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Read an analytical essay this past week, "Catch and Release: Strategies of Overt and Covert Narratorial Control," Sonya Larson, The Writer's Chronicle, March/April 2018, pgs 62 - 74. The essay is available at the publication's website; however, an Associated Writing Programs' membership paywall intervenes, $$.
Several example narratives' models attended that read, study, and reflection: Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son, a short story collection of chronologically linear and closely related episodes, a la a picaresque novel, and several Herbert Dune novels.
Larson poses narratorial control as a sensibility, sensibilities actually, internal to a narrative's milieu, by and large, relevant to a focal viewpoint agonist's state of being at any given now moment. Not a narrator nor writer's control, rather that of an agonist's control, and lacks thereof, and any bolus between those extremes. In part emotional control -- self-control, too -- part control of events, settings and milieus, and other personas, and part control of transformative processes, complication's motivations, conflict's stakes at risk, and tone's attitudes toward topics and subjects.
Simplified, narratorial control is an agonist's inside looks outward and inward perspective, estranges narrator and writer alike, and danger close narrative distance, albeit often by default first-person narrative point of view, or third-person close limited metaphoric substitution for that first-person type. Far from the detached narrator point of view type, though detaches as much as possible from narrator anyway -- instead of a narrator report emotionally and psychically detached from agonist personas' perspectives.
Johnson's Jesus' Son evinces that danger close narrative point of view to a crossed theta and dotted iota, yet the control belongs to the out of self-control focal agonist, whose name given cannot be posted, as it is F---head. A drug and alcohol-addled persona who, through the episodes, further loses control and ends, more or less, more in control of his life than before, as much as any such afflicted individual might. The exquisite lost control language and action intimate his state of being while it transforms from extreme to extreme, of lucid to addled, and back and forth and in between. The type is covert narratorial control, at times, out of control.
Anyway, each episode is more or less part anecdote, part sketch, limited vignette development, snapshots, yet, in total, a complete dramatic movement -- as like a kaleidoscopic zoetrope slow motion picture sequence. Ah, truly a picaresque in all of its glories and appeals: episodic adventures of a roguish agonist's vice and folly-ridden social situations.
The Herbert Dune novels disappoint from their remote narrative distance, each more summary and explanation tells of a remote, detached narrator synopsis lecture. Overt narrator narratorial control, even close overt writer control, that is, or, actually, lack of appreciation for prose's artistic crafts. And, oh my, a rigid mechanical, formulaic overt writer control, attempted and failed picaresque method form at that.
Larson notes that characters' complex complications, conflicts, and attitudes usurp writer, even narrator, control; this is narratorial control: how a character's true realized nature exerts covert influences at odds to a writer's overt design, for best, strongest dramatic effect. Fabulous!
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