- Guilherme Dearo
Time, reality, memory: points of view in Morrison, Lerner, and Luiselli
Atualizado: 28 de jun.
The art of remembering in Beloved, 10:04, and Lost Children Archive
“Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only
way of finding clarity in hindsight”.
(Valeria Luiselli, “Lost Children Archive”)
If we put side by side three contemporary Americans novels from different authors and years such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, it becomes obvious one element that links them all together: the motif of recollection. The novels, with different plots, structures, and strategies, reinforce discussions about memory, the importance of remembering, and what happens to human beings when one cannot remember, or cannot tell their own stories. Exploring these questions, Morrison, Lerner, and Luiselli construct narratives that stress past and present, freedom and oppression, the passage of time, and the register and reverberation of oral and imagetic stories through the society.
In those novels, choosing different points of view to tell such recollections and stories is an essential part of the author’s strategy. Different ways to create the point of view of specific characters’ memories produce different results. As states Norman Friedman, the point of view is crucial in fictional writing:
Thus the choice of a point of view in the writing of fiction is at least as crucial as the choice of a verse form in the composing of a poem; (...). The question of effectiveness, therefore, is one of the suitability of a given technique for the achievement of certain kinds of effects, for each kind of story requires the establishment of a particular kind of an illusion to sustain it (1955, p. 1180).
By choosing a point of view, therefore by giving power and space to a character or to another consciousness, the author can create his story-illusion (or even break it):
(...) when an author surrenders in fiction, he does so in order to conquer; he gives up certain privileges and imposes certain limits in order the more effectively to render his story-illusion, which constitutes artistic truth in fiction. (ibid., 1184).
In Beloved, through flashbacks created by the narrator and through the character’s oral stories and memories, the act of remembering and sharing stories is always emphasized. Those characters need to tell and recollect in order to preserve their own identity. The novel works with the idea of the returning of history, the returning of memories and unresolved things from the past. The main characters, African Americans, are completely traumatized from the horrible things that happened during the period of the slavery in the United States and during the American Civil War. As explains Raynaud (2007, p. 43),
Situated in 1873, after the abolition of the Peculiar Institution, Beloved deals with the recollections – what people remember – and the memory of slavery – the act of remembering. It probes its effects on the individual psyche of black and white people, but also the repressed memory of slavery in the make-up of the American nation.
Beloved, a kind of ghost or psychological manifestation, represents mostly the past that always returns to haunt the black person in the present. As says Aquino (2012, p. 200):
As the narrative suggests, Beloved’s presence symbolizes the past that haunts the present by not being fairly told and analyzed throughout the centuries. It has to be remembered, re-membered, and re-examined in order to be accommodated, otherwise it will continue as fragmented and disconnected rememories that cannot be controlled or forgotten.
During chapter six of the first part of the novel, Sethe is telling her daughter Denver and Beloved about her past, due to the girl's constant curiosity. Sethe “learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling” (p. 58) [1]. Sethe finds it strange that she relishes in telling Beloved stories from her past, because, in general, “It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past life hurts. Everything in it was painful or lost” (p. 58). But what starts as a conversation about earrings and a dress for her wedding with Halle turns into a painful memory about her mother. Beloved asks “Your woman she never fix up your hair?” (p. 60). Sethe, reluctantly, starts to think about her mother. She says her mother was always working in the fields and that she rarely could see her. She says that one time her mother showed her a mark on her rib and told Sethe that, if something happened to her, Sethe could recognize her by that mark. And, then, the big revelation, a very painful memory: “‘What happened to her?’ / ‘Hung. By the time they cut her down nobody could tell whether she had a circle and a cross or not, least of all me and I did look’”. (p. 61) After that, “She had to do something with her hands because she was remembering something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross” (p.61).
