Novel Insights

By David Leon Higdon

At virtually all levels of the study, knowledge of many of the basic aspects and qualities of novels is assumed somehow to have entered the reader's understanding through osmosis, since they are often not discussed in the rush to cover characters and meaning. NOVEL INSIGHTS aims to acquaint the reader with basic mastery of such features as titles, epigraphs, structures, narrative voice, and styles which improve the reading experience and to increase understanding of what these features contribute to the wholeness of the novel. Definitions and pertinent examples from major novels of the last three centuries are provided in jargon-free discussions and questions designed to lead to further mastery of basic reading skills necessary for unlocking all the texts have to offer. The discussions begin with unlocking what knowledge the title gives to the reader, advances through consideration of the relationship between the teller and the reader, and concludes with basic strategies of understanding style,understanding character population, and identifying themes and meanings,

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Leon Higdon
• Release date: May 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311127266

Book preview

NOVEL INSIGHTS

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED READER

Copyright 2014 David Leon Higdon

Published By David Leon Higdon at Smashwords

Acknowledgements

George Painter Cover Design

Bill Moore Technical Editor

NOVEL INSIGHTS is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting our hard work.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Paratext

Chapter 2 – Beginnings, Middles and Endings

Chapter 3 – The Tick-Tock of Time

Chapter 4 – The Narrative Voice

Chapter 5 – Character

Chapter 6 – Style

Chapter 7 – Structure

Chapter 8 – Themes and Meanings

About Dr. David Leon Higdon

The novel is the most transvestite of all the narrative genres. Throughout its history, the novel has disguised itself as such things as an autobiography (Jane Eyre), a collection of letters (Pamela), a diary, a journal (The Ogre), an accidentally found manuscript (Don Quixote), a mobius strip (Finnegans Wake), an encyclopedia (The Encyclopedia of the Kazar), a transcript, a cookbook (Like Water for Chocolate), footnotes (Pale Fire), a jigsaw puzzle (Life: A User’s Manual), an email, etc. At all times, though, the novel has remained true to its commitment to depict the human being moving through time.

Since humans developed speech, there have been narratives, but there have not always been novels. Similarly, there have always been tales, but there have not always been short stories. Narrative artists have given us some of the most important and most significant records of civilization long before the novel came into existence—The Epic of Gilgamish, The Ramayana, Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Njal’s Sagas, and numerous other works during the time span from 3000 BCE to 1300 CE. And though these works are quite different from the direction narrative takes when it metamorphoses into the novel, both forms share a number of characteristics: they have a narrative voice (a narrator), they tell a story, they are populated by agents (characters), and they reshape the general chaos of life into a meaningful whole. Of course, they have very different ideas as to what constitutes a story, whether or not the narrator is to be fully trusted, if the characters are capable of change, what purpose the story should encompass, and, very important, whether the work should be in verse or prose.

Narrative is an ancient art; the novel is not. At some point between the evolution of language and the invention of writing systems (ca. 3500 BCE), narrative came into existence, because humans are story-telling animals. The ancient world created an astonishing matrix of oral tales and developed a quasi-professional class of story-tellers who kept alive the history, genealogy, customs, and entertainment of his or her clan, tribe, or culture. The novel has a much shorter history, beginning in the early 18th century and burgeoning into the most popular form of reading in the 19th and 20th centuries, sometimes rewriting the tales of the past but sometime creating totally new worlds and characters, even worlds of the future. The novel’s rise to prominence spawned many new forms--the detective story, science fiction, psychological case-studies--as it responded to the contemporary societies and its hunger for newness and originality. The drive for empires in the 19th century carried the genre to the colonies, and today the novel is a world-wide genre, aggressively outliving the numerous theoretical obituaries about its death.

Unfortunately, study of the novel at virtually all levels assumes knowledge of many of the novel’s and short stories’ basic qualities and characteristics and hence devotes none or very little attention to these. In the rush to analyze character and to recognize the meanings of texts, certain aspects are overlooked or assumed already in place through some type of osmosis. Novelists themselves have offered their knowledge and understanding of these in a number of essays and books, and academic theorists have honed knowledge of a variety of topics in detailed analyses, sometimes analyses too complex or too obscure for students fairly new to the study of novels and short stories. Very accessible discussions, though, have been offered by novelists such as E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1924), at ninety years of age still eminently readable and sensible, though informally off-putting at times, David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction (1982) whose fifty short chapters cover a range of topics but perhaps uses too many novels unfamiliar to readers, Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel (1986), more general than Forster and Lodge and more postmodern in its focus, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1993), which raises useful and provocative questions about the full agenda and unequivocal goal of a novelist. Two books by academic theorists and historians are Jeremy Hawthorn’s Studying the Novel (3rd edition, 1997) and James Wood’s How Fiction Works (2008),which offers examples from one hundred English, American, and Continental authors, but only three from the rest of the world. Both books are quite readable and useful in clarifying terms and explaining general theories.

Novel Insights concentrates on the basics of reading and studying novels and short stories, aims to fill in the gaps in the general field of reading them, provides pertinent and useful examples, and arms the beginning student with an arsenal of terms, ideas, and expressions. In doing so, it builds on the knowledge of narratives acquired in hearing books read by parents or others in childhood which use many of the devices and conventions brought to complex maturity in novels and short stories.

CHAPTER ONE

PARATEXTS

Paratexts are all those features accompanying a novel but outside the text itself. The word takes the prefix para- which means beyond, outside, subsidiary to, as in paranormal or paralegal or paratroopers. Paratexts include such features as titles, subtitles, subsidiary chapter or part titles, epigraphs, illustrations, prefaces, and notes. The paratexts bear considerable authority, because they have been chosen by the author to orient, direct, focus and even tutor the reader. Paratexts frame the main text in interesting, helpful, and interpretative ways. They are the most reader-friendly aspects of a novel or short story and are intended to be helpers or guides. Just as interstate highways have useful signage assisting one in reaching his or her destination, paratexts function to guide the reader in practical ways in how to navigate through the novel or story, and what is said about the novel applies equally well to the two other main narrative forms at present time: the short story and the film. Unfortunately, paratexts are frequently ignored by readers, teachers, academics, and even publishers.

TITLES, SUBTITLES, SUBSIDIARY TITLES

All persons in Western Civilization have names, usually three names—a given name, a middle name, and a surname—reflective of civilization’s desire to bestow a particular identity on virtually everything. From the myth of Adam naming the animals to parents struggling through an assortment of names for their expected baby or companies such as automobile and pharmaceutical firms seeking a memorably evocative name for a new product, we seek names that will distinguish, define, and characterize. Sometimes, ideology dominates the choice, as when Puritan society encouraged a seventeenth century English family to name its daughter Through-Much-Tribulation-We-Enter-Into-the-Kingdom-of-Heaven Crabb (They called her Tribby.), or sometimes mere whim, as when a twentieth-century Englishman already named James Bond sought and received court permission to add the titles of all seventeen of the James Bond movies to his name. Most books are not bashful in the least. They announce themselves immediately, especially if they are general scientific texts or academic textbooks such as Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything or John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History; however, with works of fiction, pragmatic intentions and aesthetic intentions often struggle against one another.

Selecting a title is part of the creative act of the author, and authors do not select titles carelessly. Before settling on Hard Times, Charles Dickens entertained at least fourteen other titles, and the manuscript of The Waterfall shows that Margaret Drabble jotted at least six other possible titles at various points in the composition of the work. During the last three hundred years, novelists have created a variety of titles, all of which are friends of the reader: name, category, abstraction, quotation, symbol, proposition, and those few which simply elude the reader for one