Annotated Bibliography – Last Night in Montreal:
Introduction
Prior to taking How Writers Read, I considered myself to be a strong reader. I was able to move quickly through the books I read, and generally finished one or two per week. I primarily read historical fiction, especially that which took place during and after World War II. I came into the class expecting to do well, since I consider myself both a strong reader and writer. However, I quickly realized during our reading of Demian, that there is much more to being a successful reader than the amount of books you can work your way through in a period of time. During my first reading of Demian, I missed a ton of important themes that were present, since I moved through the book quickly in an attempt to finish it. After discussing the deeper meaning of the novel in class, I began to recognize that actually understanding a book is more than enjoying a story and then moving on; it is providing the author with your full attention both during and after you experience their writing. As my group and I have explored four complex novels throughout the semester, I have come to understand that reading is not just something writers do for enjoyment, but a task that must be done rigorously in order to hone their craft.
Following A Clockwork Orange and The Secret Scripture, we dove headfirst into the novel I chose for us to read; Last Night in Montreal. After hearing me talk about how intriguing the premise of the novel was, KKJM Reads was ready to explore Emily St. John-Mandel’s intricate storytelling. Despite knowing we were in for a wild ride, we were not prepared to learn that out of the four narrators in the novel, not a single one could be identified as reliable. Through our contributions of the four different methods of reading (Reading For – Kassidy, Form and Genre – Katie, Intertextual Codes – Jake, Rhetoric of Narrative – Monica) to each blog, we were able to dissect the minds of the narrators; Lilia, Eli, Christopher, and Michaela, in order to develop a broader understanding of what was really occurring in the novel.
Part 1: Reading For
The twisted psychological fiction novel, Last Night in Montreal, was KKJM Read’s third book. It is a book about Lilia, a now adult woman who was kidnapped by her father when she was seven-years-old. For the next ten years of her life, Lilia traveled back and forth across the United States with her father, never settling down, and learning, after her father suggested they find a town to call home, that she had forgotten how to stay in one place. Years later, after she abandons her boyfriend, Eli, in New York City, readers follow him as he unsuccessfully attempts to piece together why she left. Throughout the novel, we also see Christopher, the detective who spent years looking for Lilia, spiraling out of control as he abandons his family and intensifies his pursuit of Lilia. Eventually, everything comes to a head, with Michaela, Christopher’s daughter, jumping in front of a train, Eli having a mental breakdown, and Lilia settling down and getting married in Italy.
As Robert McKee says in “Structure in Meaning,” “The controlling idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices.” The controlling idea in Last Night in Montreal was, as with Lilia, initially hard to track down, since the story is told out of chronological order through four different points of view. However, during the last act’s climax, which involved Michaela committing suicide by jumping in front of a subway train, Lilia leaving once and for all and going to Italy, and Eli suffering an emotional breakdown and returning to New York, it became clear that the controlling idea of the novel is that “in order to create a meaningful and fulfilling life, one must face the meaning behind the traumas of their past.” Throughout the majority of the novel, Eli and Lilia both avoid facing the trauma they’ve experienced and will not deal with the ghosts of their past: Lilia’s “ghost” is her inability to stay in one place, and Eli’s “ghost” is his inability to finish his thesis. Although Eli ends up back in his mother’s house after experiencing a mental breakdown, we see that he eventually comes to terms with this controlling idea, saying:
“Lilia’s metaphor, not mine — she was talking about how she lived. About how you can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave” (St. John Mandel 224).
Through this quote, readers recognize that Eli is identifying the controlling value of the novel and coming to understand that if he wants to live a life that he is more than just a passive observer in, he must immerse himself in the world. It is not enough for him to stay in Brooklyn, pretending that he will one day finish his thesis. Instead, he must go out into the world, accept that he has failed at earning his doctoral degree, and move forward. He does this by telling his brother, who he references as being a world traveler and a person who actually does things rather than just talking about doing them, throughout the novel, that he would like to go with him the next time he travels abroad. Through this change in Eli’s perspective, we understand that seeing Michaela commit suicide has allowed him to realize that in order to survive, one must sink into life rather than living on the outskirts.
Much like Eli, Lilia spends the majority of her life, as told throughout the novel, avoiding doing whatever it takes to complete what she started. Throughout the novel, Lilia talks about how her decision to move from place to place is more of a compulsion, at one point saying to Eli:
“You’re not listening. You don’t get it. It isn’t admirable. I cannot stop. All I ever do is leave…I am always running out of time. This is all I ever do, and there is nothing admirable about it.” (St. John Mandel 78-69).