In another example, the last chapter of the first part brings a scene where Sethe talks to Paul D and she finally tells him the story that he already suspects, the story when she had to kill one of her children. Before that, the reader already knows such facts in detail. After the revelation, they argue and Paul D leaves the 124 house. Sethe knows that she has to tell him everything, although she resists. Paul D is there, “But his smile never got a chance to grow. It hung there, small and alone, while she examined the clipping and then handed it back.” (p. 161). And “I don’t have to tell you about Sweet Home — what it was — but maybe you don’t know what it was like for me to get away from there.”, she explains to him (p. 161).
Then, the narrator starts to explain the feelings of Sethe, cornered, while she realizes she has to tell him everything (“Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask”. - p. 163). At the same time, as we enter the interior of Sethe through an indirect discourse, we start to listen to her direct voice, very personal and full of emotions, and the two voices mix: “Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple.” (p. 163).
The first passage is an example of a more realistic way of putting the recollection of the character within the narration. Sethe is telling the story of her past to Beloved and Denver in the present, during a conversation where she is actively influenced to talk. In the second example, however, we observe a free indirect speech, where the voice and description of the narrator merges with the speech of Sethe, one helping the other moving forward and telling the gruesome episode of her killing a child, a very painful memory, therefore a very difficult one to recollect and to tell honestly to another person.
Both examples show similar moments — Sethe remembering something from her past and telling it —, but they are also very different because of the context of the scenes, and also because they need to produce different effects, and Morrison constructs the scenes differently in order to achieve that. In the second example, Morrison chooses a free indirect speech, where the consciousness of Sethe and her narration mixes with the words of the narrator. Sethe seems to struggle to remember something extremely painful, and the narration helps her to move forward. As explains James Wood:
Graças ao estilo indireto livre, vemos coisas através dos olhos e da linguagem do autor. Habitamos, simultaneamente, a onisciência e a parcialidade. Abre-se uma lacuna entre autor e personagem, e a ponte entre eles — que é o próprio estilo indireto livre — fecha essa lacuna, ao mesmo tempo que chama atenção para a distância. Esta é apenas outra definição da ironia dramática: ver através dos olhos de um personagem enquanto somos incentivados a ver mais do que ele mesmo consegue ver (uma não confiabilidade idêntica à do narrador não confiável em primeira pessoa). (2011, p. 25)
With those examples, it becomes clear that the fragmentary style of the novel, with different voices and protagonists in a constant struggle to tell and to recollect urges for different points of view:
The aesthetic limits of such a work are that it should still be readable as a novel, hence the fragments of narrative. It is also a reflection on the character of storytelling, its reliance on a storyteller and an audience, on the material of experience. Fragmentation is justified through the use of different narrative viewpoints and the very character of memory. (RAYNAUD, 2007, p. 55)
In 10:04 [2], Ben Lerner also creates different points of view and types of narration, based on the centrality of the protagonist Ben, a writer who lives in New York. From his initial point of view, who starts the story with a first person narration, the novel will make some changes along the way, even bringing the direct voice of the author himself as a narrator. If in Beloved Morrison took inspiration and data from real events, creating a fictional work that any reader can understand that has a parallel reverberation with past and present of the United States, in 10:04 Lerner brings the fusion of fiction and reality to another level.
Lerner creates a metafictional plot, not hiding from the reader that: what he is telling is a book, a story — therefore, there is no intention of creating an effect of illusion. In one point of the novel, he speaks directly to the reader, as an actor in TV looking directly to the camera and talking to the audience on their houses (“Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them” [Part Four, position 2472]); that he built some aspects of the novel from his own life (for instance, the protagonist’s name is Ben, also a writer, a poet, and a teacher [3]); and that some textual material used in the novel it is, in fact, a “recycled” material from Lerner’s reality, such as the short story “The Golden Vanity” — published by Ben Lerner in 2012 in The New Yorker magazine, it is also the whole Part 2 of 10:04, a short story written by the fictional Ben that would guarantee him, later, a proposal by a publisher for a whole new novel. As explains Corrigan (2014), “to use Lerner's own description, it's a book that's written ‘on the very edge of fiction.’”.
