the text is written (narrator, focalizer…) and the political assumptions (ideas or
contradictions) behind the text. Structuralism is a way of analyzing texts that’s based on binary
oppositions (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, religion vs. paganism), it is a social, cultural,
fashion trend and poststructuralism is this trend only for analyzing books and texts.
Poststructuralist theorists (Barthes, Levi Strauss, Baudrillard…). Poststructuralism will try to
avoid the binary oppositions from the texts, every single text is moving to an area of ambiguity,
we can find contradictory readings of the same text.
1960s :beginning of deconstruction, promoted by Derrida, he’s looking for contradictory
elements in the text, those shady areas that create contradictions in the text. Reader response, by
Roland Barthes, the author is not the source of meaning, it’s the reader related to the text “The
Death of the Author”, the birth of the reader can only happen when there’s the death of the
Author. Feminism (De Beauvoir) she is separating two things that have become together to
enslave women (kitchen, maternity…), she makes a distinction between biology and culture,
(Angela Davis) “Feminism is a radical notion that makes women human beings”. 1970s:
postmodernism, the rejection of universalism, stability, reality and definition, forget your safe
place, comfort zone. 1980s: Cultural Materialism/New historicism (Greenblatt), the same but
Britain / US, to look at the context in which the text takes place. Every single text is surrounded
by context and ways which you can trace the history of the moment in which the text, book was
written. Foucault said that power extends throughout society and that power and knowledge as
institutionalized forms of social control. 1990s: the decade that forever changes our approach to
critical theories. From that moment, university classes were centered not only on the book itself
but its surroundings. Cultural studies (Hall) an individual experience does not exist, a reading it’s
a result of many experiences from the past. Postcolonial Studies (Fanon) mental health analysis
of people under colonialism, useful to read these kind of texts. (Said) the west creates and
imagines the east. (Spivak) what kind of language does the subaltern uses, using English when
your living or from a colonised country. Gender Studies / Queer Theory (Butler, Kristeva, de
Lauretis, Sedgwick, Halberstam and Fuss) continuation of 60s feminism. Sexuality is socially
constructed, in the 60s is biologism and constructivism as well as in the 90s, your gender and
sexuality is created by society. Thye reject biologism and propose constructivism, one is not born
a woman, is made or created a woman. Rejection of heteronormativity and that what is normal is
being heterosexual. Fluidity of individual sexuality and that there’s no need to define what you
do and who with, rejection of definitions (connected to modernism).
Gerard Genette, a narratologist.
Author, narrator, reader
Author: the contemporary approach to the figure of the author is going in the same direction,
Roland Barthes’ Dead of the Author. First of all, a text addressed as a political pamphlet because
of the May 68 Student Revolution. This Author that becomes a God on the text, but Barthes
wants the birth of the reader so it has to have the death of the Author. That’s because he’s
interested in shifting the person who gives meaning, instead of the Author creating meaning, it
has to come from the reader. If we want to reclaim out power as readers, we have to get rid of the
Author. That is why we do not approach the text as a secret reading of the author, the text has as
many reading as readers. Intertextuality, every time we read the text, the text keeps developing,
the text changes because you have changed and you project the meaning.
Narrator: the agent that holds the text together. Source: Gerard Genette. The narrator has 5
functions within the text. Narrative function: to tell the story to the reader, it’s the fundamental
function of the narrator. Directing function: a narrator who interrupts the story in order to
comment on it, f.ex. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the narrator in Midnight’s children, that’s
a narrator that we can find in contemporary literature. The first directing narration we find is
Tristram Shandy, a text from the 18th century. A narrator that interrupts the flow of the fiction
can be found through all fiction history. Communication: addresses the reader directly, like
Midnight’s Children, it can be found on Don Quijote. Testimonial function: It performs as
witness, Rushdie’s narrator tells the story from what he lived. Ideological function: it interrupts
to instruct, literature to instruct the reader. The contemporary narrator and its functions can be
found in the beginning of fiction. The narrative instance is the result o narrative voice + time of
narration + narrative perspective (focalization). That’s because we need to know the place the
narrator occupies in relation to the story (diegesis). If the narrator appears in the narrative, they
will acquire a particular status. The absent narrator (heterodiegetic) and the present narrator
(homodiegetic), if the story is about the narrator themselves on the person we may call the
narrator (autodiegetic). Focalization, particularly if the narration is a first person narrator we
have restriction to have different focalizers. If it’s an omniscient narrator, there’s no restriction
on focalization. It’s a matter of perception. There are three kinds of focalization. Zero
focalization (omniscient narrator, knows more than the character, that’s why they can explain to
the reader), internal focalization (the narrator knows as much as the focal character, when the
narrator is intradiegetic f.ex. Jane Eyre, when she’s punished and locked up, the text makes the
reader feel as how the little girl is feeling) and external focalization (the narrator knows less than
the characters, camera lens type of narrator: outside).We analyze because we want to know the
narrative technique and the constituent elements of the text in order to understand why does the
narrator chooses this type of narration.
Reader: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. It creates meaning
on the text. Meaning lies somewhere between the text and the reader. Meaning is in the text
(narrator) and the reader also constructs the meaning. Texts promote different readings.
Contemporary fiction consciously demands a critical and active readership. These type of fiction
we’re going to be reading consciously demands a critical reader, the fiction, previous to the
contemporary age, did not demand a critical reader. The texts from before contemporary age also
demand a critical reader, but on those times, there was no active reader. The reader today
(contemporary age), when we read Jan Austen f.ex. needs to be critical and active. The
difference between a text published before contemporary time and after is the reader, so then, the
narration was not necessarily conscious. Reader response is after the Author has disappeared. A
critical and active readership means to analyze the meaning of it. We are looking for a space the
author provides for the reader to create space (perspective). Critical reading is about opening
spaces in fiction. Open-endedness, when the text refuses to give the reader a conclusion.
Contemporary fiction is about us thinking about the expectations we have about the text, it says
more about the reader than about the text itself. The use of different narratological processes, the
way the text is written creates different effects for the reader. If we have a hero, autodiegetic and
1st person narrator who uses internal focalization, this will produce a strong illusion of realism
and credibility in the reader. All fiction is an illusion, including fiction in the 1 st person although
it is manipulating you with credibility. The text is not talking about the present but about the past
in relation with the narrator.
Translating memory
Fragmentation, unification of memory (different perspectives of the same moment), thinking of
the past. First, think of the key moments, then thing about what else happened.
We have created the memory so we have full control of it because we have invented it, you’re
inventing the memory every time you think about it (adding more and more information to that
same memory). We are constantly creating memories that don’t even exist. Nothing happened in
the way we memorized it because we create it, we fictionalized our memory, our memory it’s
fiction. Memory is very objective (in the sense that is connected to objects, a smell of
something…). When we have a moment in which we remember something (dipping a madeleine
into tea, and then we remember something connected to that moment) we call it the madeleine
effect.
