Chapter 7 epistolary novel

What overwhelmed me was the instant she understood my point of view and acknowledged my authority.This makes me want to punch the table...... The phone rang.Please wait a moment. no.A student was mentally ill.Yes, I want to howl at the moon when I think of her nonchalantly writing and drawing in London.I just want to know if she looks up, even for a moment, comes back to reality, and says... I suddenly had another idea.Maybe she didn't write and draw casually, but described what happened in the guest room that day.One of her surly, overly sensitive heroines is eccentrically running along the side of the road after spotting the fuchsia shorts of the self-righteous young scholar.Thanks, you don't mind - I've automatically picked up the irony in this, even though it's not the same thing - she wasn't writing a private letter to a friend in the far country.She was writing to my friends.My friend is also my enemy, my colleagues, my students...

What?My shorts are fuchsia?Certainly not fuchsia!Don't you know anything about my hobbies?But she might say fuchsia.That's how they are.They embellish and embellish real people—they make up lies. Michael Frain, The Trick (1989) Novels written in the form of letters were particularly popular in the eighteenth century.Samuel Richardson's long didactic, psychologically delicate epistolary novels on the theme of seduction Pamela (-74-) and Clarissa (1747) are European novels milestone in history.Affected by this, many imitators have emerged since then, such as Rousseau ("New Heloise") and Laclos ("Dangerous Intercourse") and so on.The original manuscripts of Jane Austen's novels were written in epistolary, but she later changed her mind, seeming to anticipate the decline of the epistolary novel in the nineteenth century.In today's era of popular telephones, this kind of literary genre is even rarer.But as Michael Frayn's The Trick shows, the genre is not only not dead, it's worth saving.

The invention of the telex machine may have revived the genre (a trend presumably reflected in Andrew Davies' 1990 novel The Dirty Telex), but generally speaking, contemporary Writers of epistolary fiction had to keep their correspondents at a distance in order to make this traditional form of communication plausible.The protagonist, or the anti-heroine, in Frayn's novel is an unknown person in his thirties, a teacher at a certain British university, and engaged in the research work of a certain contemporary female writer.The female writer was a few years older than him, and her name was not disclosed, and she was only called by her acronym JL.Once he invited a female writer to give a speech at a university, but unexpectedly he was invited to sleep on the bed in the female writer's guest room.He wrote to his alumni living in Australia about the incident and its consequences.

He is both fascinated and suspicious of female writers.On the one hand, he is complacent about being able to have such an intimate relationship with the research subject, on the other hand, he is worried that female writers will use their relationship as material to write in new works, publicly publish and distort this relationship.He admired and envied the other party's literary talent, and was inexplicably angry.His inability to control the other's creative imagination despite possessing the other's body (and eventually marrying it) drives him into a rage.Finally he tried in vain to acquire the "knack" (that is, the technique of writing a novel) for himself.The irony of the theme is well known—that critique and writing are two distinct capacities—and the cleverness of the narrative makes it both fresh and interesting.

Although epistolary novels adopt the first-person narrative perspective, they have some special features compared with autobiographical novels.First, while the narrator in the autobiography has a prior knowledge of the story, the epistle deals with events still in progress, or, as Richardson puts it, "in sorrow, in the throes of an uncertain future." . . . the style of such a man writes far more vividly and deeply than the dry, lifeless style of describing a man who has overcome all odds. . . ” The same effect can of course be achieved by using the diary format, but the epistolary style has two other advantages: first, it allows for multiple correspondents and thus allows for different perspectives on the same event and, of course, different interpretations.Richardson uses this very well in "Clarissa" (for example, Clarissa, in a letter to her friend Miss Howe, narrates the meeting with Lovelace, saying that he seems to show A sincere willingness to reform; Lovelace recounts the same scene in a letter to his friend Byerfort, except that he tells her that the meeting was an elaborate hoax he devised to lure her into the bait.) .2. Even if it is limited to only one correspondent like Frain, the letter is still different from the diary, because the letter is always sent to a specific recipient, and the possible reaction of the recipient is always to the words in the letter Influences make it rhetorically more complex, more interesting, and more clear.

Frayn has used the second advantage very successfully.The university teachers he described have many character flaws, which are quite comical.This person is vain, quick-tempered, and headstrong, and these traits are shown by his frequent self-prediction or imagining how his Australian friends will react to his words (thanks, you don't have to).Sometimes the letters read like monologues in a play, in which we hear only one side and speculate on the other: "What? My shorts are fuchsia? Of course not fuchsia! Don't you— Don’t you know my hobbies?” The style here is close to the above-mentioned “Kanshan Style” that imitates spoken language, but it also naturally accommodates deliberately arranged written language, such as: “A surly, eccentric, overly sensitive character in her writing After seeing the fuchsia shorts of the vain young scholar, the heroine is running along the side of the road strangely." If the adjectives and adverbs of this sentence are filled with too many adverbs, which makes it appear lengthy and bloated, that is also intentionally arranged by Frain .The author wants the narrator to vividly convey the comic effect of his tragic situation, but cannot endow him with the characteristics of quick thinking and eloquence, because once he is eloquent, it is contrary to his desire to master the "tricks" image of incompetence.

Writing, and speaking strictly speaking, can only be a faithful imitation of other writings.The words it embodies and the non-verbal events it embodies are invented.But it is difficult to distinguish a fabricated letter from a genuine letter.Generally speaking, the mention of the writing background in a novel draws attention to the existence of the "real" author behind the text, thereby destroying the reader's illusion of a fictional reality.But in epistolary fiction, doing so only reinforces the reality of the illusion.For example, I would never incorporate an agent's phone into a piece I was writing, but Frayn's college teacher cuts in on a student's phone call as he writes a letter, which makes the story both real and authentic. Can reflect the personality of the character (he only thinks about his own affairs, and even ignores the duties of a teacher).

The pseudo-documentary and realistic sense of the epistolary novel made the early novelists of this type as influential to readers as some soap operas are to TV audiences today.When Richardson published his massive Clarissa regularly, volume by volume, readers used to write letters begging him not to let the heroine die; many early readers of Pamela thought the letters What is written on it is real and true, and Richardson is just an editor.Modern readers are certainly not so credulous.But in a novel that is meant to make fiction seem like reality, Frayn is setting up yet another hoax by having his college instructors complain that novelists make reality into stories. (College faculty grumbled: "That's what they are. They embellish and embellish real things—they make up lies.)