Here, Lilia accuses Eli of failing to listen, to get her as she sees herself: as a terrible person without honor, a person without trust. Whatever Eli finds to be admirable about Lilia is for her a false pretense. So, by telling Eli this, she is coming as close as she ever will be to being honest about her way of being in the world, and her inherent lack of responsibility to do anything other than what she has always done and to be anything but who she always has been, and is giving Eli the chance to realize the type of person she truly is. However, Eli chooses to carry on with his idealistic view of her, much like he does with the other things in his life which he believes to be important to him, such as his thesis. Through Eli’s actions, we begin to understand the counter-idea of the novel, which is “moving through life with an idealistic view of people and things will never allow you to deal with life as it is lived, since life cannot happen in any other way than the way it actually does.”
Meanwhile, we must also dig into the premise of the novel, which is “How does one receover from childhood trauma?” Both Michaela and Lilia experienced trauma during their childhoods, although it was different for each of them. While Lilia was thrown through a window by her mother at the age of seven and then kidnapped by her father, Michaela experienced both emotional and physical abandonment from both of her parents. First her mother left when she was fourteen, with Michaela coming home to see her father sitting at the dining room table with a half-eaten cake. When she asked what it was for, her father informed her that:
“You missed the party…It was a going-away party. Your mother left” (St. John-Mandel 115).
Then, on page 149, the chapter begins with:
“The year Michaela was fifteen, she lived alone. Her father was traveling in another country” (St. John-Mandel 148).
Being physically abandoned by both of her parents within a year, after having them be emotionally unavailable to her for years prior, clearly had a significant impact on Michaela, since we see her luring Lilia, the girl her father abandoned her to pursue, to Montreal years later. Through this interaction, we see that both girls are struggling to recover from their respective childhood traumas. Michaela is attempting to play God to the girl she feels her father chose over her, while Lilia is pursuing Michaela, since she holds information about her past that Lilia cannot remember. Ultimately, Michaela succumbs to the tragedy of her childhood, failing to find peace in meeting Lilia and jumping to her death. However, Lilia, having found out the parts of her past that she cannot remember, is able to move forward, starting over one last time in Italy. This difference in the two character’s stories demonstrates that in order to grow you must face the truth behind your past, which Lilia is able to do by contronting Michaela. However, Michaela does not tell Lilia the trauma her existence had caused during her childhood, and ultimately dies, having never faced her past, and subsequently having never broken free of her trauma.
- Controlling Idea (purpose): In order to create a meaningful and fulfilling life, one must face the meaning behind the traumas of their past.
- Counter Idea (context): Moving through life with an idealistic view of people and things will never allow you to deal with life as it is lived, since life cannot happen in any other way than the way it actually does.
- Opposing Controlling Value
- Purpose: Facing the truth behind your past allows you to grow.
- Context: Staying stagnant and being afraid to face your past will never allow you to break free of your trauma.
- Premise: How does one recover from childhood trauma?
While reading Last Night in Montreal, our “reading for” addressed how we were reading the book, as well as any preconceived notions we brought into our reading. Part of the reason we chose to read Last Night in Montreal was because of the structure of multiple points of view, as well as its lack of chronologically-ordered events. Having read other novels like this one that use “setups” and “payoffs” as readers move throughout the different points of views in the chapters, I expected that I would be held in suspense for the majority of the novel, which ended up being true. More so, however, I ended up being left in suspense at the end of the novel as well in some aspects, since neither Eli or Lilia’s storyline was truly resolved. While we do see Eli deciding to travel the world and Lilia settling down in Italy, we never truly find out if they succeed in their respective endeavors, which results in the understanding that this is not a novel that was meant to wrap up all the loose ends in the plot. Instead, readers are left to wonder what happens to the main characters that survived, if they ever truly broke their toxic patterns and if they were really ever able to face their demons once and for all.
Part 2: Form and Genre
As I discussed in the previous section, at the end of the novel we find out that Michaela committed suicide by jumping in front of a moving train. This triggers two responses: Eli being hospitalized in a psych ward in Montreal and then moving back into his mother’s house after witnessing her death, and Lilia, ending a chapter of her life that had been open for too long now that both the detective who hunted her and his daughter were finally dead.
Throughout the novel, Lilia lived with the paranoia that Christopher, the detective assigned to her case and Michaela’s father, was going to find her. This fear that she was going to be discovered contributed to her inability to stay in one place as a child, since her and her father always had to be one step ahead, evading the detective in the blue car who spent years of his life chasing after them. Lilia’s desire to stay lost is overtly brought to readers’ attention on page 111 when after seeing a segment on TV about her disappearance she writes a note in a hotel bible, knowing Christopher will soon find it, saying:
“Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home. — Lilia” (St. John-Mandel 111).
