Two lines. Unfogged's gonna have a baby.
If I point something out, will I be slain?
Do old comment links work? I'm still not convinced. If they do, I will feel much better about how my day was spent. Let's test one.
OMG, I think they DO work. I may just weep from joy.
What do you want to say, Weiner?
My joy is tempered from the Internal Server Error I just got. Also, why am I not getting any comment emails?
The iconic one here works. But this recently left link to an old comment is now broken.
(And your day was better spent than mine, trust me.)
Whatever is converting it is stripping the comment number on the way, so that it just goes to the bottom of the thread. In Safari, anyhow.
Not having received advance assurance that I would not be slain, I will now duck and cover.
Your second link in 10 works for me, if it was supposed to go to Apo's "oh really", at least.
See, I'm getting the links through the website working OK but when Ben emailed me a link and I clicked on it, it didn't work. I got the "going to the bottom of the thread" thing that Apo described.
Weino, your second link doesn't work, I think, because it's new, and those comments got renumbered so that the old comments could have their numbers back.
It's better this way.
The link in Apo's comment (linked in the second link in 10) doesn't work. But the link to Kotsko's "Cry cry masturbate cry," in the post I linked in the first link, does work.
That is, Apo was trying to link to some old comment of bphd's I presume, and now it seems to go to the wrong thread.
15, that's what I thought, and I agree.
I think -- and have always thought -- that the "going to the bottom of the comments" behavior has something to do with the form code on your comments pages -- Something in there causes my browser -- Firefox -- to set the focus to the first input box ("Name") 7 times out of ten. And when it sets the focus thus, it likes to make that input box visible, which entails scrolling to the bottom of the page. Not an HTML expert, don't know what tag is making this happen; but yours is one of like fewer than five sites where I've seen it happen.
Like see? See? When I posted that comment there (#19), it did what I was talking about.
Comment emails? Becks, you don't mean that each of these comments gets emailed to someone? Because that would be insane.
They do. To the author of the post.
Unless the author of the post asks the site not to email it, because, as Jackm says, that would be insane.
But, but. Won't someone please think of the trackback???
Random bleg on behalf of a friend. Proving that there is no subject at all on which I am knowledgeable, a friend just asked me a question about literature, and I can't answer it that well, but I thought you guys could.
Here's her question:
I'm still in grad school for philosophy, and it's going alright. My diss is going to have something to do with fictional entities. So, expect to be hearing from me now and again, as you are all my expert advisors on this topic.
What are some good examples of short stories and/or novels in which the author refers to himself, or to the characters *as* characters, or to the story itself?
This was all I had for her:
Sophie's World (blech) and The French Lieutenant's Woman come to mind for straight up metafiction. I'm kinda ignorant about this stuff though. Aren't some of those B authors supposed to be all meta--Barthelme maybe? I haven't read him.
probably a lot of 18th century pseudo-memoires, like Tristram Shandy, etc. Really probably a lot that's first person narrated, if the narrator's style is at all self-conscious. I mean, Huck Finn? Probably, though I can't remember off-hand. They don't refer to the story as fictional but they do refer to the process of shaping it, I think. David Copperfield? There's a contemporary Spanish book about writing that's very self consciously half memoir/half fiction that I really liked, what was it called? Damn. The Back Room or something like that. Urg. Carmen, I think, was the first name of the author. Ooh, Carmen Martin Gaite...lemme google. Oh, yep, El cuarto de atras. Rockin. I don't know if it's around in English. Probably, though.
bitchphd would probably know. She's got a lot of metafiction on her shelf.
John Barth seems to enjoy the self-referential (Barthelme and Brautigan too), according to an excruciatingly dull analytic survey of pomo literature I edited last year. I would go back into the file to give you more specific information, but the whole project still makes me angry even to contemplate.
Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller is self-referential in a not-annoyingly-cutesey way, mostly.
She's got a lot of metafiction on her shelf.
And that's not a euphemism.
26 -- Breakfast of Champions has a scene in which the author makes a cameo appearance looking for one of his characters. Is this the kind of thing your friend is talking about? There's a fair amount of that in Vonnegut, BoC is just the first one to come to mind. Also: What's that Italian novel from the second half of the 20th century, that tracks the reader's interactions with the opening scenes of various books that are sort of meant to be confused as a single book? Because that one might be interesting for her.
