Book Review: The art of fiction by David Lodge (Penguin) - Part 2

Here are my notes and favourite quotes. I also added useful or fun videos and/or links.

First and foremost, here is the answer to yesterday’s question:

Which way of opening a novel (above) is not a direct quote from The Art of Fiction?

In medias res

3 - Suspense

Novels are narratives, and narrative, whatever its medium - words, film, strip-cartoon -- holds the interest of an audience by raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers. The questions are broadly of two kinds, having to do with causality (e.g. Whodunnit?) and temporality (e.g. What will happen next?) each exhibited in a very pure form by the classic detective story and the adventure story, respectively. Suspense is an effect especially associated with the adventure story, and with the hybrid of detective story and adventure story known as the thriller. Such narratives are designed to put the hero or heroine repeatedly in situations of extreme jeopardy, thus exciting in the reader emotions of sympathetic fear and anxiety as to the outcome.

Suspense can only be sustained by delaying the answers of these questions [What happens next?....]. One way of doing this [...] : restrict the narration of the scene to one character's point of view. The suspense is extended by a detailed account of [the character's] thoughts... breathtaking shifts of perspective too! 

4 - Teenage Skaz

Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word [...] used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word. In this kind of novel or story, the narrator is a character who refers to himself (or herself) as "I", and addresses the reader as "you". He or she uses vocabulary and syntax characteristic of colloquial speech, and appears to be relating the story spontaneously rather than delivering a carefullt constructed and polished written account. We don't so much read it as listen to it, as to a talkative stranger encountered in a pub or railway carriage. Needless to say, this is an illusion, the product of much calculated effort and painstaking rewriting by the "real" author. A narrative style that faithfully imitated actual speech would be virtually unintelligible, as are transcripts of recorded conversations. But it is an illusion that can create a powerful effect of authenticity and sincerity, of truthtelling. 

For American novelists skaz was an obvious way to free themselves from the inherited literary traditions of England and Europe. The crucial impetus was given by Mark Twain. 

5 – The Epistolary Novel

Novels written in the form of letters were hugely popular in the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson's long, moralistic and psychologically acute epistolary novels of seduction, Pamela (1741) and Clarissa (1747), were landmarks in the history of European fiction, inspiring many imitators such as Rousseau (La Nouvelle Héloïse) and Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses). 

The epistolary novel is a type of first-person narrative, but it has certain special features not found in the more familiar autobiographical mode. Whereas the story of an autobiography is known to the narrator before he starts, letters chronicle an ongoing process; or as Richardson put it: "Much more lively and affecting ... must be the style if those who write in the height of a present distress, the mind tortured by the pangs of uncertainty... than the dry, marrative unanimated style of a person relating difficulties and dangers surmounted can be..."

The same effect can of course be obtained by using the form of a journal, but the epistoslary novel has two additional advantages. 

Firstly, you can have more than one correspondent, and thus show the same event from different points of view, with quite different interpretations, as Richardson brilliantly demonstrated in Clarissa.

Secondly, even if you limit yourself [...] to one writer, a letter, unlike a journal, is always addressed to a specific addressee, whose anticipated response conditions the discourse, and makes it rhetorically more complex, interesting and obliquely revealing.

Question 

What is your favourite epistolary novel?