In this quote, thirteen-year-old Lilia says that she wishes to remain vanishing. She claims that she wants to continue flitting from place to place, putting down no roots. However, at this point, the home she is referring to is still, in her mind, her mother’s house. By the time she reaches her twenties, though, she has abandoned the idea of her mother’s house being her home all together, and had instead begun to see herself as someone who existed within the margins of a place, never truly settling in anywhere, saying:
“You’re still not getting this. It’s just, listen, I’ve never moved to anywhere in my life. When I show up in a city, it doesn’t mean I’m arriving, it only means…When I show up…I’m not arriving anywhere, I’m only leaving somewhere else” (St. John-Mandel 78).
Personally, I wasn’t expecting the twist of Lilia referring to home as her mother’s house until the was at least thirteen, and missed that detail during my first reading of the novel. Since Lilia is unable to remember her childhood prior to her abduction, it was interesting to me that she still subconsciously knew that she had once had a home somewhere. To me, it seemed that the shift from Lilia viewing herself as a person who had a home to someone who belonged to the road came when she was sixteen and her father decided he was going to settle down with a woman and stay in one place. This was demonstrated in the below quote:
“Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side is frankly unimaginable” (St. John-Mandel 179).
This quote occurs when Lilia was contemplating living in one place with her father and his girlfriend, Clara, when she was sixteen. It allows readers to recognize that at this point, Lilia no longer understands or has the ability to relate to anything but a nomadic life. At the same time, this is the first time it is easily indentifiable to Lilia that traveling is no longer just a way of life to her, but rather is the only way of life to her.
As I read the novel, I expected that Lilia would end up with Eli at its conclusion, since he spent the whole novel chasing her around, pining over her, and attemping to bring her home. However, at the end of the story, there is no resolution, no fulfillment of that desire the form brings the reader to desire Furthermore, the reader is led to assume that the two never see each other again: Eli chooses to travel abroad with his brother and Lilia moves on with another man. This twist, so unlike what readers have been groomed by the conventions of the romance genre to expect as they appear as the substantive and stylistic elements of the narrative: girl leaves boy, boy chases girl, boy and girl life happily ever after, changed the novel in an integral way. Rather than the expected fairytale ending, this novel mimicked “real life” in the sense that sometimes things end with no resolution and no tying up of all the loose ends. For example, on page 224 Eli rereads the letter he wrote about Lilia while he was searching for her in Montreal, which says:
“I wanted to be her North Star. I wanted to be her map. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker; her interpreter; her language. I wanted to be her translator, Zed, but none of the languages we knew were the same” (St. John-Mandel 224).
If this book adhered to the typical substantive and stylistic elements of the romance genre, this letter would have somehow found its way into Lilia’s hands and she would have been swept off her feet. She would have realized how much Eli meant to her and returned to him, and they would have lived happily ever after. However, this novel broke the conventions of the genre, choosing to leave Lilia and Eli’s relationship as unresolved as the novel came to a close. Another aspect of this quote that I found interesting were the references to the North Star, maps, compasses, and interpretors. To me, this once again followed the theme of loose ends. Without a North Star, or a map, or a compass, or an interpretor, one cannot find their way. Similarly, in the novel all of the characters seem to be just as lost at the end of the story as they were in the beginning. While both Lilia and Eli have decided to start over, neither seems to have found any direction or guidance, which could arguably be what the references to these four things are alluding to.
Although I didn’t expect the unresolved ending during my first reading of the novel, once I reread the book, I noticed that St. John Mandel does include hints that things will end the way they did throughout the novel. According to Kenneth Burke in Lexicon Rhetoricae, “Syllogistic progression is the form of a perfectly conducted argument, advancing step by step. It is the form of a mystery story, where everything falls together” (Burke 124). What this means is that syllogistic progression is actually an argument that deems the conclusion to be logical, or inevitable. Through the author’s writing, the steps of syllogistic progression are able to occur in a way that can be easily discerned and made sense of when a reader is looking for them with the purpose of extracting them from the text. In terms of Last Night in Montreal, readers are able to discern instances of the inevitability that Lilia would leave Eli, so long as they are tracking the clues and paying attention to the details, as well as the deeper meanings behind the seemingly insignificant events that are occuring.
