The Relevance of Historical Fiction in Contemporary Times. (Rough notes for a talk given)

 Definitions, famous, of History

John Jacob Anderson

"History is a narration of the events which have happened among mankind, including an account of the rise and fall of nations, as well as of other great changes which have affected the political and social condition of the human race." (John Jacob Anderson)

W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman

"History is not what you thought. It is what you remember. All other history defeats itself." (1066 and All That)

James Joyce

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." (Ulysses)

Arnold J. Toynbee

"History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead."

The Psycho-Historian

Between 1942 and 1944, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote the first short stories which were to become the basis for the Foundation trilogy. The main concept of the Foundation Trilogy is that if you are a good enough mathematician, you can accurately predict the future, based on the record of the past. Asimov read very widely indeed, so it should come as no surprise that his ideas were based on the writings of other historians.

Charles Austin Beard

"If a science of history were achieved, it would, like the science of celestial mechanics, make possible the calculable prediction of the future in history. It would bring the totality of historical occurrences within a single field and reveal the unfolding future to its last end, including all the apparent choices made and to be made. It would be omniscience. The creator of it would possess the attributes ascribed by the theologians to God. The future once revealed, humanity would have nothing to do except to await its doom."

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

"History is and should be a science ... History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies."

Voltaire

"The first foundations of all history are the recitals of the fathers to the children, transmitted afterward from one generation to another; at their origin, they are at the very most probable, when they do not shock common sense, and they lose one degree of probability in each generation." (The Philosophical Dictionary)

Edward Hallett Carr

"History is ... a dialogue between the present and the past. (originally: Geschichte ist ... ein Dialog zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit.)" (What Is History?)

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The major lessons of history? There are four: First, whom the gods destroy they first make mad with power. Second, the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small. Third, the bee fertilizes the flower it robs. Fourth, when it is dark enough you can see the stars." (Attributed to historian Charles Austin Beard, but this version is the one Martin Luther King used in "The death of evil upon the seashore")

A Pack of Tricks

Not everyone likes the study of history or finds it useful. Henry Ford was a prime example of that and so was Henry David Thoreau, what may be one of the very few things those two gentlemen had in common.

Voltaire

"History is nothing but a pack of tricks we play on the dead." (French original) "J'ay vu un temps où vous n'aimiez guères l'histoire. Ce n'est après tout qu'un ramas de tracasseries qu'on fait aux morts ... "

Henry David Thoreau

"As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs." (Walden)

Jane Austen

"History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome." (Northanger Abbey)

Ambrose Bierce

"HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools: Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown 'Tis nine-tenths lying. Faith, I wish 'twere known, Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide, Wherein he blundered and how much he lied." (Devil's Dictionary)

Malcolm X

"A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself."

The Passage of Time

Whether you like history or not, there's no denying the impact it leaves on us.

Henry David Thoreau

"Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate." (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.)

Gusti Bienstock Kollman

"You know, it's so strange, I've lived through four forms of government in my life: monarchy, republic, Hitler's Reich, American democracy. The [Weimar] republic was only ... 1918 to 1933, that's fifteen years! Imagine that, only fifteen years. But, then, Hitler was going to last a thousand years and he lasted only ... 1933 to 1945 ... twelve, twelve years only! Hah!"

Plutarch

"So very difficult a matter it is to trace and find out the truth of anything by history." (Plutarch's Lives)

Douglas Adams

"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we eat?" the second by the question "Why do we eat?" and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?" (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe)

T.S. Eliot

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

What are the Important Definitions of History? – Answered!

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Some of the important definitions of history given by different historians are given below:

The English word ‘History’ is derived from their Greek noun ‘Historia’. ‘History’ or ‘Historia’ simply means ‘enquiry’ or ‘research’.

The term ‘History’ has been taken from the German word ‘Geschichle’ means an intelligible and significant narration of the past events.

In fact development of history started with the ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides.

Herodotus popularly known as the ‘Father of History’ wrote about the Graeco-Persian wars this contains a mine of information including those relating to the ancient Egyptians and Persians. Thucidides developed this subjects on scientific lines. He wrote the “Pelopenesian Wars’ on the basis of evidence and showed the relation between causes and effects or results.

Thomas Charlyle “World History is a biography of great men”.

Prof. Renier: “History is the memories of societies.”

E.H. Carr: “History is an unending dialogue between the present and the past and the chief function of A historian is to master and understand the past as a key to the understanding of THE present.”

Prof. G.R. Elton: “History is concerned with all those human sayings, thoughts, deeds and sufferings which occurred in the past and have left present deposit; and it deals with them from the point of view of happening change and particular.”

Lord Acton: History is the unfolding story of human freedom.”

Prof. A.L. Rowse: “History is essentially the record of the life of men in societies in their geographical and their physical environments. Their social and cultural environments arises from the interaction of the one with the other, the society and its geographical condition.”

Prof. Carl G. Gustavson: “History is a mountain top of human knowledge from whence the doings of our own generation may be scanned and fitted into proper dimensions. History enables a person to see himself as part of that living process of human growth which has emerged out of the past and will inexorably project itself out beyond our own life-time. We are the product of the past but not the complete product.”

According to an article titled “7 Elements of Historical Fiction”, in general writers of fiction must address seven crucial elements: character, dialogue, setting, theme, plot, conflict, and world building.

Great examples of historical fiction in literature include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, and The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates.

Historical Fiction is a story that takes readers to a time and place in the past. How far back in time does an author have to go for their work to be considered Historical Fiction? ... Historical Fiction is set in a real place, during a culturally recognizable time.

