ENGL 123 HOW TO ANALYZE TIME IN MEMOIR AND AUTOFICTION

Transcription

1 ENGL 123 HOW TO ANALYZE TIME IN MEMOIR AND AUTOFICTION

2 MEMOIR & AUTOFICTION memoir: an autobiography; records of events or history written from the personal knowledge or experience of the writer, or based on special sources of information. autofiction: fiction based on (a part of) the author's life, fictionalized autobiography or memoir.

3 CLOCK TIME VS. NARRATIVE TIME Clock time always relates to itself, so that one speaks in terms of seconds or minutes or fractions of seconds. Narrative time relates to events or incidents. We could expand time by stretching the event out with more description or we could contract time by relating a long time with a few words.

4 GENETTE S 3 ESSENTIAL NARRATIVE ELEMENTS OF TIME order duration frequency

5 ORDER linear narration vs. nonlinear narration story: detective solves murder, murder occurs, murderer is caught events in real time would be: 1, 2, 3 but in story-time: 2, 1, 3 prolepsis (flash-forward) analepsis (flashback)

6 DURATION scene clock time is roughly equal to narrative time: the events as they happened. summary brief survey of typical events over a longer period of time. pause digressions or descriptions that place story on hold. ellipsis omits all detail; skip forward without returning to event.

7 FREQUENCY singular: event occurs once and is narrated once. iterative: event occurs n times and is narrated once. repetitive: event occurs once and is narrated n times. multiple: events occur n times and are narrated n times.

8 LINKLATER S BOYHOOD (2014) It's constant, the moments, it s just... it s like always right now, you know? Mason You know what I'm realizing? My life is just gonna go, like that! This series of milestones. Getting married, having kids, getting divorced, the time that we thought you were dyslexic, when I taught you how to ride a bike, getting divorced AGAIN, getting my masters degree, finally getting the job I wanted, sending Samantha off to college, sending YOU off to college... You know what's next? Huh? It's my funeral! I just thought there would be more. Mom

9 MARCEL PROUST ( ) À la recherche du temps perdu began to take shape in Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off and it was published in France between 1913 and Rated the longest novel ever by the Guinness Book of World Records, there's no doubt that Proust's masterpiece could quite easily double up as a mightily effective doorstop, with 7 volumes (3,000 pages) clocking up nearly 1.3 million words.

10 CRITICS ON RECHERCHE Alfred Humblot: My dear friend, I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep. Jacques Madeleine: At the end of 712 pages of this manuscript, after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface one doesn t have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it! Impossible to say anything about it!

11 PROUST ON THE NEWSPAPER That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of 50,000 men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait.

12 THE NEWS-IN-BRIEF: HENRI VAN BLARENBERGHE In January 1907, Proust read about a man who had butchered his mother to death with a kitchen knife. He then locked himself in his room and tried to cut his own throat, and then attempted to shoot himself. When police arrived, they found him one eye dangling out of its socket. Proust had met the murderer at dinner parties and exchanged a few letters with him.

13 NEWS-IN-BRIEF RESPONSE Proust wrote a 5-page article in response, attempting to place the squalid tale into a broader context, judging it not as a freak murder defying precedent or understanding, but rather as a manifestation of a tragic aspect of human nature at the center of many of the greatest works of Western art since the Greeks.

14 PROUST S SAD YOUNG MAN & CHARDIN Proust imagines a sad young man gazing dejectedly at his bourgeois surroundings (knife, underdone, tasteless cutlet, a half-turned-back tablecloth) and longing for the splendors he had seen in museums and cathedrals. Proust decides he should take this youth to the Louvre not to see grand palaces painted by Veronese but to view the works of Jean-Baptiste Chardin.

15 CHARDIN Now, when the young man walks around the kitchen, he will say to himself, this is interesting, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin. The narrator s (like the sad young man s) life is drained of interest before he eats the madeleine. The incident with the madeleine helps him realize that it isn t his life that has been mediocre so much as the image of it he possessed in his memory. Combray s steeple & writing his first lines on the view of 3 steeples

16 POWER OF ART Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists (932).

17 READERS OF OURSELVES Proust also desires his readers to be readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or censure me, but simply to tell me whether the words that they had read within themselves are the same as those which I have written (1089).