The Intrusive Narrator

I'm finally getting serious, about this whole question of the narrator. In many of my favorite 19th (and even 18th) century books, the narrator has a personality of sorts and "intrudes" into the story: Tom Jones; Vanity Fair; Walter Scott's Waverly; George Eliot's, Adam Bede. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Tolsoy all used it. They say that, paradoxically, Tolstoy is both intrusive and "miraculously" absent. Hugo and Stendhal have narrators that intrude. Stendhal goes so far as to tell the reader that his character really is a fiction and if she were a "real" young woman, she would never act that way.

Hugo stops to fill in history in both The Hunchback of Nôtre Dame and Les Misérables. In the Hunchback he also tells us that it's too bad the building where his action is taking place is gone, because it means he has to waste time telling us what it looked like and we have to waste time reading his description. He says if only it were standing, he could just send us there to look at it and we would understand. I found that intervention fascinating. I really would like to say something like that about the Paris of 2010 compared to the Paris of 1823, which is when the events of my book start happening.

Perhaps the most famous intrusive narrator is in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre where she addresses us as "dear reader". The whole phenomenon was considered entirely passé by the end of the 19th century. Flaubert changed everything, making the narrator disappear and creating the "modern" novel—Madame Bovary (1857). Since then, it's been frowned upon because it supposedly separates the reader from the story by reminding them that they're reading.

As I read around the Internet about the whole concept, I was somewhat reassured by the discovery that there still is some defiant use of the technique, notably among "post modernists," people like John Fowles who wrote three endings for The French Lieutenant's Woman. Post-modernists want to remind the reader they're reading.

I don't think that's my point of interest. I'm not sure how to articulate what attracts me. I know that I really enjoyed the intrusion in Vanity Fair and more recently in Stendhal. I find it exotic, I think. It doesn't remove me from the story; on the contrary, it pulls me in. I guess I like being reminded it's a book. I don't know. In any event, I'd like to try my hand at the technique for several reasons. Primarily because I'm trying to write a 19th century novel and it seems like one of the primary elements that needs to preserved.

The second reason has to do with the fact that I have a narrator in mind who would also be a character in the novel, which is essentially what an intrusive narrator becomes. I've talked about this before, when I was in Paris, early on. It came up the day I took my first walk through the Latin Quarter with a little walking tour that was teaching us about the French Revolution. One of the places we stopped to look and listen was on Rue de Tournon.

This is where the fortuneteller, Madame Lenormand lived, until dying at the age of something like 75 (her date of birth is in question) in 1843. She saw some of the people connected to my novel. Notably Frederic Chopin, but she also saw Liszt's first mistress, Marie d'Agoult. In my telling she also ends up seeing Louise Farrenc, so it's nice to see that I'm not completely off the mark, and that she really was involved to some extent, with the celebrities of the my day, and particularly the musicians. I suspect I'll discover other important names connected with her if I search hard enough. The point is, I'm considering letting her tell this story—that is, be the narrator.

She's buried in Père Lechaise and dies, as I said, in 1843, right in the middle of my story. She's famous for her fortune telling. That's why Chopin ended up seeing here. He was morose about his love life and she was recommended. Marie d'Agoult too, was trying to figure out what to do about leaving her husband for Liszt.

According to biographical material I found today, Madame Lenormand had been trained as a young girl by the gypsies who taught her to read coffee grounds and egg whites and ashes and the shards of a broken mirror. They also taught her palmistry and astrology. Later, in Paris she studied alchemy, numerology, mythology, the Kabbalah and geomancy. That's a pretty interesting combination, and it's supposedly true. The picture shows her reading for Robespierre and predicting his death. He tried to stop her from doing readings after that, as did Napoleon when he didn't like what she said. She survived and continued.

Apparently she read behind a secret doorway that was hidden in the wall. People waited in her drawing room to see her and were ushered back to where she read and then ushered out the back. She read from a plain deck of playing cards that she had written little notes on and drawn pictures that associated specific cards with specific mythic moments, like the moment the Trojan Horse was pulled through the gate into Troy. She also named the cards. I found a deck right before I left Paris and purchased it. I've been studying it, learning how it works, how to read it. She laid out all thirty-six cards, but did not read them all. The readings are complex. I'm having a good time trying to learn the deck.

When George Eliot starts out Adam Bede, she talks about the Egyptians and how "with a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertook to reveal to any chance comer far‐reaching visions of the past." She tells the reader that she's about to attempt the same. I'm thinking perhaps that Madame Lenormand might say something similar. She's buried in Père Lechaise and I think she's narrating the story from death, telling us something about the past the same way the Egyptian sorcerers do. She might even show us around and introduce us to the tombs of the various characters. She might find Tori there, hovering on Chopin's tomb. I don't know.

I watched a very intriguing documentary on Père Lechaise last week. It's called Forever. I found this collage of it on YouTube. The film seems to be saying something that I too want to say, about the eternal power of art to move and shape us, and like the pianist in the film, I somehow am paying tribute. It seems to me that this is part of what I'm looking for in the Prelude and in the narrator. I know that what I'm saying right now is vague and general and doesn't really communicate all that I'm feeling, but it's a start, a stab at it.



I'm thinking that by using Madame Lenormand, talking from the other side, I think, a ghost who walks us through Père Lechaise and introduces us in some way to the story we're about to hear, that I might be moving closer to what I want. Did I say I've started reading, War and Peace? Andrew Todhunter's assignment. I found the new translation and I've begung. It's about 1500 pages.