Historical fiction transports readers to another time and place, either real or imagined. Writing historical fiction requires a balance of research and creativity, and while it often includes real people and events, the genre offers a fiction writer many opportunities to tell a wholly unique story.

Reading historical fiction allows us to be moved by what happened. ... The historical novelist exposes the reader to the inner lives of people across time and place, and in doing so illuminates history's untold stories, allowing the reader to experience a more complex truth.

Scaramouche.

1. The need for historical fiction by sensitive writers is what I want to stress.   Dickens' Hard Times is an example. Hard Times was not Historical Fiction when it was written. Tale of Two Cities was. but want to start with the startling assumption that what we write today is historical fiction in a sense, as it will be seen as that by future generations.

2. While reading Historical fiction we negotiate between the particular and the universal. Thus the biographical interpretation becomes relevant.

3. The second kind of interpretation that is needed is the historical interpretation. This also  brings in the political, the economic, the psychological, the philosophical, the religious, the social or sociological, the cultural, the anthropological, the textual etc.

"A historicist critic is one who seeks to place a text in its context, to reveal the embeddedness of, for example, Shakespeare's Macbeth in the witch-hunting mania of King James I's early reign. Historicists might use what we know about social customs, economics, politics, or religion to read a text. They might also do primary research in a historical archive, uncovering documents that shed new light on something about the text that a reader at several centuries' removed from the text's original publication previously could not see.

We weighed opposing viewpoints on the "author problem," viewpoints that either place more value on the author's intention or on the reader's reaction. Parts 2 and 3 explore a parallel "problem" in literary studies: what we might call the "time problem." Opposing viewpoints on the time problem lean toward historicist or presentist readings of texts, placing more value on the historical embeddedness we were describing above or, conversely, the modern relevance of a text."

"A presentist critic is one who seeks to place a text in a modern context, to reveal the relevance, for example, of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew to ongoing conversations about women's rights in the United States. When writing about Shakespeare, presentists might apply a modern theory or idea to the plays to see how they stack up, or they might use the plays as examples to make a point. Of course, we can also think of performances of Shakespeare's plays as interpretations in their own right. When performing Shakespeare, a presentist interpretation might set the play in a new geographical location, have characters performed in a way that aligns them with certain recognizable groups or types, or use other elements to emphasize a resonant theme."

"The plays’ ethical tally is always double-entry, with each positive balanced by a negative in another column. In this reckoning, Shakespeare is, irreducibly, both for and against Brexit."

"Reading for present relevance."

 

How to Write a Novel - Chapter 5 (the last section on Point of view)

 The thing about the fallible narrator is that though he is fallible we think he is infallible. We think he is trustworthy and reliable, and who makes us think so. The writer. It is his skill that makes it so for us.

I want to quote in this respect from Henry James's preface to The Ambassadors to illustrate this point.

"That charming principle is always there, at all events, to keep interest fresh: it is a principle, we remember, essentially ravenous, without scruple and without mercy..."

How does Henry James keep interest fresh?

1. He tell us through Strether's fiance, Mrs Newsome, that her young son is in the 'trap' of an elderly woman from Paris.

2. This is not like drama, as Henry James states, as he makes dramatic irony stand on its head. When Strether reaches Paris and meets the "fallen woman" or the "other woman", Strether becomes convinced over a period of time that she is nothing of the sort. As he is genuinely convinced we become convinced too. He becomes infallible to us. We are as much in the dark as the character is but he is so sincere, so genuine, so well delineated in being honest we feel we can completely rely on him and trust him. This is what is great about Henry James's story-telling. He takes us consummately for a ride, as later he lets us down when Strether finds out the woman is all what Mrs Newsome says and only what she says, and this shows how much his method is removed from dramatic irony, how different he is from Shakespeare, as here the audience is not in the know about anything the characters don't know, and Henry James' mastery is he knew this kind of compositional excellence can only be created in the novel. James is a very dangerous writer in developing point of view to such an extent for unity of effect in the reader that it is good he did not turn to crime, as he could persuade us of anything, and it would have had disastrous consequences for the sensitive if it led them to action.

Does Henry James have a predecessor? Yes, of course, in Pride and Prejudice, we have a masterly reversal of point of view, that of Elizabeth's who starts out by liking Wickham and hating Darcy but ends up seeing Wickham as ruinous and loving Darcy. This is a kind of hourglass pattern in the novel and worth it for its tendency to show us how a reader can be putty in the hands of a great writer if he or she wants it.

But to come back to the preface of The Ambassadors that should have come at the end and not the beginning but which we have to come back to to the end, so that we can agree with James that he has indeed created a masterpiece.

"One’s work should have composition, because composition alone is positive beauty; but all the while—apart from one’s inevitable consciousness too of the dire paucity of readers ever recognising or ever missing positive beauty—how, as to the cheap and easy, at every turn, how, as to immediacy and facility, and even as to the commoner vivacity, positive beauty might have to be sweated for and paid for! Once achieved and installed it may always be trusted to make the poor seeker feel he would have blushed to the roots of his hair for failing of it; yet, how, as its virtue can be essentially but the virtue of the whole, the wayside traps set in the interest of muddlement and pleading but the cause of the moment, of the particular bit in itself, have to be kicked out of the path! All the sophistications in life, for example, might have appeared to muster on behalf of the menace—the menace to a bright variety—involved in Strether’s having all the subjective “say,” as it were, to himself.

Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him with the romantic privilege of the “first person”—the darkest abyss of romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scale—variety, and many other queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a back door. Suffice it, to be brief, that the first person, in the long piece, is a form foredoomed to looseness and that looseness, never much my affair, had never been so little so as on this particular occasion. All of which reflexions flocked to the standard from the moment—a very early one—the question of how to keep my form amusing while sticking so close to my central figure and constantly taking its pattern from him had to be faced...

