One of the central questions Station Eleven asks its readers is: what would you do in a world without technology? No electricity, no Internet, no modern transportation; the world-wide pandemic called “the Collapse” by the survivors in the story, has reduced people to a nomadic, anarchic existence, one in which they are fascinated by the artifacts of the way things used to be. What do the characters in the book themselves do? Beyond basic human activities like eating and sleeping, they perform Shakespeare’s plays for others who attend these performances. They fight violently against those who would try to control them. They forage in abandoned houses for not just useful, but interesting objects. They have love and sexual relationships. Children. They search for lost companions, protect each other from harm. There’s an interesting message here. After such an apocalypse, some authors might (and have) shown humans lapsing into barbarism and despair. But Ms. Mandel does not do this. Not only do the survivors have children and love, they work together, they care for each other. And they spend considerable energy on the arts. Station Eleven has been called and promoted as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel. Also as speculative fiction. What does dystopian mean? The word comes from the ancient Greek word topos, meaning a traditional theme or formula in literature. Official definitions often begin with the idea of dystopian being the antonym of utopian, so there are utopian novels, where an ideal society is depicted, and there are dystopian novels, where society is oppressive and dehumanizing. George Orwell’s 1984 is a fine example. Characteristic themes of a dystopian novel include: Government control Environmental destruction Technological control Survival Loss of individualism For centuries, there have been cultural fears about technology, and dystopian literature often involves technology running amok and being used for evil purposes. Fahrenheit 451 is a good example, as are the Terminator films. Hasta la vista, baby. A recurrent theme in dystopian works is that a utopian society leads to the loss of individual freedom and control, a fear that the greater good always leads to tyranny. Brave New World, anyone? So, how about in Station Eleven? Certainly, the book depicts an apocalypse. Most of the world’s population has died in a pandemic of flu. However, instead of being controlled by machines, the survivors must cope with the loss of technology and the resulting impact on their lives. There is no internet, no gasoline, no electricity. The survivors cannot take survival for granted. Books and other written materials—like Kristen’s Station Eleven comic—are hidden and hoarded. Because of the devastation, there doesn’t seem to be any government, and the survivors must cope as best they can in a tribalized and violent society where strangers are sometimes malevolent. There is not the environmental destruction depicted in the Station Eleven comic, although it could be said that the environment, in the form of the flu pathogen, has turned on humans. Instead of a loss of individualism, the survivors actually express considerable humanity. The Traveling Symphony group is shown presenting Shakespeare’s plays, keeping that humanist tradition alive. I think it’s a disservice to confine Station Eleven in a genre like dystopian. As we can see above, it’s much more than this. It is speculative in the sense of showing the results of a possible but not real event. Of course, isn’t most fiction speculative in this way? Most fiction is based on a question. What if particular characters are placed into a situation in which they must react and adjust? What do they do? This is the center of Station Eleven. Next week, we’ll continue our discussion, focusing on the way the novel handles time. Ooh. Till then. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

This week, a new novel, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. This acclaimed book was published in 2014 and has been adapted into a film version. Of course, the story is supremely timely as it deals with the impact of a flu pandemic that kills off most of the earth’s population, a foreshadowing of the real devastation caused by the Covid virus. Station Eleven also shows a global shipping crisis that leaves hundreds of ships at anchor unable to unload their cargo. Sound familiar? The title, Station Eleven, references a comic book owned by one of the main characters, Kirsten Raymonde. The comic is called Station Eleven and has to do with a physicist named Dr. Eleven who lives on a space station. In a favorite scene of Kirsten’s, Dr. Eleven is rendered looking out on a horizon and thinking, “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on earth.” This is a nice metaphor for the book which concerns survivors of the pandemic. There is a dedication: In Memory of Emilie Jacobsen. Emilie Jacobsen was Ms. Mandel’s literary agent. And there is an epigraph from Czelaw Milosz: The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, And for me, now as then. it is too much. There is too much world. This too, seems to be an apt metaphor for the whole book and certainly suggests its theme. Station Eleven is structured in sections—the first one entitled The Theater—and chapters are embedded within each section. The story begins with a scene showing the staging of King Lear in Toronto. It is from the perspective of Jeevan, a young man who is initially sitting in the audience. The first line is “The King stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.” This is the sort of thing an audience member would plausibly see on stage and represents the narrator showing what Jeevan is seeing—arguably expressed in rather poetic, Shakespearian language, setting a tone for the whole novel. The second sentence is “This was act 4 of King Lear, a winter night at the Elgin Theater in Toronto.” It’s possible an audience member would think such a thing but more likely, it’s the narrator speaking to provide context for the scene. Speaking to the reader—Jeevan is not speaking to the reader, he’s watching the play. He doesn’t know he’s in a story! An interesting thing occurs in paragraph 3. Arthur Leander, the actor playing Lear is speaking a line, “…distracted by the child version of Cordelia, and this is when it happened.” Here we’ve caught Mr. or Ms. Narrator red-handed, telling the reader that “this is when it happened.” Jeevan, observing things, wouldn’t know that “this” —Arthur is having a heart attack—happens right then. It’s not till a few moments later that he suspects something is wrong. No, this is the narrator telling the audience that, in this fiction, the reader has arrived at a significant point. Pay attention! the narrator is saying. The story continues, told generally through the perspective of Jeevan. Chapter 2 shows a scene occurring at the same time as the previous scene with Jeevan, but in this one, he does not appear. (Can’t be two places at once). It is in a bar where several characters are discussing Arthur Leander’s death. The narrator is showing this scene, and there is no reporting from an internal perspective. At the end, the narrator does a nice foreshadowing thing by saying: “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.” This is the first hint at the catastrophe that’s about to come. After we learn something about this catastrophe when Jeevan’s doctor friend Hua calls him and describes the outbreak of the deadly Georgian flu, we get a brief chapter of the narrator showing other reactions to Arthur’s death. There’s the introduction of another major character, Miranda, who is Arthur’s ex-wife. Then, the narrator returns in Chapter 6 with “an incomplete list,” of things that are no longer possible after the flu has killed most of the Earth’s human population. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit from below…No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd…No more pharmaceuticals…No more Internet…No more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches…” This is the nameless narrator speaking. Some readers might assume that the narrator is Ms. Mandel herself, that she is telling the story. Readers of this blog will know by now to scoff at such an innocent idea. Let’s hear it for the over-educated! The narrator tells the story that the characters experience, and is a mouthpiece for the Implied Author, the entity that wrote the book, a creation of Ms. Mandel. Could we review who all these folks are? Sure. The author, Emily St. John Mandel, created the story. In the story, there is a narrator who tells the story—the storyteller. In some stories, the storyteller may have different opinions than the author—this doesn’t seem to be the case in Station Eleven. Another way to say this is that the narrator in Station Eleven seems to be reliable. The major characters, Jeevan, Miranda, and Kirsten, live the story. The narrator tells a portion of the story through each of their perspectives. The implied author is the image of the author evoked by the work and expressed through style, ideology and aesthetics. This is important—a person might meet Ms. St. John Mandel at the grocery store and form an impression of her; perhaps she is serious or silly, plays with the fruit or something. But this same person reading Station Eleven would form a different impression of the author—an image evoked by the book. This implied author image is important because it’s the image that the author herself is giving readers. But the image is not the flesh and blood human. ‘Kay, easy-peezy. Also, the reader infers particular ethical positions about the implied author from reading the text. One fairly explicit position in Station Eleven is that art is an essential part of humanity, no matter how challenged humanity becomes. The narrator is an entity whose presence is expressed in words, evoked in the text of the story, if you will. In some novels, this Narrator may be a character who is telling the story, an “I.” In others, like Station Eleven, the Narrator is nameless and separate from the characters. The Implied Author is an entity who is created by the real flesh and blood author to write the book. “It” makes choices about the structure of the story, including what to include in a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. It chooses which characters’ perspective will be used to show a scene; it chooses what is to be shown and what is left out—that is, how time is handled. Are there gaps in time? Is the story episodic or continuous? Take me to the station. Till next time. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