Those metafictional intentions, with autobiographical elements, reflect in the way Lerner chooses to construct the point of view of the narrative. Also, they reflect in the moments where the characters remember something from their past. There are some interesting examples of recollections from 10:04, where memory and identity play important roles. In the beginning of Part Three, the protagonist explains that he works periodically at the Park Slope Food Coop, in Brooklyn, a food cooperative. That day, he is in the basement, working at the “food processing” station. Then, he starts to talk to another employee, Noor. She tells him that her father is from Lebanon, while her mom is from Boston and, on that side of the family, she has Russians and Jewish relatives. When he asks Noor if she still has many relatives in Lebanon, she answers: “It’s a long story. I have a kind of complicated family” (Position 1199).
Noor starts to tell the story to Ben, while they are constantly interrupted and need to pause the conversation until they are free to talk again. “My dad died three years ago from a heart attack and his family is largely still in Beirut, Noor said, although not in these words. I’ve always thought of myself connected to them, even though I barely saw them growing up”, Lerner writes (Position 1199). Later, Noor reveals that she found much later in her life that her father wasn’t her biological father. Such shocking and bizarre discovery affects her life profoundly, since she, during her entire life, had identified herself with the Arab community and had been involved with Middle Eastern political issues. “I still believe all the things that I believed; it hasn’t changed my sense of any of the causes. But my right to care about the causes, my right to have this name and speak the language and cook the food and sing the songs and be part of the struggles or whatever — all of that has changed (...). Like, somebody wanted me to give a talk at Zuccotti Park about Occupy’s relation to the Arab Spring and I didn’t feel qualified, so I said no”, she explains to Ben (Position 1281).
The second interesting point is the whole Part Two, a short story called “The Golden Vanity”. As explained before, that narrative is also a real short story that the author Ben Lerner published in The New Yorker magazine. Within the limits of fiction, it is also a short story that the protagonist Ben wrote. Before we read the short story, Ben is talking during Part One about the ideas he is having for that potential story, for that text he hasn't written yet. “The story would involve a series of transpositions (...). I would change names: Alex would become Liza (...); Alena would become Hannah; (...) Dr. Andrews to Dr. Roberts, etc.” (Positions 684-692). Here, Ben is narrating his plans. Later, “The story came quickly, almost alarmingly so — I had a draft finished within a month — and I sent it to my agent, who sent it to The New Yorker, (...).” (Position 706).
We can analyze that 10:04, as a contemporary novel, reflects the fact that Lerner knows, as a fiction writer from the 21st century, that he is in an unique position as a narrator, as a storyteller. The metafictional characteristics of 10:04, where the discourse of “Ben” and the discourse of Ben Lerner feed each other, interfere in each other, show us that. As explains Theodor Adorno about the narrator of the contemporary novel:
O momento destacado será o da posição do narrador. Ela se caracteriza, hoje, por um paradoxo: não se pode mais narrar, embora a forma do romance exija a narração (...). Do ponto de vista do narrador, isso é uma decorrência do subjetivismo, que não tolera mais nenhuma matéria sem transformá-la, solapando assim o preceito épico da objetividade (2003, p. 55).
The narrator faces a crisis, a crisis of the impossibility of dominating reality as a whole as the novel used to. If Painting and its pictorial realism had to rethink its paths with the invention of Photography in the 19th century, the novel also had to face the rising of the Cinema, of the mass media, of the Cultural Industry. Says Adorno:
O que se desintegrou foi a identidade da experiência, a vida articulada e em si mesma contínua, que só a postura do narrador permite. (...) A narrativa que se apresentasse como se o narrador fosse capaz de dominar esse tipo de experiência seria recebida, justamente, com impaciência e ceticismo (2003, p. 56).
