I favor implication, allowing each reader to respond to a story based somewhat on his or her preconceptions. To appreciate the nuances of a novel, however, does require a level of openness to let the story communicate on its own terms. To me, that is part of the appeal of fiction. Therefore, using a framework of introductory literary analysis—with the caveat that there are some mild plot spoilers—I offer you this series[1] as a way to delve deeper into the authorial vision of my debut novel, There was Music.
Framing Identity
The Focalization of Setting & Plot
Rhoda is what literary theorists might call a personified, intradiegetic narrator-agent because readers can experience the active, intimate, and limited focalization or perspective of her consciousness.[2] In other word, readers are exposed to the external topography of Illirium only as it pertains to Rhoda’s immediate experience and/or internal state, all three of her narrative points of view gradually establishing the scope of Illirium. I try to deliberately pace the world building within Rhoda’s immediacy because terms associated with fantasy kingdoms, cities, natural landscapes, and races can quickly overwhelm readers. This is not an uncommon critique of my or other Fantasy stories.
In a similar way, while dedicating significant plot space to a character’s daily routine is done to positive effect in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, serving to show Offred’s unusual life in the totalitarian society of Gilead, in other novels I find it shifts the focus too much from the protagonist to the setting or slows the plot, as happens at times in Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and to a lesser extent Alias Grace. An example where I apply this caution is in the daily routine of Tïrmen Prison. The few details that are provided about Rhoda’s life as an inmate are meant to either direct readers into a deeper empathy of her internal state or else elicit a general comparison with what is known or imagined of a common prison or gulag.[3]
Part of Rhoda’s strength is her memory. First, it provides a way to cope, as with Atwood’s Offred: to “step sideways out of [her] own time. . . . [to] Somewhere good.”[4] More importantly, memory has the power to save, which sexual trauma survivor Alice Sebold writes is “often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.”[5]
With Bard, Rhoda gradually shifts her focus from her inner topography to the larger, external narrative at work in Illirium. This is meant to suggest how Rhoda’s story has in a way only begun, despite There was Music ending. For the purpose of conflict, especially as it concerns identity, “is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.”[6] I thus direct Rhoda beyond the frame of There was Music toward the larger, unresolved narrative of my Fantasy series.
That is not to say that There was Music has no resolution. Its denouement is Rhoda’s assertion of freedom, healing, and identity. Finally distancing herself from the sources of her trauma, her story makes what Tolkien calls a “turn”; and when it comes, readers “get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.”[7] At the novel’s end, readers are offered pause to reflect, during which Rhoda presumably ventures on to find her aunt and learn more about her mother. There is also the beginning of a response to what Joseph Campbell describes as the “dimly audible call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without.”[8] The title, There was Music, heralds this juxtaposition of conclusion and beginning: something lost to the past (i.e. There was music, but now it is gone) and a turning point (But then there was music . . .).
Characterization through Narrative Structure
& Point of View
Rhoda is prominently characterized through a relationship of past, present, and future. I shift between two modes of first person narration—one in present, retrospective mode (“Future Past”); the other in present, simultaneous mode, poetic in tone and shown in italics to convey a dreamlike remembrance (“Dream Bridge”)—while a majority of the narrative is shown through limited, simultaneous narrative mode expressed in the third person past tense (“Distant Present”). Together, these modes provide a subtextual theme about temporality, as with some of Atwood’s novels that consider whether time ensnares[9] or if a person is more conscious of the past and future than conscious of the present.[10] This influences Rhoda’s inner conflict; for as Atwood writes in Alias Grace, “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness . . . It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling, to yourself or to someone else.”[11]
The expositional interludes provided by the Future Past mode is informed by the limitations of recounting past events, especially for trauma survivors.[12] The narrative context of this mode’s analepsis is not even suggested to be between Rhoda and Bard until the beginning of Part 3. Atwood uses a similar technique in The Blind Assassin, in which it is not until readers are 94% through the novel that Iris’ first person narrative is connected to the third person narration of the unnamed woman. Together with the Dream Bridge, the use of this mode in my narrative exposes an amalgamation of Rhoda’s abstracted memories, subconscious desires, and otherworldly revelations. They help reconcile her sense of the receding past, detailed and yet distant present, and the ever-approaching future.