This week, I want to finish looking at Normal People, although this rich book could easily yield more discussion. However, certain audience members have a tendency to become…restless, shall we say. You know who you are. Last time, we looked at a key sequence in the book, beginning on page 229 of the 2020 Hogarth paperback edition, in a chapter entitled Four Months Later (July 2014), followed by Five Minutes Later (July 2014). The first chapter is from Marianne’s perspective, the second, Connell’s. During the course of an evening, Marianne and Connell are at his mother’s house watching the World Cup semi-finals. They have not been lovers for a long time, but—"Then he lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it. She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him.” Those scamps. As I described last time, they have sex, during which Marianne asks Connell to hit her. He refuses, and she leaves for her mother’s house where she is attacked by her brother Alan. She calls Connell, who arrives and takes Marianne away, first threatening Alan with death. These are the broad actions of the two chapters, but a lot is shown about the characters’ thoughts and feelings. After Marianne leaves, Connell’s mother returns, and Connell is upset: “It is extremely irritating that his mother thinks he and Marianne are together, when the closest they have come in years to actually being together was earlier this evening and it ended with him crying alone in his room… “She (Marianne) asked him to hit her and when he said he didn’t want to, she wanted to stop having sex. So why, despite its factual accuracy, does this feel like a dishonest way of narrating what happened? What is the missing element, the excluded part of the story that explains what upset them both? (this is the implied author communicating with the reader). It has something to do with their history, he knows that. Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colors, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing his hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.… What’s left for them, then? There doesn’t seem to be a half-way position anymore. Too much has passed between them for that. So it’s over and there’s just nothing? What would it even mean, to be nothing to her? He could avoid her…but the glance could not contain nothing…He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.” Some aspects of this passage are troubling in that Connell appears to be thinking of Marianne in a rather narcissistic way. This narcissism seems to drive his behavior. When Marianne calls him, he becomes very anxious—angrier. “A colored haze sweeps over the driveway…Connell, his sight even blurrier bow…His vision is swimming so severely that he notices he has to keep a hand on the door to stay upright. Connell’s face is wet with perspiration. Alan’s face is visible only as a pattern of colored dots… After he gets in the car with Marianne, he feels his power over her again. His vision settles…he can breathe.” Of course, following this dramatic chapter, we have a break of seven months and then land back in Dublin where Connell and Marianne are living together, I think. They are happy—it’s clear that Marianne—whose perspective the reader is shown—is content and “normal.” Does this mean she has given up abusive sex? Yes, but… “In bed, he would say lovingly: You’re going to do exactly what I say now, aren’t you? He knew how to give her what she wanted, to leave her open, weak, powerless, sometimes crying. He understood that it wasn’t necessary to hurt her: he could let her submit willingly, without violence. This all seemed to happen on the deepest possible level of her personality. But on what level did it happen to him? Was it just a game, or a favor he was doing her? Did he feel it the way she did? Every day, in the ordinary activity of their lives, he showed patience and consideration for her feelings. He took care of her when she was sick, he read drafts of her college essays…” It would seem that Marianne and Connell have maintained the dynamic in their relationship where Marianne willingly submits to Connell, and he is dominant, but there is no physical violence. No violence at all, it’s loving. Just…kind of controlling. ‘Kay. In this final chapter, Marianne muses about their love and about life, and at times, it’s hard to determine who is speaking: the character Marianne or the implied author. Free indirect speech, best beloved. “She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed. It was so unlike him to behave that way in public that he must have been doing it on purpose, to please her. How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. She knows he loves her, she doesn’t wonder about that anymore.” The scenes of Connell refusing to hit Marianne during sex and then his “rescue” of her and his denouncement of Alan are very significant, especially for Marianne. It frees the couple to love each other; perhaps, Marianne is reassured by Connell’s standing up for her, and he is strengthened by the knowledge that he has really helped her. The ending of Normal People is open to the reader’s interpretation. Connell, who has apparently graduated from university, has applied for a MFA program in writing in NYC–without telling Marianne. He is accepted, and tells her, but presents this as something he wouldn’t want to do unless she accompanied him. She says she does not want to leave Dublin, but that he should go. Connell says: “…I’m not going to New York without you. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you.” “It’s true, she thinks, he wouldn’t be. He would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life. He would be different with women even, and his aspirations for love would be different. And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely. Would she ever have been happy? And what kind of happiness might it have been? All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same pot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, talking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that. … She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.” (And here, let’s be reminded of the epigram from George Eliot: “It is one of the secrets in that change in mental poise which has been fitfully named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.”). Yup. Who is speaking in these passages? The Narrator, through Marianne? The implied author? Prraps. We see that Marianne transforms dramatically, going from being a sort of ugly duckling to someone capable of selfless love. Connell, I’m not so sure about. Over the course of the book, he transforms from being a naïve youth plagued by self-doubt and depression into a talented writer of fiction (?) who nevertheless maintains a benignly controlling relationship with Marianne. He’s not a bad sort, but he isn’t really so good either. He does have a new life and feels redeemed by Marianne’s love, but I’m not so sure he recovers from the depression. At the end, the reader wonders: will Connell go to NYC? Will they re-unite when he’s done? Or is this a further separation? Open and unanswered questions. You can answer them yourself. Thank you, Sally Rooney for writing such a meaningful and intelligent book. Next week, a new one. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Till then. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