The point of view and the types of narration adopted by Lerner in 10:04 show us how that conservative and objective narrator died in order to surge a new one — and that movement, according to Adorno, appears since James Joyce and Marcel Proust, for example —, a narrator that breaks the wall between fiction and reality, that knows the limits of its own narration, including the limits of language; and that doesn’t want to elude the reader by creating a fictional world totally detached from reality and from its own act of writing and fictionalizing.
In the first example, the narrator Ben, who starts the narrative with a first person account, gives space to Noor to speak, and she speaks in the first person while telling him the story of her family. Although we listen to Noor in first person, we can't take what she says for granted, since there is the intervention of the narrator, Ben: “My dad died three years ago from a heart attack and his family is largely still in Beirut, Noor said, although not in these words. I’ve always thought of myself as connected to them (...)” (Position 1199). Here, both Noor’s speech and Ben’s speech are connected, and Ben says a crucial line: “Noor said, although not in these words”. Therefore: what Noor says is being mediated by Ben; and that is a recollection from Ben, telling a recollection of Noor, a double layer of remembering and telling. First, from Noor to Ben, somewhere in the past; after that, we don’t know when, Ben/Ben Lerner is telling all that to us, as readers. Therefore, we can’t “trust” entirely what is being told. Noor’s speech can’t be an example of an objective account of the past and her life, even with a first person speech. The same thing happens to Ben: we can confide in his recollection, since his memory can fail.
Something similar to example one happens when the protagonist remembers a story from his father (Part Three, Position 1731). “My dad told me all of this when I flew home from Providence for Daniel’s funeral (...)”, Ben begins to say. Later, he starts to mix his own voice in the present, telling his father’s story with an indirect speech, with the voice of his father, in a direct speech in first person. “After the funeral, when I left the family to sit shiva in that giant house in Albany (...) [Position 1753]” is his father telling the story. Then, without interruptions, “I could picture all of this as we drove to Topeka, I said to Alex, with unusual vividness (...) [Position 1761-1768]”. Here, it is Ben speaking, remembering to Alex, in the present, a moment with his father where they drove to Topeka, and, in that moment from the past, his father told him the story he is remembering now. And he remembers he remembering, since he says “I could picture all that as we drove to Topeka” to Alex.
In the second example, we have a whole short story within the novel that functions as a recollection of autobiographical elements of Ben. If the protagonist is revealing that he intends to write a fiction using his own life as inspiration, only changing some names and details, and then, in the next chapter, we read that short story, we can assume that text is a kind of narration from his past, of his life, to others. A recollection, thus, using the aesthetics and the discourse of fiction. If the short story, published and presented to us readers, is the present, so its content is the past — assuming, again, that Ben told the truth, that he used some aspects of his own life to write the story; and we can attest some of it in the short story, such as the names he early predicted: Liza, Hannah, Dr. Roberts etc.
But, again, Lerner doesn't want to create an effect of illusion. In the same way he puts himself in his metafictional narrative, he doesn't hide the fact that “The Golden Vanity”, as a discourse, is a repetitive one, taken from another place, beyond the limits of the fiction. If the narrator is an unreliable one — his first person discourse is subjective and frail, plus the character Ben is bending between two worlds, his fictional world and the world where he’s only the pale creation of someone’s mind — what the short story tells us is also unreliable: it can be based in inaccurate memories of the protagonist. Not only the reminiscence within the fiction of the short story can be inaccurate, but what they recuperate from Ben’s life can also be false. More: the consciousness that shows us the short story as memory, letter by letter, can also be failing or lying. In another place and world, there is another short story called “The Golden Vanity”, entirely different or “will be as it is now, just a little different”. Because Ben can't tell us right (or he does not want to). Or because Lerner doesn’t want to.
Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, as 10:04, also works with metafiction and different layers of texts that mix reality and fiction, although her novel doesn't want to be as explicit as 10:04 in terms of being a “metabook” or “metafiction”. For example: as the character of the mother in the novel, in real life Luiselli also worked as an interpreter for immigrants:
“Her 2017 book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions detailed her experience volunteering as an interpreter in immigration court, helping lawyers determine which children might be eligible for relief. (...) In Luiselli’s retelling she suggests that neither her first documentary approach nor her fictional approach [Lost Children Archive] has successfully reclaimed and revealed the children’s lives, but both texts have helped expose the darker forces that enveloped them.”. [4]
Also, Luiselli took references, direct and indirect, from another seminal texts and vast documents to create her own text, and those references are mentioned:
Luiselli, a formally experimental collagist of a writer who conceives of her work as a dialogue with various texts, has filled this novel with imbedded references and quotes from a semester's worth of seminal books and documents about road trips, Native American history, and immigration, which the family tote cross-country in seven boxes. Remarkably, these materials add edifying heft without weighing down the novel. Prime sources include Ezra Pound's Cantos and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (...). [5]
In the novel [6], for the most part we have the direct point of view of the mother, who discusses things about her children, her work, and about her troubled marriage. Also, the boy of the family has space to talk in first person for a large part of the narrative. Luiselli’s novel
“is narrated by an unnamed woman, who with her unnamed husband and their two children—a five-year-old girl, who is the woman’s daughter from a previous relationship, and a ten-year-old boy, who is the husband’s son, also from a previous relationship—is driving, in the summer, from New York City to the southeast corner of Arizona. The mother and father are not writers, exactly; they are documentary makers, of a kind, and met while working on a large audio-recording project, which aimed to make a soundscape of emblematic New York noises—subways screeching, ministers preaching, cash registers shutting, playground swings swinging. In Arizona, they plan to do different, adjacent things: she will work on “a sound documentary about the children’s crisis at the border”; he intends something vaguer and more abstract: to make what he calls an “inventory of echoes” about “the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.” [7]
The first example of Luiselli’s narrative strategy is the opposition of two voices, mother and boy. The novel shows us two different characters telling us “the same thing”. They are two different points of view, although they appear in different stages in the novel (but not in the plot) and both are narrating in first person, creating the “same” point of view for that particular moment, the point of view of a protagonist speaking in first person and acting as a protagonist, will all its limitations or possibilities.
During the whole part one (Family Soundscape), the mother is speaking. Since the beginning of the novel, we follow the story through her eyes, the protagonist, as she tells us in first person all about her life in the present, her past, and the present trip the family decides to do, mixing the needs of the husband’s work with the needs and desires of the her work. She begins the narrative in medias res (“They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid. From the copilot seat, I glance back to check on them every so often, then turn around again to study the map. We advance in the slow lava of traffic toward the city limits, across the GW Bridge, and merge onto the interstate.” - p. 5), already in the present of the trip, to then explain her past and how they got there (“My husband and I met four years ago, recording a soundscape of New York City. We were part of a large team of people working for New York University's Center for Urban Science and Progress.” - p. 6).
During all “Family Soundscape” chapters (“Relocations”, “Routes & Roots”, etc.), the direct voice of the mother mixes moments from the present, with the verbs in the present (“On a road called Happy Creek, we get pulled over by a police car. My husband turns off the engine, takes off his hat, and rolls down his window, smiling at the policewoman.” - p. 45), with moments from the past, recollections, (“When the girl was four and had started going to public school, she prematurely lost a tooth. Immediately after, she started stuttering”. p. 16), and moments not focused on actions and facts, but in reflections that vary from her life to work, literature, politics, the current refugee crisis etc. (“No one looks at the bigge map, historical and geographical, of a refugee population’s migration routes. Most people think of refugees and migrants as a foreign problem.” - p. 50). Furthermore, her direct point of view will return much later in the novel.
