Textual Interventions - Narrative Time and Metafiction

Student Number: 120023091

WR30230, Textual Interventions

‘The Pumpkin Café’

Narrative Time

Her first train had arrived ten minutes late at Shrewsbury station, so of course

she had missed her connecting train to Chester University and was waiting in the

dingy platform café that sold terrible coffee. She loved good, rich coffee with two

teaspoons of sugar and a dash of whole milk, but had been missing it for the few

days she had been at her grandparent’s because her grandma only bought

Sainsbury’s own instant coffee, which was on a comparable level to the coffee

currently held by the cup in her hand.

Moving away from the cashier she now surveyed the few tables within the

square room and chose one next to the corner facing the door. She sat down and

placed her large headphones over her ears even though her i-pod battery was dead.

Pulling her phone out of her pocket she began to flick through Facebook, then

Instagram, but neither held her attention for very long.

She felt herself drifting as she stared at the cup next to her phone. She’d left

on the moulded plastic lid and her lipstick had transferred around the mouthpiece to

leave a pinkish stain that corresponded with the lines in the skin of her lips. The

coffee had spilled when the cashier put the cup onto the counter, and a caramel

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coloured line had run down the side of the orange cardboard, through the bold,

white, ‘Pumpkin Café’ letters and to the bottom of the cup. The line was partially

hidden by a sleeve of brown cardboard which had the café logo stamped onto it

alongside the warning of ‘Careful, I’m Hot!’. Near the cup were three torn packets of

sugar, one was much damper than the other two. The damp packet had fallen into

the coffee while she’d been pouring it, making the sugar inside all soggy and

clumped together, so she’d given up trying to get it out and opened a third.

A tear rolled down the side of her nose and she wiped it away quickly before

looking at the other customers in the café and then reaching into her laptop bag to

pull out a lined notepad and a black pen. She looked once more at the people

around her and began to write. Her hand moved slowly across the paper to begin

with but as she continued the words seemed to flow out of her pen with increasing

speed. She paused when she got to the last page of her thinning book and looked

up. After a moment she took a sip of her coffee and thought about that morning.

When she had showered and packed her bags she’d taken them downstairs

to put them in the hall next to her parents’. They were in the front room with her

grandparents drinking cups of tea and she sat on the floor when she joined them.

The conversation was about the weather, the ice on the roads, and the time it would

take to get to the station. Her grandma and dad were doing most of the talking, her

granddad was half asleep, and her mum was watching him through puffy eyes.

A few minutes later they all stood up together but her granddad rose from his

chair slowly. There were hugs all round, and a lot to be said but no one seemed to

say it so neither did she. After hugging her grandma she went across the room to

hug her granddad gently, thinking of a million things to say, and feeling disappointed

when her tongue concocted the inadequate, “Bye, I’ll see you soon.”

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She took another sip of her station coffee and noticed an old woman in a

brown coat watching her. Wiping her eyes again she wrote a few more paragraphs

on the paper and then ripped the pages out of the notepad. After she’d put the pen

and notepad back into the bag alongside her laptop she checked the departures

board and swung the bag over her shoulder. Sliding up the handle on her small

suitcase she pulled it to the door and disposed of the coffee cup and sugar wrappers

in the bin.

She exited and made her way to the correct platform hoping that the old

woman hadn’t picked up the pieces of paper she had left behind.

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Metafiction

This is not for you.

This is for me.

This is so I can un-jumble my brain and work everything out because very

little makes sense at the moment. I need to write this down and just leave it. I can’t

destroy it or throw it away because I need to know it exists. I need to transfer the

information, see it on paper, and then go on without it. Doing this will help me sort

things out in my brain. If you are the one reading this I need you to understand that

this is not for you.

I need to write down that I was already emotional in the car journey from the

station. It is fact that I had felt small tears occasionally slip down my face as I

watched the lights of the motorway rush past in their pairs. Luckily it was dark so if I

half shut my eyes my parents thought I was asleep when they looked at me in the

rear-view mirror. I needed not to talk. My voice would have cracked, then they would

have known, and I needed them to not know how fragile I was.

I needed to be strong.