I was more than agitated enough to reflect that, grimly deprived of one alternative or one substitute for “telling,” I must address myself tooth and nail to another. I couldn’t, save by implication, make other persons tell each other about him—blest resource, blest necessity, of the drama, which reaches its effects of unity, all remarkably, by paths absolutely opposite to the paths of the novel: with other persons, save as they were primarily his persons (not he primarily but one of theirs), I had simply nothing to do. I had relations for him none the less, by the mercy of Providence, quite as much as if my exhibition was to be a muddle; if I could only by implication and a show of consequence make other persons tell each other about him, I could at least make him tell them whatever in the world he must; and could so, by the same token—which was a further luxury thrown in—see straight into the deep differences between what that could do for me, or at all events for him, and the large ease of “autobiography.” It may be asked why, if one so keeps to one’s hero, one shouldn’t make a single mouthful of “method,” shouldn’t throw the reins on his neck and, letting them flap there as free as in “Gil Blas” or in “David Copperfield,” equip him with the double privilege of subject and object—a course that has at least the merit of brushing away questions at a sweep. The answer to which is, I think, that one makes that surrender only if one is prepared not to make certain precious discriminations.

The “first person” then, so employed, is addressed by the author directly to ourselves, his possible readers, whom he has to reckon with, at the best, by our English tradition, so loosely and vaguely after all, so little respectfully, on so scant a presumption of exposure to criticism. Strether, on the other hand, encaged and provided for as “The Ambassadors” encages and provides, has to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary than any our straight and credulous gape are likely to bring home to him, has exhibitional conditions to meet, in a word, that forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.

NOTE THAT: FORBID THE FLUIDITY OF SELF REVELATION! The fluidity of third person is better! 

 Half the dramatist’s art, as we well know—since if we don’t it’s not the fault of the proofs that lie scattered about us—is in the use of ficelles...

The material of “The Ambassadors,” conforming in this respect exactly to that of “The Wings of the Dove,” published just before it, is taken absolutely for the stuff of drama; so that, availing myself of the opportunity given me by this edition for some prefatory remarks on the latter work, I had mainly to make on its behalf the point of its scenic consistency. It disguises that virtue, in the oddest way in the world, by just looking, as we turn its pages, as little scenic as possible; but it sharply divides itself, just as the composition before us does, into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to over-prepare, for scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that justify and crown the preparation. It may definitely be said, I think, that everything in it that is not scene (not, I of course mean, complete and functional scene, treating all the submitted matter, as by logical start, logical turn, and logical finish) is discriminated preparation, is the fusion and synthesis of picture. 

Henry James dismisses "today's reader",  the common idea of beauty, method, autobiography and the first person, not to mention drama, more subtly, for words like unity/consistency/intensity of effect/affect, scene, picture, composition and "the figure in the carpet:. For him, the novel is THE FORM of his time. He is the last of the great, traditional logocentric writers. To achieve all this, he uses the point of view specifically, very accurately, carefully, so finely that we have to learn of him if we want to use it. Enough said. Point taken, Well learned. Please do read The Ambassadors and if not, at least the full Preface and try to understand what a great lesson he has to teach us about form, genre, topic, central theme, the 'composition' of the novel and the POINT OF VIEW.,

I am not asking for your agreement with Henry James' views but stating that if you are a real student of literature, prose, non-fiction or novel writing you would do well to familiarize yourself with his prefaces and novels.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/432/432-h/432-h.htm#preface - you can read the Preface here to get its full beauty.

How to Write a Novel - Chapter 4 (More on the point of view)

 Of course, before going on I need to clear something up, which is that 'point of view' is not about the use of first-person, second-person, third-person, and plural forms of these only. Or about implying it by using the passive voice to leave it to be guessed by the reader the way I ended the last paragraph in the last chapter. Beckett often does that, it is a very common way of writing notes for drama, a kind of shorthand and maybe he brought it in from that or carried it from fiction to drama, not quite sure which and it doesn't matter. Suffice it to say it opens one more door.

A young, new writer or an old one who should be mature but need not be in technique, and still may write great literature, may use the point of view not being very clear about it. This leads to mixed narratives that need to be looked at to be learned from. Let us think of the actual process of composition and demystify it. When a writer writes he is there in his writing, plus a narrator, plus the character or characters in whom also one finds him, and only then do they have in them something of their own. Few writers reach the point where the character refines the author out of existence in himself, to misquote Joyce.  Dickens and Beckett admit to their folly by giving David Copperfield Dickens' initials in reverse in the novel of the same name and Beckett does the same in More Pricks than Kicks by naming his character Belaqua Shuah, S B in reverse, but this is just the tip of this particular iceberg.

Let us look at it more carefully. There is the author. Then there is a narrator, sometimes, who may be the author at that particular place in time, or not, or partly him. There is a character who may have something of the author in him or not.   The latter two may or may not be the same person. Clear? No? That is exactly what I mean too. If the author knew what he was doing he would be clear., it would be clear but when he does not or allows mix-ups it won't be, whether it is a bad habit with him or immaturity, youth, or he pulls it off successfully. The best writers learn by doing and not necessarily from a textbook so all this is allowed bu meanwhile it may help you to see what I mean by looking at Hard Times or More Pricks than Kicks in slightly more detail. Unless I proof-text things, they mean nothing.

Here is the beginning of Chapter 2 of "Hard Times."

"Thomas Gradgrind, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts and calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind.  With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.  It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.  You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, sir!

