On Running the Multi Narrator Recording Session

With Irony

Yesterday I left you in Abbey Road, Studio Two, deciding how to record four people, A, B, C and D — who all have very different, very passionate accounts to give concerning A’s affair with D, and B’s with C.

You’re the record producer, and you can decide where to place each of them, and when to start them speaking, and how exactly to prompt them to speak.

This is intended to demonstrate the kind of decisions that the invisible organising narrator of a multi narrator novel has to make.

But before I go through some of the options, as I see them, I need to say a little about irony.

I’m not going on book definitions of irony here. These are my own working understanding. They are rough, and I know there’s more to say. But —

Irony is speech in the presence of knowledge.

By speech I mean utterance — so it can be spoken, written, thought or said of someone (i.e., he believed that).

Presence of knowledge is deliberately vague. In most cases, that knowledge is something the audience (readers or viewers) possesses by the time they hear the speech.

Irony comes in two main kinds. There is witting irony and unwitting irony.

The speaker in witting irony shares the knowledge, and speaks in reference to it.

The speaker in unwitting irony doesn’t share the knowledge, and speaks in ignorance of it.

Here’s a simple example. Imagine we read this in a story —

A man is stepping out the door to go to the beach. The day looks sunny, but weather forecast on the radio five minutes earlier has said that later there will be wind, rain and high winds. The man looks up at the sky and says, ‘This is going to be a lovely day.’

Whether he is speaking with witting or unwitting irony depends entirely on whether he has heard and taken on board the weather forecast.

If he is in the presence of the knowledge of the forthcoming storm, because he had the radio on, he’s self-consciously being ironic in what he says. As readers, we hear him referring to something we also already know. We are both in on the joke.

If he is ignorant of the knowledge that it’s going to be a foul day, because his radio was on but he wasn’t listening, then what he says is the subject of irony because we — the readers — separately know it’s going to be a foul day. What he says refers to something of which he’s not aware. Only us readers are in on the joke. Because the joke is on him.

(In writing this, I am remembering all those stand up routines and blog posts that point out exactly how Alanis Morissette’s song ‘Ironic’ isn’t ironic. And I’m expecting some schooling, but we’ll see.)

I hope you get the main point here.

When a character says something within a novel, equivalent to This is going to be a lovely day, we — as informed or uniformed readers — are aware of different nuances of irony.

Some of these are generic. The cover of a book may, in itself, tell us that terrible and testing things are going to happen to the main characters, many of whom will die. (Horror or war stories.) So when they say, ‘Everything’s going to be alright from now on,’ we know that’s absolutely not true.

The very fact that characters are in a story means we know that stuff is going to happen to them. They aren’t aware (mostly) that they are in a story, or that their speech and thought is being reported for the delight of readers.

In fact, irony — us readers knowing things characters don’t know — is one of the founding principles of the novel form.

We know they are windmills, not giants, that Don Quixote is tilting at.

Let’s get back to our recording session.

What does irony have to do with this?

Well, everything.

In recording the session, we can either try to maximise the amount of unwitting irony, which means having A, B, C and D speak in complete ignorance of what one another are saying or have said, or we can try to maximise the witting irony, by going back and forth between them (through talkback in their isolation booths) and playing them excerpts from what the others are saying or have said.

My first decision as a producer, you see, after I’d got the two ex-couples riled up, was to put each of them in an isolation booth with headphones on. That way they can’t shout over one another.

Now that I’ve said a little more about the set-up, I’m going to throw it back to you again.

As the writer of a novel, you’re going to choose whether your invisible organising narrator (who may very well re-voice all of the recordings you’re about to make) is going to have A, B, C and D speak in the presence of this or that specific piece of knowledge, or whether it’ll be better to allow them some agency, some comeback, some access to the humour and viciousness of witting irony.

We all had a lovely time together that evening.

What you can’t do, however, is have each of them sometimes speak as if they were the sole speaker, and sometimes speak in response to what’s already been said by their ex or their lover.

That’s an inconsistent POV. And we’re back to the Festival of No.