I was okay by the time we arrived at their house but then my grandma opened

the door and we all greeted her with hugs. I think there are different expiry times on

different types of hugs; a normal greeting hug between relatives should be brief,

roughly three seconds, as should the average goodbye hug. A hug between lovers

saying hello is long and a goodbye hug is longer.

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The hug my grandma gave me was too long. It turned from a simple hello hug

into one with more meaning. The extra squeeze meant something, it gave me an

uncertain feeling, like when you test milk that’s a day past the expiry date and you

are trying to work out whether it is okay. Those extra seconds told me everything

was not okay.

If you are reading this you do not know him and you will never meet him. This

will mean nothing to you but, he was too skinny when I walked into the front room

and wrapped my arms around him. I did not hug him tightly, however as my fingers

felt his ribs through his shirt and jumper I heard a thin pained gasp slip through his

dry lips. It is a fact that he could barely walk back to his seat. Other facts are that it

took him several moments longer than an ill person to sit down in his chair, that my

grandma had to pick his blanket up from the floor and place it on his lap, and that

she had to put a towel over his hands to keep them warm.

I took off my jumper just before I sat down on the sofa but little beads of sweat

were already starting to form underneath my arms. I started to zone out the talking

as I stared into the electric fireplace where the pattern of flames repeated on a loop.

When I glowered at the repetitive flickers for long enough my eyes stopped stinging

and dried up.

I needed to be strong.

After a while my grandma put a cushion onto my granddad’s knees so that he

could put his elbows onto it and lean forwards to rest his head in his hands. She later

explained that he has to switch between sitting forwards and sitting backwards

regularly. His organs and back are weak and when he puts pressure on either of

them it is very painful. Leaning forwards takes the pressure off his back and leaning

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back takes the pressure of his organs. It is a balancing act. She says the morphine

helps.

I don’t know if anyone is ever going to read this but if you are I am only going

to tell you the facts. I need to organise the facts, write them down, acknowledge

them and then categorise them into my brain like I do with all types of information. I

take away the emotions and I can function.

I need to be strong.

Across the weekend he barely ate anything. No one told me why so I can’t

write that fact down. He did not join us for meals and my grandma left the table early.

I did notice that holding objects is difficult for him as, when I walked into the front

room to ask my grandma if she wanted desert, he was eating custard but the spoon

in his bruised hands was at an awkward angle and the contents kept sliding off. My

grandma says his hands are very painful. They are thicker than I remember and

match his swollen ankles but not his gaunt face.

He is quiet most of the time. He is in the room with all of us but barely

interacts and this is difficult. I find myself watching him, wishing there was something

I could do as his breath catches, but when his eyes meet mine as if in embarrassed

defiance of my gaze, then I feel a little ashamed. Occasionally he comes out with a

funny remark which shows us he is still in there somewhere but he is mostly gone

now. I feel like a bitch when I think that, because we are lucky he is still here, but it is

true. He is fading. He has almost faded. I need to be aware of that. I need to

acknowledge that he is nearly gone now because too soon he will be completely

gone. There is nothing I can do. That is a fact.


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The other reason I am writing this is because I will be going to my

grandparents’ house again in two weeks’ time. I know seeing him this weekend has

been hard as he looks ill and I know that unlike the times before, this ‘down’ is not

because of chemo, there will be no ‘up’ rest period between treatments, this is the

final ‘down’. I am telling you facts. He is dying. I am going to my grandparent’s house

in two weeks and he might not be there. I have said goodbye to him, and am waiting

for a train, and I might never see him again. These are facts.

I will put feelings and worries in here as, even if you do read this, I need to

acknowledge them now in order to ignore them later. Please remember if you are

reading this that I do not want your sympathy. You do not know me and I do not care

about you, but sometimes I need to put ink onto paper in order to make things in my

head line up in the neat columns that they are supposed to line up in.

I am writing this to make the columns line up.


This is a fact – I might never see him again.

This fact terrifies me. I keep asking myself what if that was the last time I ever

say goodbye to him? Although I am trying to trick myself into dealing with emotions

as facts, I know that our last goodbye was not good enough, because although I said

goodbye I couldn’t say Goodbye. I was not ready to say Goodbye but what if that

was my last chance?

This is a fact - I am crying in a train station café and an old woman is staring

at me. I hope you are not the old woman who is staring at me. If you are the old

woman staring at me then please put these pieces of paper down. I will hopefully be

on a train at this point and there is nothing you can do.