Textualizing memory
Every time we bring up a memory, we create it, and if we bring it up again we recreate it. We get
to crystalize memories through language. Invented memories: you believe you witnessed a
memory but you did not witness it, you think you lived that memory because someone described
their memory vividly. Narrators who say ‘I think I was a witness’, the narrator is putting you on
alert to know if that memory is created or if the narrator witnessed the event. Proust: “The past is
hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in
the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.” Memory is not
something that just happens, is something material. A shudder runs through his body, something
related with pleasure saying that the recreation of memory is a pleasure. What gives us pleasure
is not the content of the memory but the moment of us creating a memory, the act of
remembering itself. It gives us pleasure because it’s an essence that’s part of yourself and that
makes you stop feeling mediocre, accidental and mortal. He becomes a time traveler, when
recreating a memory we go to an invented past, the past is an invention. We go to that place we
are inventing, in which you have control, and for that reason it’s pleasurable. It’s not mediocre
because it’s as pleasurable as you want, it’s not mortal because you can create a memory with no
one dying, and it’s not accidental because it has an effect on the body, it’s material. Proust likes
it so much, he tries to recover that first sensation, but memory is new every time we bring it up,
language separates you from that initial feeling of the first time. When you crystalize the
memory and bring it back again and so on there’s a loss of the first sensation. The memory
returns because he recreates the fantasy of childhood. Whatever you remember from childhood
it’s an invention that you have given yourself. Memory is the place of control, we’re the author
and narrator of the memory. Your identity is based on the memories and the ways you have
chosen to crystalize. You are made from your memories, you can change your identity as many
times you want because you create these memories. History is collective memory, what we all
agreed what we’re going to remember collectively. This collective memory has to do with your
personal memory. It’s bidirectional, collective history is affected by our personal history because
it’s a creation of memory from ourselves, and it goes the other way round, your personal memory
is related with collective memory, to the point that we create our personal memory depending on
the collective memory (politics). The collective memory, what we all remember as a group, is
chosen by us and our identity. Souvenir: something that allows you to remember, the memory is
encapsulated in something material. Memory is not arbitrary, because we choose what we focus
on. These unimportant details become important because we choose them. We focus on stuff that
is detail, seem unimportant but we choose to forget important details. And that is because
memory is fiction, and when we try to recreate memory shying away from fiction it becomes
clumsy.
(3) “All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with first cold rains of winter, and there were
no more tops to the white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the
closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the
midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine had died, where I had a room on the top
floor where I worked” (Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964)
(4) “There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old
white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square,
the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal
Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The
street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the
only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tyres, with the high narrow houses and
the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died” (Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of
Kilimanjaro, 1961).
(3) is the memory and the (4) is that same memory but fictionalized. The first one feels clumsy
whereas the second one flows naturally. It doesn’t really matter whether the memory is (fully)
truth but what matters is that it has an effect on the reader. The best way to capture memory is
through fiction, not through facts. What works better is the memory fictionalized because the
reader makes us curious and gives us pleasure, whereas the memory itself gives just curiosity.
The need to be true to facts is a corset, it makes us uncomfortable, while the memory being
fictionalized gives us pleasure, fictionalized memory works better as a narrative text, while
memory itself works better for a factual text.
(5) “I see again my class-room, the blue roses of the wall-paper, the open window. Its reflection
fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book.
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality
makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the
room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change,
nobody will ever die” (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1951).
You can try to be true to facts but also let that memory invade you. The actual fact, the material
part, of remembering something is immortal. The idea to step out of time, to having lost time, the
pleasure of remembrance is a pleasurable experience. “avec un tel frémissement de bonheur”
it’s not a shudder but something else, related to sexual pleasure. Meaning that memory is
something material that gives us material pleasure.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)
The construction of characters feels very parodic. The use of the grotesque, exaggeration of
certain features, that’s the way in which characters, certain events and episodes are created. A lot
of unexpected things happening all the time. Sometimes weird things may happen, similar to
magical instead of historical events. There’s a lot of realism (historical facts that happened)
mixed with magic (events that do not coincide with what’s happen), it’s magic realism related to
Latin American narrative. There’s a lot of hidden references (Arabian nights, fairy tales).
Although this is a book based on historical traumatic facts of a collective memory, he’s mixing
other ingredients we would not expect on a historical novel (fairy tales, magic, myths,
legends…). One of the big issues of the text is that it tries to tell us something but is refilled of
different texts. There’s digression, he’s incapable of following a straight line, of keeping the
narration within its limits. The novel is also about the ide of what and why this type of narration.
3 different issues: narration (how and why the text is constructed), history and the effect of
narration (how narration affects the narration of history, the limits between history and narration
and if we can have limits) and the creation of the individual memory (identity) with collective
memory.
Preliminaries
Few weeks ago the author was attacked and has recently lost the sight of an eye. In 1989 the
political leader of Iran made a fatwa on him, any person who has Islamic faith, has to kill the
author. That’s because on 1988 he published a novel The Satanic verses where he fantasizes
about some verses of the Quran in which it’s claimed that he does anti-Muslim propaganda. One
of the many problems of the fatwa is that it can not be lifted until the person who makes the
fatwa lifts it and he died so the fatwa is still ongoing. The attacks are not only to him but to the
translators. The satanic verses is censored in some Muslim countries. He’s become really popular
because of this situation.
The ways in which he writes are related to history, nation, culture and fiction. And all this
through how memory is related to history, nation and culture. Historical or national memory. The
novel is written where a nation is born, India becomes country because it acquires independence.
It’s a national and historical memory that is created. And there’s personal memory that is related
to this historical memory. Rushdie has a degree on history, so history is his main source to write
his novels. History is the retelling of that historical fact. The end of the 19 th century and
beginning of 20th, marks a change on historiography, that promotes different versions of the
events, not just one. By extension, history has been read and written in a teleological manner,
cause and consequence, but when there’s a change on historiography, it’s not read and written in
a teleological manner but in a way where there’s a lot of versions and many details that are not
hidden. We are the result of this accumulation of these historical events. When we revise the way
in which we narrate history, we open a door to a debate in which history becomes less factional
and more fictional. History becomes a way of narration, one of the potential ways we can tell the
past.
Book One: “To me it’s a crazy way of telling your life story”
The opening / preface: A wacky Bildungsroman
The use on the gap as a use for silence. He uses a narrative based on pathos (pathetic),
demanding a sympathy. Coming from the idea of demand for empathy. Above all things I fear
absurdity (meaninglessness).
The narrator vs. the storyteller
He is a very specific kind of narrator and his narrative is colored by this specificity. His doubts,
silences, opening fictions, he’s gathering material for oral narratives, so he’s pretending to be a
storyteller. The difference when you’re telling the story and when you’re writing a story is that
telling a story can change everytime you tell them (overflowing narration) but once is written the
story becomes defined. It depends on memory (the storyteller uses mnemonic devices) and the
audience (try to change a story so that the audience become engaged.