Aha! It is "If on a winter's night a traveler". by Calvino. Here are the first two pages of the book, which are in my opinion (like that of the person who made them available online) very interesting.
...However the Calvino book might be the exact opposite of what your friend is looking for. The author is a total cipher, the reader is a character.
Oh, right, there's also that Paul Auster book where one of the characters is looking for some dude named Paul Auster the whole time.
Oh yeah, and isn't the main character in Everything is Illuminated named Jonathan Saffron Foer, or whatever that guy's name is?
I'd need to flip through books to find an actual example, but I bet you can find examples in Chaucer or Boccacio, or anything else from roughly the same period, in which characters are explicitly described as characters in a story. That's more pre-naturalism than post-modern; the fourth wall hadn't really been erected yet.
And there's always Northanger Abbey, which is all about Catherine's failure as a Gothic heroine.
that Paul Auster book
Jonathan Saffron Foer, or whatever that guy's name is
It's a shame we don't have some sort of tool at our disposal to give us more authoritative information.
Oh, googling everything is poor sport.
The Tale of Genji has a lot of that stuff. ex. Ch. 47: "but is anything original likely to emerge from drunken revelry? The smallest fragment would do injury to my story, I fear, were I to write it down."
I think there's something in Middlemarch where Eliot expresses impatience with Dorothea, but it's a very long book and I can't find it right now. And when I looked up David Lodge's chapter on "The Intrusive Author" in The Art of Fiction the example was from Adam Bede (and Howards End). But that (very short) chapter might be a good place to look. Lodge himself does a lot of this, in Souls and Bodies/How Far Can You Go? and in Nice Work (especially his introduction of Robyn, I think).
Alasdair Gray's Lanark has an epilogue, a few chapters before the end of the book, in which the hero confronts the author. Joanna Russ's The Female Man ends with the author addressing the book (after a last chapter in which the Joanna character of the novel seems to turn into the author, though I don't know what is and isn't fictionalized there). Robert Coover's "The Enchanted Poker" (in Pricksongs and Descants has a lotta authorial intrusion; the second section IIRC reads "There is a poker on the island. I put it there."
And as for story as story, the first chapter of every section of Tom Jones is an address to the author, and in Northanger Abbey Austen refers to the "tell-tale compression of the pages" giving away that the end is approaching. (These examples also from The Art of Fiction, the last chapter on "Endings." I definitely recommend that book to yer friend.)
Peeve: Some contemporary analytic philosophy of fiction seems to act as though all fiction consists of a bunch of sentences that are all true of the fictional world, with little attention to stylization; or as if any departure from this is an avant-garde trick that presupposes the existence of fiction that is like this. As the examples from paradigm realistic fiction show, this is not true.
One of the problems with your friend's bleg, though, is that a lot of first-person narration could fall under her broadly defined catagory. If she wants to exclude instances where the "author" narrates and participates in the story with an "I" character--and she might want to do so because that would include a shitload of work--then she needs to come up with a way to restrict her bleg.
For example: why not include Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia, where a first-person narrator--easily identifiable with the biographical author--wanders around in a psychotic delirium? What logical reason is there for preferring, say, Auster's author-figure "Paul Auster," who spends a lot of his time writing in his apartment? The latter is, it seems to me, simply a more emphatic version of the former's self-referentiality...
[/crankily unhelpful postmodernism.]
I think there's something in Middlemarch where Eliot expresses impatience with Dorothea, but it's a very long book and I can't find it right now.
The "St Teresa, foundress of nothing" bit? I was thinking of that, but wasn't sure if it were explicitly framed as a comment on Dorothea as a fictional character.
Northanger Abbey Austen refers to the "tell-tale compression of the pages" giving away that the end is approaching.
And of course Lodge does the same thing in Changing Places, in the last scene. (Talks about how it becomes obvious that a dilemma is about to be resolved, as the book is coming to an end, and then ends the book without resolving the dilemma.)