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This is not for you.

This is for me.

Critical Commentary

I wanted to write a portfolio which had two separate pieces but an overall

unifying theme. I decided to explore the use of Narrative Time in my first piece as

both my pieces are set within the same time period, however, I use the first piece as

a framing device for my second. In my second piece I chose to use Metafiction as

this technique disallows the reader to become truly involved in the story and links to

the way in which my character disallows the reader to be involved with her emotions.

From reading The Fault in Our Stars1 by John Green I decided that one main

theme of my portfolio would be losing someone to cancer. In The Fault in Our Stars

the protagonist has to deal with not only having cancer herself but losing her

boyfriend to cancer, and throughout the book although she is living her life she is

waiting and worrying for something to happen to him. I tried to replicate this idea of

waiting for something to happen to a loved one by basing my first piece in a train

station. I wanted the train station to act as a symbolical limbo as it is where my

character writes down, therefore faces, her emotions and then tries to move on.

In The Fault in Our Stars the main character narrates, ‘…maybe I was missing

my last chance to see him, to say goodbye…’ (Green, The Fault in Our Stars, p.230)

and I felt that this sentiment of inadequate or missed goodbyes was extremely

1 Green, John, The Fault in Our Stars’, (London: Penguin Books, 2012)

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poignant which is why I employed it in both my Narrative Time and Metafiction

pieces. I wanted to mirror this concern subtly in my first piece with, ‘ feeling

disappointed when her tongue concocted the inadequate, “Bye, I’ll see you soon.”’

And more obviously in my second piece when, in a rather panicky style, my narrator

wrote, ‘I know that our last goodbye was not good enough, because although I said

goodbye I couldn’t say Goodbye. I was not ready to say Goodbye but what if that

was my last chance?’ I feel that in both pieces I have managed to mirror Green’s

idea of the last goodbye being important to loved ones, but also being a point of

concern and pressure for them.

I read Paul Ricoer’s article on ‘Narrative Time’2 in which he explores how

language can be used to show the movement of time. In this article he quotes Martin

Heidegger, ‘”saying ‘now’” says Heidegger, “is the discursive articulation of making-

present…”’(Ricoer, ‘Narrative Time, p.173) then Ricoer goes on to explain, ‘saying

‘now’ is turned into a form of the abstract representation of time.’(Ricoer, ’Narrative

Time’, p.174) Showing that by the use of ‘time’ words, literature is able to place a

narrative in its own abstract time, yet makes this narrative time easily accessible to

the reader. This article goes on to explain how words and phrases such as ‘now’,

‘then’ and ‘and then’ shows the movement of time, which is something I have

focussed on in my Narrative Time piece. My second paragraph is where the

narrative ‘present’ begins, ‘…she now surveyed…’ and I have tried to use the literary

techniques discussed in Ricoer’s article throughout my piece in order to display

different passages of time to my reader.

2 Ricoer, Paul, ‘Narrative Time’ in The University of Chicago Press, Vol. 7 (1980), pp. 169-190

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Tobias Wolff’s, ‘Bullet in the Brain’ from his short story collection, The Night in

Question3, uses varying techniques to explore and manipulate narrative time. He

utilises the structure of an opening summary paragraph in order to give his

character’s background, ‘Anders couldn’t get to the bank… everything he reviewed.’

(Wolff, The Night in Question, p.200) which I have tried to emulate in my narrative

time piece with, ‘Her first train had arrived… cardboard cup in her hand.’ Wolff also

uses a close-up technique in order to slow down narrative time, ‘a certain rosy blush

on the underside of the clouds.’ ’ (Wolff, The Night in Question, p.201) I have

replicated this when I describe, ‘a pinkish stain that corresponded with the lines in

the skin of her lips.’ However, where Wolff slows down narrative time to create

tension, I have slowed down time in order to create a sense of distance, to suggest

that my main character is emotionally detached and ‘spaced-out’.