In MC the audience is Padma, the story is told because Padma cannot read. It links with Ganesha
(the divinity of storytellers). The construction of Saleem as a storyteller is constructed by
Ganesha. Hybrid physique of Ganesha is shocking but is also related to his family history. He
was born with a head of a human being and came from the Goddess Pamrati and God Shiva, one
day Shiva becomes so jealous because he doesn’t think Ganesha is his child so he cuts his head,
he then is really sorry and tries to find a face to replace the head but the only head he finds is an
elephant. His doubt ignites also our doubt of who his father is or why he has doubts. Very close
connection to Saleem’s life story who does not know his parentage. It is said that they swapped
Saleem, so we don’t know if the story is of Saleem or of the swapped baby. All of a sudden you
are building the bildungsroman and all of a sudden you tell that you’re a swapped baby, so he’s
undermining the bildungsroman by subverting all the tradition of the 19 th century novels, because
all these novels talk about where you come from (family history, biological determinism)and
he’s saying that this is not going to be a traditional bildungsroman. He’s going to undermine all
the classic expectations. The novel is seemingly going forward but it’s a novel about rebirth (a
lot to do with Hindu mythology). There’s no teleology, but circularity. Ganesha is the deity of
literature, the antecedent of the storyteller therefore transforms the voice of the narrator into the
voice of the storyteller. He’s always in the company of a little mouse (representing the audience).
That someone is going to change the story Ganesha is telling. The little rat in MC is Padma, in
life is the audience.
Audience: the audience gives its flavor of orality. When you’re telling the story you’re looking
for the reaction of the audience (particularly in Hindu tradition). The audience is the reader as a
critic, Padma is a huge presence that is making comments on the story constantly, the only
presence in the novel that ha the power to contain the story from overflowing, without Padma the
story would never end because of the constant overflowing (bcs he doesn’t want to die). She’s
the most important presence in the novel. She wants a “what nextism” (teleology, progressive
narrative), continuing with the narrative and stop digressing. Padma becomes a cocreator,
because she helps the narrative be constructed with her comments. Padma is a metaphor for the
reader of contemporary fiction. The active, resisting reader that is cocreator of meaning. Through
the … the story is leaking, overflowing. This is how the story is constructed, the gap and silence
is the source of meaning.
Book two: “Reality is a question of perspective”
Historical discourse: fact and fiction
Memory plays a role and has a flavor on the fiction because it depends on the person, if there’s
memory there’s fictionalize, therefore there’s perspective (focalization). “Sometimes legends
make reality and become more useful than the facts” meaning that a legend (flavor of a fairytale
or folklore, story based on real things but it’s not real, it’s something that is shared by a
community) becomes part of the community, they make a reality, there’s something about the
fictionalization of history that’s beneficial because it helps us to create a (national) identity, a
sese of cohesion (helping the reader to understand it). Fiction makes the reader more aware of
the story than the facts. Fiction is important to create empathy, that’s the reason why we tell
children fairytales.
Saleem as the New Historian: fragmented, provisional, subjective, plural, a construct, a
reading (Rushdie 164, 223 -digressions). The history is in fragments (no need for internal
coherence, non-teleological (no cause consequence). It is provisional (it can always be recreated,
retold, this is the history that I give you, if you have another, welcome, contrary to a defined
history), it is subjective (personal view of history), plural (many different perspectives) it is a
construct and a reading (it is not factual but a story from something factual that happened).
‘Alpha and Omega’: techniques that fictionalize history: prolepsis (anticipation), why he chose
the title, subjectivity, he goes through all the alternatives.
Not a progressing narrative but a digression, talking about something else, overpopulation, not a
historical factual text. He’s opening a space that does not belong to history and does not belong
to fiction but it’s a middle space that allows him to think about all the alternative texts that he
could have given. Not just the text itself but all the texts he could have written digression. He
forces this ambiguity on the text while talking about the history of India (metafiction, how the
fiction is created). The writer of history has already decided what’s going to be written and how,
not like MC. The problem of contemporariness: a parody of the all controlling narrative. When
he goes back he becomes a different narrator, seems to be more in control than in the prologue.
The effect of the imaginary construction of the characters. He’s not a witness of the events that
happened before he was born, so he’s imagining and reinventing the past, so he becomes a
fantasy of an overcontrolling narrator. That gives him absolute fictional power. The narrator
pretends to be in control. He is moving into the present while he increasingly loses the control of
the narrative. The problem of contemporariness is that it doesn’t give you perspective, so you
pretend to be in control of the narrative. When he was telling about the past he had also no
control, but he was pretending because the story of the past is easier to pretend. No narrator is in
full control of the narrative, they pretend. The postmodernist narrator brings out the doubts of the
narrator. The mask has fallen, the narrator doubts and it’s portrayed in the narrative.
Fact meets fiction: The Widow
The widow is not just any character but a historical character. When the widow appears legend
becomes reality. The appearance in the widow brings the presence of the fairy tale. The widow
portrays or is inspired by Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi (1917-1984. PM of India, 1966-77 and
1980-84. Assassinated (by one of her guards). State of Emergency (all her political opponents are
going to be imprisoned, censorship on the press and sterilization of people living in slums). The
Widow is so many more things: the witches on fairytales, as a cruella de vile, the Freudian
Castrating Mother. The Widow has control in the future because she’s seen as a goddess. Not
just talking about his personal and national live but the live of all the people who have lived this.
In that moment is when we have multiple perspectives.
Postmodern approach of Historytelling, telling history from trauma. Meaning originates from
digressions, not coherence, ‘The Midnight’s Children Conference’ is one example of the multiple
perspectives and the silences of not only the narrator but of all who lived that. He subverts the
idea of the individual and starts telling about the masses. It begins with duplicity (just two
characters) but it continues with the historically involved people. The Midnight’s Children
conference is a conference in where a 1001 children where born on the same day, when
independence started. All these children become the heroes of the story, they become a
representation of India itself. He acknowledges the existence of the Midnight Children and the
1001 become a part of the history.
Book three: “He was born in Old Delhi…once upon a time”
How do you narrate the future when hope is excised. He makes an open choice when in the
history Indira Gandhi dies in the wrong moment. Memory is important because it is the way in
which we construct national history and autobiography, personal history, so then identity.
Saleem, once he is born, he is reborn several times in terms of the narrative, related with Hindu
religion, he is drained of memory so that he can start a history for himself. He’s gong to explore
the subaltern. The Indian society is a society of differences (social class, which place do you
belong?). Saleem introduces the idea that the possibility of people from lower classes are part of
society and transforming them into a political threat. They have become a threat to political
control and power.
The narrating has been taking a shape that denies conclusion, hope and future. There’s no
traditional bildungs roman because the narrative has been teaching the reader not to expect any
traditional bildungsroman narrative. “hope, too, was excised”.
The end goes back to the beginning. Instead of closing he gives us circularity. He goes back to
the beginning but he introduces minor changes, because he wants to grant the reader the pleasure
of circularity, so the reader is given a kind of closure, but when you introduce the beginning
again with changes there is no repetition, we don’t create meaning but we stay on the same
narrative level, everything seems to remain the same but as there are changes the story advances.