Trollope comes into his novels and talks about their structure occasionally -- I can't remember the book, but there's one where he reveals the solution to some suspenseful issue halfway through the novel, and says that 'this isn't the sort of book that anyone can spoil for you by telling you the ending'. Probably one of the Barsetshires, but I couldn't swear to it.
there's one where he reveals the solution to some suspenseful issue halfway through the novel
Ever highbrow, I am reminded of the bit from Hitchhiker's Guide about "The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defense system will result merely in the breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of somebody's upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale."
The Mid-march passage is: "One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea ? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?"
I continue crankily.
What is the basis for distinguishing the smart and reasonable authorial voices intruding into Middlemarch and Northanger Abbey from the demented or parodic authorial voices intruding into, say, Vanity Fair or Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness?
The brilliant and now sadly late Muriel Spark has lots of that sort of thing going on. In The Comforters the main character is afraid she's a character in a book, and hears a typewriter typing when plot developments are going on.
Also, what about Thomas Mann?
The field of narrative semiotics descended into infinite regression contemplating authorial self-referentiality. The entire field was lost in the mise en abyme some time around 1980 and there have been very few survivors.
A good primer on what those scholars were up to can been found in the early work of Umberto Eco (you can polish off Six Walks in the Fictional Woods in an afternoon). To get a sense of how the field fell off the cliff, Barthes's S/Z is readable, if totally mad, and A.-J. Greimas is more disciplined, more insane, and totally unreadable.
Yeah, Sterne does it: he is both Yorick (famous passage where he goes to France and is recognized as the author of Tristram). David Foster Wallace does it a lot. I understand Pynchon does, but only by reputation, as to my shame I haven't read Pynchon yet. Jane Austen does it constantly. If memory serves, R&G do it in Stoppard's R&G are Dead, though that's not a novel or a short story, but I throw it in just to annoy Joe. Lovelace does it in Clarissa. In fact, it's very conventional in 18th-c epistolary novels for the author to refer to him/herself as the "editor" of the letters, which may be a version of what your friend is thinking of. There is also, of course, the famous "Reader, I married him" in Jane Eyre. Steele apologizes at the end of the Tatler (also not a novel or short story) for "writing in a Mask" as Isaac Bickerstaff.
I think the problem your friend is going to have is going to be finding some criteria by which to narrow the list, rather than coming up with examples. It's not really uncommon for first-person narrators to do this sort of thing, I don't think.
"both Yorick and Tristram." As well, of course, as the author, Sterne.
And how could I forget Aphra Behn in Oroonoko?
46 -- I don't think you really see too much explicit reference to the author in Pynchon. Certainly the characters are portrayed as being characters in a story, But I can't really think of anywhere that Mr. Pynchon enters into the narrative. (He's more of a reclusive type, y'know.)
It's even in the Chronicles of Narnia ("And now we get to one of the nastiest things in this book.")
49-50: I don't think authorial asides should really count for the purposes of this discussion.
What are some good examples of short stories and/or novels in which the author refers to himself, or to the characters *as* characters, or to the story itself?
"Our Story" by the author of "The Lady or the Tiger", no lie.
At Swim Two Birds, which I assumed hadn't been mentioned because w-lfs-n was tied to railroad tracks or something, but that theory seems to have been wrong.
Poem: "Borges and I" which I think originally appeared (in English) in Labyrinths, though I could be wrong about that.
Novella: Back when I read it, I had some theory about how the narrator of Dostoevsky's "The Double" was one of the characters, though my view seemed to be in the minority.
46: There's a line to be drawn between authorial commentary as the purported chronicler of a true story and as the writer of an admittedly fictional story. Jane Eyre, the 'editor' of the letters in Les Liasons Dangereuse and, as you say, every other epistolary novel, Moll Flanders -- it's harder to find an 18th/19thC novel that doesn't do this than that does. Admittedly fictional is quite a bit rarer -- Thackeray does it in Vanity Fair (the "Becky puppet") -- but it isn't terribly common.
