THE NARRATOR AND THE AUTHOR IN FICTIONAL HOMODIEGETIC NARRATIVES IN MICHAEL SWAN’S POETRY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/folium/2024.5.9Keywords:
Michael Swan, narrative poem, homodiegetic narrator, author, transtextuality/ intertextuality/precedent-related phenomenaAbstract
In this article, we use basic conceptions of narratological and transtextual theories, as well as the theory of intertextuality to explore the agencies of the author and the narrator in the poems by Michael Swan. There is a general consensus about possibility of identity between the author and the narrator in factual and autobiographical narratives, and their distinction in heterodiegetic and homodiegetic fiction. The question whether the personality of the author can be revealed through his/her first-person fictional poetic narratives requires further discussion. Six first-person poetic texts by Michael Swan were chosen for analysis, all featuring common narrative strategies. The author prioritizes his narrators’ “first-hand experience”, rather than exercising impersonal omniscience, to better immerse the reader into the poem’s worlds. The homodiegetic narrators of the poems are mostly the “I-as-protagonist” and occasionally the “I-as-witness” types. Fixed internal focalization is used in five out of six poems; variable internal focalization, in one. The texts share another distinguishing feature: transtextual/intertextual connections and precedent-related phenomena. Both the stories on which Michael Swan bases his poems and the stories told by his narrators describe out-of-the-ordinary situations. The plots of the former are changed in the poems; occasionally, the focus of attention is shifted. It leads to the development of quite new, unexpected themes, which in two cases are in sharp contrast with the precedent ones. While the narrators overtly declare their presence in the poems, the personality of the author is withdrawn. Nevertheless, the recurrent narrative strategies allow us to suggest that the author’s personality is revealed through his texts. He creates text-worlds that are simultaneously based on and divergent from popular and well-studied literary/cultural phenomena, thus presenting himself as a proponent of an unorthodox approach to classic precedents.
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