It also reinforces the idea of everytime you recreate a story is different, orality and memory is
about little variations when telling the story. The story must have a little gap (Faultline) so that
there can be variations. A concept that goes against teleology. Teleology is accumulation of
experience going from a to b from be to c, but in MC the narrator interrupts this progress many
times. Subversion of traditional narrative. This allows the narrator to explore the less privileged
part of Indian society. They are the subaltern, the voice of the marginalized can only be heard in
fiction. The narrative is constantly moving between analepsis (past) to prolepsis (anticipation of
the future). Is it possible to narrate the future when the narrator said that The Widow (Indira
Gandhi) created the state of emergency in which she cut the future and hope. Lack of control on
the text appears as the narrator doubting, contradicting himself, showing how he’s not been
thinking ahead the type of narration he’s going to be used. The sterilization is a metaphor, if you
sterilize a good part of the population, you sterilize the whole country, because the country has
no future, hope. In the end, he’s going to reintroduce the child that came from Parvati and Shiva,
that’s going to be adopted by Saleem, and is called the child of hope, he’s the one that introduces
the circularity on the novel. The child has ears similar to a tiny elephant, remembrance of
Ganesha, son of Parvati and Shiva, seen also at the beginning (circularity). When there’s a gap a
story begins, kind of rebirth. Pg. 586, repetition but with variations, in the beginning, celebration
of independence of India, on that page the child is born but there’s no celebration, India’s going
towards the state of emergency, it’s going towards pessimism. The little variations introduce
meaning, that’s where Faultline is introduced and where progress in introduced (the progress that
finds the leak to change the narrative a bit, not the teleological progress). Through the Faultline
the meaning is produced. It’s not making progress teleologically but in circularity (repetition
with variations where new meaning is created). He doesn’t want to reach the end of narrative,
because the end of narrative is the end of existence. He introduces and retakes the idea of the
narration not being about him but about the entire society. Difference between historian and a
prophet is the past and the future, he considers himself a prophet. Prolepsis. Anticipating the
future recapturing the past.
Final paragraph: all related with the concept of the crowd, the multitude, invoking the multitude
of people involved in the country. Prolepsis and analepsis (talking about the future but invoking
what happened in the past). We have been seeing how Saleem filled the narration with
digressions, and we can see how this is because the obsessive avoidance of progression. The text
is filled with all the little stories that have populated the text. In the end, the death of the main
character, but it’s a celebratory end and death. It contradicts traditional understanding of
narrative. Rationality: there’s only one identity. And the text it’s moving towards a fluid identity.
He becomes part of the crowd and he enacts what he has been anticipating. And he becomes
what he has been anticipating, very strong representation of India. A novel about India and a
very Indian text. He’s been using the image of the nose and knees, ideas of multiplicity, referring
to his big nose (symbol for himself) and the knees (symbol for Shiva). Saleem is the anti hero
while Shiva is the hero. Knees and nose are the origin of the story, that creates a gap at the center
of his being, he looses his faith and there’s nothing that can feel that gap. A story about leaking,
ferocity (leaking the past into the future) a text that refuses limitations.
Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson (1992)
Written in the 90s, a moment with great theories. The body becomes one of the most important
things on the novel. Discussion of the body as something cultural. Discussion on the expectations
on the reader with a non-binary narrator. Transgressive novel because it is a novel about a
romance, and there’s no romance that doesn’t define the gender of the narrator.
Preliminaries
It is a product of the 90s, so very related with the theoretical publications we can find in the 90s,
Judith Butler’s gender, dissolution of binaries when it comes to gender. Winterson, born in
Lancashire was adopted by her parents that are from the Pentecostal Evangelist cult and they
wanted her to be a missionary, she was trained t convince people. Se went to become a writer. At
16 she was expelled from her family home after a 3-day exorcism because she was with another
woman. She went on to have a number of jobs and finally she started reading English and then
started working as an editor at Pandora Press and firs published Oranges are not the only fruit,
story of her life, it was shocking because she started using autobiography but included fairytales,
and she was able to break all the binaries between fact and fiction. Many years later Why be
happy when you can be normal? kind of a sequel from the first novel. In 2019 she published
Frankenstein a rewriting from the point of view of AI and trans identities. Is her fiction
autobiographical. Autobiography (considered for women) / metafiction (considered for men) she
is in an in between on autobiography and metafiction.
Description of Written on the Body: shape of subversive novel in terms of gender and sexuality,
description of love (how to, forms…), there’s indications on love not being natural but
constructed or cultural, the novel shows that love is something that has a lot to do with the place
we come from, the culture. if we have to learn how to love it means there are discourses
(patriarchy…), the novel is moving to the direction of how is love natural if its gender marked.
But we have it so incorporated that it feels natural. We need to denaturalize this. The novel is a
proposal to try to denaturalize what feels natural or normal of our culture. It’s a novel written in
analepsis (flashback) and about memory, it is a memoir because it has a more open structure than
a diary, it looks more like invoking or fantasizing memories. It is about grief in relation to love
because there’s always the possibility of loss (melancholy). About desire (can only happen when
the object is not present). Form of a memoir until the second part, so in terms of form, structure,
it's subversive because it doesn’t stay with one genre, it breaks the binaries of form, narrative.
The whole novel is about fluidity (gender, genre, subjectivism-objectivism (it forces an
emotional reading of science)). Move away from the idea from the subject and object in a
relationship.
Intertextuality: Monique Wittig's Le corps lesbien (she tries to break the drama of French
language, the subject writing the poem fragments the first person ‘je’ and ‘tu’, it focuses on the
body of the beloved, we see this on the second part on the novel). Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (a
short text with anticipations with what happens on 21 st century literature and all the debates we
are having. She proposes that there’s a character in the middle of the night changes gender and
how everything changes for the character, exploration of how sexuality, sex and gender are
socially constructed). Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Roland Barthes’s A Lover's Discourse
(meditation on love, how we and how to love and how to transform the other).
The title: Written on the Body, relation between biology and culture, a body that becomes a page
in which you write your memories, scars, tattoos, romance (something that happens physically
on the body), semantic messages you’re sending by how you dress, reaction of another body that
has a lot to do with your cultural context, move the body away from the organic discourse
(cannot be changed) and into the cultural discourse (can be changed). The moment we write
something on the body it feels it’s natural, that it can’t be changed, but it’s a cultural discourse
(can be changed because it’s something we learnt, so it can be unlearnt).
Textuality/sexuality: if it can be written, it can be rewritten (you rewrite yourself and your body).
The concept of the body changed throughout the centuries so it’s something cultural, a construct.
Is the body an evidence of sex/gender? Can we claim that all body parts have the same status as
such presumed evidence? Arm (can we distinguish if it’s of a man or a woman), pelvis
(biologically sex woman has it more separated), body parts have different status according to
how much they belong to one gender or another gender, according to whether it is gender
marked or not. This shows the importance of gender difference in culture, anyone trying to
transgress the gender construct is going to have animosity (?), that difference is important in
order to maintain the power on patriarchy, the whole patriarchy is based on this.
The author is using inconsistencies of her life to fictionalize her/his writing, the body as
something cultural, the body has a specific shape also according to the culture we live. The body
becomes discourse if it can be written on its means that it can be a discourse and it can be
analysed as so. Gender difference according to the discourse of biology that we are dismantling,
biology is exclusively based on genitalia, thus discourse shows who you are presumably. Writing
on the body begins even before the body is here, the discourse starts even prematurely. Under the
discourse of biologilism (patrarchy) evidence becomes prescription, the prescription is that if you
have this body you must do this, political step forward.