Admittedly fictional is quite a bit rarer
I'm afraid this isn't really true. All of the sketch writers adopted these extraverted authorial personae, for example. Washington Irving's Knickerbocker characters, Dickens's "Boz," Thackeray's Yellowbook sketches, etc. The stylized or participatory authorial voice continued to be a popular conceit throughout the century in genre fiction: Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, Doyle's Holmes stories...
On the philosophy front, both Kendall Walton and Gregory Currie (Mimesis as Make-Believe, The Nature of Fiction, respectively) treat the problem of authorial interaction with their characters. Nick Wolterstorff (Worlds and Works of Art, 1980), who does not get cited nearly enough, has a few examples, too. I'm sure your friend is familiar with these authors (better be, if her diss is on fiction), and I know they refer to these sorts of paradoxes.
This is different than mere asides or first-person narration; that's relatively easy for any self-respecting theory of fiction to deal with. What I think your friend is after are impossible interactions, where the author-narrator falls in love with his character and impregnates her and then is murdered by his bastard fictional son (At-Swim Two Birds? Can't remember. One of the Walton or Currie books.), or the characters ask to be written or demand that their stories end happily.
If I recall, some old Bugs Bunny cartoons used to have the artist interrupting the story by erasing Daffy Duck's mouth, or changing the background (so the character is underwater! Aiee!). And I think the old Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons often involved the author asking Winnie if he should continue, or if the children really wanted to hear that part.
Here, I'm on shaky ground -- I'd need to have books around me to flip through. But do many of those participatory authorial voices explicitly admit that they're making it all up? My impression, weakly founded though it is, is that usually they stick with a claim that everything in the book is really true, even if the claim is made in a self-consciously silly and obviously false way.
You know, I think I'll just invite her to the thread amd maybe she'll show up and clarify what she wants. She's someone I wouldn't mind knowing that I blog here. (Thanks for all your help!)
Martin Amis tells a funny story about the first time he uses this particular literary device, i.e., introducing himself into the novel (Money). Father Kingsley has no patience for the newfangled tricks, so younger Amis new exactly when his father encountered Martin in the text: Martin saw Kingsley threw the book across the room.
That last sentence hates pronouns.
That last sentence hates pronouns.
It also has problems with tense.
Joan Didion appears as a character in her novel "Democracy," which is probably my favorite novel of hers, though I think the self-insertion bit is one of its weak points.
But in order to speak of them, I must speak of myself and of my time in the city of Oxford, even though the person speaking is not the same person who was there. He seems to be, but he is not. If I call myself "I", or use a name which has accompanied me since birth and by which some will remember me, if I detail facts that coincide with facts others would attribute to my life, or if I use the term "my house" for the house inhabited by others before and after me but where I lived for two years, it is simply because I prefer to speak in the first person and not because I believe that the faculty of memory alone is any guarantee that a person remains the same in different times and different places. The person recounting here and now what he saw and what happened to him then is not the same person who saw those things and to whom those things happened; neither is he a prolongation of that person, his shadow, his heir or his usurper.--Javier Marías, All Souls
LB--Oh, I see what you're getting at now. Apologies for being dense earlier. You're right that the explicit move to flaunt the total untruth of the story is pretty rare. The early 19th-c sketch writers often even took it in the other direction, with half their audience getting taken in by Poe's hoaxes and the other half enjoying being above the others.
I don't think that an explicit unveiling really changes the narrative structure, though. It gives writers a little more rhetorical cover to present material shocking to their audience's sensibilities, perhaps, and it calls attention to the self-referential ironies implicit in a lot of multi-perspectival literature, sure. However, if you were to do a semiotic mapping of two persona-narrated stories, one marked "true" and the other "fictional," it's only the modality, not the structure that would change.
But I'll stop now.
Right. In Scott, for instance, you often have a narrator framing the whole story by pretending to find a manuscript, etc. It's actually done to try to enhance authenticity, and provide cover for archaic and seeming-artless language and style.
"Borges & I" isn't a poem. There's a collection of homages to/ripoffs of that story, though I can't remember what it's called; William Gass and Edward Gorey participated, among others.
Lanark also has a list of plagiarisms of various sorts near the end. I remember that there were diffuse plagiarisms, called "difplag", and some others. I think there might be more of what the blegger's looking for in 1982 Janine.