In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general.  In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl.  Who is that girl?"

To break it up for you - the first paragraph is the character thinking. We are in his head. This is omniscient narrative as the narrator can see inside the heads of his characters, and whether it is a limited omniscience or not is not clear yet for those who have read the novel till this juncture, but in the next paragraph, we need/see/notice the narrator. He interpolates himself with a "no doubt". He is not to be doubted, in other words, unlike Thomas Gradgrind. And we see why when he suddenly uses three similes/metaphors why we should side with the narrator.  He says the students are to the owner of the school "little pitchers soon to be filled with facts." A disconcerting image. Then he compares Gradgrind, ideally named, to a "cannon...prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge" bringing in power, colonialism and imperialism to education and the classroom, as negative things, and lastly, he uses the metaphor of a "galvanizing apparatus" for Gradgrind, and by using the adjective "grim" with "mechanical" and "substitute" which will take the place of "imagination", storming it away, he brings in irony against the industrial revolution with its mechanization and dehumanization. 

The narrator thus assumes a voice that is clearly connected to the author here and intrudes on us telling us not to think well of the character that he himself has created, in that particular time-frame in the novel. Whether this is 'showing' or wise I leave you to decide, but for me while it is not "showing" Dickens' savage similes and metaphors redeem it. 

Show and not tell, they say. 

This brings me to Henry James and the point of view. If you read me carefully, you'd understand that there is something called the omniscient (all-knowing) point of view, the limited omniscient point of view and first-person point of view, second-person point of view, third-person point of view, all in singular and plural etc., and all limited, so far, plus point of view in absentia by using the passive voice.

There can also be shifting points of view as I noted up above, from character to narrator in the instance I gave you, for example.

But which is the best one? According to many the third person point of view or he or she. This is where Henry James plays an appreciable trick. He brings in the fallible narrator or the narrator whose point of view cannot be taken for granted as the gospel truth. Take "The Ambassadors" and Lewis Lambert Strether. He goes to Europe to search for a missing American, a young man Chad, sent to look for him by his parent, the woman whom Lambert is engaged to, and also going to appease his own curiosity about Europe, from the New World (America), and is told by his fiance that Chad Newsome the young man is in the clutches of a femme fatale from France, who is obviously a witch, a harridan, a shrew and an older woman who is a temptress and all that. When he meets the femme fatale finally, he finds she has a beautiful daughter  Jeanne, a bad husband reportedly,  is called Marie de Vionnet, and does not seem anything like a femme fatale.  She charms him completely and against the hints thrown out by his friend Maria Gostrey, an American woman who knows Europe well but no longer holds rigid Boston Brahmin, puritan morals,  Lambert is about to go back at the end of the novel to report to his fiance that her son is not in anyone's grip and is only friends with the perfectly winsome and morally upright Marie. 

However, then at almost the very end of the novel he finds out that Chad is having a full-blown affair with Marie and everyone, almost, except he, knows about it and thinks nothing much of it. The word cougar did not yet exist, but one thinks of it in 2020, in relation with the novel and of Chad as only a cad, in relation with the decadence of Europe which is what Henry James has been getting at circuitously, that behind all the culture is only a superficiality that finally is only about, God forbid, sex an older woman wants with a younger man whom she seduces and keeps in her pocket, therefore, as he is handsome and American, for her own interests and the whole relationship has nothing to do with love on her or his part.

Henry James is the master of the fallible narrator or the untrustworthy/unreliable one whose views change in the course of the novel or are all along wrong as in the case of the Turn of the Screw. There are always two turns at least, in Henry James's screw(s), if not more.

Feminists may or may not like the novel and Baudrillard points out North America became even more decadent in his book on it, on the U.S.A, but for students of point of view Henry James' novels are compulsory reading, both the two I mentioned already and "Portrait of a Lady", to start off with. So are his prefaces,  - like Shaw's prologues are - (interference by me), as Ezra Pound pointed out.

You could start by reading the preface to "The Ambassadors."

How to Write a Novel - Chapter 3 by Dr Koshy AV

 We look at setting with different eyes. Different points of view. They say while teaching beginners, first-person, second-person, third-person, et al, to infinity, if you could only figure that out. They say don't use the second person. A writer who always believed in breaking rules was Samuel Beckett. 

So he wrote in his novella Company this haunting section:

"The light there was then. On your back in the dark the light there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. A nook in the gorse. East beyond the sea the faint shape of high mountain. Seventy miles away according to your Longman. For the third or fourth time in your life. The first time you told them and were derided. All you had seen was cloud. So now you hoard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale sky . You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light."

http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/beckett-company.pdf

You can call it lyrical, you can call it poetry, you can call it prose, you can call it prose poetry, but the p(o)int is the way he uses the second person, not often used but used so well here you do not notice the difference, as you too are being used by it now by me, as in the hands of an adept you can use any 'person' and make it work, whether first, second, third or third, second and first or all mixed up. 

First person - I, we.

Think: Arthur C Clarke's title - I,Robot.

Think: God to Moses - "I AM THAT I AM."

Think: Treasure Island by R L Stevenson

"

"The Sea-chest

 

LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and dangerous position. Some of the man's money—if he had any—was certainly due to us, but it was not likely that our captain's shipmates, above all the two specimens seen by me, Black Dog and the blind beggar, would be inclined to give up their booty in payment of the dead man's debts. The captain's order to mount at once and ride for Doctor Livesey would have left my mother alone and unprotected, which was not to be thought of. Indeed, it seemed impossible for either of us to remain much longer in the house; the fall of coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the clock, filled us with alarms. The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror. Something must speedily be resolved upon, and it occurred to us at last to go forth together and seek help in the neighbouring hamlet. No sooner said than done. Bare-headed as we were, we ran out at once in the gathering evening and the frosty fog."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/120/120-h/120-h.htm - (Chapter 4 of Treasure Island. first paragraph)

I must admit, we see in the above passage a beautiful use of I and we for narrating a story in the first- person, the same fluent way I have used I and we in this sentence!

