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CRITIQUE:

The Narrative Self

This is the second of Jen Craig's novels that I've read, although I believe that it's the first that she wrote.

Like "Panthers", it explores the nature of narrative. It's most likely to interest readers who are interested in the structure of fiction and the perception of reality.

Here, the novel is concerned with how the mind uses narrative to constitute and define the self and identity.

We use our experiences to compose and construct our personality. These experiences relate to moments (some of them titillating, some of them terrible, and some of them traumatic) or what the narrator (Jen?) calls an "accident of events".

Ironically, it's not so much Jen's narrative that we witness, but that of her older sister, Trude, who relates her story to Jen, after Jen returns from a trip to France, away from their mother and family.

Thus, Jen's narrative is her experience of listening to Trude's narrative of how she suffered a near fatal accident (possibly a car accident in which she broke her hip and a leg?), serendipitously met a man who would become her partner (Murray), attended an art workshop in the country, realised her ambition to become an artist, and held her first exhibition.

Meanwhile, in the course of recording Trude's narrative in her journal, Jen, in her turn, at a metafictional level, realises her own ambition of writing a novel.

Jen even describes herself as "an arbitrarily assembled kind of person", she being comprised partly of other people's experiences (and accidents).

The Imperative of Art

Having freed herself (her self?) from the influence of their mother, Trude recognises that she is subject to "the imperative of her art":

"There was always this pursuit, this instinct to move forwards...

"She now knew that she had no other choice than the one of being an artist."

Trude felt that there "was something gripping her about art". It had swept her up on a "wave of opportunity."

The Decisive Break

In retrospect, Trude realises that she needed the accident to achieve her artistic potential:

"There was no other way she was going to be an artist than to have an accident smash a break through the life she had been living...

"She needed to have that accident, then, if being an artist was what she was in the innermost parts of her being, and so paradoxically, for her own survival, she had to have nearly died...

"It had taken the accident, she now realised, to shake something of real sense into her...The art workshop [had] inadvertently changed her life forever...

"There had been a break in her life, a decisive break."

Her creativity now shaped her personality and her relationships with others (including her family). It even shaped her recollection and memory of her childhood and her origins:

"Several times as a child she had become convinced at a particular moment that she had been born to be nothing else but an artist.

"Too soon after each of these occasions, she said, she had let the clutter and disorder of ordinary life intrude on her thoughts."

Jen Craig writes lucidly about the clutter and disorder of ordinary life that define the self and identity.


SOUNDTRACK:
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Elvis Costello & The Attractions - "Accidents Will Happen"




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