*lanser jargon*

I looked Susan Lanser up. She has a wide body of work in narratology, which explains why she has the energy and time to conceptualize those very elaborate diagrams of the descriptive poetics of point of view. On the other hand, Susan is a feminist, which explains why she particularly focused her attention on how the aforementioned poetics formed ideology.

Despite having to read the chapter about four times before finally getting it, I think that Lanser’s close reading of Chopin’s “A Story of an Hour,” and Hemingway’s “The Killers” effectively demonstrated her elaborate diagrams on the descriptive poetics of point of view.

THE AUTHORIAL VOICE

Much of Lanser’s discussion on the two stories were aimed to extract a certain voice from what I understand as the implied author, and this voice may or may not be homologous to that of the real author’s own experience and principles.

In her reading, Lanser doesn’t, as formalists do, just look at individual constitutes of the narrative text and explain them as is. She is actually concerned about what kind of authorial voice emerges from these narrative constitutes and what kind of ideas this authorial voice is imparting through the diegetic elements.

As I understand it, ideology is deduced from both diegetic voices, revealed through a (very) thorough examination of point of view, more specifically in terms of narrative status, contact, and stance; as well as nondiegetic voices pertaining to the real author’s own background and ideological biases.

The Descriptive Poetics of Point of View. Remembering Chatman’s narrative communications model discussed in class many sessions ago, there are multiple layers that constitute the diegetic and nondiegetic voices that ideology is supposedly drawn from. It would be a pretty noisy place to conduct evaluations, hence, as Lanser applies in her readings of the two stories, she uses the descriptive poetics of point of view to make measurements for judgement.

A STORY OF AN HOUR

I was particularly interested on how Lanser breaks down Chopin’s technique in “A Story of an Hour” in order to communicate feminist ideology. I read her analysis about three times before I bothered to look at her diagrams on poetics, only by which time I finally understood what the heck she was talking about, because most of the terms were just jargon to me until I saw how they all fit together in the diagrams.

In particular, I only want to talk about this part in that section: “In women’s fiction, the homologous levels of point of view often merge with striking clarity.” True enough, Chopin was herself a victim of unequal gender relations during her time. This was relatively easy to tell in her story, in contrast to Hemingway’s “The Killers” where the narrator seems to be in hiding thus making it hard to pinpoint his ideology. Nevertheless, even stories narrated like “The Killers” are still prone to “outbursts of comment” where eventually, the ideology of the text can be extracted through careful examination of technique.

CONCLUSION

I have never felt so dumb in my life, but I am truly amazed at what Lanser has done, that is once her words started sounding more like English instead of Math equations. In my defense, “point of view” meant an entirely different thing to me for the last twenty years of my life. Hence, the dissonance in suddenly having to consider it this complex multifaceted function from which ideology is generated.

Works Cited

Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." The Norton Introduction to Literature . Alison Booth, and Kelly J. Mays. 10th ed. New York, 2011. 308-315. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Scribner, 1987.

Lanser, Susan S. “Point of View as Ideology and Technique.” The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction, Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 246–276.