Keywords
snare
Coined by Roland Barthes in S/Z, a deliberate evasion of truth
“To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”
This is from A Mercy by Toni Morrison. These are the final lines spoken by Florens's mother (minha mãe) in her chapter, which is the final chapter of the book. These lines draw a comparison between the book's portrayal of literal and figurative enslavement (i.e., being legally enslaved vs. being enslaved by your passion or love). Both the blacksmith and for minha mãe portray the more figurative enslavement to passion or love as just as restrictive and wicked as literal, legal enslavement.
Minha mãe chose to give away/sell Florens to Jacob, in her words, "Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle. He said yes. It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human." She believed that Jacob could offer Florens a better life than what she had experienced at the hands of Senhor d'Ortega, or at least that Florens's experience would be different.
primary vs. secondary narrator
primary: narrator of the frame story (Art in Maus)
secondary: narrator of the inner story, who appears as a character in the frame story (Vladek in Maus, governess in The Turn of the Screw)
"But pop—it's great material. It makes everything more real—more human. I want to tell your story, the way it happened."
"But this isn't so proper, so respectful... I can tell you other stories, but such private things, I don't want you should mention."
This comes from Maus by Art Spiegelman. In this scene near the start of the graphic novel, Vladek has just told Art that he doesn't want the story of his first relationship to appear in the book because it doesn't relate to the Holocaust. There's an irony in what Art says—Vlad's story "makes everything...more human," but Jewish people are, of course, depicted as mice. This scene foregrounds the work of writing the graphic novel, disrupting our sense of the relationship between primary and secondary narrator.
Take a stance: did Peter Quint kill Myles, or was it the governess?
Peter Quint: governess is able to accurately describe what Quint and Jessel look like; Miles screams, "Peter Quint—you devil," which would seem to suggest that he really saw the ghost; both children looking out the window at night
Governess: becomes attached to the children very quickly; won't contact their uncle about anything and takes matters into her own hands; Miles dies in her arms
closure
From Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (though he didn't coin the term), closure refers to the tendency to perceive incomplete parts of an image and construct a whole in your mind. For McCloud, closure implicates the reader as an accomplice in the text, particularly in acts of violence: the reader completes the death that isn't depicted in the comic. This is why he refers to closure as "blood in the gutter."
"I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him.
'Whom do you mean by "he"?'”
This is the final scene of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, where the governess attempts to pull a confession from Miles about whether or not he has been interacting with Peter Quint. Miles's answer (“Peter Quint—you devil!”) would seem to suggest that the ghosts are, in fact, real, though it's uncertain to whom Miles refers when he says "you devil": is Peter Quint the devil, or the governess? This scene is also significant because Miles dies at the end of the encounter, and we don't know whether the governess killed him, or if he died because the ghost of Quint was exorcised from his body.
Give an example of a dialogic text and a monologic text, and explain the differences between the two.
Dialogic: A Mercy (many voices, all in conversation/tension with one another; different styles of narration; Toni Morrison as abstract author holding the many voices together)
Monologic: Mansfield Park (unity of style; dialogue in the text is subsumed under the authority of the author)
dialogic narrative
Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogical narrative analysis is concerned with the presence of multiple voices in a work. How are dialects juxtaposed in a work of fiction? How might one person actually speak with two voices? Toni Morrison's A Mercy is an example of a dialogic narrative, comprised of many voices, filled with internal contradictions, where each character is associated with a different style of narration. Each mode of expression is in conversation with each other.
“Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark - weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more - but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?”
This quote comes from A Mercy by Toni Morrison. This comes from the first chapter of the novel, when Florens, the main character, sets up the mysterious conceit of the novel: she is confessing to something, but we don't know to what, or to whom her confession is directed. This is an example of Florens's unique voice and worldview: her unusual syntax, the references to reading signs and symbols in steam, her diction ("the wicked" as a noun) all distinguish her voice from the other character and demonstrate the world she lives in—one of symbols, ambiguity, and darkness. There are two notable examples of deliberate ambiguity in this moment: "I promise to lie quietly" (does she mean lying as in falsehood, or lying as in lying down?) and the question "can you read?" (are you literate, or can you read signs?).
How does The Turn of the Screw set snares?
gutter
From Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (though he didn't coin the term), the gutter is the empty space in a comic between panels. It's in the gutter that we create closure: we complete the story based off of what is and isn't represented in the comic. This is why McCloud calls closure "blood in the gutter."
"It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give."
This quote is from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. This is the first time that the governess sees Peter Quint, who appears standing at the top of a tower while she is out on a walk. This is an example of how James's dense syntax contributes to the overall ambiguity of the novella: the many commas, the confusion over the two gasps of emotion, the strange and confusing word order of "My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first."
How does Maus trouble the division of primary/secondary narrator?
-The graphic novel toggles between the internal story of Vladek surviving the Holocaust and Art trying to coax the story out of him. Art is technically the frame narrator, but he becomes a character in both his and Vladek's telling, complicating the division of primary/secondary narrator.
-The form of the graphic novel: the words are Vladek's recollection, but the images are Art's imagined depiction of what the Holocaust must have looked like. The inner story, therefore, is infected by the frame.