Sex is an integral part of Normal People. Let’s get a definition. (Wait…what? A definition of sex?) Yes, we all “know” what sex is, but I like to begin with a definition of a concept I’m writing about so that everyone knows the basis of things. (So that we’re all on the same page?) ‘Kay. It’s hard to find a useful definition of sex, which is notable, I think. The English word “sex” comes from a Latin word meaning to divide. Most definitions tend to involve circularities like “Sex is engaging in sexual relations.” Here’s a rather legal definition of sexual relations: sexual relations are established when a person "knowingly engages in or causes . . . contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person". Contact is agreed to mean intentional touching, either directly or through clothing. ‘Kay. In an earlier post on Normal People, the old maestro cited a comment made by Anahid Nersessian, in the New York Review of Books: “…What sets Rooney apart is that she makes what ought to be the most ordinary aspects of intimacy seem aspirational, as if consent and mutual gratification—however defined—were the summit and not the ground of erotic possibility.” Consent is a key concept here, just as it is in contemporary society. Is this “intentional touching” being conducted with mutual consent, or is it coercive, with one party having power over the other? Consent is always given in Normal People, although the motivations for sexual relations may be complex, and painful. In a compulsive manner, Marianne seeks out and promotes sexual relationships where she is abused by her partner(s), thereby acting out dynamics from her childhood and birth family. In a climactic scene, she tries to involve Connell in this pattern, but he refuses, and this is significant for them both in a positive manner. One of the ways Normal People diverges from traditional romances is that consent is a necessary part of the recipe for sexual intimacy. There are representations of traditional gender roles, particularly in the way Connell eventually protects Marianne from those who mean her ill (and do her ill), but this is not a story where the man pursues the reluctant woman, and finally wears down her hesitations to win the “prize.” Although come to think of it, I guess that involves consent too—but it’s a different beastie in Normal People. Initially, Connell is very aware of Marianne as a woman; he attends to the finer details of her attire and appearance. “…Marianne came downstairs in a bathrobe. It was just a plain white bathrobe, tied in the normal way. Her hair was wet, and her hair had that glistening look like she had just been applying face cream…He knew she was probably getting dressed in her room, and whatever clothes she was wearing when she came back down would be the clothes she had chosen to put on after she saw him in the hall.” And Marianne is equally interested in Connell’s physicality: “It occurred to Marianne how much she would like to see him having sex with someone; it didn’t have to be her, it could be anybody. It would be beautiful just to watch him.” Well. After a first kiss, Connell “drops by” Marianne’s house where his mother is working. Marianne goes to her bedroom, and he follows her. They sit on her bed. “He touched her leg and she lay back down against the pillow. Boldly she asked if he was going to kiss her again. He said: What do you think? …he did start to kiss her…He put his hand under her school blouse. In his ear, she said: Can we take our clothes off?” After they have sex, Connell muses about Marianne and about other partners he’s had: “With Marianne it was different, because everything was between them only, even awkward or difficult things. He could do or say anything he wanted with her and no one would ever find out…That’s so good, she kept saying. That feels so good. Her body was all soft and white like flour dough. He wanted to fit perfectly inside her. Physically it just felt right, and he understood why people did insane things for sexual reasons then…His decision to drive to Marianne’s house that afternoon suddenly seemed…maybe the only intelligent thing he’d ever done in his life.” Well, sure. My point here is again, this is not a story of a guy winning over a gal to have sex—and then how he’s insensitive about it. No sir. Connell and Marianne seem to be equally enthusiastic in their pursuit and capture of one another. And Connell is quite sensitive after the deed is done. (It should be said he is not always so sensitive later). And Marianne experiences sex with Connell as healing. “Connell… leans down and kisses her on the forehead. I would never hurt you, okay? he says. Never…You make me really happy, he says. His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I’m not just saying that, I really do. Her eyes well up with tears again and she closes them…She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment…” And consent? “She stands at his chair and, looking up at her, he undoes the sash of her bathrobe. It’s been nearly a year. He touches his lips to her skin and she feels holy, like a shrine. Come to bed, then, she says. He goes with her.” My view is that the story’s climax occurs when Marianne is attacked by her brother Alan, and calls Connell for help. He arrives at her house and threatens Alan and takes Marianne away. Prior to this, Marianne and Connell are having sex. She says: “You can do whatever you want with me. He makes a noise in his throat, leans into her a little harder. That’s nice, he says. Her voice sounds hoarse now. Do you like me saying that? she says. Yeah, a lot. Will you tell me I belong to you? What do you mean? he says. … “Will you hit me, she says?” … No, he says, I don’t think I want that. Sorry Marianne indicates she wants to stop having sex, and Connell gets off her. Are you okay? he says. I’m sorry I didn’t want to do that, I just think it would be weird. I mean, not weird but…I don’t know. I don’t think it would be a good idea. … You think I’m weird? she says. After this, Marianne goes home, is attacked by Alan, calls Connell for help. He arrives, tells Marianne to get in his car, and threatens to kill Alan. The chapter ends with Marianne saying thank you. The next chapter is entitled Seven Months Later. She and Connell are together at the university, and the perspective is the narrator reporting about her. “Marianne is neither admired nor reviled anymore. She’s a normal person now. She walks by and no one looks up.” What’s going on here? A very complex exchange, my point in including it in this discussion is the sexual content. Marianne attempts to continue a pattern of sexual behavior that she has found compulsively meaningful—being hit during sex—with Connell, but he refuses to go along. He is confused and apologetic. She is embarrassed and leaves but when her brother assaults her, she turns to Connell for help. Although he doesn’t want to hit Marianne, he is moved to shove her brother against a wall and threaten to kill him. (This reader was happy about the whole thing). But after this, Marianne and Connell are finally at peace with each other. Marianne feels she’s a normal person, the implication is that she’s done with her abusive family and her desire for sex that reinforces her sense that she’s bad. Connell seems okay with the whole thing. Of course, soon, the couple will decide to separate but that’s another discussion. The point here is that consensual sex is powerful and healing. And that both men and women must give consent to mutual pleasure—not to conquest and domination. Sex is not the only factor in Marianne’s and Connell’s transformation, but it is integral. Next week, I think we’ll wrap up Normal People by looking more closely at the transformation and the end. Till then. (whiny voice—But I thought people in Ireland didn’t enjoy sex because they were too hung up). No. Obviously. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

This week, let’s look at one of two major themes in Normal People, social class. I realize that last time, I left off with the threat to get into a mysterious issue, the role of dialogue and whether it may represent the characters speaking directly to the reader rather than through the narrator. I don’t wish to dodge this, but I’m not sure that Normal People is a clear example, so I will postpone the matter. (Yay!) Thematically, Normal People is a lot about sex and social class. Ms. Rooney, the real author, has an agenda here, I think. It’s gently put, but there’s a value judgement that sex is positive and even healing but can also be an expression of personal problems, and that some people judge others on the basis of social status and shun them unfairly. More on sex later. (Yay!) Class, like ethnicity and gender, is one of those issues not usually addressed in polite conversation in terms of recognizing and discussing differences. Money too. We like to pretend that social class doesn’t matter but Normal People does a nice job of showing that it does—especially on an emotional level. In polite conversation, and perhaps in polite books, there’s an attempt to smooth over differences and deny them. Of course, Normal People concerns an ultimate difference, the one between males and females, but addresses it more in terms of Marianne and Connell being different, particular people rather than representatives of two different genders. Perhaps class gets the same treatment. In an amusing passage early on, Connell recommends The Communist Manifesto to Marianne, thinking, he says, she would like it. He offers to write down the title, but she assures him she already knows it. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx argues that the goal of the working class is to displace the capitalist system with socialism, changing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a future communist society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This would mark the beginning of a classless society in which human needs rather than profit would be the motive for production. In a society with democratic control and production for use, there would be no class, no state and no need for financial and banking institutions and money. Is this what Connell is advocating? No, he’s making an ironic joke pointing out the differences between he and Marianne. A flirtation, my dear. Although at the beginning of the book they attend the same high school, Marianne and Connell have a different social status, which is determined by social prestige rather than difference in wealth. They are both white Irish people, but Connell is from a single parent family; his mother was an unmarried teenager when she had him and works as a cleaning person in Marianne’s mother’s house. His family, the Waldrons, have a reputation in the community of being “bad” although Connell is seen as one of the “good’ ones. He works and goes to school, and there is not a sense that he and his mother live in poverty—they are just significantly less well-off than Marianne’s family. His intention has been to go to law school after graduation, despite an interest in literature. It is Marianne who persuades him to go to Trinity College in Dublin to study literature, even though this may lead to less monetary success. Marianne is the youngest offspring of a wealthy family, the Sheridans. Her father recently died; the implication is that he was older. Her mother, Denise, is a lawyer and works full-time. The family lives in a sort of mansion. In terms of social status, it is Connell who is “top dog.” Marianne, although coming from a wealthy family, is regarded in the high school caste system as being odd and marginal—because of her behavior and maybe her wealth. Connor is handsome and athletic. So, Marianne and Connell are from different backgrounds but are drawn to one another as friends and as lovers; Connell’s mother being the connection. Connell is self-conscious about his humbler background; Marianne seems somewhat embarrassed about hers. Although Marianne and Connell tend to deny and play down their class differences, their friends accentuate them, creating a meaningful context for the theme. Once they had off to University in Dublin, their social status is reversed. Now Marianne is part of a circle of other wealthy friends, who tend to look down on Connell’s humbler roots. The book is well along when Marianne and Connell finally address the issue directly. When they both receive merit scholarships at the university, Connell says, I guess we’re from very different backgrounds, class-wise. I don’t think about it much, she said. Quickly she added: Sorry, that’s an ignorant thing to say. Maybe I should think about it more. You don’t consider me your working-class friend? She gave a smile that was more like a grimace and said: I’m conscious of the fact that we got to know each other because your mother works for my family. I also don’t think my mother is a good employer. I don’t think she pays Lorraine very well. No, she pays her fuck all. … I’m surprised this hasn’t come up before, she said. I think it’s totally fair if you resent me. … I just feel weird about all this, he said…You know at the dinner last night, those people serving us, they were students. They’re working to put themselves through college while we sit there eating the free food they put in front of us. … The whole idea of “meritocracy” or whatever, it’s evil, you know I think that. But what are we supposed to do, give back the scholarship money? In excellent fashion, this conversation is not resolved in any substantive way, it’s left open which is, I believe, how “real” conversations tend to go. Our thoughts and feelings linger afterward, re-casting the original experience. In this one, Marianne reminds Connell that in high school, she was treated badly by other students in a sort of reverse discrimination, and Connell guiltily recalls that he too mistreated her. At that moment he thought: just as their relationship in school had been on his terms, their relationship now was on hers. But she’s more generous, he thought. She’s a better person. I think what we see is that Marianne and Connell are from different socio-economic backgrounds. They are aware of it; it effects their relationship but does not prevent it from deepening. In a sense, they overcome whatever limitations their social status and class have put on them. ‘Kay. Next week—sex! I promise. Till then. (We have to wait?) #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

We’ve talked about how, at times, the locus of narration in Normal People can be hard to determine. That first sentence, “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell,” could be the narrator’s perspective reporting about Connell, or about Marianne’s perspective. It’s ambiguous, and I believe it’s deliberate. Because the two characters are so intimate, their perspectives blur. But, as the first chapter develops, it becomes clearer that it’s from Connell’s perspective. “To Connell, this seems like something she could accomplish in the car…In school, he and Marianne affect not to know each other.” But at the end of page two, we find, “She exercises an open contempt for people in school. She has no friends and spends her lunchtime alone reading novels. A lot of people really hate her. Her father died when she was thirteen and Connell has heard she has a mental illness now or something.” I’m reading this as a shift to the narrator reporting about Marianne—kind of from Connell’s perspective still. But this is not the sort of comment a real person would probably make. Like you know someone, and you think—they have no friends and are contemptuous of everyone. It’s too well-formed, as an inner thought and attribution about someone. It reads more like the narrator commenting, even commenting on Connell’s experience of “hearing” about Marianne. This chapter is the narrator showing a scene between Connell, Marianne, and Connell’s mother, Lorraine. It is all about Connell reacting to Marianne, and culminates with him saying, “I never said I hated you…” And then the narrator says, describing Marianne, “That gets her attention, and she looks up.” This may be the only instance of the perspective shifting to Marianne. Connell might infer that he got her attention, especially by her behavior of looking up, but he wouldn’t know this for sure. The story doesn’t say, “Because Marianne looked up, Connell figured he’d gotten her attention by saying he never said he hated her.” Then Marianne says, “Well, I like you…” and this is significant. The chapter describes how Connell is attracted to Marianne, albeit in a conflicted way. And he is shown as having rather constrained experiences of sex. “Any time he has had sex in real life, he has found it to be so stressful as to be largely unpleasant, leading him to suspect that there’s something wrong with him, that he’s unable to be intimate with women, that he’s somehow developmentally impaired.” Chapter Two, entitled, “Three Weeks Later (February 2011) shifts to Marianne. “She sits at her dressing table looking at her face in the mirror.” She encounters her loathsome older brother, Alan. Here’s a description of him. “Though he’s grinning, the force and extremity of this impersonation makes him look angry.” This is the narrator using elegant prose to show Marianne’s reaction. A real person probably wouldn’t think this thought, only that “he looks angry, he’s pretending to smile. What a lout.” After a paragraph break, time shifts to the past three weeks. From Marianne’s perspective, we learn about her watching Connell playing football (not American football), and lusting after him. We learn about what’s been happening in the past three weeks. “After their conversation in the kitchen, when she told him she liked him, (Chapter One), Connell started coming over to her house more often. The narrator comments, “She had to laugh then, and he had to laugh because she did. They couldn’t look at each other when they were laughing…” This represents a slight intrusion into Connell’s head, I believe. An explanation of his behavior. The next paragraph re-establishes the focus on Marianne’s perspective by using the word “seem.” “Connell seemed to understand how she felt about school…He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities…This surprised her.” (that he seemed to think that). The use of “seemed” establishes that through the narrator, Marianne’s thoughts about Connell are being described. As things continue in the story’s recent past, we read about the couple’s first kiss, the powerful attraction Marianne feels towards Connell, and this culminates in a paragraph break and shift back to the present where Marianne leaves after fending off Alan and going to Connell’s house for a sexual liaison. This is the narrator showing her perspective on things—almost all. This pattern of the narrator alternating between showing Connell’s perspective, then Marianne’s, continues throughout the book, giving the reader a double description of a relationship. It makes me remember the novel’s epigram from George Eliot: “…to many among us neither heaven nor hell has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence…” (whiny voice—‘scuse me, Mr. Pretentious Bully—‘scuse me!) You again? Security! (You’re making this too complicated, as usual. Isn’t the narration just omniscient? Hah, I’ve caught you making a mistake—hey, hey, hands off, I’ll go quietly. I’ll take my answer off the air). Thank you. I thought the door was locked. Let’s move on. (cool professional voice—But Mr. Bray, doesn’t the whiny voice have a point? Could you explain?) ‘Kay. The question concerns different kinds of narration. Omniscient narration is when the narrator entity can show all the different characters inside and out. The omniscient narrator knows the whole story from beginning to end and is relating it to the audience. In Normal People, the narrator presents one of two characters at a time, first showing Connell’s experience of the story, then Marianne’s. And as we discussed last week, there’s a sense that the story’s narrator doesn’t “know” the story from beginning to end; it’s more that the narrator is showing the on-going story of two people. Of course, that is illusion. We’ve also talked about how the story makes considerable use of free indirect style, which blurs the distinction between narrator and character. This is close to what’s called “third person limited point of view,” a style where a narrator sticks to one character but remains in third person. Normal People is in third person, the difference is that the narrator presents the alternating perspectives of two characters. There is another issue lurking here, my friends. The issue of dialogue. Is dialogue merely another aspect of the narrator showing the reader the behavior of the characters, or is it the characters themselves taking over the storytelling? Let’s wrestle with this next time. Till then. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