But, later, from part two (“Reenactment”), the boy of the family starts to speak. We begin to revisit all the things that the mother has told us (the past of the family, the preparation for the trip, the trip itself), but from his unique point of view. His part goes even further in the future, and we will discover new things about their travels. From the first paragraph, we enter the boy’s game: “Calling Major Tom. Checking sound. One, two, three. This is Ground Control. You copy me, Major Tom?” (p. 191), in a reference that we’ve learnt before (the nicknames, the Bowie’s song). The boy’s language is clearly different from the mother. He talks about his “Ma” and “Pa”, he talks about his thoughts (“That night, I dreamed that I killed a cat and that afterward, I walked out into the desert all by myself and buried its parts: tail, feet, eyes, and some whiskers.” - p. 201) and his activities during the trip (“I had heard echoes before, but nothing like the ones we heard that next day when we all walked out into the Burro Mountains.” - p. 227). At the chapter “Echo Canyon”, the boy’s discourse accelerates, as the narrative creates for him a stream of narration, with no interruptions (p. 319), where he narrates the final part of their adventure (when they were, actually, lost): “(...) and we heard them saying we're coming, oming, oming, and probably something like stay where you are, are, are, and you stood there and it took you a moment, but you also breathed in all the air around you, your belly ballooning out, and called it out, your beautiful name, and it came back mighty and powerful all around us, Memphis.” (p. 338).
If both speak in first person and act as the main protagonist of the story, we can analyze that they have a limited point of view. Both mother and son are limited by their eyes and minds. But, since we have direct access to their thoughts and we can witness, side by side with them, their adventures, we don’t feel a limitation in terms of narration and information. On the contrary, the two points of view create contrasts, comparisons, and complementations. Friedman, analyzing that kind of point of view, would define it as a “I as protagonist”:
Because of his subordinate role in the story itself, the witness-narrator has much greater mobility and consequently a greater range and variety of sources of information than the protagonist proper, who is centrally involved in the action. The protagonist-narrator, therefore, is limited almost entirely to his own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Similarly, the angle of view is that of the fixed center. (1955, pp. 1175-1176)
The main difference between the two points of view, mother and son, is that the recollection of the son is clearly about things that have already ended, and he’s re-telling all his adventures to a specific person: his sister. All his discourse is marked by the presence of the little girl: “I don't think you understood any of the news or any of her stories. I think you didn't even listen. But I listened.” (p. 208), “I don't know if you will remember what Pa told us about the Eagle Warriors.” (p. 209), or “In the evening, Pa made dinner, and you fell asleep with your head on the table before we even finished.” (p. 224). As a letter, or a record, the boy tells about the trip to the girl because maybe she asked him too, and because she isn’t able to recollect all by herself, because of her young age. We learn in the final chapter, “Document”, that the parents probably split up after the trip, and each child will leave with their respective biological parent. Now that boy and girl are being separated, the boy has the concern to leave a final message to the girl, a testament about remembering: “You might feel lost one day, but you have to remember that you're not, because you and I will find each other again.” (p. 350).
The last example comes from the daughter of the family, the youngest, who, by trying to imitate the work of the father, “documents” sounds she perceived during the trip. But, differently from her mother and brother, she doesn’t have entire chapters to recollect her memories and tell us her stories. She doesn’t even have a well-structured narrative voice (while her brother, a little older, is very articulate for his age). The way she presents us her direct point of view, as a protagonist who lived the story, is having a document full of fragments, thoughts, onomatopoeias, and “written sounds”, “written echoes”. That document is kept in box number VI, in the beginning of part four.
Her collection of memories and impressions varies in styles. We have registers like “written sounds”, very abstracts: “Mem mem mem mem”, or “Wa wa wa wa wa” (p. 342); or “insect echoes”, more concrete: “Bzzzzzz, bee buzzing” (p. 342). She expresses her daily routine and activities through sounds or through little remarks: “Tac, took, tac, our footsteps in desert”, “Waaaaahhhh, nooooo, ahhhhhh, me crying”, or “Rumch rumch, us eating cookies” (p. 344). When we understand her point of view, we see that she is telling the same story of her brother, step by step, yet with an unique and peculiar eye.