67: Tolkien, too. (Talking about hobbits in philosophy papers is always fun.) Not only does he pretend to have found this manuscript, he pretends to have translated it and even to have changed some of the hobbits' names so they would sound more natural to English ears.
I met found a manuscript in an antique hand, which read…
And, LB, it's pretty rare. Most asides play along with the fiction (that these are real people, that I know their stories), rather than acknowledging that the characters are made-up.
But there's no mention that what's going on is impossible, either. Daffy Duck is a talking duck in the fiction, not a bunch of lines and color, yet he can be erased!. That, I think, does require tweaking the narrative structure (because it can't be true in the fiction that Daffy is a duck and true in the fiction that he can be erased.)
It can be, if it's also true in the fiction that ducks can be erased.
I think that's the wrong conclusion to draw, though.
You're the kind of person who, on seeing a black swan, concludes that not all swans are white.
I prefer to give up noncontradiction.
But there's no mention that what's going on is impossible, either.
One version of this paradox has been exhaustively studied in the genre of the Fantastic, in which, basically, a realistic world is set up, and then some impossible element intrudes into that realistic world to screw up all the epistemological baselines. ("Is this really happening, or am I in a dream?" is the parodic thesis-statement of earlier versions of the genre.) The canonical theory here is Todorov (1970).
57: Whoops, I should say that the philosophers who do what annoys me are, like, two philosophers of language.
65: I don't think that's necessarily the author speaking, is it? Though Marias blurs the line between himself and his narrator a lot; I'll have to read Dark Back of Time, which I understand to be about the reception of All Souls among the people in Oxford it was based on.
55/58: The intrusive narrators I cited in 38 all do admit that they're making it up. Souls and Bodies is both broadly realistic and has author-character interaction; that's pretty rare, I think, for obvious reasons.
In re At Swim Two Birds, it's not obvious that that Flann O'Brien shows up anywhere in there. The narrator of the framing story seems to be a fictional character, who doesn't have any messy metafictional interactions. Of course the stories within are full of characters and authors interacting in weird ways.
68: I grant the correctness of this, because Andrew Hurley put it in Collected Fictions, rather than Selected Poetry. Also its complete lack of a verse/stanza structure.
Paragraphs are the new stanzas!
Lodge in Small World, too -- pretty much the whole thing. (My favorite touch is the twin female characters, each with a comma-shaped birthmark on the opposite hip, so that if they stand next to each other in bathing suits they appear to be within quotation marks.)
In Souls and Bodies/How Far Can You Go? (this is a spoiler so mild I don't know why I bother) Lodge's voice is caught on tape near the end, which is what is meant by author/character interaction. I think that's the only time it happens in Lodge's work.
My guess is that symbols like the quotation mark thing don't count; that's just something that is true in the world of the fiction, and whose symbolic value has to do with the textuality. Or maybe it does count. Dunno.
It's somewhere close to the line -- it's not a direct voice of the author, but it's not just a symbol within the fiction, it's a symbol of the fictional nature of the fiction.
What about Pirandello: Six Characters In Search Of An Author?
82: That's one of Wolterstorff's examples, something about how impossibilities are tolerated within certain parameters (it's not possible that characters could walk onto a stage and demand to be written, but it's happening!) without all epistemological baselines being overthrown. (Some are, but we tend to partition them off from other conclusions we might draw from the work.)
77: Hehe, had missed your earlier comment. Sometimes I think analytic philosophers of fiction need to read more fantasy (or at least, that's how I justify wasting time...). Ludlow's got a fun article on Everquest, though.
Thanks all! I am the aforementioned friend, and I found your comments very helpful. To clear up slightly the goal of my question, as some people seem to have worries that I am taking on too broad a goal, all that I need for my paper is a moment in literature in which the author uses the characters' names as characters, instead of simply referring to them.
For those who are curious, the philosopher Nathan Salmon has an article out called "Nonexistence" (Nous 32:3 (1998) 277-319) in which he distinguishes between a "pretend use" and a "real use" and he claims that _whenever_ an author uses a fictional name, it is a pretend use. I'm trying to draw a finer distinction and to argue that it's in these self-referential (or what-have-you) contexts that the use is clearly "pretend." I think that in more "normal" contexts, the use is closer to our reference to ordinary living people.
