9780415317856_the_routledge_creative_writing_coursebook

www.ATIBOOK.irThe routledge creative writing coursebook 106of British experience with those of her Indian grandmother’s generation, stories ofviolence and genocide.Uncertainties of narrative evaluation, of self and identity in fiction, surely figure in thenew (or comparatively new) assessment of cultural shifts which the term post-modernaddresses. The ‘inner room’ of the self is less a space where drives and needs converge orare in conflict as a place where products are on display. Consumerism itself is a form offiction-making. The narratives of advertising show people emotionally bound to theproducts that they use—whether to a Corvette car or a brand of powderball for adishwasher. In Brett Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, the self becomes both productand consumer. The novelist Umberto Eco has written about Disneyland (America’s‘Sistine Chapel’) with a fascination for its perfect fakes. Here is where we ‘consume’ thepast, re-invent it as glamorous commodity. We enter Adventureland, the Pirates of theCaribbean:Each was devised by observing the expressions of a real actor, thenbuilding models, then developing skeletons of absolute precision,authentic computers in human form, to be dressed in ‘flesh’ and ‘skin’made by craftsmen, whose command of realism is incredible. Each robotobeys a program, can synchronise the movements of mouth and eyes withthe words and sounds of the audio, repeating, ad infinitum all day long hisestablished part (a sentence, one or two gestures) and the visitor; caughtoff guard by the succession of events, obliged to see several things atonce, to left and right and straight ahead, has not time to look back andobserve that the robot he has just seen is already repeating his eternalscenario.(Eco, in Docherty, 1993:204)The Pirate scenario described here parodies that of fiction. A traf-ficker in illusions, thewriter of fiction also creates worlds in authentic detail, a matter of craftsmanship,absolute precision, by observing the expressions of real people together in real settings.But as we have seen that makes up only a part of what fiction does. A text endlesslydetailed and precision tooled like the ‘authentic’ wrought-iron balcony of a New Orleanscoffee house (another of the Disneyland attractions), wouldn’t produce the qualities offiction people enjoy it for. They need a Who, a consciousness, a character participating.In the case of Disneyland, however, the only Who implied or actually present is aconsumer.RetellingsThe retelling of existing fiction using new settings and characters is another way forwriters to experiment with the narrative process. Writers make use of other stories byrecasting them in a contemporary context. It is as if the books themselves are speaking toeach other. An example of this method is Jackie Kay’s short story ‘Shell’, from the samecollection as ‘Trout Friday’ (see page 129). In ‘Shell’, the main character, a single parentliving with her son Louis who is black, undergoes physical changes that appear to beconnected with overweight and exhaustion. The narrator stays faithfully inside the main