Chapter 29 Narration: different tone

Christie was the Prince Charming in the hearts of single women back then.In winter, there was heavy snow for days on end, and half of Europe was starving.In the sky, the German bombers delivered food instead of shells.The flame of the gas stove is getting smaller and smaller, and the light bulb is flickering.People who have never met before snuggle up and seek solace.In Grace's eyes, Christie is nothing more than a beacon of hope.He was sharp, tall, and masculine, making him the ideal mate.Christie is Grace's ambition and ambition.She doesn't want a diploma, a career, or fame.Nothing.All she wants is Christie.

She loves him.Yes, love him from the bottom of my heart.Her heart beat faster at the sight of him, and her whole body melted with longing.However, she would never, and could not, fall into his arms.He took her rowing, (yes, he can row), carefully protecting her.He took her to climb mountains (yes, he often climbs mountains), and took good care of him.He said he would buy her a house (indeed, he could afford it), but she didn't want it.Diamonds, no.Thank you Christy.watch, don't.Gifts, keepsakes, no, dear.Chocolate, ah, great, thank you.Orchids, feast, take a taxi home, okay.Kiss, no problem.Breasts, you can touch them (how bad people are!), but hurry up, hurry up.See you tomorrow, Christy, my one and only love, my dearest.I'd rather die for you, but never sleep with you.

On the way home, Christie stopped in Soho and stayed for an hour, looking for some fun.How about living! She loves him.She wants to marry him.Otherwise, how would she live? Faye Wilton, Girlfriend (1975) In the previous section we discussed the alternate use of show and narration in Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews.I have said that a novel written purely in outlines is difficult to read.Many contemporary novelists, however, specialize in it without any ill consequences.As a technique, summarization seems to be particularly suitable for the rhythm of modern people and the characteristics of pursuing incisive conciseness and irony. It is especially effective for novels with many characters and a long time span.In this way, the slow pace and tedious details of classical novels are completely freed.For the above reasons, I myself adopted this method in the novel "How Far Can You Go".However, it is worth noting that using this method should try to avoid repetition and singleness in words and sentence patterns.All of Fay Wilton's novels use this method extensively, and its fast rhythm and energetic writing are worth learning.

"Girlfriend" narrates the history of the fate of three women in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, focusing on how they treated sex and marriage under the conditions of ever-changing social moral norms.Women as a whole are portrayed as sexual and emotional victims, longing for husbands, longing for lovers, even after being abused and betrayed by them.Men, on the other hand, are portrayed as slaves to egoism and sexuality, as powerless as women.However, because men naturally like to seek flowers and ask willows, the fun they get in this society is far more than that of women.The passage quoted above refers to an earlier period, the forties.Back then, decent girls didn't use that idea as a bargaining chip in a fight between the sexes, though they could.Grace is not actually a virgin, but pretends to be, knowing that Christie " places a high value on the virginity of the woman he loves, even though its destruction is his forte." Thus, both characters compromise each other amidst contradictions and hypocrisy , which adds to the comedy.

The opening paragraph of the first paragraph provides a background of the times: the cold war is severe and food is scarce.All of this is displayed through a series of images, rather like a montage in a movie.Afterwards, the author interweaves Grace's personal emotions with the pain and sorrow of the whole era, which is quite ironic.Half Europe was starving, and all Grace cared about was convincing Christie to marry her.As for her ambition to be a painter, she had long since put it on the back burner (Grace was studying at the Slade at the time). "Christie is Grace's ambition and ambition. She doesn't want a diploma, a career, or fame. She doesn't want anything. She only wants Christie." Here, the author shifts the description of the event to the description of Grace's mentality.This is especially prominent at the end of the next paragraph.