Second person, - You singular and you plural.

Read again carefully what you were given above.

Third-person - He, she, it, they. 

How to use it and first-person together: "In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman’s cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath."

How to use he, she, it, and they together: "His aunt was in the garden, tending whatever flowers die at that time of year. She embraced him and together they went down into the bowels of the earth, into the kitchen in the basement. She took the parcel and undid it and abruptly the lobster was on the table, on the oilcloth, discovered.

“They assured me it was fresh” said Belacqua.

Suddenly he saw the creature move, this neuter creature. Definitely it changed its position. His hand flew to his mouth.

“Christ!” he said “it’s alive.”

His aunt looked at the lobster. It moved again. It made a faint nervous act of life on the oilcloth. They stood above it, looking down on it, exposed cruciform on the oilcloth. It shuddered again. Belacqua felt he would be sick.

https://evergreenreview.com/read/dante-and-the-lobster/ (The excerpts are taken from Beckett's Dante and the Lobster, in his collection of short stories More Pricks than Kicks.)

Enough to start you off with, whether you are singular or plural and a he, she or they.  You can't be an it but you can be it. Isn't it? Now go for it and start using these points of view. 

More about point of view and narration in the coming chapter. In depth and profundity, more is there to come and be written. The absent point of view is to write without bringing in an I, he, she, they, we, you, you as is being done here in these last three sentences, by the way. Except that, as in deconstruction, I used them all in the last or previous or preceding sentence to say I did not use any of them!

How to Write a Novel - Chapter 2 by Dr Koshy AV

 Someone may ask me, what about how the setting is handled in modern fiction or postmodern fiction. It is true that it is possible to write a novel like Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar that deals with wordplay and has no setting, so to speak, or something by William S Burroughs (Soft Machine) that could be accused of something similar, or praised, and that setting in someone who shows the move from modernism to postmodernism like Beckett (The Unnameable, How It is) is almost done away with but these are the exceptions and while they are good to keep in mind, they need not be the example one wants to follow unless it comes naturally to one. 

From setting in a short story that is usually just one, or in a drama that follows the Aristotelian unities, we see setting expand all over the globe in a novel like Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne.

I used several words along with setting and it may be nice to give brief definitions of them:

Setting is time, place, space, where, and when. Space is inclusive of the other words I used like foreshadowing, atmosphere, mood, tone, and (usually social) milieu/environment.  But what do these words mean?

Setting can be integral or backdrop too. Egdon Heath comes to mind. It creates an atmosphere in which man is only "slighted and enduring" but not colossal like it, and that is why it matters, and can be and is very "Atmospheric". It may seem like backdrop but it is integral, more integral to Hardy's Wessex and philosophy of life than his characters, to put it more clearly.

"It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.

This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness—“Bruaria.” Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. “Turbaria Bruaria”—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters relating to the district. “Overgrown with heth and mosse,” says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.

Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to—themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance—even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change."

We see Hardy use a word in there that was used earlier for setting, landscape. That is description that is all about atmosphere. Atmosphere is used interchangeably with mood, by many critics, but mood is probably more specific and more given to change faster. We find mood in the Phantom of the Opera. So clearly. It is there also in Emile Zola's Nana. 

 "It was the evening on which MM. Debienne and Poligny, the managers of the Opera, were giving a last gala performance to mark their retirement. Suddenly the dressing-room of La Sorelli, one of the principal dancers, was invaded by half-a-dozen young ladies of the ballet, who had come up from the stage after "dancing" Polyeucte. They rushed in amid great confusion, some giving vent to forced and unnatural laughter, others to cries of terror. Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment to "run through" the speech which she was to make to the resigning managers, looked around angrily at the mad and tumultuous crowd. It was little Jammes--the girl with the tip-tilted nose, the forget-me-not eyes, the rose-red cheeks and the lily-white neck and shoulders--who gave the explanation in a trembling voice: "It's the ghost!" And she locked the door. Sorelli's dressing-room was fitted up with official, commonplace elegance. A pier-glass, a sofa, a dressing-table and a cupboard or two provided the necessary furniture. On the walls hung a few engravings, relics of the mother, who had known the glories of the old Opera in the Rue le Peletier; portraits of Vestris, Gardel, Dupont, Bigottini. But the room seemed a palace to the brats of the corps de ballet, who were lodged in common dressing-rooms where they spent their time singing, quarreling, smacking the dressers and hair-dressers and buying one another glasses of cassis, beer, or even rhum, until the call-boy's bell rang. Sorelli was very superstitious. She shuddered when she heard little Jammes speak of the ghost, called her a "silly little fool" and then, as she was the first to believe in ghosts in general, and the Opera ghost in particular, at once asked for details: "Have you seen him?" "As plainly as I see you now!" said little Jammes, whose legs were giving way beneath her, and she dropped with a moan into a chair. Thereupon little Giry--the girl with eyes black as sloes, hair black as ink, a swarthy complexion and a poor little skin stretched over poor little bones--little Giry added: "If that's the ghost, he's very ugly!" "Oh, yes!" cried the chorus of ballet-girls. And they all began to talk together. The ghost had appeared to them in the shape of a gentleman in dress-clothes, who had suddenly stood before them in the passage, without their knowing where he came from. He seemed to have come straight through the wall."