The Distant Present mode uses “free indirect discourse”[13] to retain access to Rhoda’s thoughts while at the same time creating a sense of bodily detachment. In traumatic situations, as with certain Dream Bridges, this suggests a coping mechanism, such as when Atwood’s Offred states, “I would pretend not to be present, not in the flesh. This state of absence, of existing apart from the body” being like armor.[14] It uses past tense because the act of remembering can also create a kind of distance, like looking at oneself from the outside.[15] Moreover, this Distant Present is told in the sharpest detail because it is the most grounded in the physical present. It begins in medias res to create immediate tension and mystery, but also to convey Rhoda’s stressed state of mind and to hint at the possible antimimetic unreliability of her focalization.[16]
Structurally, this is inspired by Christopher Nolan’s film, Memento (2000), which shows one storyline moving backwards scene by scene while the other moves forward. This not only thrusts viewers into Leonard’s disorienting short-term memory loss, but also raises questions about the reliability of memory. Nolan’s film’s “emplotment,”[17] his juxtaposition of sujet against fabula, echoes in my intercalation of Rhoda’s shared memories in that it is only toward the end of Part 1 that readers are shown why she is actually in prison. To some readers, the triad of narrative perspectives may feel jarring; but that is partly the point. Atwood creates a similar affect in Alias Grace, where it is not until page twenty that the narrative clearly identifies amnesiac Grace Marks as the focalizer.[18]
Rhoda’s cognition is severely tangled, her strength pressed to the limit. As a result, her temporality is fracturing. In prison, time loses its meaning. My lack of chaptering, dividing the narrative into three parts—“Prison”, “Wilderness”, and “Medium”—distinguishing scenes either by an extra space or three asterisks, as well as my starting in medias res, are intended to heighten Rhoda’s sense of confused temporality. This approach is somewhat influenced by Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, where Pi, stranded on a lifeboat, loses a sense of time and reality: “I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.”[19] Thus, memory juxtaposed with both internal and external topography becomes a new kind of temporality for Rhoda.[20]
Temporality’s relationship with identity is most powerfully conveyed in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, further encouraging my non-linear narrative structure and characterization. Mukherjee’s sujet is ordered to elevate Jasmine’s sense of the past, present, and future coexisting, including the various identities she has been given: “ghosts float toward me. Jane, Jasmine, Jyoti.”[21] Rhoda also struggles with different identities associated with names: 43-1-12, her prison number;[22] Namél, the name Nabilak gives her; and her original name, Rhoda. As with Jasmine, this emplotment is enhanced through various motifs—like the refrains of a poem—that “measure the value of narrative elements in terms of contextual significance.”[23] The past echoes ever in the present, prominent refrains being “Why are you here?” and “It was not easy.” Through such characterization, I hope to imply “a particular way of understanding [the] causal-chronological relationships” of Rhoda’s life; in short, to convey the veracity of her psychological response to trauma.[24] Thus, layer by layer, her character is revealed, all the while avoiding “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.”[25]
Footnotes
[1] Adapted from my dissertation (M.A. in Novel Writing) submitted to Middlesex University, London (5 October, 2018).
[2] Bal, 1991; Hawthorne, 2010.
[3] Such as is thoroughly explored in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
[4] Atwood, 2006, p. 47.
[5] 1999, p. 114; see also Atwood, 2000, p. 508.
[6] Le Guin, 1997, p. 153.
[7] 2006, p. 154.
[8] 1973, p. 21.
[9] Atwood, 2006, p. 165.
[10] “Now becomes then even while it is still now” (Atwood, 2000, p. 379).
[11] Atwood, 1997, p. 298.
[12] Tutu & Tutu, 2014.
[13] Hawthorne, 2010.
[14] Atwood, 2006, p. 184.
[15] Such as is literally the case with Ebenezer Scrooge’s journey in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
[16] Richardson, 2012.
[17] Herman, 2012.
[18] Or page thirty-five to begin the main plotline involving Dr. Jordan.
[19] Martel, 2001, p. 242.
[20] See Stokes, 2001.
[21] Mukherjee, 1989, p. 21.
[22] Inspired by Jean Valjean’s identity as Prisoner 24601 in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
[24] Herman, 2012, p. 71.
[25] Salinger, 1979, p. 3; see also Stokes, 2001.