Post No. 9—Third Chapter

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

 Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

Copyright © 2012 by Thos. Kent Miller

All rights reserved

  [Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous. I suggest beginning at the beginning by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or by using the Blog Archive to the right to Locate Post No. 1 in July.]

From "Silver Blaze"

—Sidney Paget

From Allan Quatermain

—Artist not identified 

The Third Chapter

The third chapter of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire is entitled "Preface 'The Prodigious Phone Call' By Thos. Kent Miller, Editor".

This entire book, including the previous two chapters that are presented as "Editor's Notes," is an exercise in a literary device called "narrative distancing." However, it is this chapter—the third chapter— that underscores how narrative distancing is this novel's principal feature or conceit. I explain:

If you say, "I'm telling a story," that is the first person narrative mode.

However, if you say, "I'm telling a story that my brother told me. He told me this tale: "I had an adventure," he said . . . . ", that is the simplest form of narrative distancing. The first narrator is telling a story that someone else told him. This technique is used less frequently these days than in the past. In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, the technique was used in innumerable gothic novels and ghost stories to enhance both verisimilitude and the suspension of disbelief.

Taking it to the next level, then, if you say, "I'm telling a story that my brother told me. He told me this tale: 'I had an adventure,' he said, 'in a native land where the village shaman gave me the secrets of life. He told me, "My son, in this land there were once giants . . ."'

Of course, that is a more complex narrative mode—narrative distancing twice removed.

In the early 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft used narrative distancing to great effect in his landmark story "The Call of Cthulhu". Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi had some interesting things to say about the structure of this story in his book A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft (Third Edition, Wildside Press, 1996). His comments are entirely included on page 256 (Chapter XI, "1. Style and Structure"):

"'The Call of Cthulhu' presents the greatest structural complexity of any of Lovecraft's tales . . . . Here we have a main narrator ( . . . Thurston) paraphrasing the notes of a subsidiary narrator ( . . . Angell) who himself paraphrases two accounts, that of the artist Wilcox and that of Inspector Legrasse, who paraphrases yet another subsidiary account, the tale of Old Castro; Thurston then comes upon a newspaper article and the Johansen narrative . . . . This entire sequence can be depicted by the following chart of narrative voices:

Thurston

            Angell

                        Wilcox

                        Legrasse

                                    Castro

            newspaper item

Johansen"

Joshi then concludes by saying " . . . Castro's wild tale . . . is three times removed form the principal narrative . . . This is narrative 'distance' with a vengeance!" [Italics and explanation mark both Joshi's.]

Now, while not hinting for a millisecond that my writing is comparable to Lovecraft's, nonetheless, by applying Joshi's logic to CRUCIBLE, a graphic presentation of my novel's narrative distancing looks like this:

I don't intend for readers to read CRUCIBLE in a linear fashion as they would most novels. I've structured CRUCIBLE like a child’s nesting toy—like a set of Chinese nesting boxes or Russian nesting dolls—insofar as the reader is asked to explore multiple layers within layers, of framing devices within framing devices, books within books, narratives within narratives, manuscripts within manuscripts, and tales within tales, thus to be swallowed by a maelstrom of ideas and adventures—relentlessly descending into a scholarly labyrinth.  

[Actually, this is not unlike H. Rider Haggard's second world-class best seller after King Solomon's Mines—She: A History of Adventure. Scholar Norman Etherington has explained in his The Annotated She that in She "The Chinese nest of boxes appears in many guises throughout the book."]

Another way of saying it is that my story doesn't pull the reader along in a linear narrative; instead it asks the reader to read down into the various and numerous layers and elements of the book. Yes, while, a case could be made that I took the whole notion of narrative distancing to an extreme, however, I will say that all this happened organically. In other words, I did not set out to structure the book in this manner; it just happened in the process of my crafting a story that I myself would have loved to read.

Anyway, the chapter begins with me speaking to the reader and within 100 words, I offer up a [fictitious] letter from Judy-Lynn Del Rey, the science-fiction editor of the Del Rey imprint of Ballantine Books during much of the 1970s and 1980s (see note 1 below).

You can see here how I presented that fictitious letter on the first page of the chapter:

But an interesting point is that the fictitious letter from the novel was based on a very real rejection letter that I'd received from Judy-Lynn in 1981:

 

As I said, in this chapter the narrative distancing begins. In short order,  in my story I'm taking a phone call from James Turner, editor/publisher of Arkham House at the time of my [fictitious] Preface [see note 2 below]

Shortly thereafter, I received a package from Turner at my door that contains:

•          A note from Turner

•          A photocopy of a [fictitious] 1,600-word typescript of an [fictitious, i.e. written by me in careful emulation of HPL] letter written by Lovecraft to fellow Weird Tales contributor par excellence Clark Ashton Smith. Turner explains in his note that this letter was left out of the Arkham House five volume set of H.P. Lovecraft's Selected Letters, and that, "If it had been printed, it would have started on page 19 of volume II where letter #188 to Frank Beknap Long currently is."

Arrow points to where Lovecraft's letter to Clark Ashton Smith should have appeared.

•          Another note from Turner.

•          A letter from Dr. Watson to the great 19th century landscape painter Frederick Church [see Post No. 10 for more information in Church].
•          A long Foreword also from Dr. Watson to Church explaining just why he has sent a fat manuscript to Church.
•         The manuscript itself (a virtual tome) that is in essence the story Quatermain told to Watson and Church before a roaring fire in Church's home in upstate New York.

—All of which sets up the fourth chapter of the book entitled "Forward by John H. Watson, M.D." It is in this chapter that we first encounter Allan Quatermain as a character. 

Comments are appreciated; thank you!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507 

[Note 1: Judy-Lynn Del Rey, with her husband Lester, took over the editorship of Ballantine Books’ science-fiction and fantasy lines in the mid-1970s—shortly after Ian and Betty Ballantine sold to Random House the publishing house that bore their name and which they started in 1952. the late Judy-Lynn Del Rey, who was up until her death in 1986—and still is, to be sure—considered one of science fiction’s most admired and important editors.]

[Note 2: Following H.P. Lovecraft's death in 1937 at the age of 47, two of his young protégés, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, started a publishing company in Sauk City, Wisconsin, called Arkham House (named after a recurring town in many Lovecraft stories) for the sole purpose of reprinting Lovecraft’s work within the dignity of hardcovers. Though sales were slow to start, the paperback reprints took off during W.W.II and, of course, now H.P. Lovecraft is considered by many to be one of America’s foremost writers of horror. (Indeed, over the last decades, devotees have spawned a hugely successful Lovecraft cottage industry.) In time, Arkham House began publishing collections of other Weird Tales authors and is still a viable publishing house to this day. After Derleth’s death in 1971 (following the brief management tenures of Wandrei and Roderic Meng), James Turner became editor in 1974.]