Although I know this is bad blogging practice, I probably won't be checking this site to respond to your comments -- I have half a million things to do tonight. But thanks again for your help!
For the sake of fraternity, I reprint the e-mail I just sent Catreb (real name obvs. Bertac):
From How Far Can You Go?/Souls and Bodies, by David Lodge "...and a girl you have not yet been introduced to, who now comes forward from the shadows of the side aisle, where she has been lurking, to join the others at the altar rail. Let her be called Violet, no, Veronica, no Violet, improbably a name as that is for Catholic girls of Irish extraction, customarily named after saints and figures of Celtic legend, for I like the connotations of Violet -- shrinking, penitential, melancholy -- a diminutive, dark-haired girl, a pale, pretty face ravaged by eczema, fingernails bitten down to the quick and stained by nicotine, a smartly cut needlecord coat sadly creased and soiled; a girl, you might guess from all this evidence, with problems, guilts, hangups.
Reprinted in The Art of Fiction, p. 35 (ch. 8, Names).
Salmon sounds like one of those carpetbagging philosophers
of language I was complaining about. Or maybe not, I'd have to read the article to see if I really object to that thesis.
Catreb: Cool! That Salmon paper's a bitch and a half, so I don't envy you.
Different tack, too. Most people it seems would grant some kind of pretense account of the ordinary reference contexts ('Sherlock Holmes lived in London' as 'According to the story, ....'), but balk at expanding them to critical/non-fictional contexts ('Doyle hated his best creation, Sherlock Holmes, but couldn't find a way to dispose of him...') Cf. van Inwagen, Thomasson, etc. Also lots of expanding pretense accounts (Walton's official versus unofficial games, pretense theories of truth.)
But yeah, on the bleg, any reference to the characters as characters would work. Maybe the opening of Romeo and Juliet, which is pretty much 'We're going to tell you a story now" ? Plays are tricky though.
And then there's that Reagan biography with the biographer as a character. Has anyone ever read that?
Salmon's thesis is just weird. IIRC, he's trying to argue that direct reference works even for fictional characters, without postulating that fictional characters exist. He treats ordinary statements about the fiction as pretenses (no objects necessary), and then does something totally screwy for the critical non-fictional references that is totally escaping me at the moment.
critical non-fictional references
Such as "Sherlock Holmes is a character in Conan Doyle stories"?
Yup, exactly. What van Inwagen would call 'theoretical entities of literary criticism.'
I think that the whole idea of an author "pretending" to do something when he or she's writing is kind of dumb, but hey.
It will come as no surprise that I don't particularly care for M m s s s M k B l v .
Ok, I might be running into the disciplinary wall here, but when literary critics talk about "characters," one of the central problems we run into is the extent to which our understanding of these "characters" is reliant on--and determined by--plot. Do these philosophers of fictional characters take plot-necessary constructs like Bertha Rochester into account?
(Disciplinary wall acknowledged: this might be altogether irrelevant or too muzzily worded for the specific inquiries undertaken by the abovenamed philosophers.)
Not an answer to the revised question, but a great instance of an author being a character in his own fiction is Yann Martel's Life of Pi, in which the entire introduction to the novel is fictional, though you only realize that once you get into the novel itself. Also, the novel's protagonist/narrator ends the novel by telling his story to some listeners, who don't believe it, and present a much more realistic and plausible explanation for the events, at which point he asks them (and by extension us), "which story would you rather believe?"
There's the ever-popular (at least among children's lit) "… which is the very book you're reading now" ending, instances of which you can find, off the top of my head, in
SPOILERZ RUN AWAY
Roald Dahl (could be The BFG, can't remember), and particularly well executed in Jill Paton Walsh's The Green Book.
And somewhere in Time Regained, the narrator recounts a heroic story and says "Although every other name in these books is changed, I'm going to give their real name here: Suchandsuch."
Back on topic: Why doesn't one of the bloggers just CLOSE the "Innocence" thread? That reduces the number of people who have to behave well. (I actually expected the 'testing' comment not to go through.)
