Many years ago I read Northanger Abbey, one of the few Jane Austen novels I really enjoyed, and other than various literary history and criticism that has touched on Ann Radcliffe, that remained my main source of knowledge of her works until I finally made my own way through The Mysteries of Udolpho. And, [...]
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Amateur Reader’s first question about Your Face Tomorrow, on completing Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, is what on earth it’s supposed to be. That is, “how is the narrator, Deza, narrating, and who is his audience?” It’s a problem: Deza narrates the story with constant digressions and, more problematically, an overwhelming amount of long dialogue [...] Deza interprets people for a living, at least when he’s working for the group, and today I’ll do some interpreting of Deza. I may even make some progress toward answering the question of why Deza and his wife cannot live together. Deza lives his life in a strange position during much of the trilogy. [...] In the second volume of Your Face Tomorrow, Deza witnesses a horrifying event. After Rafita de la Garza, a bumbling, offensive acquaintance of both Tupra and, much to his dismay, Deza, behaves in appropriately toward the wife of Tupra’s Italian “business associate,” or whatever you want to call it, Tupra must deal with him. [...] When I finished the second volume of Your Face Tomorrow, I contemplated the many episodes that make up Deza’s narrative as he follows the stream of his consciousness, and now that I’ve completed the series I decided to do some real work and go through and analyze the structure of the whole thing. It’s a bit involved, and highly subjective, but I think reveals some interesting things about the trilogy. First, I went through and “coded” passages in the book according to what overall “theme” or motif I thought they most belonged to. The selection and classification into themes is where most of the subjectivity comes in but I don’t think available “scientific” alternatives are really an improvement. So I used what I’ll call my best judgment to come up with eleven main “themes” of the novel plus a “wrap-up” section at the end of the last section, where I felt too many things were covered too quickly to really subdivide further. Typically, a section of narrative had to be at least three or four pages long for me to count it as its own section, so simple allusions or brief, sentence- or paragraph-long interludes aren’t counted here. Based on the classification of each episode I made this way, I calculated how much of each book, each volume, and the total trilogy was taken up with each theme. You can see all the original data the calculations are based on in this Google Docs spreadsheet. Amateur Reader says he’s not sure what Henry James meant by his famous “loose baggy monsters” quote, but I’m sorely tempted to apply the term to the whole of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Does not its length alone qualify it for such status? I may have been running a bit late at the [...] I ended my post on the second volume of Your Face Tomorrow with a question: is Deza in control of his narrative, consciously choosing to let the thread go and pick it up again as he so often comments on others doing, “or is it a true natural stream of consciousness coming through—and is [...] Benito Cereno, one of Melville’s Piazza Tales, is among my favorite of his work and probably my favorite novella-length item from him. My first post on it, from way back during my maritime lit project days, is still one of my favorites, and I still look forward to reading the real-life journals of Amasa [...] In most stories, duels happen outside the law, or perhaps at its margins. People will look the other way if you leave town. You just have to make sure not to attract too much attention. Often sanctioned by the local code of honor, duels are not typically sanctioned by the legal regime in the [...] Both of the Tolstoy titles included in the Art of the Novella series are later works. The Death of Ivan Ilych was published in 1886, 11 years after Anna Karenina and 17 years after War and Peace. And while The Devil wasn’t published until the twentieth century, it was apparently written around 1888, the [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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