2002-07-28 - 8:26 a.m.
My overwrought entry of last week helped give me some perspective on what I’m doing, with myself and with my writing, and one of the tentative conclusions I’ve reached is that if I’m going to continue with the diary, I’m going to give it the attention it deserves. My original working plan for anecdotes narrated journalistically is sound, and I hope to increase the frequency of my updates and their quality. For the later goal, I have decided to renew focus on my writing, as I have definitely slacked off on the issue of concern for my prose, coasting on my satisfaction with what I can produce just typing naturally. (Not instantaneously, mind you, but without deliberate strategy for prose composition.)
But I don’t own any manuals on prose composition other than the Elements of Style, which I just reread. (I have looked for some sort of advanced, micro-prose writing book, including at the writing resource center, where Some girl told me effectively they only do remedial-type work.) So instead I pulled from my boxes of books a book that Mac Miller assigned but never mentioned in “Shakespeare’s Long Shadow.” The book is The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. I haven’t examined prose in detail since my first year, when I was going to major in British and American literature. Reading along, I said to myself, “I haven’t thought about an iamb in over two years!”
Honestly, it’s been a good two years.
But what really got me, attempting to mine prosodic insights out of this book of poetry, was that in the glossary of forms it has an entry for narrative. As part of my disinterest in literature, I’d come to take narrative for granted. Well, how will this entry apply to me in my online-diary habits, I thought. “Structure of the narrative” was one sub-section, and consists mainly of a breakdown of the narrative voice . Narrative voice has four aspects:
A. Orientation.Simple enough, in diaries, the author is the protagonist and narrates the story--no possible way around that reality.1. In the author-orientated narrative viewpoint, the author narrates the story.
2. In the character-orientated narrative viewpoint, a character in the story narrates.a. A major character (protagonist or antagonist).
b. A minor character
B. Person.Again, very simple. By nature, diaries can only be first-person singular. Of course, any other person could be used as narrator, but that would be either to create a special effect or would be dishonest to the nature of diary writing. That’s where it gets interesting:1. The story can be narrated in the first person singular...
C. Angle.Of course, this perfectly defines what one‘s diary is--the main character and the author are fused together.1. From the single-angle, only the actions of one character are followed; only what occurs in that character’s presence is narrated.
Suddenly the narrative is not so simple. Of course, in one diary multiple angles are totally impossible; again, what defines the diary is the single perspective.2. From the multiple-angle, (double, triple, etc.), what occurs in the presence of two or more characters is narrated.
Yet our diaries do not exist in isolation, but are part of the web of multiple online diaries associated with, at least, New College. Moreover, beyond just being a part of New College, some connection exists in the diary web between association of people, similar experiences, and specific places at New College. Some people are in constant contact, while others don’t know each other. Consequently, when the text considered isn’t one diary but all diaries, the angle is all of those multiple perspectives.
But what, exactly, is being narrated?
One diary is one person’s experiences. But all diaries would equal the some total of those experiences only if those diaries had nothing in common, which we’ve said isn’t the case. It’s tempting to say the story of “reality” is being narrated in the perspectives of all the diaries, but that’s overstatement--the social value of the overlapping perspectives is a little more specific.
Only God has the omnipresent angle in diaryland, and He hasn’t updated in almost 2000 years.3. From the omnipresent angle, the narrator has access to actions everywhere in the story.
D. Access.It all comes together: All narrators have subjective access to their own character, being as the character and author are indelibly fused. But they only have objective access to everyone else. Moreover, their subjective access to themselves only consists of the level of consciousness, or awareness--if something goes on inside or outside them that they’re unaware of, they have no knowledge. This access is then used to produce a first-person narrative--pointedly, not a pure process, although right now I‘m only talking about the implications of narrative perspective.1. The narrator might only have objective access to occurrences, being able to narrate only actions seen or heard.
2. The narrator might have subjective access, being able to narrate not only actions and words but the thoughts and emotions of characters as well.
The individual narratives then become part of the web of other narratives, all of which were also written with subjective access by the narrators. The inter-subjective text that results seems less like a work of literature and more like a slice of reality. Virtually impossible before the Internet, this textual web that is called diaryland is an exciting development of--dare I say it seriously?--postmodernism.
Cubist prose, if you will.
The diaries are diverse, and many writers have no interactions with each other. The overlap that does occur, however, presents a portrait of the social connections of this slice of reality. The writers narrate their multiple perspectives based on their knowledge, and through this process reality is recorded, presented, and consumed in text. Moreover, since these entries are ofter written for each other, they become a site where reality is negotiated, contested, agreed upon.
Can you tell I’ve been up all night reading Foucault? I sure can. I was working on an imcomplete paper and got totally sidetracked.
