Morrison: Point of View
Morrison’s articulation of a guide is significant. The guide can take on multiple points of view, move the narrative, and does not (in an overt way) reveal itself or its itinerary. This aspect of the guide function is important to the narrative construction of Rendezvous Eighteenth. On one hand, the narrator appears to guide the reader using the conventions of detective fiction—I will discuss the conventions in my analysis. On the other hand, the narrator guides the reader through Ricky’s “interior dialogue,” which points to the construction of a love story.[1] Once I examine the guides’ focus on love/romance as motivation for Ricky’s actions, I examine how romance unfolds spatially and compares to Amine’s examination of mid-twentieth century African-American expatriate fiction.So you have this sort of guide. But that guide can’t have a personality; it can only have a sound and you have to feel comfortable with this voice, and then this voice can easily abandon itself and reveal the interior dialogue of a character. So it’s a combination of using the point of view of various characters but still retaining the power to slide in and out, provided that when I’m “out” the reader doesn’t see little fingers pointing to what’s in the text. 78
[1] Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method states: “we must consider the possible (or rather the variable) narrative competence of the reader, arising from practice, which enables him both to decipher more and more quickly the narrative code in general or the code appropriate to a particular genre or a particular work, and also to identify the ‘seeds’ when they appear. […]. Moreover, this very competence is what the author relies on to tool the reader by sometimes offering him false advance mentions, or snares—well known to connoisseurs of detective stories (76-7). I offer that Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth may ‘short change’ detective fiction readers of a certain competence. In particular, I suggest that reviewers may slight Lamar’s use of detective fiction in Rendezvous Eighteenth because the novel has two routes or codes for reading—detective fiction and romance. The ‘seeds’ of romance are discernable through the characters’ motivations.