The first instance of a seeming insignificant detail, which ends up being an important step in the syllogistic progression of the novel, occurs on page 25. At this point in the novel, Lilia has been telling Eli about her nomadic childhood, the fake names she’d used, and the detective who followed her. The novel then continues, saying that:
“[Eli] wasn’t too caught up in the words to notice that she was tracing the contours of wings over his shoulder blades” (St. John-Mandel, 25).
This passage demonstrates two divergent possibilities that each serve as premesses in the syllogism, the first hints, or steps, of the syllogistic progression that is central to the disruption of the reader’s expected fulfilment structured by the genre of romance. Here, the narrative presents a hint toward this disruption: that even while telling Eli about this story as if it is in her past, she is drawing wings, which symbolize freedom, knowing subconsciously that she was never meant to stay with him. But it is also hinting toward Lilias complicated relationship with telling the truth, and Eli’s ability to see the truth while at the same time remaining willfully blind to it. Narrated from Eli’s point of view–the reader gets that Eli interpretes “wings” that she draws on his shoulders, and the reader assumes this is the case: the whole story she tells is tracing the wings. Lilia leaving Eli (she flies all the way to Italy) permanently is the ending occurrence, and while at first read, or glance, it doesn’t seem that this will be the case because in the moment she is sharing more about her life with Eli than she ever has with another person, once you go back and reread with the idea of picking out these instances, it is quite plainly recognizable that they push the novel forward, providing subliminal hints of what is to come. This work relies on Burke’s concept of syllogistic progressive form in order to be successful.
Another instance of this inevitability occurs on page 88, saying:
“In the first year her father used to pull the car over and hide her, but later she knew how to build her own shelter, and she’d perfected her own hiding place by the time she turned eight” (St. John-Mandel 88).
While at the surface level, it seems that St. John-Mandel is just describing how Lilia learned to hide herself from the police or someone who may have recognized her, when keeping Burke’s syllogistic progression in mind, it is easy to believe that she is also talking about how Lilia learned to not rely on anyone. While it was her father who had originally rescued her, she eventually began to hide herself and create her own shelter, effectively relying on no one, which made it so easy for her to leave the people she was supposed to love. Since St. John-Mandel continued to include hints, which while unnoticeable on the first reading, became clear when using the method of “close reading,” looking out for surprising elements right in the words and sentences themselves, it became more and more evident by the time I reached the end of the novel that the twist was going to be that Lilia never came back to Eli.
Part 3: Intertextual Codes
When first reading this novel, readers may be thrown off by the events that are occurring: a young woman has spent her entire life traveling, and now does not physically or emotionally know how to stay in one place for any extended period of time due to the trauma that she experienced as a child. She has a very difficult time existing in one place, listing the different cities she’s lived in as an adult as:
“Minneapolis, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Denver, some other places in the Midwest, New Orleans, Savannah, Miami, a few cities in California, and Portland” (St. John-Mandel 19).
Then, a few months before Lilia disappears from Brooklyn and Eli, she tells the girlfriend she leaves behind in Chicago that she is incapable of knowing how to stay. According to Kaja Silverman in “Re-writing the Classic Text,”
“Barthes observes that the ‘semic space is glued to hermeneutic space’ in that what the hermeneutic code moves toward (i.e. ‘a profound or final space’) is nothing other than a signified which refuses to connote. The hermeneutic code inscribes the desire for closure and ‘truth.’ However, this code provides not only the agency whereby a mystery is first suggested and later resolved, but a number of mechanisms for delaying our access to the desired information” (Silverman 257).
What Silverman is saying is that the hermeneutic code expresses readers’ desire for closure at the end of a novel. In Last Night in Montreal in particular, readers spend the majority of the novel in suspense, never truly discerning the “truth” and closure that the hermeneutic code seeks to provide. However, through the process of examining this code, readers are able to identify what first brings about the mystery of the novel, as well as the steps that St. John-Mandel must pursue in order to ensure that readers are left in suspense. One of the most interesting implications of this intertextual code is that not all parts of it must be present in order for it to function, meaning that it can bring forth the mystery, as well as examine the mechanisms that delay our understanding of the information we are seeking, while never truly presenting readers with a clear view of the end result.
As Jake discussed in blog three, the cultural code of Last Night in Montreal is that “when the past becomes the present, we lose the future.” Meanwhile, Lilia’s semic code of the novel was uncovered on page 9, and said:
“Looking out at an uncharted landscape of Brooklyn rooftops in the rain, and came to a somewhat unsettling conclusion: she’d been disappearing for so long that she didn’t know how to stay” (St. John-Mandel 9).
