Novel Synthesis: On Structure and Readership
I’m not quite sure when my preoccupation with form began. Required readings of one of Eagleton’s chapters on form and content made me consciously aware that I often spoke about the relationship between the two, but it’s a rather recent realization that my first instinct is to talk about form. Several of my brief blog entries (be they about the novel, museum, or the street) often center around the navigation of form and structure, as were, as I recall, many of my even briefer comments made during class. My most recent entry on the structural shifts in White Teeth provoked me to consider an exploration of structure as it relates to readership for this next-to-last blog entry, my novel synthesis. I’d like to explore some seemingly basic (yet fascinating) structural components of the novels in the order in which I read them.
Upon the conclusion of my final assignment this past spring semester, I hurried to the UT Co-op Bookstore, filled a weighty basket with Bleak House and the other novels. Because of its monstrous size (and historical distance from my own time period, which tends to alienate me), I decided to attack this Dicken’s novel before I let myself read anything else. I read about half of the novel, took a few weeks off, and upon my return, found it nearly unreadable. I’m still not quite sure why this is. I had enjoyed the novel, my first exposure to Dickens, but found myself unable to get back into the swing of the novel. I realize that I’d stopped in the middle of a chapter, and found it necessary to start the entire three-chapter episode (and eventually the whole novel). Now having finished Bleak House (and having enjoyed it immensely), I find myself still troubled the novel’s many layers of structure. While I understand that the novel was initially published serially in some sort of periodical, even my attempts to read the novel in those serial increments, as it was ‘intended’ to be read failed me. They seemed a bit too lengthy (is it true that Dickens was paid by the word?) to be easily digested in just one sitting and I became easily distracted the by change of narrative voice within each episode.
Before I finished up Bleak House, I switched to White Teeth so I could enjoy a huge stylistic and chronological change of pace. Similarly to Bleak House, White Teeth is divided into several layers. Not only does the novel contain four separate ‘books,’ each with a corresponding title and eye-grabbing apostrophic quote, but each of these ‘books’ was subdivided into interestingly titled chapters. While my ability to voraciously flip through the pages of Smith’s novel might be due to my own interests and proclivities, I can’t help but think that the structure of White Teeth actually helped me as a reader, rather than alienating me. As I mentioned in my earlier post on this novel, Smith also employs interesting paragraphic breaks that, like her catchy lead-in quotes and chapter titles, propel the reader forward through the text.
I’m not sure that I was as conscious of the influence of structure of the other two novels on my readings of them, but this post has allowed me to backtrack and rethink what effect their frameworks might have had on me. The structural note of Dorian Gray that I most remember is seeing the page of a new chapter with a simple ‘1’ or ‘7’ at the top; the chapters are untitled. Plenty of novels don’t have chapter titles, so perhaps this only protrudes in my memory because both of the other chaptered novels we read employed chapter titles as a device. I’ve tried to sit and dwell on how this influenced my reading of the novel, and if nothing else I can say that a simple number at the top doesn’t give you any information or a preview of the chapter like ‘The Ghost Walk’ might. There is a way in which this simple numbering system reduces the reader’s expectations/ability to predict the action of the chapter. Mrs. Dalloway, another personal favorite (both in this course and in life!) was probably the hardest novel to put down—not just because of the quality of the book, but because the lack of chapter division and seemless shifts by the narrator into various character’s consciousnesses never allowed for an easy place to bookmark. I read the novel for the first time almost entirely in one sitting, mostly out of necessity. As challenging as this may have been for me as a reader, this lack of interruption now seems entirely essential to the novel. Time is not broken up by chapters, but by the tolling of Big Ben, marking away the hours in the distance.
posted by PatrickMcKelvey @ 9:22 AM
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