This week, let’s look more closely at the role of the narrator in Normal People. A definition, please. A person who narrates something, especially a character who recounts the events of a novel. So, the narrator entity tells the story, right? I’m afraid it’s more complicated. Are we going down the rabbit hole? Hang on. Long time readers of this blog will recall that I like to make a distinction between the real author of a story, the implied author, the narrator, and the protagonist(s). Generally, the narrator tells the protagonist's story, or may even be the protagonist or some other character. (Nick in Great Gatsby). There are certain books, Dostoevsky’s come to mind, where the characters vie with the narrator in telling the story (polyphony, y’all). The implied author is a separate entity from the real author. This is a controversial and paradoxical stance that I have attempted to explain before. Let’s just say that the implied author structures a particular story, choosing the way the story is told, including who and what the narrator is. Let’s examine a particular scene in Normal People. Midway through the chapter entitled, Two Months Later (April 2012), we have a paragraph break, and then this passage: “Marianne went home for a couple of days this week, and when she came back to Dublin last night she seemed quiet. They watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg together in her apartment. At the end Marianne cried but she turned her face away so it looked like she wasn’t crying. This unsettled Connell. The film had a pretty sad ending but he didn’t really see what there was to cry about.” Appropriately, this passage is in past tense, as the previous section was in the present. However, I’m finding it difficult to contextualize things. In this passage, the use of the word “this week” fixes the time as relating to the previous scene but I don’t know if it was before or after. I think before. It probably should be said, just to be clear, that Connell and Marianne are sexually active with each other. Because of Marianne’s tears, Connell decides she's upset about something. “The character in the film had become pregnant unexpectedly, and Connell was trying to remember when Marianne has last had her period…Eventually, in a panic, he said: Hey, you’re not pregnant or anything, are you?” Is this evidence of the dim-wittedness of young men? Prraps, best B. But Connell’s a good sort, maybe a bit emotionally constrained. Marianne laughs and assures Connell she is not pregnant. “No, she said, I got my period this morning…What would you do if I was?” Connell states that he would support whatever decision she made. And Marianne says she probably would like to keep a baby but adds: “Do you think I’d be a bad mother?” Connell assures her he thinks she would be a good mother. They talk about their respective families and how they’d react to Marianne being pregnant. Connell assures Marianne that his mother would also be supportive. “She loves you, don’t worry.” But about her own family, Marianne says, “I don’t think they care very much what I do.” Connell thinks about how Marianne has described having “strained” relationships with her family. Of course, we the readers know it’s a bit more serious than strained. Marianne’s father was physically abusive to she and her mother, and we’ve seen evidence that her older brother Alan is rather like dear old dad. Connell thinks: “…she almost never goes home, or she goes and then comes back like this, distracted and sullen, saying she had a fight with her family again, and not wanting to talk about it.” He says: “You had another falling-out with them, did you?” Marianne acknowledges that she did. They go to bed, and Connell gives her an orgasm (I know you’re curious—read the book). Then she seems happy, and Connell is happy because he can make her happy. “He was the only one who knew her like that.” I do not summarize this scene at length to poke fun. I have another purpose, best B. The scene is interesting because we have the mysterious narrator entity showing us Connell’s perspective, including his inner experience. However, we the reader also possess lots of other information to contextualize things. We know things Connell doesn’t know, things Marianne knows and doesn’t know. Things the narrator doesn’t know. Really? How could that be? I kind of slipped that in there. Heh, heh, heh. Connell doesn’t know just how bad Marianne’s family is to her; he seems to have a need to think they “love” her, which is not her experience at all. Marianne doesn’t know all about Connell’s feelings about his family, about how he feels about his father (I’m not sure Connell knows this himself). She might guess that Connell feels badly about not being able to support a baby, but she doesn’t know this in the sense of Connell having told her. He didn’t. And the narrator? How could a narrator not know what’s going on in its own story? Well. This reader, reading this scene, immediately wonders if the reason Marianne is crying while watching the film is not because she’s pregnant but because she isn’t. Her period represents the loss of the possibility that she was pregnant. Of course, I am unusually sensitive and know all about women. (raucous laughter in the background. Women’s voices. Sound of a chair thrown). ‘Kay. But this was my interpretation, okay, maybe not the only possible one. But not Connell’s and not I think, the narrator’s who’s showing the scene from Connell’s perspective. It is the implied author who is communicating here with the authorial audience, the audience that reads critically and doesn’t just accept whatever the narrator says at face value. Also, it could be said that the narrator doesn’t know the title of the story or how it’s structured, meaning the long passages of time between the chapters. And what did happen when Marianne visited her origin family? She never says exactly, the narrator never describes it. Connell is shown inferring things about it. Does the narrator know and is refusing to tell? I don’t think so; I think the implied author is showing that the narrator has limits, that there are things outside of the narrator’s awareness. We are dealing with two levels of communication here. First there is the narrator of Normal People speaking to its ideal narratee, the audience who will “get” all the narrator says and not what it doesn’t. Then there is the authorial audience, whom the implied author is addressing. This is the audience that, while reading, is aware they are reading fiction, that the story has been contrived to produce certain affects, certain questions. And membership in these audiences can overlap. It is perhaps another paradox, but there is more in the book than what the narrator shows. Till next time. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

Normal People, I’m going to say, is a book of recollection. A story of two people, told from a future vantage point and ending in a way that indicates the story will continue. One of the chief ways the author gives this effect is in the use of time. Time is handled in an interesting and skillful fashion. The reader notices right away that each chapter of the story is identified by a reference to a date and period of time. Thus, the first chapter is “January 2011,” the second chapter is “Three Weeks Later (February 2011),” and so on. The story is episodic; it is told in episodes or discrete scenes. The scenes that occur in the present are told in present tense, those in the past, in past tense. There are also scenes that collapse time; they are in imperfect tense and signify on-going actions or thought. Let’s look at how this works. The fifth chapter is entitled “Two Days Later (April 2011), which we might note is four months after the beginning of things. “He stands at the side of the bed while his mother goes to find one of the nurses.” Present tense—the implied author is cueing us that we are in April of 2011, the action is happening right now and it’s from Connell’s perspective. It is not the reader’s present—more on this later. We could say that the narrator wants the narratee to accept that this is the present, the authorial audience knows that, as the book was written in 2018, the story is actually looking back, recollecting, if you will. More on this later. Then