I’m reading Conversations With Friends and I’m fascinated by the narrator.
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But this book, the 1st person narrator feels disinterested. It feels like it almost might as well be a third person narrator, insofar as we don’t really experience the world along with Frances, we just get a very precise report from Frances of some things she experienced.
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The thing I find most interesting about every novel is the position of the narrator. In Tolstoy the narrator is God, in Madame Bovary the narrator is “what if Emma Bovary but self aware,” in Austen the narrator is No One and is much wiser than her characters.
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First person narrators have the same complexities. I don’t know that I’d ever want to write a novel, but I would very much like to write a paper about the narrators of novels.
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I also love how Frances always tells us exactly as much as she knows about her own emotional state. When all she can parse is a physical sensation, she reports a physical sensation. When the emotion fits a familiar name, she provides the name. I think it’s wonderful.
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White books never have a politics, not really. They have political opinions, and some have soul, but they never really have politics. I feel like all black art has politics. Maybe blackness is a response to a political situation in a way whiteness is not.
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Whiteness is a political situation; blackness is a response. That’s not true exactly but it’s not quite untrue either.
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And I don’t mean that all black art is “screw whitey” art, like Toni Morrison talks about. But serious black American art is about surviving being black in America, using and wielding and sharpening and developing this tool called blackness to do so, I think Morrison included.
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End of conversation
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