This code demonstrates that because of the living patterns she’s spent the majority of her life adhering to, Lilia has developed an inability to stay in one place and settle down into a repetitive and stable life. This idea reinforces the cultural code that although she sees every new move as a fresh start, she is really living the same story over again each time, since she repeats her past over and over again, which effectively turns it into her present, and ultimately prevents her from creating a new future. Through this endless cycle, we can begin to uncover the hermeneutic code of the novel, beginning with thematization, which is explained as the semic defition of a character as mysterious, of Lilia. This is demonstrated on page 5 of the novel through the quote:
“He might’ve seen something: a look in her eyes, a foreshadowing of doom, perhaps a train ticket in her hand or the words I’m Leaving You Forever stitched on the front of her coat” (St. John-Mandel 5).
This thematization presents Lilia as a mystery, being that when she disappeared there were no signs, meaning that her absence raised a lot of questions for Eli. By presenting Lilia as the mystery of the novel, St. John-Mandel allows for her to become the central point of readers’ intrigue. In order to uncover what is perceived as the resolution of the mystery, readers must be able to unravel the reasons behind is Lilia’s disappearance. However, since in the end there is no disclosure, or moment of closure, in the novel, readers must accept that Lilia is meant to remain a mystery, with the exception of any piecemeal revelations we may receive. Then, we must move on to the proposal of an enigma, which is defined as the dawning of the actual mystery, and was present on page 18 in the quote:
“He found later on that most of her childhood memories had a hallucinatory quality, as a result of traveling some distance too often and changing her name so frequently that she sometimes forgot what it was, but her memories of the first year or two of travel were the least precise” (St. John-Mandel 8).
Through this, it is evident that the mystery of Lilia’s childhood is tied up with the circumstances that led to her kidnapping, as well as what actually happened once her father first removed her from her mother’s home. Lilia’s childhood is able to be proposed as the enigma, since, as it says in the above quote, her childhood memories are so strange that they are fuzzy, seemingly imagined experiences. Her early childhood has impacted her as such that she doesn’t remember the first seven years of her life that took place at her mother’s house, nor does she have any precise recollection of the next year of two of her life. Effectively, this means that Lilia has lost nearly a decade of her existance, and truly had no memory of what it is like to live in one place, which separates her from the people around her, such as her father and Eli, who have experiences of living a stationary life. Since she is different from all the other characters in that aspect, which we can attribute to her nomadic childhood, we can firmly propose it as being the engima.
Next, we circle back to the multiple places Lilia has lived when formulating the enigma on page 19, saying:
“Minneapolis. St. Paul. Indianapolis. Denver. Some other places in the Midwest, New Orleans, Savannah, Miami. A few cities in California. Portland” (St. John-Mandel 19).
From there, Eli cuts through the conversation, saying:
“You’re a traveler” (St. John-Mandel 19).
Lilia’s travels ultimately require the story to request an answer, which comes in the realization that the reason Lilia cannot stay in one place is because she is subconsciously eluding the memories from her childhood that occurred while she lived a stationary life with her mother. By choosing to forget these memories, Lilia has effectively allowed herself to adopt her nomadic way of life as normal, since by leaving every few months she can never truly attach herself to someone who had the power to hurt her, such as occurred with her mother. Finally, we come to the snare of the novel, which is defined as deception or evasion, which is that Lilia runs away from a place before her past catches up with her, such as when Lilia peered over her shoulder, worrying that “a private detective could still look for me,” despite the fact that she was a legal adult at that point. It is interesting to examines the parallels between Lilia running from place to place as adult and her childhood departure when she initially was taken by her father. On the night she left her mother’s house, this quote explains that Lilia left willingly:
“She turned back into the room, clutching her bunny…and she made her way out into the silent hall…Down through the shadows of the living room, through the silent kitchen. She unlocked the front door and ran out barefoot into the snow…This was her escape. It was recorded in newspapers” (St. John-Mandel 26-27).
Much like she does as an adult, Lilia does not make a fuss about leaving. Rather she acts as if everything is completely normal, going to bed when her mother tells her to that night, but chooses to get up and leave when she sees her father standing in her front yard. She goes quitely, telling no one, leaving no clues, and moves on to the next portion of her life. This pattern is much the same as she moves into adulthood, since she unexpectedly leaves each place she settles in, telling not a single soul, and making the decision to start over time and time again.
Then, we reach the equivocation, or a statement that is both true or false, when Eli asked Lilia if she was going to leave him on page 32, replying:
“I don’t know” (St. John-Mandel 32).
