Authorial Intrusion

[bgmnts]

Dear gentle reader, do authors still do this? The last 'modern' fiction I read was Stephen King's Duma Key and that was a standard third person narrative. I have read a bit of 19th century literature recently and I've noticed it was common to address the reader directly or comment on the story, as though they're relaying it to you personally.

I quite like this technique and wonder if authors do this nowadays.

Cheers.

[jamiefairlie]

Occasionally

[BJBMK2]

Illuminatus does this quite a bit. But I dunno if that's the kind of thing your after? It's done, like everything else in the book, in very much a meta, ironic sense.

[convulsivespace]

David Foster Wallace does this though maybe just in his essays.

[gilbertharding]

I remember my young mind being blown by the appearance of a character called Martin Amis in Money. Now I've re-read it recently, I'm struggling to recall why I found it so amazing.

Similarly, I'm currently re-reading London Fields (this time I'll finish it!) and I realise that the presence of an Author Character completely passed me by first time around... perhaps because he isn't called Martin Amis.

[Dr Rock]

Kurt Vonnegut is wont to do it, and so did I in the-novel-I-wrote-that-nearly-got-pubished-but-didn't.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I remember my young mind being blown by the appearance of a character called Martin Amis in Money. Now I've re-read it recently, I'm struggling to recall why I found it so amazing.

Similarly, I'm currently re-reading London Fields (this time I'll finish it!) and I realise that the presence of an Author Character completely passed me by first time around... perhaps because he isn't called Martin Amis.

Reminds me of how the main character in Crash is called "James Ballard", I think ol' JG was being a bit mischievous with that one.

[Dayraven]

That sort of direct address to the reader, apparently in the author's own voice, has gone being a common feature in 19th Century literature to being experimental now.

I think two important authors in the move away from this might be Flaubert and Hemingway — Flaubert for making a more distanced, 'objective' tone a literary goal that others followed, Hemingway doing the same for a pared-down style of prose.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I did it a couple of times in my absolute failure of a book that not even my friends bothered to read. Not all the time, but moments like this for example, where the lead characters are in a karaoke bar:

I smiled and nodded and let him ramble on, before he ordered two pints of lager and I fumbled my way through the song book, noticing that there were very few numbers in it that came from the last decade and most were nightmarish eighties pap. George joked about us doing a duet of the only song in the book that he'd heard of, Paradise By The Dashboard Light, but that definitely did not happen and definitely did not lead to loud booing whenever I opened my mouth, and if anyone suggests otherwise I'll see you in motherfucking court.

So yeah, maybe it's not a surprise they never finished it.

[Average Comedy Enjoyer]

"James Ballard"

The character of James Ballard is a physician in Crash and Hi Rise, which he was before he was an author.

Stephen King is relentless in his inclusion of protagonists who are popular novelists or literary types (Rear Window, The Shining, Misery, 11/22/1963, etc).

He also crossreferences his books making them functionally all within the same universe.

- The Dark Tower acknowledges the existence of Penny-wise from IT

- Every book which mentions incarceration always says "they've gone to Shawshank"

- In 11/22/1968, which is about time travel, the protag fucks around in Derry for about 100 pages, and characters acknowledge the existence of Pennywise

[Video Game Fan 2000]

o jamesy let me up out of this

[Herbert Ashe]

BS Johnson in Alberto Angelo:

Spoiler alert

[close]

[Mr Vegetables]

There's a bit in The Silver Chair that says something like "If you ever find yourself in Narnia, I think it would be a good idea to go here," and that very casual first person comment did a lot to make everything feel more real.

But that's almost the opposite of commenting on the artifice of fiction, maybe. As a device it makes it all feel less artificial and more grounded in the world.

[Vodkafone]

In J-Pod by Douglas Coupland there is a cameo by a character called Douglas Coupland. The book version is horrible, I'm not sure whether it's meant to be one of those self-effacing 'aren't I awful - please say no' schticks or whether it's a genuine bit of self-loathing. Anyway, there you are.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Dear gentle reader, do authors still do this? The last 'modern' fiction I read was Stephen King's Duma Key and that was a standard third person narrative. I have read a bit of 19th century literature recently and I've noticed it was common to address the reader directly or comment on the story

"Oliver's story has a few Twists, eh, readers!?"

[bakabaka]

It was when Philip K. Dick met Horselover Fat that I lost the plot (or rather, the origin of the narrative).

[notjosh]

Kurt Vonnegut is wont to do it, and so did I in the-novel-I-wrote-that-nearly-got-pubished-but-didn't.

I'm just reading Slaughterhouse-Five and was reminded of this thread by this bit:

Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there . . . an American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, "There they go, there they go." He meant his brains.

That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.

[dead-ced-dead]

I did it a couple of times in my absolute failure of a book that not even my friends bothered to read. Not all the time, but moments like this for example, where the lead characters are in a karaoke bar:

So yeah, maybe it's not a surprise they never finished it.

I've done this quite a lot in my manuscript, too. It's written in the first person from the point of view of an autistic girl with an obsession for old music. So I added lots of little moments of the character instructing the audience to stop reading and head to Spotify.

I think in character and stylistically it has a place, but my friends also haven't read it, so maybe they were right to do so.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I wrote my undergrad dissertation about exactly this but now I can't remember much about it. The main books I talked about were Money, Breakfast of Champions and The French Lieutenant's Woman. I'm pretty sure I found space to say about how crap J-Pod is as well. French Lieutenant's Woman is interesting, he comments on the book in footnotes as it goes on, then comes in and changes the ending a couple of times. Breakfast of Champions is similar, Vonnegut comes into the story and moves characters around. I love it personally.

[fucking ponderous]

Pynchon does this quite a bit. I can't think of any specific examples but he does. Referring to the reader as "Jackson" and all that.

Also Nabokov's Pnin, where the story is told as if the titular Russian emigre professor is someone Nabokov (or whoever the narrator is supposed to be) actually knew.

I find it very endearing. It's like someone telling you a story face to face. In Nabokov's case it's a wizened Russian man talking about an old acquaintance, and in Pynchon's it's a speed freak history buff losing his mind at you.