Alden Nowlan’s poem, ‘An Exchange of Gifts’, from his anthology, An

Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and Selected4 uses a form of metafiction in which the

writing is almost forceful in the way it addresses the reader. ‘As long as you read this

poem…’ (Nowlan, An Exchange of Gifts, p.19) is the first line which immediately

breaks down any ideas that the reader is allowed to become invested in the narrative

of the poem. It positions, from the start, the reader as a ‘you’, an outsider, and I have

tried to replicate this idea of the reader being an outsider in my own Metafiction piece

through the repetition of, ‘This is not for you. This is for me.’ I think this placement of

the reader means they are privy to the narrator’s emotions, but that the metafictional

form of the piece, coupled with my character’s narrative voice, means that the

3 Wolff, Tobias, ‘Bullet in the Brain’ in The Night in Question: Stories, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1996) pp. 200-2034 Nowlan, Alden, ‘An Exchange of Gifts’ from An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and Selected (Toronto: Irwin, 1985) p.19

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reader’s sympathy is unwanted and creates an intentional barrier between the reader

and the character/narrator.

I read Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale5 and although I enjoyed

the book and the way Atwood writes metafiction I decided to use metafiction in a

more direct manner. However, through Karen Stein’s article, ‘Margaret Atwood’s

Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale’6, I came to appreciate the ways in which

Atwood set up her metafiction novel. Stein says that ‘Atwood’s interpolated texts set

up a frame that asks us to read the rest of the book in a particular way.’ (Stein,

‘Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale, p.57) This is where I

got the idea for my Narrative Time piece to frame my Metafiction piece. As my

Narrative Time piece focuses on the outward appearance and activities of my main

character it creates a frame which acts as an introduction in which emotions, ‘She

felt herself drifting…’, ‘A tear rolled…’ and the events behind them, are only hinted

at. Then in my second piece the reader is looking for these emotions and the

reasons behind them, and is given these things in abundance, however, they are not

allowed to feel like they could comfort my character as the narrative voice and

metafictional technique separates them emotionally.

I feel that by using metafiction as the writing technique for my second piece it

opened up the opportunity to write in the first person and to stylise my piece so it

reflects my main character’s thought process and adds complexity to her narrative

voice. By using the repetition of ‘I need to be strong,’ and ‘These are facts,’ it

suggests that my main character is constantly thinking these things to herself as a

mantra in order to contain her emotions and to shut others out.

5 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1996)

6 Stein, Karen, ‘Margaret Atwood's Modest Proposal: The Handmaid's Tale,’ in Canadian Literature, Vol.148 (1996) pp.57-7

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I think that I have managed to use two different concepts, Narrative Time and

Metafiction, to produce pieces which work together and create one portfolio which

from one piece to the next deepens in emotional complexity. Across the entire

portfolio the reader comes to understand that the main character’s granddad is dying

of cancer, but that the main character is guarding her feelings so forcefully, that the

reader is not allowed to share in her emotional turmoil.

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Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1996)

I read this book as research into different styles of metafiction but then decided that

Atwood’s particular style was not one that I wanted to replicate.

Green, John, The Fault in Our Stars’, (London: Penguin Books, 2012)

I based the theme of my portfolio on one displayed through this novel – losing someone to

cancer.

Nowlan, Alden, ‘An Exchange of Gifts’ from An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and

Selected (Toronto: Irwin, 1985) p.19

I appreciated the way in which Nowlan stylises his metafiction and decided that I wanted to

use the same style in my own metafiction writing.

Ricoer, Paul, ‘Narrative Time’ in The University of Chicago Press, Vol. 7 (1980), pp.

169-190

In this article Ricoer explains the use of language in Narrative Time and how certain words

and phrases manage to bridge the gap between abstract narrative present and external

public present. I used this information when writing my own Narrative Time piece.

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Stein, Karen, ‘Margaret Atwood's Modest Proposal: The Handmaid's Tale,’ in

Canadian Literature, Vol.148 (1996) pp.57-72

This article highlighted how Atwood had used previous texts to give her readers a frame in

which to read her main narrative. It is from this that I got the inspiration to use my first piece

as a frame for my second.

Wolff, Tobias, ‘Bullet in the Brain’ in The Night in Question: Stories, (New York:

Random House, Inc., 1996) pp. 200-203

In this short story Wolff uses, summary paragraphs, present time, close-ups and flashbacks

to manipulate narrative time, all of which I have used in my own Narrative Time piece.

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Textual Interventions - Narrative Time and Metafiction

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