This famous semi- introduction in Phantom of the Opera starts off rather normally in mood or its absence in a light-hearted way but shifts to one of unease, disquiet, and irritation even, which however presages something unsettling, foreshadowing the end of the novel. where the mundane opera house is transformed to a tragic place for a "corpse." A Corpse of a Ghost!

And tone? Jane Austen is full of the exquisite use of tone in Pride and Prejudice and so is Henry James in The Ambassadors, and both of social milieu, as is Tolstoy in War and Peace. 

This has been a nice explanatory canter to expand on yesterday's note, but to fully understand me you must have read the writers and novels I refer to.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/122/122-h/122-h.htm#link2H_4_0003 (Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy , from Chapter 1 Book !)

http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/digi075.pdf (Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux translator of this version unknown to me, Chapter 1)

How to Write a Novel - Chapter 1 by Dr Koshy AV

 In preparation for Nanowrimo.

A novel and its aspects.

I have written some novellas or long stories and novels, and they are all in cold storage and one is lost. But I find writing on how to write novels more interesting than writing novels. One was published in Scream and other Urbane Legends, a novella, with moderate success, but it needs probably a revamp and a relook. If ever. It was initially a novel but I dumped most of it.

So for Nanowrimo, I am going to write a series of notes on novel writing or creating a novel or composing it.

Let us start with something obvious. A novel should have a setting. The setting must be rooted in time and place, and in a "space." The setting will have mini settings in it. There may be more than one, and many settings in it. In Charles Dickens's Hard Times, there are two major settings. One is the industrial city of Coketown, based on cities like Manchester, and then there is the real Liverpool. So one is fictional and the other real, but both are set in the nineteenth century's first half, naturally, as it is a realistic Victorian novel. Dickens wanted to write to his audience about their life so he could improve it for the better. The point is he knew clearly where he was going to set his novel. If you are going to write a novel you need to, too. Novels can be fantasy, or futuristic, or imaginary, or realistic, dystopian, historical, myth-based, utopian, sci fi, steampunk, gothic, whatever, but what are its settings going to be?

In Coketown, for instance, in Hard Times, the novel also shows us a school, an inn, the streets, the inside of a church working people go to, a disused mine, two homes of rich people, one of a poor person, the river dye'd purple with the effluents of the factory, the factory, the bank, the bank's staff-quarters etc.

This is detailing. Remember scenery can foreshadow as well as needs to be detailed along with milieu, atmosphere, tone, and mood if you mean business. Dickens meant business.

"CHAPTER V

THE KEYNOTE

Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course got on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!

No. Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing mystery of the place was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations? Because, whoever did, the labouring people did not. It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of concern. Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed this, because there was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main force. Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same people would get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting drunk. Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium. Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top moral specimen. Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular statements derived from their own personal experience, and illustrated by cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short, it was the only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a bad lot altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen; that they never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable. In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable:

There was an old woman, and what do you think?

She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;

Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,

And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet.

Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds*? Surely, none of us in our sober senses and acquainted with figures, are to be told at this time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the existence of the Coketown working-people had been for scores of years, deliberately set at nought? That there was any Fancy in them demanding to be brought into healthy existence instead of struggling on in convulsions? That exactly in the ratio as they worked long and monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical relief—some relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits, and giving them a vent—some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a stirring band of music—some occasional light pie in which even M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and would be satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the Creation were repealed? "

I am old fashioned. I like this as here Dickens not only describes but shows us the atmosphere, mood, tone, and milieu social or otherwise. And how does he do it? By using all the tools of poetry sans meter. He is philosophical, religious, sociological, economic, psychological, and political by turns and always fittingly sarcastic and skeptical. He uses vocabulary, diction, alliteration, repetition, figures of speech, imagery, and sense words we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell as well as organic imagery and onomatopoeia and kinetic imagery.

"It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. "

This is how to write setting. This is how to foreshadow and kill suspense if at all one must. Some may not like the richness of his writing and prefer the minimalism and the spare writing of a Hemingway but one should learn to appreciate his kind of writing too with its purple passages. They wear well too. That is why he was called the Shakespeare of the novel and English prose, due to the same richness in prose that Shakespeare had in his dramas.

* To understand this reference and the one to Gradgrind and Bounderby you have to be familiar also with the first four chapters of the novel, dear reader.

You can read it from here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/786-h/786-h.htm .That is also where the extensive quote comes from, from Chapter 5.

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 20 (The Conclusion - A Meditation on Form/s in Verse/Poetry)

 I have told you the definition of the sonnet. I have given you the note on what M H Abrams said of it, where it began and where all it has spread to in its key moments, the poets whose names matter in it, the best examples, and also through their content a glimpse of how the content and the form itself has undergone changes, showing also the history of the changing times in minuscule, and the theoretical concerns it had and still holds for us. The fact that it ends with a discussion on the form is no coincidence as it ends as of now here in this book with me with postmodernity which is meta-form oriented, postcolonial albeit of an underlying note kind, and with democratic left-leaning nationalism with a holistic attempt to combine Western and Eastern elements rather than to deconstruct them with an either/or approach. Meanwhile I also bring in trauma, disability, ethnic and minority studies, affect theory, feminism, ecocriticism etc., briefly in flashes and touches for those with the eyes to see.