While Lilia may not have known in that exact moment that she was going to leave Eli, she had never been able to stay in one place prior, implying that the pattern would continue on. This interaction between Eli and Lilia can also act as the jamming, or failure to find an answer, which triggers a desire to know, since when Lilia evaded his question and gave him a vague answer, it caused Eli to get upset and throw her book out of their apartment window in anger. Then moving on to the partial answer, or piecemeal revelations, we find these at the end of the novel, when we see Lilia in Italy with her husband, which while the scene does not provide us with full closure, does show us that at least for the time being, Lilia has managed to stay in one place with someone.
These pieces of the hermeneutic code work to add elements of mystery to the novel, while also demonstrating the cultural code that is at work. By reading the novel through the view of the hermeneutic code, we are able to better understand both the purpose of the novel itself and the semic code that lies within Lilia. By continuing to evade her past, Lilia effectively plays into the lifestyle she is avoiding, by running away time after time, and preventing herself from pursuing a better and more stable future.
Part 4: Rhetoric of Narrative
The actual audience is described by Peter J. Rabinowitz in his his article “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” as:
“The flesh-and-blood people who read the book…It is the only audience which is entirely “real,” and the only one over which the author had no guaranteed control” (Rabinowitz 126).
When I began reading this novel, I was planted firmly in the territory of the actual audience, and began my reading with a varietry of preconceived notions, such as that Lilia’s father was a criminal for taking her away in the middle of the night and that she had suffered mentally and emotionally throughout her life because of it. However, as I began to dive deeper into the novel, understanding that she had an abusive mother who would have likely caused her serious harm or killed her, I was able to recognize that her father was doing what he felt was best for her by removing her from her present situation, even if the one he has placing her in as a result was not ideal. From here, we must move on to the authorial audience, which is one who gets involved in the book and seeks to understand the deeper meaning that the author is attempting to get across to readers. Rabinowitz explains is below, saying:
“Since the structure of a novel is designed for the author’s authorial audience, we must, as we read, come to share, in some measure, the characteristics of this audience if we are to understand the text” (Rabinowitz, 126).
In order for a reader to fit into the role of the author’s authorial audience in the case of this novel, they must be willing to set aside the preconceived societal notions that all kidnappers are evil. While this is a difficult concept to accept, since rarely do we ever hear that a person responsible for a kidnapping saved the day, this is the case in Last Night in Montreal. A few days before her disappearance, Lilia’s mother had thrown her out a window into the snow after becoming irritated with her, and as a result she ended up with cuts all over her body. After Lilia’s step-brother called her estranged father to warn him that she was in danger, he took her away in the middle of the night. In the quote below we can see that Lilia’s mother did not truly care about her daughter’s disappearance, and went to great lengths to hide the evidence of the way she had hurt her daughter before reporting her kidnapping to the police:
“‘Help me,’ she whispered. ‘Put your shoes on. Bring me the broom…’ They worked together for a while in feverish silence, scooping and sweping the broken glass out of the snow, collecting it in a shoebox from the hall closet” (St. John-Mandel 26).
As one can see, not only was Lilia’s mother abusive, but she was also sneaky and manipulative as she tried to keep herself out of trouble before reporting her daughter missing. Based off of the poor decisions Lilia’s mother made, it came to be that by kidnapping Lilia, her fathr was actually protecting her. In order for readers to be able to become the authorial audience, they must overcome the hurdle of believing the contrary and begin to see Lilia’s kidnapping as her escape.
From this, we derive the ideal narrative audience, which saying “This is the audience for whom the author wishes he were writing and relates to the narrative audience in a way roughly analogous to the way the authorial audience relates to the actual audience. This final audience believes the narrator, accepts his judgements, sympathizes with his plight, laughs at his jokes even when they are bad” (Rabinowitz 134). Based off of this idea, the ideal narrative audience is able to take on the role of the person who the author is addressing the story to. This role must be filled by someone who is willing to believe everything that the author says, and who the author intended to write for. I was initially unsure of who the ideal narrative audience would be in this novel, being that there are four unreliable narrators, throughout the novel. However, after thinking it over, I realized that it is Eli. He was always willing to see the best in who I viewed as the main narrator of the novel, Lilia, and believed all that he was told by her, despite her history of lies and disappearances.
While there essentially are four narrators, Lilia is arguably the main narrator, since the plot hinges on her disappearance at the age of seven. However, Eli is the ideal narrative audience, since he takes Lilia at face value, believing all the stories she told him before his disappearance and defending her throughout the novel. Eli loves Lilia to the point that he doesn’t question that her story is correct, but rather attempts to protect her to other characters, such as Michaela, who seek to use Lilia’s story as a pawn. Despite evidence pointing to the contrary, Eli sticks to his belief that Lilia only went to Montreal because Michaela was going to tell her about her past, not that she left because Eli was just a pit stop on her way to the next city. Silverman states that:
“The semic code represents the major device for thematizing persons, objects, or places. It operates by grouping a number of signifiers around either a proper name, or another signifier which functions temporarily as if it were a proper name.”