In fact, what we see here is not a single style.Unlike the passage in "Joseph Andrews", which has only the voice of the author Fielding, it is a fusion of multiple genres or multiple voices.In this way, the various frictions in Grace and Christie's flirtatious love are portrayed very accurately and vividly, which is also solemn and harmonious. "She loves him. Yes, she loves him from the bottom of her heart. When she sees him, her heart beats faster, and her whole body and mind melt in longing." Here, the author seems to have borrowed traditional literary language to describe love: love letters, Love poems and love stories. "She Couldn't Be in His Arms" comes directly from Mills and Boone's love story.This imitation highlights the unreliability of what Grace is doing.The next information in parentheses (yes, he can row a boat...yes, he climbs mountains...and yes, he can afford it) may be the author's anticipation of some questions the reader might have and did not provide it in time Apologies for the information.Maybe it was Grace bragging about Christie's words to her girlfriend. (To further complicate matters, the narrator is in fact one of the girlfriends, Chloe, who writes about herself in the third person and, like a novelist, reads the minds of other characters.)

"Diamonds, no. Thank you, Christy. Watches, no. Gifts, keepsakes, no, dear. Chocolates, ah, great, thank you." From a grammatical point of view, this part and the rest of the paragraph are It was Grace's direct words.However, quotation marks are not used in the text.Obviously, this is not a record of speech acts, but a summary speech, which is the condensation of Grace's speech, thoughts or implication on different occasions.She can say "see you tomorrow" and "my only love, dearest person", but almost never say "I would die for you, but I will never sleep with you." This line seems to have its origin .Two extremely short but symmetrical passages outline, in the narrator's voice, the sexual impasse between the two.This dry tone reveals the special requirements of the characters.

This quotation vividly and representatively reflects a feature of the novel's language that the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called "the phenomenon of polyphony" or "dialogue". (Readers who don't like literary theory may want to skip the rest of this chapter, which is far more than pure theory. It is the soul of the novel's representation of life.) According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the traditional epic and lyric Language, or expository language, is a "monologue" that attempts to give a single view or interpretation of the world through a single style.The novel, by contrast, is a "dialogue" that includes a variety of styles and voices.Voices speak to each other and to voices beyond the text, culture and society.Fiction realizes this dialogue in different forms.The easiest way is for the narrator to have a dialogue with the characters in the book.The characters in the book speak languages ​​that match their identities according to their class, religion, occupation, gender, etc.This is commonplace in novels, but it is extremely rare in narrative literature before the Renaissance.In Charles Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend there is a foundling named Sloppy.An old woman named Betty Higdon adopted him.In the old woman's eyes, Slopey was a genius. “You may not think so, but Slopi reads the newspaper with a voice,” she said. “He plays the cop in different voices.” Novelists play cops in different voices, too.

"For the prose artist the world is full of voices," wrote Mikhail Bakhtin, "and he must go deep into it and discover with a keen ear the peculiarities that distinguish it. He These characteristics must be introduced into one's own verbal behavior without destroying one's own verbal behavior." The novelist can do this in several ways.Through the technique of free indirect speech, you can combine your own voice with that of the characters to express thoughts and feelings.Or let the voice of your own narration be dyed with a special color, which has nothing to do with the voice of the characters.Henry Fielding, for example, often employed a pseudo-heroic style, using the language of classical and neoclassical epics to describe vulgar scenes or adventures.The following is how Mrs. Waters seduced the protagonist Tom Jones at the dinner table:

First of all, two charming eyes shot out from the two charming pupils, staring straight at each other.Those bright eyes were like lightning.Luckily, the gaze only fell on a hunk of beef (which he was about to get onto his plate) without doing any harm . Etc., etc.Mikhail Bakhtin called this style "two-way discourse", that is, this language deliberately imitates a certain way of speaking or style while describing a certain behavior.In this way, a parody effect is created, because the style is so out of tune with the subject, that the style looks artificial and absurd.The gap between theme and style is not very obvious in Faye Wilton's novels, because the language and theme of the erotic novels she borrowed are more consistent with the language and theme of pulp magazines, but there are some exaggerations or It's just a cliché, perhaps; this style should be called "hybrid", not "imitative", or to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin's words, "stylized." His classification of novel discourse is extremely complicated, But the basic thing is very simple, that is, the language of the novel is not a certain language, but a collection of various styles and voices.It is precisely because of this that makes the novel a very democratic and anti-totalitarian literary form: here any way of thinking or moral concepts will be challenged and confronted.