There is a difference bet prescription of what can do vs what should do. The patriarchal
discourse that assume that you have an specific role constructed among the idea of biologism and
the idea that a body is prescribed. How can we dismantle biologism – prescriptions is always
politically charged, someone is telling you to dos something but it’s not natural to have children,
is not natural if its imposed by biology. In the context of theory, we have to go back to the 60’s
and the proposal o feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir author of the Second sex, a text
related to the first way of feminism before the suffragist movement. De Bevaouir is proposing a
debate on gender, she takes the theory forward by saying that biology is not involved in
womanhood but there something that has to do with culture and whatever is learn on society
discourse. She writes “one is not born a woman but rather one becomes a women”, she
established being born and becoming. Breaking the way to queer studies. She is establishing a
difference between biological sex an culture gender. If you can be a women you can decide to
unlearn the kind of women that you have become, there is nothing biologicall about womanhood
in this case femininity but is all a matter of culture and education.
Butler and Diana suss moved away from the discourse of existentialism claims lie bioogism that
there is an essence on the individual called biological sex that bring us to something related to
other biological sex and any deviations are accepted but consider deviations. Butler and the other
proposed in the 90’s to take feminism away from existentialism and placed feminism in the
realm of contructionalism, gender is a cultural contruction and sex too, everything is a cultural
construction as discourse. Including biologism that is also a cultural construction. -)Queer is the
deviation so we decide that the pronouns of the narrator are going to be they/them.
The body as discourse, the body is tangible, corruptive and corrupted, but is our essential core.
From this we can also move forward into being a body. Being this body means that the body is
the location of identity.
Becoming a body, the body is approves of constant transformation so the body is becoming a
pre-existing the cultural code and therefore we cannot separate the body from the culture form
which has been produced. Each individual body is part of the cultural mask. Therefore what is
written on the body is cultural, and it is a metaphor from the society to which it belongs. The
body is first and foremost the tool of capitalism and we labour, we work therefore we use of
body to do so. It is secondly an object of consumption, it consumes but it is also consumed by
society, you get discourse on how to change our bodies, the body as an object of consuming
society. The body is an object of discipline (Michelle Foucault’s philosophy)
All the discourse written on the body there is illness, the body becomes a body that is
overexposed. The sick body becomes an over discourse body. When Lois is sick the narrative
becomes obsessive with the sick body. We tend to see the see objects in fragment because is
easier to objectify.
In the 2nd part of the body the body of Louis is fragmented – objectification. Fragmented body is
culture is an objectify body, a body that we see in poetry. At the same time is also pornography
because is obsessed too with fragmentation because is objectification of the body. In the 2nd part
of the novel the body of Louis is fragmented and obsessively invoked. It is objectification?
The novel refuses to disclose the gender of the narrator in a very conscious manner, an issue of
the novel because we have a non-binary narrator. It is spreading throughout the novel something
that Wintenson states as red herrings- It is given us information about the reader, it make us
check as reader how does it makes us feel about the gender of the narrator, it kinds of puts a
mirror in front of us. Its romance no romantic, a love story. Are you going to spend the rest of
the novel trying to find clue about the gender? This ell us if the reader needs to disclose is
because the reader has this existentialist view of society that tell us that if it s a women we weel
have the anticipation of my reaction if there is a brekoup- Men do this and women don’t a
romance based on cliché. Cliché tell us that if there is crisis in the narrative, the female character
is going to react like this and the male character in another way. If we need to anticipate we
have expectation on the narrative and we do not allow to establish a path that culture dictates for
us. If we need closure – traditional reader. The non-binary narrator is more about the reader than
the narrator itself.
Culture categorises identities and is very much present from beginning to end, the narrative
proposes something new, it is just not about criticising, and the novel is going to propose an
alternative to the dissolution of identity and language. We need a reader that except the game
that the narrative is serving. There is no other gene in literature where gender binaries as mark as
romance, romance marks difference btw men and women. Romance comes from the conduct
book where all romance is based on how you have to behave according to your gender. Conduct
books are always directly to young girls and how to behave in the conduct of love stories. We
tend to assume that love story is something natural but romance is the high produces of clichés.
Romance as a cultural invention is not natural but an invention of the happily ever after
narrative. Women had to be satisfied under capitalism and the only way is by fantasizing an ideal
marriage making them slaves. We do that trough to romance. Happy endings with happy
marriages. Cliché of women wanted to get married and men wanted to escape from it. It is
proved that men gather benefits from marriage rather than women. Romance is divides to make
you to want you to get married. Romance is gender marked because it si instructing mean ad
women on how to behave in romantic relations.
Part I “It is the clichés that cause the trouble
“Why is the measure of love loss?” It is a story about loss - not love. There has been a history of
people going and coming, but there is one person that allows the narrator to wonder how much
you are going to appreciate something until you lose it. Love and loss as the 2 sides of the same
coin. A romance in the context of absent. If this is a romance of absent is it a story about desire,
desire needs space and loss. It is a story in the context about desire, loss ignite it. The most
important element on the context of desire you fantasize it when the object is not there and you
use it through language which is the substitute of the lost object. The object needs to be invoke
trough language- spelling something. The measure of love depends on the culture. The syntactic
structure is important because it is upset, love and loss are together in the sentence. This is the
thesis of the narrator. The narrator is a self-conscious narrator who is aware that there is an
audience.
The process of romance is an unstable process that makes you move, process of becoming but
the objective is toward stability. The process is moving to exposure. The process becomes fixed
because that is the ideal o relation that romance sells which is happily ever after. Romance is
selling a stability that it is forever, nothing changes. The idea that romance is a process by with
we are looking to something that will make us whole. Wholeness is stability. The cliché is based
on you are the one- I lv you. The discourse of romance moves toward stability. Thought the 1rst
part the narrative is building a fantasy of stability but it leads nowhere like on how Louis is
constructed trough the narrative. The stability of the subject relies on the instability of the object.
By extension we kill the object, we kill them and transform them into something that it is useful-
aka red flags.
The narrator is constructing the object as they desire, this is called the stability of the male gaze,
but how do we make it coherent if the narrator has no gender. Even when you’re alone at home,
as a woman, you’re seen by a man (patriarchal society), and the women are watching themselves
from a male gaze, “natural” way of seeing, it’s an acculturation in which women are seen as
objects, so women see themselves as objects.
The novel of romance works through clichés, is constructed upon cliches, whether supporting or
averting them. In the case of WB, the clichés are: the use of the monologue (we only hear one
voice, the narrator occupies the main voice, it’s easier to construct the other as an object of desire
if there’s only one person speaking) that does not allow for dialogism (multiple voices). This is a
narrative in retrospect, full of melancholia, a narrative on memory and based on analepsis
(flashback), there’s external (extra diegetic, is not about the story but gives us information about
the narrator “I used to have a girlfriend…”, just remembrance) vs. internal (when the narrator
recalls the memories with Louise, gives us info about the relation exclusively with Louise)
analepsis, and both contribute, more external analepsis, with the construction of clichés.