To augment JM's comment, John Barth does this quite a lot, in the rather good Tidewater Tales and also in the less-good Somebody the Sailor, as well as elsewhere.
Martin Amis in The Information wraps up a rather sadistic plot by saying in effect, but I will be kind, and this will not be that kind of book. It's one of the things I dislike about Amis, the cruel toying with the reader's sensitivities.
I want to say Philip Roth, but I'm not quite sure there's the same level of explicit metacommentary you want. Certainly he appears in his fictions, as "himself", especially in Operation Shylock. But does he actually say, this is a cardboard cutout of me, a character, and here's what he will do? Can't remember that happening.
I enthusiastically support the move to close the Innocence thread, since it takes me about five minutes to load the damned thing when someone links to it without warning. And I vote that that person should be Wolfsen, for the Giant Mutant Cockroaches and the Little Bitches shall indeed inherit the Earth.
Yeah, if anyone cares I back the end of "Innocence" too. Not least, out of pique, because in the recent mishegoss some comments got deleted, mine among them.
I vote not to close it, b/c it amuses me.
But is your amusement of greater social utility than the relief of my pique?
How to put this. Innocence didn't mean to hurt anyone. Innocence just wanted to pet the rabbits. But, sadly, *BLAMMO*
102: That depends. Which of us is more unpleasant when piqued?
As long as no one changes comment 1000 I don't care what happens to that thread.
Why doesn't one of the bloggers just CLOSE the "Innocence" thread? That reduces the number of people who have to behave well. (I actually expected the 'testing' comment not to go through.)
I have closed it, as have others. It gets reopened.
I'm not entirely sure I don't understand the self-referentiality in literature part of this thread, but Robert Louis Stevenson's A Chapter on Dreams is about the influence of dreams upon Stevenson's work, but framed at first as a story about a young man afflicted with vivid dreams who begins to discipline his dreaming, becomes a writer, and has some of his ideas brought to him in his sleep. Here's the (somewhat long) self-referentiality quotation, which follows a story in which the dreamer, already a character in Stevenson's essay, is a character in a dream ("the little people" is the name he gives to whatever it is that's structuring the dream):
Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, the dreamer awoke. His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it soon became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable elements; which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told. But his wonder has still kept growing; and I think the reader’s will also, if he consider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of the little people as of substantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the woman — the hinge of the whole well-invented plot — until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little people’s! And observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it. I am awake, and I live by this business; and yet I could not outdo — could not perhaps equal — that crafty artifice (as of some old, experienced carpenter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by which the same situation is twice presented and the two actors twice brought face to face over the evidence, only once it is in her hand, once in his — and these in their due order, the least dramatic first. The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my question: Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who are they, then? and who is the dreamer?
Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a person than myself; — as I might have told you from the beginning, only that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism; —and as I am positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little farther with my story.
I never got an error, but the recent comments sidebar hasn't updated to show comments 108 and 109.
Now it's updated. Maybe it was just a delay.
I haven't clicked on the Innocence thread in months because it crashes my computer.
the Giant Mutant Cockroaches and the Little Bitches shall indeed inherit the Earth
Anybody know a good probate lawyer? This could get ugly.
all that I need for my paper is a moment in literature in which the author uses the characters' names as characters, instead of simply referring to them.
I'm feeling thick here, but I'm not quite following this. Can someone who gets it give me an example?
The following might be wrong, both because I'm not entirely sure what distinction Catreb is getting at with use/refer (use/mention and sense/reference both being familiar dichotomies) and because I'm half asleep.
"Little Red Riding Hood was walking through the forest, frolicking with the little animals."
"It is totally unclear what the classic fairy tale figure of Little Red Riding Hood is doing in this comment, she popped up and demaned inclusion."
I think Catreb is looking for an instance in which the author 'breaks the fourth wall', and acknowledges that the characters she's writing about are characters, instead of presenting them and treating them like they're real people/independent actors/etc.
"While the scene looked frightening, Little Red Riding Hood knew there was nothing to fear, because the background music remained light and cheerful."
Then I retract what I said above about Pynchon not fitting the criteria -- Gravity's Rainbow has that kind of stuff in spades.