whaddya know?

Apparently I am, in fact, capable of waking up at 9am and working all day. Okay, not all day, but I've gotten a fair amount of work done so far and I'm going to do some more work as soon as I publish this. It's amazing how much one can accomplish with one's internet connection isn't working and one's roommate is asleep so there's nothing one can do about it. I did a fair amount of writing this afternoon. 1700 words, to be exact. I was basically just riffing off the first chapter of Cat's Cradle, the length of which is one page.

Here's the thing: in all three novels, the opening paragraphs provide a disproportionately large amount of information, and they all three point to the end of the story being narrated. In Cat's Cradle, though we don't have some of the more vital details, such as the near-total destruction of the planet by ice-nine, we do know that a little-known religion called Bokononism will play a major role in the story and we know that the narrator believes everything to have happened according to a plan that was not his own. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle (there has to be a way to shorten that without calling it The Castle, please! WHALitC doesn't work for me either), on the first page we learn that the narrator is Merricat and she is 18, that she may have a preoccupation with death, and that everyone in her family except her sister Constance is dead. In the first lines of Pale Fire, similarly, we find out that the poet whose poem's commentary we are reading is dead, we learn the setting in New Wye, Appalachia, USA (just as in Cat's Cradle, we can see - if only in hindsight - that Jonah is narrating from the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo), and we are told the structure of the poem and the organizational habits of the poet, which the commentator seems to appreciate. Likewise, we learn that our narrator is not as professional as we might expect from an academic literary commentator.

So, all three narrators are unreliable (quote/unquote), but I'm steering clear of that issue as much as possible because what narrator is "reliable"? What does that mean? It seems to me that all narrators are varying degrees of unreliable, perhaps, so we could say that these three are especially unreliable or whatever. Or we could label them "mad," as many critics have done, but that raises the question, what is sanity? I have no interest in either. Actually, that's not true, I have too much interest in both issues to do either of them justice in a 12-13,000 word paper ostensibly about other things.

I had to explain to someone else what I was writing about, and I think that each time I have to do this, I clarify what it is I'm talking about. I said something along the lines of: I'm analyzing three novels in which the narrated events take place before the time of narration, and the stories are all marked by catastrophic events of some kind, so that the story is told as if all events lead up to the catastrophe and then lead away from it. What I mean by that is that there are these markers, these events, to which greater meaning is attributed, they mark temporal boundaries: things happen either before the event or after. On top of that, there are several levels of markers and events, meaning that several stories are layered on top of one another, each told from after the fact, each told as if the events leading up to the marker somehow point toward the marker.

So what I'm interested in with this project is how the past is narrated. Essentially, how history is told. And especially in this time period, the late 1950s/early 1960s. Why do these novels present a teleology, and why do all roads lead to destruction? Without going too much into the whole nuclear proliferation thing, and without talking about containment. I could make that argument, I think, but I'm not going to. It's a bit passe in literary circles now, so I've read, though it was all the rage twelve years ago when Alan Nadel's Containment Culture came out.

Anyway, good work day. Maybe I will reward myself a little.