This is a very interesting comment, indeed. Trying to avoid throwing
this question back onto Frederick alone, I was wondering if anyone could
comment further on this "basic trick" of changing first person dramatic
monologue to third person?
I'll try to add some comments from my POV... it is something I have been
at least trying to do, more so to move toward free indirect discourse,
so that may be the first comment. (FID's ambiguous point of view, it
could be first, second or third.) The other thing that occurs to me is
the distinction between digesis and mimesis seems to get lost. (To risk
a rough translation; digesis as telling and mimesis as showing... wrt to
narratology, Metz and Genette and to Plato if you so wish.) To follow
this on, if digesis as telling a story is obviously narrative and
mimesis can be stretched between narrative and lyric then the formal
distinction between narrative and lyric on which narratology (from
Chatman, Story and Discourse) seems to blur so much that it becomes
almost impossible to make such a distinction. (I am tempted to discuss
Hegel but I will leave that... esp the elision of time into space in
_Science of Logic_.) Which sort of gets back to Frederick's comment on
narrative and lyric.
Can't think much more to add quickly, best press the send button...
On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 14:11 -0500, Frederick Pollack wrote:
> -- I think my basic trick in poems like this is to
> take a dramatic monologue and put it into the third person. Which invites
> further compression and selectiveness, and allows some associations that
> wouldn't strictly occur to the figure being described. I used to write the
> ordinary - often too flat - lyric narrative Doug mentions. Then I started
> challenging myself with lyric per se - and then I wanted to see how much
> narrative a lyric could absorb: to what extent a character, or a stretch of
> a character's life, could itself become an image.
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