The construction of clichés are seen, created because of acculturation and push us into a world of
heteronormativity. For example: Disney (Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, toxic relationship
(being kidnapped, idea that female sacrifice can change him, one of the big clichés of romance),
Hollywood (romance is engrained in every single narrative, even if it’s not on the main subject
of the story, it is absolutely everywhere you look, there’s something about patriarchal culture that
makes you see this and want this, it makes it desirable and if it doesn’t look like that you don’t
want this, and if you want what doesn’t look like that you’re in trouble), pop culture (it teaches
you something). Clichés teach you what culturally is a “good” romance and a “bad” romance,
it’s perpetuated (no one is stopping this, it goes from generation to generation. The concept of
female heroine in romance has changed because Disney adapts, from snow white to Frozen, it
adapts very slightly but is the same story, the basis of it.
Is the present story built on clichés? The first part of the story is based on cliches, objectification
(when she’s ill from leukemia is an excuse to become a victim, everyone but Louise is deciding
for Louise). The abuse and overuse of the language until it signifies nothing, you speak through
cliches so the language is devoid of meaning, language is not the source of meaning. Pg. 105 (the
letter), you may judge better or worse someone who leaves a partner who is ill, objectification is
so seen that the person who is ill does not decide, no one asks her everyone decides for her, on
the one hand he husband and on the other the narrator. The first level is you can’t leave a partner
with n illness (that’s up to you, what do you do on that situation). The second level is the
objectification, they decide for her, even though she’s not the typical victim, she know what she
wants, the narrator doesn’t give this power to the object because then it becomes the subject, and
the narrator becomes the object so they lose narrative control. At the level of language it
becomes clear that the letter is based on clichés (doesn’t mean anything), they adjust taking from
constructions that have been overused and abused so many times that now they don’t mean
anything. It becomes a climax in relation of clichés. The use of “red harrings” (a little clue where
the narrator is fighting so we may imagine is a man, language is abused and overused, so much
that we don’t know the gender of the narrator, way to play with the binaries),
Can we write a romance without clichés? The novel is going to propose how to do this. Romance
is everywhere, can we tell romance in an original manner? In this moment the novel becomes
metafiction (a novel about how to write a novel). The proposal of the narrator is that you have to
go back to what made you objectify the body, and you have to rewrite it, go somewhere where
she can be an object and a subject and you can also be a subject and an object.
Part II: “You’re the foreign body”
Interruption of narrative flow, the reader is forced to stop and focus. The narrator has to reclaim,
reappropriate the body. Pg. 111 the narrator says that is going to use a language the most
possible further away from poetry, medical language (but even it can be a source of emotion).
That is another way in which binaries fall apart, difference between medical language and poetry
is fallen because the narrator uses and unifies both of them. Louise’s body is going to be cut up
(anatomized), fragmented, as well as the narrative, and then when we reassemble, join the
fragments we’ll find something new. First entry we get is “The multiplication of cells by
mitosis”, when you’re getting older you do not multiply as much cells, when you have cancer
you have an overpopulation of cells. The sick body is not a receptacle of desire, but the narrator
will reassess the narration into being a poetic, desirable piece. From this moment, every single
entry follows the same pattern, medical entry and reentry through poetical language. The body is
making to much of itself when you have cancer, on the body of Louise there’s overgrowth,
excessive. Being able to transform through language the object into the subject and the narrator
then will have to accept that is also transforming but into an object. Pg 119. It uses the same
metaphors and images as the letter, but they are moving not in the letter (abuse and overuse of
language) but in the entry. What happened is the presence of loss and the difference in language
that in the entry provokes emotion.
Louise’s body becomes a site of re-negotiation. The language becomes charged of loss, desire
because the language becomes emotionally charged through the medical terms. There are no
clichés (language not emotionally charged). Fragmented body. The coherency of the subject
depends on the coherency of the object.
The body we found in fragmentation is a dismembered body. Focusing particularly on medical
aspects of the body, and it starts with cavities, where the body is not, so the places with wholes
they are also part of the human body, those places that are not material are also part of the human
body and they also invoke desire. A presence/absence at the same time, as well as Louise
(present but also invoked through language), what makes this presence/absence possible is
desire. This physical absence can take the body to a place that allows both absence and presence
at the same time. Textualization of desire through memory.
“Let me penetrate you” the sentence begins by asking permission, therefore granting choice so
we are recognizing the other as a subject/object, in the first part of the novel this has been denied,
but in this second part Louise is being recognized as a subject so she has desire, on this sentence
“let me” means that Louise is a subject, and the second part “penetrate you” means she’s the
object. The second part of the novel is used to reappropriate the words so that they have
meaning. And Louise is the subject that desires and the narrator is the object desired. The agent
that creates that space is desire. When desire appears there’s the invocation of Louise. There’s no
desire without absence, you need absence in order to have desire and language invocation allows
that we have reencountered this negotiation. There’s a new dynamics of desire.
Part III “This is where the story starts”
The novel is moving to a certain ambiguity that disrupts the concept of definition and that allows
the feeling on the… the imagery of the quest: introspect, desire. That lets the narrator/character
to explore the obsession and search of the object through the language of desire therefore
character formation. The use of analepsis and the end where we’ll see how all this is summarized
in the ending. Pg. 174 disruption, not just analepsis but also the possible different futures there
are, alterative realities. Pg. 188 metafictional question like is this how it’s going to finish.
Metafictional ending working through the narrative flow. “It’s the clichés that cause the trouble”
finish with this metafictional ending “is this a happy ending?” not the reader that makes things
emotional, the story does not end when the reader disappears. “this is where the story starts”
means that the novel (book with a beginning and end and certain amount of pages) did end but
not the story (has a line of its one, it can begin before or after the novel starts). Not necessarily
closure because its moving towards circularity and it’s moving towards a different space. Louise
seems not present in the room but an imagination from the narrator. She’s present and absent at
the same time, the narrator has opened that space (presence/absence) because of the narrator’s
desire. Happy ending is a cliché, for that reason, this novel does not specify what type of ending
it is, to end with the construction of clichés. There is a quest and the novel ends while they’re
completing the quest, looking for Louise, so the text is looking for the quest, not for the
completion of it. This ending may not give happiness in the traditional sense of the word but an
ending of freedom, a novel about the collapse of… a novel where you can be free, that allows
freedom for the characters and the reader. A space where you don’t have to decide, you can be
both binaries at the same time.

Julien Barnes, The sense of an ending (2011)

All narrators are unreliable, but not in the same way. If memory is unreliable, what can we trust?
It’s a short novel. The narrative needs an active reader to look for clues and evidence and
construct your own narrative. The effect of the first person is called sympathy for the narrator,
because it is a memoir, a testimony. The narration constantly gives you this comfort, because we
are resisting it. It’s a mystery, therefore an investigation but it does not follow the common and
traditional structure of fiction, we already know what has happened we want to know why, we
have to accept that sometimes there’s no explanation for what’s happening. There is a sort of
closure but not the expected one.
Dialogue and intertextuality: they are works of non-fiction Joan Didion The White album this is a
book of essays about survival, that we tell ourselves stories in order to survive. Is it possible that
we invent the past in order to make it more palatable, life is based on this idea that is chaotic,
there’s no order, but by retelling the memory we provide order, that’s how we do narrative. We
make it teleological. Security means the survival of the species. Hence the title of the novel,
everything we’ve been telling comes to an end and the end has to conclude, to make sense. It has
to have closure.