without a paragraph break, a shift to an imperfect tense: “No one except Lorraine knows who Connell’s father is.” And then a shift to past, again without any paragraph break. “He drove Lorraine to the polling station to vote at the end of February.” Here Connell is apparently remembering an incident that occurred two months before. Then, “The other night Marianne told him that she’d thought he’d turned out well as a person…he wished he could tell Lorraine what she’d said…That her only son was not a worthless person, after all. That she hadn’t wasted her life.” Then it goes back to the present scene at the hospital. So, within two or three pages, without the visual cue of a paragraph break, the story has referred to four different instances (episodes) of time and space: The present of Connell and his mother visiting grandmother in the hospital. An imperfect time of thought about his father and mother, leading to— A memory of driving his mother to vote. A memory from “The other night,” of Marianne telling him he has value as a person. A return to the present at the hospital. I think we could say thematically that this passage is about Connell reacting to the encounter with Marianne in the context of being with his mother and grandmother, who tend to disconfirm him (or at least he thinks they do, or the book shows this). Marianne affirms him. But it’s told as four discrete events in time, it’s episodic. Complex and elegantly done. But wait, are you saying the use of the present tense is an illusion? Yup. After all, the story is written after the fact. Always, best beloved. What affect does this use of time have? The present tense, illusion or not, gives an immediacy to the writing. If the past tense refers to events that have already occurred, the present tense is about what’s happening right now, as the reader reads. I think what Sally Rooney does in this book is to show a recollected story, much of it as if it were happening right now, even though it’s a recollection of episodes. A recollected story elicits the retrieval of contextual information pertaining to a specific event or experience that has occurred (not that is occurring). It includes such features as visual imagery, narrative structure, and feelings of familiarity. 'Kay, this is from a cognitive psychologist’s description of episodic memory but it sure sounds like a description of a lot of fiction writing. As I understand it, humans have two broad types of memory; we remember discrete facts like telephone numbers, names, directions, and we recollect episodes. These episodes are remembered as narrative stories and often as visual images. These episodes involve an emotional context, happiness, fear, sadness, etc. Dreams are like this too. Fiction, with its use of narrative structure, emotional context, and visual imagery, is very congruent with human experience. At its best, we read a work of fiction and think, this is exactly the way I’ve felt. And Normal People is a fine example of this, of getting very close to “normal” experience. The story accomplishes this by using the mechanisms of recollection that humans use in “real” life. Till next time. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

As we continue our exploration of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, let’s take a look at some structural issues. The story concerns two main characters, Marianne and Connell, and is told by an unnamed narrator in intriguing and adept fashion, a narrator who is able to whiz around and get inside all the characters’ heads. This busy and dare we say omniscient narrator entity however, is not an “I” in the story. It is not a character narrator as we have encountered before, actually just last time when we looked at Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. The narrator remains anonymous and apart and is pretty close to our old friend the implied author. Your old friend. There is liberal use of an element called free indirect speech or discourse. We’ve encountered this before too. Mario Vargas Llosa, in his book The Perpetual Orgy (a favorite at my house), writing of Gustave Flaubert, writes, “Flaubert’s great technical contribution lies in his bringing the omniscient narrator so close to the character that the boundary lines between the two vanish, in his creating of an ambivalence in which the reader does not know whether what the narrator says comes from the invisible teller or from the character…” It should be said that the device of free indirect speech was not invented by Flaubert; it goes back to at least the eighteenth-century and was used brilliantly by Jane Austen. What is it and why are you talking about it in the context of Normal People? What is the point? ‘Kay. Free indirect speech is what happens when the subordinate clause from reported speech becomes a contained unit, dispensing with the “she said” or “she thought.” For instance: Kate looked at her bank statement. Why had she spent her money so recklessly? Who the devil is Kate? She’s an example. More to the point, who is speaking here, Kate or the narrator? Or both? Normal People begins with this passage. Although I don’t think it’s free indirect speech, it is ambiguous as to who is speaking. “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.” Pretty straightforward, I suppose—but whose perspective is being described here? It could be that Marianne is shown answering the door when she is alerted by Connell ringing the bell. Or it could be that when Connell rings the bell, he perceives Marianne answering the door. Oh, oh. Down the rabbit hole, my friends. In a third reading, it could be that the narrator is showing this sequence to the reader. The passage continues: “She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.” ‘Kay, who’s noticing this? Is it the narrator telling the reader what Marianne is wearing, or is it the narrator describing what Connell notices about Marianne? Or is the narrator describing Marianne’s own awareness of her attire? And this is just the first paragraph. But, you say (you actually did say) why is this important? The reader could blissfully read this paragraph with the belief that she/he knows exactly what’s going on. No need for some “pretentious bully” to ‘splain the hidden meanings. The point is that there’s a lot of ambiguity here, and it creates an effect. At the very least, it brings Connell and Marianne close together; it puts the focus on their relationship, and this, we shall see, is the point of the book. Still on the first page, we have this passage: “Lorraine folds the rubber gloves up neatly…” Lorraine is Connell’s mother, an important but not central character, so it’s probably the narrator here who’s describing her folding the gloves “neatly.” This use of an adverb is what we get from a narrator describing something vs. a character’s own thoughts. “We” don’t usually think using adverbs. On page two, we have: “He (Connell) presses his hands down further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once.” Huh, again this is probably not something Connell would think about himself unless he’s unusually poetic. It could be the narrator describing how he’s arranging his hands using a metaphor, it could also be the narrator showing Marianne’s perspective on Connell’s behavior. Most of chapter one is the narrator observing the encounter between Connell and Marianne and generally showing Connell’s perspective and reactive thoughts. There is a skosh of exposition: “People know that Marianne lives in the white mansion with the driveway and that Connell’s mother is a cleaner, but no one knows of the special relationship between these facts.” Marianne and Connell may “know” this but wouldn’t “say” it in this way. It is the narrator’s language and perspective. What about free indirect speech, you say. Well, here’s an example from later on in the first chapter. “When he (Connell) talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a doorway from normal life and then closing it behind him.” Yes, the narrator is showing Connell’s inner experience, but it’s in his language (“weird things). Please contrast this with a more traditional showing of inner-ness. “Connell thinks, when I talk to Marianne, I have a sense of total privacy between us. I could tell her anything, even weird stuff, and she’d never repeat it.” Incidentally, the quoted passage mentions “normal life,” which refers to the title. We will investigate this theme of “normal-ity” as we go. I promise you. Perhaps this is a good time as any to bring up Gérard Genette's distinction between “the world in which one tells” and “the world of which one tells.” This refers to two different modes of storytelling, one in which the storyteller is part of the story being told and one in which it is outside of it, showing and describing. The narrator of Normal People is outside in the sense of not being a character in the story whom the other characters affect but who is right there in the room like a phantom the other characters are not aware of. There is a boundary between the narrator, and Marianne and Connell, and it is different from the boundary between the story and the reader. Marianne and Connell are not shown affecting the narrator, but Normal People affects me. Ooh. Till next time. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