According to the semic code, Eli’s repeated belief of Lilia not meaning to hurt or abandon him is what leads readers to believe that regardless of what Eli finds out throughout the novel, he will never change his mind about what kind of person Lilia is or what intentions she held. This repetitive rejection of reality is what allows us to place Eli as the ideal narrative audience throughout the novel, such as is demonstrated below:
Michaela: “She wrote me from New York City a few weeks ago.”
Eli: “She wrote you?”
Michaela: “Maybe a month ago. I told her I wouldn’t tell her anything unless she came here.”
Eli: “You forced her to come here. Do you have any idea –” (St. John-Mandel 138)
Through this quote, readers are able to understand that despite being directly confronted with knowledge of why Lilia chose to go to Montreal, Eli still chooses to blame others, such as Michaela, for Lilia’s actions and her inability to take responsibility for the way she hurts people. In this exerpt, it also becomes clear the Eli has not changed: He will continue to defend Lilia, despite having evidence that she should not be defended, and will reject the truth, further solidifying his role as the ideal narrative audience.
Conclusion
Last Night in Montreal is a literary work that does an excellent job of presenting the ways that unresolved trauma of a person’s past can impact their present and future. The novel causes readers to question the reliability of all four narrators, as well as the reasons why the novel does not conform to generic conventions, such as the tying up of loose ends. Ultimately, none of the narrators were all that likeable, and the book itself did not leave me satisfied, since the ending felt rushed. Whether that was intentionally done by the author or not, it came across as unresolved. With that being said, the novel still contained many literary ideas and concepts, such as controlling and counter ideas, syllogistic progressive form, intertextual codes, and rhetorical audience, which allowed us to delve deeper into the meaning behind the text. This novel not only taught the members of KKJM Reads how to construct our own opinions and thoughts about the novel through our blogs and comments, but also provided us with insight on how to become more mindful and attentive readers.
Reflection
During my time as a student in Professor Kopp’s How Writer’s Read course, I feel that I have exhibited that I understand core value 1 of Writing Arts, which states that “Writing Arts students will demonstrate understanding of a variety of genre conventions and exhibit rhetorical adaptability in applying those conventions.” Intially, I was unsure of how to apply a variety of genre conventions to my writing, and when I wrote my first blog (What’s It Going to Be Then, Eh?) I was extremely intimidated by the task of doing so. However, as we moved deeper into our readings, such as Burke’s “Lexicon Rhetoricae,” I began to develop a more thorough understanding of his five aspects of form: conventional, syllogistic progressive form, qualitative progressive form, repetitive form and minor/incidental form.
In my second blog (The Secret Register), I was able to demonstrate my first effort at identifying conventional form within a novel, which I chose to do by examining the intersection between religion, women’s sexuality throughout history, and the impact it had on the way the novel, The Secret Scripture, played out. By identifying the conventions of the novel, which were that women should be subservient to men and that women are untrustworthy, I was able to identify the way the double standard between men and women throughout the novel led to the development of the symbolic code of those who are powerful and those who are helpless. Overall, at the close of the semester I feel much more comfortable when applying different genre conventions to a variety of works than I did in September. Having had the opportunity to read and analyze the works of McKee, Burke, Silverman, and Rabinowitz has allowed to to develop a deeper understanding of how to write within different genrres, while utilizing the conventions specific to that genre.
In terms of core value 2 of Writing Arts, which states that “Writing Arts students will understand theories of writing and reading and be able to apply them to their own writing,” I believe that I have demonstrated my ability to do this successfully through my blogs during the semester. I struggled with my fourth blog the most (A Long Way to Freedom), since I had a diffcult time applying the work of Rabinowitz in “Truth In Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences” to the discussion I was having in my blog. This was primarily because it was a dense text with very complex sentences, which I had difficulty breaking down to fully comprehend the meanings. However, after speaking with Profressor Kopp, I was able to grasp the text and the four different readerly audiences in a much more siginificant way. Even more importantly, I was able to apply these different readerly audiences to my blog in such a way that I could support my claims with evidence from the work of Rabinowitz. For example:
“In saying that, Rabinowitz makes it clear that Reynolds made assumptions about his hypothetical audience while drafting his novel: one of the assumptions being that readers would be willing to “sit in the chair” of the idea that not all children in detention centers are “bad” kids, but that some have just been raised in such a way that it becomes their only path” (Tirelli, “A Long Way to Freedom”).