I spoke of the beginnings of the sonnet in Old Provencal with the Sicilian school of poets, and with Lentini, then of the arrival of the form in glory in Italy with the terza rima sonnet, then the Petrarchan sonnet, and of Dante, Cavalcanti, Michaelangelo, and Rafael. Then I spoke but not in order of the English Spenserian sonnet, the Shakespearean, the Miltonic, the Wordsworthian, the Shelleyesque, and the Keatsian sonnets, and after that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Emily Bronte, DG Rosetti, the curtal sonnet and Hopkins, and then going away from England, of Irish Beckett, the American Berryman and ee cummings and Edna St Vincent Millay, the French Rimbaud, the German Rilke, the Russian Pushkin and his Onegin sonnet, the South American Neruda, and finally of the Latin caudate sonnet of Berni, of Sonnet Mondal's version, of the immured sonnet and Philip Nikolayev, of the roseate sonnet and myself and also of the Indians including Micheal Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, Henry Derozio, Vikram Seth using the Onegin sonnet, Santosh Bakaya, Dev Mishra, Daipayan Nair and Geethanjali Dilip for their voluminous production of roseate sonnets and the anthology of sonnets coming up edited by Gauri Dixit, Sunita Singh, Vineetha Mekkoth and Bhuvaneshwari Shivakumar Shankar.

But I want to end talking of forms on a comparative note. Even among the sonnet forms people still try out the terza rima sonnet, the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan, and the roseate sonnet form rather than the variants, or a free verse version or mongrel one, and this is due to the fact that it offers a fine balance between ease and difficulty that holds the interest of poets enough and intrigues them enough to try them out. So this matters in form-making.

We see that Greece had many forms like the epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, all in verse, and ode, elegy, lyric, threnody etc. But slowly things changed and verse was left behind for prose in tragedy, comedy and tragicomedy, over time, in history, leading to the novel and short story and prose drama, and the rise of non-fiction in prose, and only the lyric and occasional poetry survived, while the epic faded as too difficult. Courtly love poems died out when there were no more courts as did bucolic and pastoral poetry, and love poems in such backgrounds or rural settings as the city became important, and in the same way while there have been many forms worldwide that tried for pre-eminence slowly free verse gained ascendancy over meter and urbanized-in-content poems took over. We see now that while the freed haiku, the gogyoshi or five liners, and the limerick,  the sonnet, and the ghazal are practiced many French forms like the villanelle are never or seldom tried out due to their difficulty. I love forms and have tried to keep writing in a form, this one, to keep it alive, with my contribution to the art knowing that no one will try one unless it has a harmony between what we ask of the poet and the freedom it gives him that is his creative input, even to make half the rules, which only I have done, which shows my mastery and greatness as a teacher and form-maker as well as skills, competencies and values creator in the students by encouraging their sleight of hand, and that is what makes my form attractive. There are two factors at work, one is that in language there is the principle of ease over labour while in form people want order in the midst of chaos, yet not too much of it. The same happens in prose too, which is why no one reads "Finnegan's Wake" but talk of it but all read "Old Man and the Sea", the latter has form and ease, while the former looks formless, and offers too much difficulty to the reader. It is the same with writers and poets.

To end, this is not a decrying of the attempts of a Hopkins or e.e.cummings, or a Sonnet Mondal or Philip Nikolayev or of the attempt at making the roseate sonnet more complicated than it is, as Dev Mishra has tried extremely well and successfully, or even by making it a syllable based or word based form like the 'tideling' which is a form by Daipayan Nair, or even my friends in spirit in other forms like those who want to make the haiku, tanka or gogyoshi (a five liner) most strict and old fashioned, or Duane Vorhees's couplette, or those who want to write stilted, laboured, artificial ghazals only, like Agha Shahid Ali did in English. Such attempts are towering and overawe us, but remain as mountains no one tries to scale again. The real way forward, even for Ghazals, is to listen to a Shabir Ahmad Mir and free it or an Amita Paul who asks for the same balance. Or for five liners to be loose tankas etc. The balance always has to be between less rigor and more of allowance or laxity. Lyrics and love poems sans harp or lyre will continue ad nauseam as well as didactic poems and cause-based ones and ones of social outrage on recent events.

Let me end by repeating that sonnets have a skeleton, it has fourteen lines, and those are divided into stanzas, rhymed or not, metered or neutered, that invariably, naturally, break themselves into structurally constituent parts that fit well into each other, and often lead to narrative poems or sequences and intricately beautiful images, sounds, figures of speech and interlinked layers of words and meanings. Things like rhyme, meter, line length, and syllabic or word count should not matter here though rhythm and beat must,  not of the metronome; but in a more organic or musical notation as in an onomatopoeic, repetitive, incantatory, evocative, hypnotic fashion. Then sonnets will add beauty immeasurable to our world and be relevant even today if on topical issues and I have offered you the best examples for you to enjoy and see why they do and even try out if you want, if you are poets. 

Read, relate, and enjoy to your heart's content, till my next sally into the lands of poetry, its forms, critical literary explication, and my own unique brand of poetry-loving, literary theory craziness. 

THE END

 

A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 19 (On Neruda and the Roseate Sonnet)

 Reading sonnets is something like being on a train journey when you are a child and watching random scenes through the window of the rural landscape drenched in beauty. Then the train takes to wings and you see the sky with birds swimming in it. It becomes a submarine and you see the underwater creatures frolic and play there. Glimpses of nations, of historical eruptions and changes, of poets and muses, of labouring and burnt midnight oil and quill and ink, giving way to the computer age. The scenery becomes urban and the birds less, the sky becomes polluted and the journey resumes on railway tracks. Soon you will reach your destination. There is a lady in the compartment with you. You want to please her and so you read her this sonnet from Neruda all women like.

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

BY PABLO NERUDA

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

She snuggles closer to you languorously and lets you make love to her, for opening the treasure box of all the sonnet-diamonds you have for her in all the previous chapters as now she has become more learned than before.