The first part there’s straightforward reminiscence, no fault lines. The second part talks about the
problem of remembering in a straightforward manner because memory is faulty.
The Narrator: Unreliability, place, progress
All narrators are unreliable but each in their own way. They have different levels of unreliability
depending on the place of the narrator in the text, diegesis, if the narrator is extradiegetic (outside
the text) or intradiegetic (inside the story), homodiegetic (if the story is about the narrator talking
about the narrator).
Character of Veronica: at first the character is bad seen because the narrator paints her bad but
then we know the narrator, Tony Webster, is unreliable so we don’t know if Veronica is so bad.
What kind of narrator is Tony Webster? He’s going to give us the version of the story that he
tells himself, and the reader has to trust completely because there’s not other possible versions
until the second part only because he introduces extradiegetic elements. There’s a difference in
control between the first part and the second part of the narrative and that’s where the
unreliability changes. There’s a moment in which Tony loses control of the narrative, when he
reads his own letter and knows that the version he tells himself starts having fault lines because
the letter and the memory of it are different. The appearance of the extradiegetic element (letter
and diary) mean the appearance of an alternative narrator, that’s when he loses control. Tony
wrote the letter but he was from the past so there’s another narrator. The diary is more
complicated because it’s from Adrian, another narrator, impossibility of going back to the
narrator because he’s dead and the diary is never to be read, if you can’t have access to the diary
the level of anxiety increases, so another loss of control, he only has a paper that talks about him
so the level of anxiety increases. You lose control on the character when the character appears,
contradiction between the construction of the character and the character itself. You have full
control when you talk about the past but when it catches up with the present you start losing
control.
Veronica’s representation. Clear example of the unreliable narrator, need of a resisting reader. (+
info pdf)
On the first part of the story, the narrator is extradiegetic (outside of the story) because he’s
talking about the past, his manipulating the reader with his pov, the focaliser, that is sometimes
extradiegetic and sometimes intradiegetic, hat’s because the narrator is manipulating the stories
from the outside to see the story from the inside so that we get empathy. The focaliser changes
from intra to extra so that you sympathise with it. On the second part, the narrator is intradiegetic
because the present catches up with him, he can’t go outside because he’s inside of the story and
it's a homodiegetic narrator because the story is about himself. the focaliser is also always
intradiegetic. The narrator has to be a resisting reader so that they are able to keep with these
changes.
Part one: the imperfections of memory
“The Serbian gunman”: Historical facts and data. The issue of responsibility (pgs. 10, 16)
Part two: (in)adequacies of documentation
A subversion of the romance of the archive. The document would be an objective object if it was
a romance of the archive. there’s interpretation, Tony misinterprets the document, the reader is
constantly interpreting or reinterpreting of Tony’s misinterpretations. There’s no way you can be
objective if you’re a subject.
The equation of Adrian’s diary. Letters are characters and he’s devised this equation and he
seems to suggest but there’s no context to know sure who’s responsible. The documents are a
source of knowledge, but it’s an interpretation. A document is a perversion of an imagined
reality. Documents are social constructs that create identity, a diary is not a legal document, not
written according to objectivity, it is emotional.
Conclusions
Seems to point to the idea that teleology is the point of objectivity (?). the process of solving
begins with the letter. In the beginning, Tony writes a letter in which he says to his mum she
should check if Veronica is damaged, they check, they have a child and the child is damaged,
and Adrian’s suicide at the end. It’s hardly possible this story has led to someone’s suicide but
there were more reasons. It’s a simplification of the story, because life is complex and teleology
simplifies it so that we can manage it and it becomes logical. The novel allows us to see how
absurd the concept of teleology is to explain life. If we don’t accept teleology we have to accept
that there’s no closure.

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (2020)

Preliminaries
Susanna Clarke was born 1959 daughter of a methodist minister, she becomes interested in
magic, as a ritual or ceremony. The concept of ritual is very present in the novel. Ritual is what
we do daily or also something we do for specifically one purpose. Or like a graduation were a
ritual becomes a rite of passage, a space that’s not here and not there. Not different from other
previous works of Susanna Clarke, like Jonathan Strange. The Ladies of Grace Adieu another
novel in between Jane Austen (English manners) and Angela Carter (magic). Piranesi is
completely different from Jonathan Strange, Piranesi is very dry, short sentences, Jonathan
Strange has a baroque style. Piranesi as a narrator is austere, a particularly naïve character, not
sophisticated, sometimes childish, therefore the style mimics the narrator’s characterization. It’s
a study in solitude, little interruption (it was written on the pandemic). Similar to Robinson
Crusoe because of a study in solitude (isolated in an island) and the 1 st person narrator, telling the
story alone. An amnesiac narrator, it has lost company, because he’s alone, and memory. If you
lose your memory, how do you have access to the person you were before, you ask those around
you, so company it’s a great way of solving the loss of memory but Piranesi is on his own so has
no reference to discover who he was. The loss of memory affects the narration, the effect on
narration is that every time he loses the memory, he has the choice of starting a new identity,
circular type of narration. Piranesi begins and ends the text with a loss of memory. He’s a
researcher so he has been writing the ideas of research, so he can access to what he was doing, a
research portfolio. He has to discover himself.
Issues of solitude, confinement (contemporary issue), inhabiting a labyrinth (the type of narrative
is a labyrinthic one, convoluted), so then there’s also the issue of playfulness (playing with
yourself, riddle to be solved) and the issue of challenge, there’s a strong presence of fantasy. A
little game that Piranesi establishes with himself and also with the reader.
Description
A book about fantasy. A book of a murder mystery in the context of academia, it is also
speculative or utopian fiction. Speculative is a kind of fiction that asks questions. Every
speculative writer starts with a what if?, a speculation that opens an alternative world. Spec
fiction is about here, now but by asking what if, it opens a portal to an alternative reality that
runs parallel to our reality. It is a portal fantasy narrative. Concept of the multiverse, multiplicity
of parallel universities.
What is the House? Extremely central already in the first part, it begins by describing its wholes,
it is the narrative space of the novel. It is a metaphor for the alternative universe that we inhabit
in our head. In the concept of academia, you have an obsession and every day if you’re not
writing you’re thinking about it. The world of academia promotes obsession, a universe in your
head that only you inhabit. The house is a very big, vast setting, it’s a huge space. The whole
first part is a cartography of the house, it’s giving you the wholes and the rules.
Technique similar to the one on Sense of an Ending a detective technique. It’s a narrative that
opens gates, portals to somewhere else. A narrative that contains all the narratives. Space in
piranessi is clearly sophisticated because there’s a lot of spaces cohabiting. One of these spaces
is the House. He has been an explorer of the house and has given us a deep description of it. The
only full-time inhabitant is Piranesi, a study in isolation and solitude which he is happy with. The
result of the experience of pandemics. Exploring the idea that loss or solitude is not such a bad
concept, also one of the questions Robin Crusoe asks. Concept of imprisonment and deliverance
is very important in both narratives. Is Piranesi imprisoned in his house or is he’s delivered from
the real world.