Through this excerpt, it is evident that I was able to identify the narrative, actual, and authorial audeinces defined by Rabinowitz to the novel I was working with: A Long Way Down. In particular, it was interesting to analyze the narrative audience of A Long Way Down, since after speaking with Professor Kopp about it he made the suggestion that the main character, Will, was actually dead throughout the whole novel. It was a suggestion that at first baffled me, but after considering it, I realized that it was simply another way of considering the events of the novel. This reassured me that there are many ways of looking at a novel, and that as long as they can be supported and applied to the scholarly texts being worked with, there is no wrong answer.
The third Writing Arts core value is “Writing Arts students will demonstrate the ability to critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects,” which I felt that I demonstrated throughout the semester as I worked with the required academic texts, as well as the novels our group chose. Over the course of the semester, I was able to apply concepts such as Jane Gallop’s “close reading,” which she explains in her article “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters.” By practicing the skill of close reading, I was able to pick interesting tidbits out of the text that I had missed previously. An excellent example of this is present in this quote that I discussed earlier:
“[Eli] wasn’t too caught up in the words to notice that she was tracing the contours of wings over his shoulder blades” (St. John-Mandel, 25).
When I first read this passage, I viewed it as nothing more than an action Lilia was taking in order to comfort Eli. However, after looking closely at the text and attempting to discern any symbolism in it, it was very easy to see that Lilia was not just making patterns on Eli’s back to comfort him, but instead was dreaming of doing what beings with wings do: fly away. This quote was really the turning point for me in understanding the importance of close reading, since it was such an important and symbolic moment in the novel, and one that I would have missed had I not gone back to practice close reading. While it is inevitable that sometimes we will skim through writing in an attempt to complete the task, it is imperative that we closely read if we wish to truly learn and understand the information that is being presented to us. Throughout the semester, I put in my best effort to read each novel and academic text closely in order to get as much out of them as I could.
All in all, I really enjoyed this course. It challenged me a lot more than I was used to, and while at times that was frustrating, it truly did make me a better student. I spent a lot of time this semester seeking to understand, whether it was the academic texts or the concepts we were applying to our writing, but theese challenges helped to make me a better student and a more creative and independent thinker. I am definitely a more analytical reader after completing this course, in addition to paying more attention to the minute details of my writing. Furthermore, I really enjoyed the opportunity to spend the whole semester working in a group, since if any of us were having difficulty or needed help with an assignment or concept, we had people that we could work on it with.
Kassidy’s Blogs and Comments:
A Clockwork Orange:
Reading for Mimesis and Theme (Jake’s Blog): I commented on October 6th, 2019
Synthetic Register and Genre in a Clockwork Orange (Monica’s Blog): I commented on October 6th, 2019
What’s It Gonna Be Then, Eh? (My blog): I posted on October 6th, 2019
The Humble Narrator (Katie’s Blog): I commented on October 16th, 2019
The Secret Scripture:
A Woman Stuck at 100 (Monica’s Blog): I commented on October 17th, 2019
The Secret Register (My blog): I posted on October 17th, 2019
Secret Me Too (Katie’s Blog): I commented on October 22nd, 2019
The ‘Real’ Secret Scripture (Jake’s Blog): I commented on October 25th, 2019
Last Night in Montreal:
All I Ever Do Is Leave (My blog): I posted on October 29th, 2019
Living Is A Mystery (Katie’s Blog): I commented on November 3rd, 2019
Running From Montreal (Jake’s Blog): I commented on November 6th, 2019
Don’t Follow Me, I’m Still Running (Monica’s Blog): I commented on December 3rd, 2019
A Long Way Down:
60 Seconds to Murder (Katie’s blog): I commented on November 15th, 2019
A Long Way to Violence (Jake’s Blog): I commented on November 17th, 2019
Follow the Rules or Break the Cycle? (Monica’s Blog): I commented on November 19th, 2019
A Long Way to Freedom (My blog) – I posted on November 25th, 2019
Works Cited:
Burke, Kenneth. “Lexicon Rhetoricae.” Counter-Statement. 1931. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. 123-183.
Gallop, Jane. “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (Fall, 2000): 7-17.
McKee, Robert. “Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Regan, 1997. 110-131.
Rabinowitz, Peter. “Truth In Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry. 4.1 (1977): 121-141.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
St. John-Mandel, Emily. Last Night in Montreal. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
KKJM Reads 