The journey that carried you around the world and now even to South America leaves you pondering about India. Michael was Bengali, so was Toru, so was Derozio, so was Sri Aurobindo, so is Sonnet Mondal. But Seth? Even he was born in Kolkatta.

And what about Kerala? And Kashmir? And Tamil Nadu? And Uttar Pradesh? and Maharashtra? And Orissa? Etc. The other states of India.

Patience to prevent that murmur soon replied by letting me make the roseate sonnet form as an alteration of the sonnet form to put Kerala too on the international sonnet writing map.

The roseate sonnet is two quatrains, a couplet which is a volta, no rhyme scheme, line length, metronome, beat or syllable or meter , and a last stanza which is an acrostic for ROSE which makes it a hybrid form but of four stanzas and fourteen lines in classic sonnet style (4-4-2-4). But by removing the thorny obstacles that stand in the way of Indian sonneteers, mainly meter, though criticized for it as therefore making it too easy, I achieved unexpected success and soon so many roseate sonnets began pouring in it is now being made into an anthology. The ROSE was used as a symbol because of its universal literary associations. I have put Kerala on the international map of sonnet writing.

Not just that - I revived interest in the form, especially my version, to the extent that poets from Kashmir, like Dr Santosh Bakaya wrote a whole narrative poem in it, for the anthology, putting Kashmir on the map and Jaipur, of world sonnet writing. It is called "You heard the Scream, didn't you?" It follows in the tradition of Pushkin and Vikram Seth, therefore, by telling a story, as narrative verse, in fifty sonnets.

There are others too.

I have written about a hundred roseate sonnets - thirty will come out soon in the anthology.

Daipayan Nair has written any number of powerful roseate sonnets and cached it on a wonderful page on FB. This is Bengali- Malayali in origin and coupled with pictorial matching.

Geethanjali Dilip has written many putting Tamil Nadu on the map along with Bhuvaneshwari Shivakumar Shankar who is the editor for the anthology.

Dev Mishra has written them becoming a representative of it in a way from Orissa though he is much wider and has carried it to a deeper level by doing it in many different ways and even mixing it with Duane Vorhees's form the Couplette. Dev Mishra is one of the best in India at present at writing in forms.

"(P)-   Indeed! I  see you experiment rigorously with many forms and styles, even new formats like the Roseate Sonnet. Which format is truly the most challenging one for Dev Mishra and why?

DM– No format is impossible if you intend to do it. However, I will consider the Roseate Sonnet Couplette — a merger of two novel forms, done by me — to be the toughest. A Roseate Sonnet is devised by Dr. Ampat Koshy. It is pretty simple. A traditional sonnet re-modelled with an acrostic at the end reading ROSE. A couplette, on the other hand, demands the rhyme of syllables. For instance, the first syllable has to rhyme with the second, the third with the fourth and so on. This is relatively challenging because you have to take care of the rhyme of syllables and the acrostic at the end, without compromising with the idea that you have."

The form Couplette (not couplet) is invented by Dr. Duane Vorhees."

Dev Mishra has also tried several versions of the Roseate Sonnet making it more difficult by using the acrostic in the beginning of all stanzas or in the end and/or middle, in the case of the couplet to complete it etc, besides doind the roseate couplette.

Roy Mark Azanza Corrales of the Philippines has also brought out an entire book of Roseate Sonnets.

Gauri Dixit comes from Maharashtra, Sunita Singh from Uttar Pradesh, Satbir Chadha from Haldwani, Reena Prasad from Kerala with Vineetha Mekkoth (our co-editor) - all have graced the form. Writers from 12 countries, including Michelle "Wyn" Corbett from Canada, from UK Dominic Francis, from USA Alistair Towesland Allen, Michele Baron, Angel Meredith etcetera, and poets in three languages, English, Hindi and Urdu have attempted it or variations on it, naturally, more than 500 have already been written and the secret of this success is it is simple, with just the right amount of difficulty. The anthology contains 102 poets with 180 sonnets and before that there was a competition which was judged by Lopa Banerjee and Elizabeth Kuriakose and in it also some 50 or so took part. This was in the Learning and Creativity-Silhouette e-magazine. The anthology will soon be published by Authorspress and Sudarshan Kcherry. Writers from almost all states in India have given poems for it spreading the sonnet fever again from Kerala first to all over India. Uiba Mangang who is one from the North East is another example. Lily Swarn from Punjab is too. Sarmita Dey continues writing it and carrying on the form thus, in a sense, in Bengal. We have Precious Chilongozi from Malawi, Africa, writing one.

Here is one by me that has been published to make you get the structure:

A Roseate Sonnet by Dr AV Koshy

August 31, 2020

I understand
why dawn ‘breaks’
& night ‘steals’.
But why hearts have to, too, or do

or people wheel and deal
to steal
from one another
I never could. I am naive,
sometimes.

Restless hearts, break like the dawn
O debtors, stolen from by others or life
Steal away from the dark night(s) in the hearts of men, and fate
Enjoy the first, fiery, red flush of dawn. 

(http://odetoapoetess.com/2020/08/31/a-roseate-sonnet-by-dr-koshy-av/?fbclid=IwAR2_3MZiZK-I0vkMl1xfOS8rg387Og7rsC5LgtCf0xPi-GPyjosGjX4j1-Y) first credit link.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49236/one-hundred-love-sonnets-xvii

https://www.photonews.in/2019/03/28/poetry-is-a-pilgrimage-debasish-mishra/

https://learningandcreativity.com/roseate-sonnet-an-experience-in-learning-the-art-of-poetry/