Formal qualities

How do you define formal?

I'm guessing the question presupposes a universal novel form or forms, but I'm also waiting for further input.

I think, in a way, you're talking about the difference between a prosist and a storyteller?

What on earth is a formal novel? Are you talking about something Jane Austen would write where everyone speaks with perfect grammar and the sentences all feel like she wrote them with a cork in her bum? Well, I'm all for good grammar, but I would never write a novel like that... What do you mean?

As a general rule, good structure is invisible. You have to dig it out of the book by force.

Ulysses, then Lolita.

Oh, and Eugene Onegin isn't bad either.

Tristram Shandy was a formal novel, as far as I understand your use of the term.

Wait I'm confused. ( doesn't take much). Surely all novels have structure or they'd just be a big mess of words? Or am I missing something here?

Do you mean a novel in verse, like Eugene Onegin or A Suitable Boy? Or do you mean a novel with a formal pattern, like Possession, which alternates between the experiences of present-day academics and the writings of the 19th-century authors they're researching? Or do you mean a novel whose structure is explicitly foregrounded by the narrative voice, like The French Lieutenant's Woman or Tristram Shandy? Or do you mean a novel that has a very clear plan of alternating points of view (so many of these it's hard to know which to list)?

Jane Austen never inserted a cork in her bum. In fact, she had a cork phobia. She also evinced a deep fear of broom handles and could stay in no house where they were present. This made things difficult for her servants.

It is widely known that Austen hated Bath. This aversion has been variously interpreted by literary scholars who overlook the obvious: the fashion among the city's beaux to carry walking sticks.

Occasionally Austen wrote through her phobias and traumas, but she was always careful to delete these passages from her final draft. Hence literature has lost the scene in Mansfield Park where Fanny falls off a ladder in the theater and, um, lights on a carelessly discarded billiard cue. Also discarded was a hair-raising bit in the gypsy scene from Emma, involving Frank Churchill's wrath and riding crop.

It's a fascinating topic, but like Elizabeth saving her breath to swell her song, I better save the rest of my research for my formal monograph.

Form! Oh yeah. Any form that serves the story is fine, even nontemporal narrative and pastiche. The less I notice it, the better it's used.

Any form for form's sake is likely to make me read Sense and Sensibility again.

I heart Jane.

anybody got a dictionary?

My own novel, Shock and Awe, is a candidate. It is formally structured in exact correspondence to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, with the brilliant twist that in every place where Finnegan's Wake doesn't quite make sense my own novel does, and in every place in Finnegan's Wake where there is an obscure pun or allusion, in my book there isn't. Oddly, no critic has yet remarked on the extent to which my book precisely mimics the forma structure of Finnegan's Wake by not being anything like it. (A big hint to those in search of topics for a Master's thesis.)

But the best novel, from a formal point of view, would be the unfinished Don Quixote, the great novel written by Pierre Menard.

It followed such a formalism that it was a line-for-line duplication of the same novel of the same name by some guy named Cervantes--yet far greater, because more informed by intervening history. Now there's formalism for you.

I won't bother to mention the obvious way A.A. Milne crafted the Winnie-the-Pooh stories to follow the Passion of Christ and the Stations of the Cross--although the precise role of Piglet is still open to debate; many have argued convincingly that this diminutive swine is not only a character with parallels in the Gospels, but simultaneously a wide-ranging critique of Jewish dietary strictures.

On the other hand, I think that perhaps I will be the first to point out the fact that, without exception, every one of the twenty-six letters letters employed by John Hawkes in The Lime Twig are precisely the same set of letters employed, many decades before, by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone. Coincidence? I think not.

The formal structures of Goodnight, Moon and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (and the author of the latter's masterful Green Eggs and Ham) are too apparent to require comment--though I think these structural devices hide the fact that both of these authors are, at their core, what Gardner would have described as "bardic, incantatory" writers rather than those concerned with crafting an an explicit, parallel architectonic narrative.

Well, okay--maybe Goodnight, Moon is architectonic. So sue me.

Genuine question. So, it's somehow using another author's outline to write your own book?

JJ

the originator of this post has AWOLed, so there's really no point in continuing this thread further by speculating about what they might've meant. So let's consider this one

CLOSED

I go camping for four days and come back to see a new Mod in town.

Perhaps we can give it a bit more time, anis.

JJ

I'm not a Mod,
and most likely never will be one,
even if I were to post 100,000,000 replies and be here for the next 20 years w/o missing a single day.
I'm just not fit for such a job, nor much else either

After David I's brilliant formal analyses, it would be a crime against literature to close this thread. Also, I'm working out a theory of how both cork-phobia and cork-philia influenced the use of form in writers from Aristophanes to Anne Lamott.

due to popular demand this thread is once again

OPEN

David I said:

My own novel, Shock and Awe, is a candidate. It is formally structured in exact correspondence to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, with the brilliant twist that in every place where Finnegan's Wake doesn't quite make sense my own novel does, and in every place in Finnegan's Wake where there is an obscure pun or allusion, in my book there isn't. Oddly, no critic has yet remarked on the extent to which my book precisely mimics the forma structure of Finnegan's Wake by not being anything like it. (A big hint to those in search of topics for a Master's thesis.)

But the best novel, from a formal point of view, would be the unfinished Don Quixote, the great novel written by Pierre Menard.

Click to expand...

10 points for the Borges allusion.

-5 points for not actually mimicking Finnegans Wake. You got my hopes up! And you misspelled the title every time, by the way. No apostrophe.

The James Joyce Museum in Sandy Cove, S. Co. Dublin, has a collection of the corks that Joyce used while writing Finnegans Wake. The even more extensive collection of corks he used while writing Ulysses was stolen in 1997; alas, it remains unrecovered.

Some scholars claim that Joyce used corks while writing Portrait, but others claim he was still in his pre-cork stage at this time.

An early draft of Barnstone's Borges at Eighty referred to the author's lifelong love-hate relationship with not only corks but also bottlecaps. Barnestone removed these references at the publisher's request.