Anodyne
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
 
Narrative as Landscape -- excellent paper by Bob Hughes, found today at wood s lot.

"'War and Peace' really is a landscape, and the text Tolstoy has given us is simply a route he found through it; his other works traverse different parts of the same landscape, by different routes, of different lengths.

I certainly get a similar experience from all Tolstoy novels - and indeed from all Tolstoy sentences. Which is not unlike one's experience of walks in a real-world landscape: whether it's an afternoon stroll or a whole day on the peaks, you still get the 'Snowdonia experience.' What's more, Tolstoy behaves as if he is in a landscape. He is famously apt to indulge in what we call 'digressions,' where he 'leaves the main path' of the tale to explore some philosophical or historical issue at length - just like some good mountain guide who takes you off the track for a while to show you some ruins, or an interesting geological structure, or a fantastic view, or to pick bilberries. (And he shares this tendency with just about every other story teller, from Milton - king of the extended metaphor - to stand-up comics like Eddie Izzard, to you or me). This tendency makes it very hard for a 'path-centric' narratologist to write a rule for writing Tolstoy novels: like trying to program an anti-aircraft gun to shoot down flies."
- posted by cjb @ 10:11 AM


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