9780415317856_the_routledge_creative_writing_coursebook

www.ATIBOOK.irThe routledge creative writing coursebook 104isn’t or will not become parcelled up as part of a finished past or a straightforward recordof recovery and progress. The crosshatch representation is not just a story, a way oftelling, but an evaluation. ‘I’m telling you this because I want you to know that it’s aboutrecovery and restitution, a story of those who triumphed over a tragedy’ is a typicalHollywood plot structure. Vonnegut had to find another way of representing Dresden,one that would carry a very different evaluation—I’m telling you this because I want youto know that it’s not necessarily possible to survive the effects of war on this scale:although it might look like you come out of it at the end; you don’t.’In an essay on narrative discourse, Allan Bell defines evaluation as follows:‘Evaluation pre-empts the question, so what? It gives the reason why the narrator isclaiming the floor and the audience’s attention’ (The Discourse Reader’, 1999:237). In asignificant amount of contemporary fiction, a recurring strategy has been to produce adeliberate uncertainty of evaluation, where one character might judge another as anunreliable narrator, where readers themselves might reach this conclusion about a firstpersonnarrator in a novel or short story. As an example of this problem of narrativeidentity, Vernon Little in D.C.B.Pierre’s novel Vernon God Little initially judges his ownstory to be so worthless and embarrassing that he deliberately avoids telling it to theauthorities accusing him of mass murder. This is an evaluation that almost costs him hislife.In Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, we meet a character whocreates a new identity for himself. He conceals the fact that he murdered his best friend.How? By becoming him. Tom Ripley checks into hotels in Venice as Dickie Greenleaf,draws money from his account, writes letters to the Greenleaf family back in the USAforging Dickie’s signature. He then makes so-called Dickie ‘disappear’. To Tom theseletters and the little narratives they contain are tactics of survival. To those he deceivesthey are nice reassuring pieces of news from their son or nephew, saying that all is wellhere in Italy. And, of course, the more we read about Tom, the more we realise he is anovelist—an illusionist—a skilful one, too, and very convincing. Fiction is his business,one that pays.The telling of stories is never neutral or innocent. A story is a telling, which also mayinclude other tellings. These might be transparently sinister in motive. Stories can be toldto exclude a listener, to intimidate, or deceive readers into a judgement based on lies, orcan persuade us of truths others conceal. In Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, we read thestory, then we hear it was written by one of the characters—one whose motives we arefar from willing to trust. What evaluation does the text of the novel bring with it—forMcEwan, for its ‘author’ Bryony, for the characters on whom she inflicted suffering, forourselves? Is it possible for us to endorse the title of her novel: is it a real or a fakeatonement?In Meera Syal’s novel Anita and Me, the narrator, Meena, a girl of 11, has a reputationfor telling lies. In fact her aim isn’t to deceive but to exaggerate, to elaborate somewhaton the facts to make them entertaining and dramatic—like fiction. She just wants to be inan exciting story. As with Tom Ripley, we enjoy Meena’s skill with storytelling. What toher parents is ‘telling lies’ to her is a way of amusing herself, her friends, and us. As thenovel’s narrator she entertains us. Here, for example, is a hint of how Meena likes thingsto be exaggerated, how she evaluates stories. She’s looking at a photograph of her parentsin Delhi years before moving to England: