ENGL 817AL - Field Notes: Contending with Collaboration

This post is not likely to be full of orderly and coherent thoughts...

When discussing the subheading for last week's class: "Authority, Ownership, and 'Complex' Authorship," we read a chapter from K.K. Ruthven's Faking Literature. In the chapter, the concept of collaborative authorship was examined and this particular section stuck out to me in relation to how we might approach Martin Amis' Time's Arrow:

"As a professional collaborator in the production of scripts for playhouses, Heywood engaged in what Jeffrey Masten calls `textual intercourse', an activity `predicated on erasing the perception of any differences that might have existed . . . between collaborated parts'. Modern critics, on the other hand, have put their knowledge of such practices to a different end by attributing to their preferred author those parts of the work they admire, and then relegating the rest to an inferior collaborator."

While Amis is the author of the text and there is no collaborator, there is an odd type of collaboration taking place on the page between the the narrator/consciousness and the physical body of Tom/Odilo. The narrator is telling the reader the story by relaying what he is experiencing through the uncontrollable-by-him body of Odilo. And Odilo's story is unfolding without the help or input of the narrator. Without both components of the narrator's insight and explanation to what Odilo's body is doing there would be just utter confusion instead. The narrator is the "preferred author" here because we do not have access to the thoughts of Odilo. The readers are biased towards the narrator over Odilo because of this as well.

Yet, there is a point in the novel where the collaboration to telling the story sort of blends because the narrator feels more at home within Odilo's body and understands more (or at least so he thinks) of what is going on in the physical world he cannot contribute to. As these events unfold to the narrator, the reader contends with the fact that the narrator is an unreliable one, but also that their "preferred" view of him was actually accurate to an extent. This blending of the events and understanding between the narrator to Odilo's actions, to me, makes it more of a traditional alignment with the idea of collaboration we're used to, but then yet again it is not quite the same still.

I have no idea if what I am getting at here makes any sense. Like I said, "unlikely to be orderly or coherent". My brain just cannot stop munching on this aspect of how is or isn't Time's Arrow a collaborative text in terms of not the author, but of the characters and the way they are authoring the experiences of Odilo's life in reverse.

Not sure if I will ever make sense of this line of thought... s...