By Alexandra Kogan
Author Biography:
Alexandra Kogan is a second-year English Literature and Art History student at the University of Edinburgh. She is a senior editor at ESLJ, has directed plays with Bedlam Theatre and Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company, and reads voraciously in her spare time. Her favourite authors are Milan Kundera, Edith Wharton, and Christopher Isherwood.
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In this essay, Alexandra Kogan compares two authors’ approaches to the questions of narrative subjectivity, authorial control and the impact of embedded societal power structures on the structure of the novel itself. She analyses Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi and The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree Jr through the lens of narrative perspective, exploring the fraught convention of objective, single-person narrative perspective and the implicit structural concerns that are consequently raised: economic, racial, and sexual – all of which are subverted by Emezi and Tiptree. Both authors place narrative control in the hands of distorted, at times exploitative figures – for Tiptree, a predatory salesman from the future, trying to sell dystopian biopower machinery to the implied present-day reader; for Emezi, the ogbanje spirits that inhibit the mind of the novel’s protagonist, Ada. This lends critical weight to their subversion of assumed power structures, aided by their respective genres (science fiction dystopia and contemporary West African fiction, respectively), seeking to critique society through defamiliarising the reader with a perceived natural order. Both authors subvert their narratorial positions of power to explore the implications and consequences of objective narratives both within the novel, as well as society at large.
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