retrospect You find out where events have led in its very first sentence The other night at dinner Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed We are told this by Barbara the 60something history teacher with whom Sheba is living in the wake of a scandal ID: 689775
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Slide1
Narrative voice in NOAS
Notes on a Scandal is a narrative told in
retrospect
. You find out where events have led in its very first sentence: "The other night at dinner, Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed." We are told this by Barbara, the 60-something history teacher with whom Sheba is living in the wake of a scandal
.
Sheba has been charged with "indecent assault on a minor"; her name, the narrator expects, "will probably be familiar to most of you by now". Barbara is going to tell us Sheba's story, lest we be deceived by the distortions peddled in the press. She is busy writing what we read. Slide2
Narrative Voice in NOAS
So there is a
present tense
to this narrative. "It's getting on for six o'clock now, so it won't be much longer . . . Sheba will come down." The novel goes back to recount the slow development and disastrous consequences of Sheba's affair in the
past tense
. But most of its chapters begin in the present, with Barbara finding secret time to scribble her story. "I'm writing this late on Saturday night. I should be in bed, but I haven't been able to get any writing done all week." Slide3
Narrative Voice in NOAS
Barbara strives to take possession of Sheba, and her composition of this narrative is her way of doing so. "The task of telling it has fallen into my hands," she announces, with unconsciously comic solemnity. To ensure "maximum accuracy in this narrative", she constructs a "timeline" on graph paper of Sheba's time at the school and her affair. Teacher-like, she uses "stick-on gold stars" for "truly seminal events". She even has a "schedule" for her composition, to make sure that she gets every precious detail down in writing. This is a narrative being hatched, even as we read. Barbara is scribbling away as she listens for the sound of Sheba on the stairs. The rhythm with which the narrative returns to the present tense keeps reminding us of the narrator and her strange designs.Slide4
Narrative Voice in NOAS
"This is not a story about me," says our narrator, but of course it is. It is the story of how Barbara schemes to acquire Sheba as her "friend". The evidence for Barbara's peculiarity must be gleaned from her own account. In a temper, Sheba reveals that her husband, Richard, has called Barbara an "incubus", and there are hints that she has what one might call a "history". Initially disappointed that Sheba befriends not her, but a "terrifyingly dull" colleague, Barbara recalls the "very severe blow" a few years previously "when my friend Jennifer Dodd announced that she wanted no further contact with me". The "friend" made "some mysterious references to my being 'too intense'". There are veiled references to "certain personal difficulties that I experienced with staff members" at the first school she ever taught in, and to the "malicious gossip" that she has suffered in staffrooms "more than once in my career".Slide5
Narrative Voice in NOAS
Barbara is determined to imagine herself into every recess of Sheba's life. So the novel describes many scenes where Sheba is present, but not Barbara. With an exact attention to words and gestures, we get the unfolding of Sheba and Steven's mutual seduction. Later we listen to them talking in bed together. More than this, we get Sheba's private fantasies. Barbara tells us how she responds when Steven, showing off to a yobbish
school friend
, treats her scornfully. "She registered a definite twinge of - what was it? Excitement? Titillation? For a split second, she found herself imagining what it would be like to lie beneath him; to have his hands on her." Those questions are supposed to be Sheba's secret thoughts.Slide6
Narrative Voice in NOAS
Partly this is explained by Barbara's role as Sheba's confessor. Sheba "tosses out intimate and unflattering truths about herself, all the time, without a second thought". She has the "insouciant frankness" that the narrator assumes is something to do with her "upper-class" background. There is no information too private to be told, and she and Sheba have spent "countless hours together over the last eighteen months, exchanging confidences". But it is more than this: Barbara "knows" what has gone on in Sheba's head, and we must depend upon her knowledge.Slide7
Narrative Voice in NOAS
Barbara's account becomes physically present in the novel. Usually, after each writing session, she hides the manuscript under her mattress. Sheba "doesn't know about this project" - it would only "agitate" her, explains Barbara, with characteristic mock-concern. Secret writings, of course, are destined to be discovered, and the crisis of this novel will come when Sheba finds and reads the narrative of her own disgrace. For then she realises what the novel's narration has already
dramatised
for us: the real story is not of her affair with the teenage Steven, but of her involvement with the weird and manipulative Barbara, the person who writes the story.