By choosing such direct, pure, innocent and particular way of showing us the consciousness and perceptions of the little daughter, Luiselli opts almost to use a “stream of consciousness”, a kind of odd monologue where we can witness a direct recollection, a recollection very officially registered and preserved, since it lays safe in a organizer box, protected by the mother. The girl’s curious voice is full of passion and free from deception. If there is a narrator (the author herself or another one), he or she steps down, giving full space for the character. As says David Lodge,
Modern fiction has tended to suppress or eliminate the authorial voice, by presenting the action through the consciousness of the characters, or by handing over to them the narrative task itself. (1992, p. 10)
The three authors, by talking about memory and recollection in their narratives, giving space to different voices and points of view, allows us to re-think what we understand by past and present, hearing echoes of old stories, dreams, and prayers, in day-to-day life. As the character of the mother reflects in Lost Children Archive (p. 133),
His stories are not directly linked to the piece I'm working on, but the more I listen to the stories he tells about this country's past, the more it seems like he's talking about the present. //
NOTES
[1] All references from Beloved are from: MORRISON, T. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004.
[2] All the references of 10:04 are from: LERNER, B. 10:04. New York: Faber & Faber, 2014. Ebook. PS.: The ebook does not have pages, but “positions”.
[3] “In 10:04, Lerner makes the relationship between author and narrator conspicuously close, more so even than his previous novel. Many of the facts of Ben’s life correspond to facts about Lerner: the critically successful first novel, the substantial advance for the second, his childhood in Topeka, his residence in Brooklyn, his profession, and of course his name. Giving a narrator your own name these days is a suspect gesture, likely to put us on guard: now we have to be extra-careful not to assume that anything about the narrator is also true of the author”. - BLAIR, E. So this is how it works. London Review of Books. Vol. 37 No. 4 · 19 February 2015.
[4] LEE, S. Book Review: "Lost Children Archive". Columbia Magazine. Winter 2018-2019.
[5] MCALPIN, H. Real Life Informs A Tense Trip In 'Lost Children Archive'. NPR. Feb. 2019.
[6] All the references of Lost Children Archive are from: LUISELLI, V. Lost Children Archive. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
[7] WOOD, J. Writing About Writing About the Border Crisis. The New Yorker. Feb., 4, 2019.
REFERENCES
ADORNO, T. Posição do narrador no romance contemporâneo. In: _____. Notas de Literatura I. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2003, pp. 55-63.
AQUINO, R. C. F. de. Excavating the past: rememories and healing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Em Tese, [S.l.], v. 10, pp. 196-201, dez. 2012.
BLAIR, E. So this is how it works. London Review of Books. v. 37, n. 4 · 19, Feb. 2015.
CORRIGAN, M. '10:04': A Strange, Spectacular Novel Connecting Several Plotlines. NPR. Sept. 2014.
FRIEDMAN, N. Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept. PMLA, Cambridge University Press, v. 70, n. 5, pp. 1160-1184, Dec. 1955.
LEE, S. Book Review: "Lost Children Archive". Columbia Magazine. Winter 2018-2019.
LERNER, B. 10:04. New York: Faber & Faber, 2014. Ebook.
LODGE, D. The Art of Fiction. England: Penguin Books, 1992.
LUISELLI, V. Lost Children Archive. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
MCALPIN, H. Real Life Informs A Tense Trip In 'Lost Children Archive'. NPR. Feb. 2019.
MORRISON, T. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. Ebook.
RAYNAUD, C. Beloved or the shifting shapes of memory. In: TALLY, J. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Cambridge: CUP, 2007, pp. 43-58.
WOOD, J. Como Funciona a Ficção. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2011.
WOOD, J. Writing About Writing About the Border Crisis. The New Yorker. Feb., 4, 2019.
Citation: DEARO, Guilherme. "Time, reality, memory: points of view in Morrison, Lerner, and Luiselli". São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, July 2022.
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