This week, a new story, my friends, Irish author Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, Normal People. Normal People was a bestseller in the United States and won critical acclaim, including being longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Set in Ireland during the post 2008 economic downturn, it concerns two young Irish folk, Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron, and their relationship over time as friends and lovers. An Emmy nominated television adaption of the book aired in 2020. After the title page, we find an epigram, a quote from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: “It is one of the secrets in that change in mental poise which has been fitfully named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.” It’s no accident that this quotation appears at the beginning. Let’s keep it in mind as we study the book, and perhaps return at the end to consider its meaning. The title too—Normal People—is it meant ironically or more literally? We’ll see, as the orange demon used to say. Writing about a different book in The New York Review of Books, Anahid Nersessian makes an interesting comment, “…the romances of Sally Rooney seem aimed at readers who, like her characters, have sex with the austere diligence of a high school valedictorian. What sets Rooney apart is that she makes what ought to be the most ordinary aspects of intimacy seem aspirational, as if consent and mutual gratification—however defined—were the summit and not the ground of erotic possibility.” At first, this seems rather negative, painting Ms. Rooney’s work as romance, an implicitly lessor genre, and then describing her characters as austere and diligent in sexual matters, suggesting they’re a joyless lot. Valedictorians might object! However, the full quote actually offers praise, saying that Ms. Rooney is set apart from other writers in that she makes ordinary aspects of intimacy seem aspirational. Consent and mutual gratification are the summit of erotic possibility. Well, yes, Connell and Marianne have sex a lot. Yay! And they are not particularly wracked by guilt about it. Double yay! Some critics have praised Normal People for being a realistic depiction of contemporary men and women in their teens and twenties, particularly regarding their sexuality. Prraps so, best beloved. Right from the beginning, there is a sexual tension between Marianne and Connell; they are attracted to each other, despite class differences and the issue of Marianne being a sort of pariah at the private school they both attend. This is not a traditional heterosexual tale of the man pursuing the woman who must finally offer consent to do the deed. Indeed, Marianne seems to be good-naturedly reveling in the power of her sexual attractiveness, in the way Connell’s face turns red around her. Connell is the one who seems somewhat embarrassed by his lust. And, I’d say, Ms. Rooney, a woman, writes empathetically about Connell, a male character. There are some interesting structural issues in the book having to do with the narrator and the use of time, and rest assured we will be getting into those. Yay? At this point, let’s say that the connection between Connell and Marianne is that Connell’s mother Lorraine, cleans house for Marianne’s mother, and that the two young folk attend high school together. In the first chapter, there’s an interesting passage where Marianne and Connell are talking about school. Marianne seems flirtatious and confidant. Connell “dreads being left alone with her like this, but he also finds himself fantasizing about things he could say to impress her.” His dread is due to his concern over being identified with social pariah Marianne by his very caste-conscious schoolmates. In this scene, he points out in the context of talking about tests that Marianne isn’t at the top of the class in English, and she responds, “Maybe you should give me grinds, Connell.” Connell finds this interesting and anxiety provoking. “Giving grinds” is ambiguous; in British/Irish slang, it can mean tutoring, taking extra lessons outside of school hours, and it may also refer to sexual intercourse. Then Marianne (that scamp) introduces a mise en abyme, a story within the story, a part that is emblematic of the whole. One of the teachers, Miss Neary, is apparently lusting after Connell and this embarrasses him—the same structure of Connell being embarrassed over Marianne’s advances. Marianne tells Connell she likes him and this leads to the two of them arranging for Marianne to come to Connell’s house when his mother is gone so that they can have sex. And this is presented in a refreshingly straightforward manner. Marianne escapes her loathsome brother Alan (more on him later) and sends Connell a text—on my way, and he replies, cool, see you soon. Sex ensues. “Kay. Let’s talk about sex a minute (or two). I’m going to say that in Normal People, Marianne and Connell present a generally positive view of sex, although we need to talk about Marianne more in this regard (her choice of partners and certain…behaviors, in particular.) In fairly modern parlance, they are both sex positive people, meaning that they consider sex a beneficial and healthy part of being human. This would be in contrast to sex negative people who deem any sexual behavior outside of procreation to be evil or forbidden. Sex negativity restricts the establishment of an inclusive world in which everyone can express their sexual and gender orientations without fear or judgement. It may make people feel depressed and guilty about not thinking a certain way about sexual matters. Connell and Marianne frequently have sex as part of their caring relationship—and not to procreate, Connell uses a condom. Normal People shows sex as essentially joyous and meaningful, an attitude that gives yours truly hope for the future, as well as validating Ms. Nersessian’s comments. Till next time. #NormalPeople #Sally Rooney #AlanBray

Last week, due to constraints of space and time, we interrupted our discussion of Cellists, the last story in Nocturnes. Let’s continue where we left off. In September, Mr. Kaufman says there’s an opening at a hotel in Amsterdam for a cellist, with “light housekeeping duties.” Tibor asks for a couple of days to decide. His hesitation makes the fellas in the band angry. “That woman’s turned him into an arrogant little shit.” So the fellas are perhaps jealous/envious. They think Eloise is like a flirty actress, they’re mad at Tibor for not accepting his lot, which is theirs as well. They’ve all had the same dreams as he but apparently without such a mentor. Tibor had never told Eloise about Mr. Kaufman, feeling ashamed. Now he doesn’t want to tell her about the job offer. In a scene where he’s playing for her, she stops him, saying there’s something wrong. But she thinks it’s because he’s realized she can’t play the cello, which she admits to Tibor, saying she is a virtuoso, but is yet “unwrapped.” Tibor is almost “unwrapped,” thanks to her help. Tibor shows anger at her deception but quickly forgives her for misleading him. However, he decides to go away on a short holiday, and before leaving, lets Mr. Kaufman know he’ll take the job. So, something occurs when he’s confronted with Eloise’s lies. It’s a turning point. Maybe he decides she hasn’t really been teaching him anything, that it’s all been a sham. And he’s running out of money. So he takes the job. But it’s more than the money issue. Maybe he’s accepting that he’s not the virtuoso he thought he was. If Eloise can lie about herself, maybe she’s been lying about his potential too, lying in order to be intimate with him. When he returns after a week, she welcomes him emotionally, wants him to play for her, he does. They have “a wonderful afternoon together,” and are closer than ever. They don’t allude to her confession or to his absence. Then, Peter appears. Peter—the man who loves Eloise and from whom she’s been hiding. Eloise wants to talk to Tibor alone while Peter gets ready for dinner. She says she’ll probably marry Peter. Tibor tells her he has taken the hotel job, they wish each other happiness and part. Para break. “Tibor left our city soon after that.” The guys have drinks with him a last time. “Like I said, this all happened seven years ago. Giancarlo, Ernesto, all the boys from that time except me and Fabian, they’ve all moved on. Until I spotted him in the piazza the other day, I hadn’t thought about our young Hungarian maestro for a long time. He wasn’t hard to recognize…And the way he gestured with his finger, calling for a waiter, there was something—maybe I imagined this—something of the impatience, the off-handedness that comes with a certain kind of bitterness. But even that’s unfair…it seemed he’d lost that youthful anxiety to please, and those careful manners he had back then…perhaps he has a day job behind a desk somewhere. Maybe he had some business to do nearby and came through our city just for the old time’s sake, who knows? If he comes back to the square, and I’m not playing, I’ll go over and have a word with him.” Seven years ago, the band blamed Eloise because they believed she’d made Tibor think he was talented and then abandoned him. The reader sees a different story—so does Tibor, I think. The story about the connection between Eloise and Tibor doesn’t have that much to do with the music. She needed him, he needed her. He needed her to make him feel special, and she needed him as a way to hide from and delay the inevitable marriage to Peter which represented something, a compromise, a settling for something less than