Structure of a labyrinth, giving the structure logic. It allows this reading of multiplicity, the
narrative is pushing to this idea there’s multiple identities. Piranesi is the name he’s been called
by someone else but he knows he has another identity. He’s not going to recover his identity but
he’s going to become someone else. The idea of the labyrinth is the multiplicity of identities. We
can structure the text in two parts although there are 7 parts. The first part is very slow, very
meditative, there’s no traditional narrative structure because there’s no cliffhangers. Piranesi
going on about his routine. There’s unreliable narrator, in this novel it’s because he loses his
memory, is unreliability doesn’t come from sophisticated tricks. On the second part, a new
character appears, 16 and this is where the mystery begins to unravel and the detective is
Piranesi, the unreliable narrator, he researches through his journals, some written by him others
written by someone who’s not himself but was before. So there’s two secondary sources, the
journals before the portal and the ones after. The journals of him before are written in a different
style because he was someone else. Then, the story becomes a riddle. Main character, narrator
and focaliser is Piranesi, a scientist and research, as in sense of an ending it’s a novel about the
romance of the archive, a subversion of it. A circular type of narrative, contents, structure and
form go together and it’s like a house with halls that Piranesi has to solve. The narrative becomes
more sophisticated, convoluted. A narrator that is very naïve. Throughout the first part we only
see the point of view of the narrator, an unreliable narrator that has amnesia, so then, the
narrative becomes a labyrinth for the reader.
Intertextuality, The name of Piranesi is ironic, he’s a historical figure from the 18 th century, a
drawer with an oppressive and intricate idea on drawings. He produced 16 visions of imaginary
prisons, an important number in the novel. Doctor Faustus: a young ambitious scholar that tries
to find a research that goes beyond and he decides his object of research is going to be the devil
and he decides to succumb to ambition and to transgress (important concept, going beyond,
overstepping). Gothic figures are very present in the text (Frankenstein). Robinson Crusoe: he
mimics, the style the tone and structure. The listing is a catalogue on documentation. The house
is a room of his own he uses to create. The republic by Plato: idea of the secondary world, in the
novel is named the distributary world, similar to the myth of the cave, an alternative reality so
it’s considered an inferior reality, the idea that what you’re projecting is more real than reality.
Reality is never as good as what happens in your mind, the fairyland of the mind, reality
becomes disappointing. The imagines world is better because we idealise it and we become the
narrator, the one in control of the story, we control our fantasy. Utopia, Thomas More: a better
place because it’s imagined, a place that actually exists, it comes from Greek and it’s the
blending of two nouns eutopos (beautiful) and outopos (no) and topos that it’s a place, so it’s a
beautiful place that’s no place. Created by Rafael in More’s text, just as a character in Piranesi.
The Narnia Chronicles: part 1 contains many references to Narnia, one of them the world of
statues, in epigraph one, in the concept of portal. Narnia becomes a multiverse, there’s an
exploration on the risk of never finding your way back, metaphor is staying so much in your own
mind do that you’ll never find you’re way back. Labyrinths, Borges: myth of the minotaur and
the maze, “all the parts of my house are repeated many times, any place is another place… the
house is the same size as the world, it is the world. Kafka, Calvino…: reference to going into the
labyrinth.
Narrative space: The House
The “Distributary world”. Piranesi calls the space the House, the Other calls the space the
labyrinth. It’s based on the idea of a platonic world. The house would be the one with positive
overtones while the other would be the one with negative overtones. Ketterley sees a place as a
place of menace, as once you enter the space it’s difficult to get out. Piranesi capitalizes object
depending on his relation with them. Ketterley is afraid of the house, Piranesi has accepted the
beauty of the house, that’s why the capital letters. For P the space is magic, we can see the
difference on K and P’s feelings in the use of P in the use of capital letters, then it becomes a
character in the novel, has a name. capitalization is a direct link to empathy, something that is
alive and changes. Contrary to Robinson Crusoe who wants to capitalize the space. K is a
rational character, so he sees objects as objects. For P the objects are in a space of ambiguity, not
alive, not unalive, enough to create empathy. This is a revision of Crusoe with the relation of the
subject with its space. Narrative of acceptance and trauma, the first volumes of the journal are
dated in a rational way while the others are mentioned as the year of waving and weeping, these
happen after going through the portal, and it’s the moment in which he accepts it and becomes a
survivor. It is important for the author that the reader feels exactly like P when he went through
the portal, lost, so that there’s empathy. If empathy is created it is difficult to abandon the
reading. Language creates reality, so it cam make reality as convoluted, as a safe space… the
threshold is the minotaur. Construction of the house with the journals, ordered before and after
trauma. A kind of system for dating more descriptive. When we meet Piranessi he has already
constructed a narrative of acceptance, he has transcended trauma. He has created reality, his
world, that allowed him to accept his trauma, experiencing the world through connection, he’s
not rational. The narrative of transcending trauma is about forgetting and accepting, then it’s not
rational because rationality is confronting the trauma. It’s a reaction to trauma that he’s
forgetting, that’s the narrative of trauma. A narrative of trauma is a narrative of remembrance or
a narrative of forgetting. It’s not a process of remembrance but a process of research and the
process of research is himself, and that has a consequence that at the end there are two persons,
him from the past and him from the present because he does not recognize that he wrote that in
the past. Fragmentation of the character.
The journals are the evidence that language creates reality, the same space is experienced in
different ways. Charlotte Higgins talks about reality in the maze in Red Threat: on mazes and
Labyrinths. When you see the labyrinth from above the perspective changes from when you see
it from inside. Narrative is perspective.
Entrapment in alternative worlds: directly related to abduction of fairies, abduction into
fairyland. From a medieval story.
Before Piranessi, Mathew is the epitome of this gothic figure, a scientist that’s looking for a
transgressive object of research.
Narrative voice: The Three
We have an unreliable narrator and focaliser. Because he speaks from the pov of traumatic
experience. Before he starts his research on his own journals, there’s just one narrator, then when
he starts there’s 2 narrators, Piranesi and Mathew (Piranesi in the past). We begin we have one
intradiegetic unreliable narrator, Piranesi, then we still see through the pov of Piranesi but we
also have a 2nd narrative voice and that’s Mathew, and then we have narrator 3 that’s going to
close the novel, he brings closure to the story. The emergence of the split narrator is viewed by
the reader. It pushes the narrative through ambiguity, and liminality. The reader is doing research
along with the narrator. Little by little the reader also becomes a researcher while you start
discovering things and you can see more things than the character, because he’s an obtuse
narrator, and that creates satisfaction on the reader. Change of location means that P is allowed to
leave the house, to go outside the real world, but he never completely leaves the house. 3 rd
narrator refuses to see the House as a place of trauma. Concept of mental collapse, he has made
everything collapse and has reconstructed all of it.
Mathew inhabits what we call “the Other world” a character that’s full of himself, ambitious, and
the idea that maybe he needs a little correction. Then there’s Piranesi, and there’s a wrong idea
that he’s the only narrative voice there is in the novel but not. It’s the reality of the house after
imprisonment. The 3rd natator that retains the most positive characteristics of Piranesi, he’s not as
oblivious.
Clarke says that writing is inhabiting an imaginary world. The author becomes a kind of exile.
Reading the book is entering the labyrinth someone wrote.