tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post736893641299280778..comments2024-03-27T16:48:21.039-05:00Comments on Wuthering <br>Expectations: As I have told her story that sympathy has grown upon myself till I have learned to forgive her - Trollope manipulates my sympathiesAmateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-16129412390737891532012-08-05T19:26:22.126-05:002012-08-05T19:26:22.126-05:00Ah ha - via Google Books, Thackerayana. Fascinati...Ah ha - via Google Books, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=iu8LAQAAIAAJ&ots=GFqW40KLXA&dq=thackerayana&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q=thackerayana&f=false" rel="nofollow"><i>Thackerayana</i></a>. Fascinating.<br /><br />The Norton Critical Edition has the <i>Vanity Fair</i> illustrations, although that edition has other annoyances. Ignore the footnotes, more or less. Exasperating textual variants, mostly, which should not be on the page of a student edition.<br /><br />I have not read <i>Saragossa</i> for no good reason - it is clearly my kind of book.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-48560208713964998872012-08-05T12:16:27.025-05:002012-08-05T12:16:27.025-05:00Sadly, none of the Thackery on our shelves is illu...Sadly, none of the Thackery on our shelves is illustrated. I had high hopes for the four editions that are over a century old, but nothing, darn it. I'll have to go shopping now. Alas, poor budget.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-27145366089676780242012-08-04T22:42:07.706-05:002012-08-04T22:42:07.706-05:00I recommend "Thackerayana," a collection...I recommend "Thackerayana," a collection of Thackeray's sketches, mostly drawn in the margins of books he was reading. There are online versions; worth browsing through.<br /><br />One of my favorite uses of the pre-Modernist narrator is in "The Manuscript Found at Saragossa": stories within stories, all told by narrators who might be lying, drugged, or mistaken. All this from 1815 or so...Doug Skinnerhttp://www.dougskinner.netnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-45642623921274057142012-08-03T17:04:44.014-05:002012-08-03T17:04:44.014-05:00Vanity Fair is fantastic. A masterful use of the i...<i>Vanity Fair</i> is fantastic. A masterful use of the intrusive and omniscient narrator, at least one all-time great character, a few knockout scenes, not all comic by any means. The narrator in that novel is the starting point for Trollope's voice.<br /><br />Try to read an edition with Th.'s own illustrations. That's Lil' Thackeray, my expressionless mascot, up on the top of Wuthering Expectations.<br /><br />Dickens performs some amazing improvisatory feats, but I think you're right about his narrators.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-42775204747086592992012-08-03T16:44:50.542-05:002012-08-03T16:44:50.542-05:00Dickens certainly knows how he feels about his cha...Dickens certainly knows how he feels about his characters from page one, and how we are to feel about them as well. I have only read four or five Dickens' novels, so I'm no expert but I don't recall the narrator changing his mind about anything. Thackery wrote what? a billion books? and I've only read <i>The Luck of Barry Lyndon</i>, way back in high school. We do however have a shelf full of Thackery at home, so I might avail myself of one or two volumes. I should at least read <i>Vanity Fair,</i> right? <br /><br />The only thing I can say about Thackery with any certainty is that my friend Ted the Librarian bears a startling resemblance to older Thackery. Ted the Librarian is a fan of Gertrude Stein. How's that for informed literary criticism?scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-59375971469565577752012-08-03T16:35:46.095-05:002012-08-03T16:35:46.095-05:00Oh, it's all stuff you've heard already, a...Oh, it's all stuff you've heard already, about the linear development of the form of the novel and a movement from stylized "classical" forms through "romance" through "realism" through "modernism" and "postmodernism" to whatever we're supposed to be suffering nowadays. "Indeterminate endings are a newfangled invention" and the like. "Deliberately broken chronologies are a hallmark of Modernism" et the cetera. I point to Chekhov. I point to <i>The Iliad</i>. I point to Cervantes. My audience, more widely and deeply read than I am, doesn't care about any my proposed history of literature. "When are you going to finish those last six volumes of Proust?" she asks.<br /><br />Still, I might write some posts about the Mythology of Literature.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-55179652687570600212012-08-03T16:11:55.418-05:002012-08-03T16:11:55.418-05:00I want to be careful not to claim too much, but Tr...I want to be careful not to claim too much, but Trollope is surprisingly playful with the conventions of fiction. He is not a formal innovator, exactly, but he <a href="http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-novelist-what-fielding-what-scott.html" rel="nofollow">keeps himself entertained</a>.<br /><br />And I am beginning to wonder if this specific device, this paralleling or sharing with the reader, is not an important part of the ethics of Trollope. It is quite different than omniscient Dickens or Trollope's real precursor, Thackeray.<br /><br />Well, as I read more Trollope I will keep this in mind.<br /><br />I would enjoy hearing about those myths. I have loved mythology since I was a child.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-85862774617894221192012-08-03T12:41:06.311-05:002012-08-03T12:41:06.311-05:00A surprised omniscient narrator really is a Modern...A surprised omniscient narrator really is a Modernist device, isn't it? I should ask ma femme about Trollope; she's read loads. I think she gave <i>The Warden</i> another read this spring. It might aid my nefarious long-term goal of disabusing her of certain myths about the "modern" novel. <i>Tristram Shandy</i> didn't quite do the trick.scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-52935130622973835772012-08-03T11:32:38.639-05:002012-08-03T11:32:38.639-05:00How encouraging that you got through my muddle to ...How encouraging that you got through my muddle to my point, the point that might well be worth developing, the way the Trollope narrator is not just directing or manipulating his readers but actually reading along with us. Or how his writing is not as far from our reading as it first seems. <br /><br />The narrator is a bit like a Shakespeare character overhearing his own monologue and changing in response to himself. <br /><br />Trollope is as strict with his narrator as any tricky Modernist. He, and we, are allowed to know <i>everything</i> - thoughts, secrets - about the present and past, but no more about the future than we do in real life (except that I can see how long the book is, or I know how many serial episodes are left). The narrator/author surely does know more but he usually acts as if he does not. I get to be as omniscient as the narrator. The pleasant illusion is maintained that he and I are watching events unfold together.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-89917376618204013792012-08-03T07:31:06.746-05:002012-08-03T07:31:06.746-05:00That's a lovely bit (both Trollope's and y...That's a lovely bit (both Trollope's and yours) about the growth of sympathy for Lady Mason. What can it mean to say, as the narrator, that you have learned to feel differently about your own character? What a twisty -- but, I agree, not necessarily clumsy -- relationship between that "omniscient" narrator (who apparently isn't omniscient enough to see this coming) and Lady Mason, and us.Rohan Maitzenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com