what she’d dreamed of. So both Tibor and Eloise transform in the story, accepting less and giving up on their dreams. At the end, we don’t know how Tibor himself feels about the encounter with Eloise, and we know nothing of Eloise. We do know they had a powerful connection that the narrator didn’t understand. The narrator, as is true in the other stories, does not change. He is the storyteller. We might recall from the first post about Nocturnes that Ishiguro stated the book was not comprised of short stories, on the contrary, he saw the sections linked like movements in a symphony. How about this? As we’ve gone through Nocturnes, I’ve mentioned themes and motifs that recur. Each story makes some mention of windows and doors and features a first person narrator who is a musician; the action in each story often culminates in a scene set during the early evening, the end of the day. The narrators are unreliable and clueless about the characters and events they storytell about. And these character subjects are typically a couple or a part of one, who are experiencing stress and heartbreak. These are the elements that connect the five parts. But is there a progression, the way there would be in a musical piece? Or a novel? Crooners tells the story through Jan of a cold and cynical arrangement made of their marriage by Lindy and Tony Gardner. Come Rain or Come Shine has glimmers of sincerity between the characters, despite Ray’s shenanigans. In Malvern Hills, the couple who are the subject of the story, Tilo and Sonja, are sincerely touching and tragic as they confront long-standing problems in their marriage. Nocturnes is funny and slapstick, but ultimately sad as the narrator, Steve, winds up alone. And in Cellists, we read about a real, although fleeting, connection between Tibor and Eloise. So it seems Nocturnes begins with a revelation of considerable cynicism about love, and conclude with a multi-layered showing of tenderness between people who sincerely connect and part. Between these, we have a tale of a marriage in which the partners try to trick each other into reconciliation, one of two people facing the dissolution of their marriage, and then a story about the relationship between two people who clumsily try to help each other but eventually part ways. A complex and satisfying book, my friends. Till next time and a new book, Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Ooh! #Nocturnes #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

In Cellists, the fifth and final story in Nocturnes, we return to the city of Venice but with new characters. The complex narrative structure involves the story of a young musician, Tibor, told by a first-person narrator, another musician who is an unnamed saxophonist, although it could be someone who played with Jan in Crooners. It begins with the narrator telling a story about how he was performing in the piazza and saw a man whom he recognized from seven years earlier, Tibor, a cellist. At that time, the narrator and the other fellas in the band had befriended Tibor, who had come to Venice to perform in a summer arts festival. The story looks back in time from at least two vantage points; one, when the narrator sees Tibor again, and two, when the events of the story occurred, seven years before. The narrator tells both stories, but the older story is one that Tibor related to the narrator. That’s pretty confusing. ‘Kay. Tibor has had good training and a few gigs, but they’ve petered out and he is struggling, The musicians decide to help him and introduce him to Mr. Kaufman, a sort of agent. The band members who’ve had formal musical training feel a kinship with Tibor. “But to be fair, I think it was just that they liked to take the Tibors of the world under their wing, look after them a little, maybe prepare them for what lay ahead, so when the disappointments came they wouldn’t be quite so hard to take.” This is a nice mise en abyme—an encapsulation of the whole story, a story of someone helping Tibor and trying to prepare him for the inevitable disappointment. The story of what occurred seven years before gets going. “When people say Tibor changed for the worse that summer, that his head got too big for his own good, that this was all due to the American woman, well, maybe there’s something to that.” After a paragraph break, we read: “Tibor had become aware of the woman while sipping his first coffee of the day.” The story enters Tibor’s “head,” although the narrator continues to tell the story to his narratee. The woman accosts Tibor, saying she’d heard his recital of the previous day. She flatters him, tells him he has potential. “At this stage, what you’re doing is waiting for that one person to come and hear you.” “She looked very pleasant, beautiful even,” he told us at the time. “But as you see, she’s ten, fifteen years older than me. So why would I think anything was going on?” So, at some point, seven years ago, Tibor had told the guys this story and now it’s being related by the narrator to the narratee. Huh. The woman, Eloise McCormack, implies that she is an accomplished cellist who can help him to play better. “Like you,” she said quickly. “I have a sense of mission, I guess.” She is not telling the truth; she does not play the cello, although at this point, the reader has no reason for doubt. As in the other stories in Nocturnes, sexuality doesn’t factor in here, although the reader may wonder. What is going on with the two levels of narration? The narrator is telling a story to his narratee, and the implied author is telling the story to his audience. I don’t think at this point, there’s a lot of divergence. The mystery of Eloise is intact on both levels. She is lying about herself, but no one knows that—except the implied author who doesn’t reveal it. Tibor is perhaps unreliably overestimating his talent, but again, that’s not clear. The narrator knows the truth and is withholding some information. Tibor, after two days of indecision, goes to Eloise’s room (the bedroom is closed off) and plays for her. She critiques his playing, and as a result, he feels he’s playing better than ever but struggles, wanting to leave, wanting to stay. He tells his friends (after the fact): “I could suddenly see everything,” he explained to us. ”A garden I’d not yet entered.” He returns over several days and plays. “…to an outsider, had there been one, (her comments) might have seemed presumptuous.” An interesting passage—who notes this? The implied author, not Tibor—“Tibor was no longer capable of regarding her interventions in these terms.” “But what’s she like herself?” we kept asking him. “On the cello?” This implies he is leaving the sessions with Eloise and going to tell the guys about it after. Tibor is curious and then suspicious about Eloise’s playing. Where is her cello? One day, the bedroom door is ajar, and he looks in but sees no cello. “Would a virtuoso, even on holiday, go so long without touching her instrument? But this question, too, he pushed out of his mind.” “As the summer went on, they began to prolong their conversations by coming over to the café together after their sessions, and she’d buy him coffees, cakes, sometimes a sandwich. Now their talk was no longer just about music.” She asks him about a girlfriend. He’s reluctant to ask her personal questions but learns a little. She’s American, has moved from Boston to Portland, dislikes Paris. “She would laugh much more easily now than in the first days of their friendship and she developed the habit, when they stepped out of the Excelsior and crossed the piazza, of linking her arm through his. This was the point at which we first started noticing them, a curious couple…a flirty actress, as Ernesto put it…In the days before we got to talking to Tibor, we used to waste a lot of idle chat on them, the way men in a band do.” So the narrator is observing them some time after the sessions have begun. The “flirty actress” remark is interesting as it will be revealed that Eloise really is acting the role of a musician. But we the readers see that she is not so much flirty as anxious and needy. Then, Eloise says that she is involved with a man named Peter Henderson, who wants to marry her. She is hiding from him in Venice, out of apparent ambivalence. “She didn’t bring up Peter again, but now, after that exchange, a new dimension had opened in their relationship…he (Tibor) knew his presence there beside her was appreciated.” So her revelation helps Tibor to make sense of what’s happening. She’s involved with Tibor and the intimacy is helping her because she’s hiding out from Peter, postponing a decision. This makes Tibor feel more comfortable. This is one of the book’s themes—the narrator (here once removed) is confronted with a male/female relationship in stress. Also, it should be noted that, like many of the characters in the book, Tibor is an immigrant from another country, Hungary. They continue their relationship. Eloise suggests she play passages he’s having trouble with, but he resists this, saying that if she played, he would just be copying her, when she talks, in contrast, it “opens windows.” There’s a sense that Tibor knows Eloise is lying about being a cellist and is trying to protect her. And here is another theme in the book—windows, portals. ‘Kay. I think we should stop here for this week and conclude our discussion next time. Till then. #Nocturnes #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray