Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory Beitrage zur Erzahltheorie)

Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel Edited by Elke D'hoker Gunther Martens Walter de G...

Author: D'hoker | Elke

88 downloads 1061 Views 5MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel

Edited by Elke D'hoker Gunther Martens

Walter de Gruyter

Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel

Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory/ Beiträge zur Erzähltheorie

Edited by/Herausgegeben von Fotis Jannidis, Matıás Martıńez, John Pier, Wolf Schmid Editorial Board/Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik ´ Jose´ Angel Garcıá Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

14

≥

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel Edited by Elke D’hoker and Gunther Martens

≥

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Narrative unreliability in the twentieth-century first-person novel / edited by Elke D’hoker, Gunther Martens. p. cm. ⫺ (Narratologia) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-020630-2 (alk. paper) 1. Fiction ⫺ 20th century ⫺ History and criticism. 2. First person narrative ⫺ History and criticism. 3. Truthfulness and falsehood in literature. I. D’hoker, Elke. II. Martens, Gunther, 1976⫺. PN3383.P64N37 2008 809.3104⫺dc22 2008033215

ISBN 978-3-11-020630-2 ISSN 1612-8427 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

Contents

ELKE D’HOKER, GUNTHER MARTENS Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 JAMES PHELAN Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita ............................................................................. 7 ANSGAR NÜNNING Reconceptualizing the Theory, History and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration: Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches........ 29 GUNTHER MARTENS Revising and Extending the Scope of the Rhetorical Approach to Unreliable Narration ......................................................................... 77 LIESBETH KORTHALS ALTES Sincerity, Reliability and Other Ironies – Notes on Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.......... 107 TOM KINDT Werfel, Weiss and Co. Unreliable Narration in Austrian Literature of the Interwar Period ..................................... 129 ELKE D’HOKER Unreliability between Mimesis and Metaphor: The works of Kazuo Ishiguro ......................................................... 147 ELKE BREMS A Sophisticated Form of Lying: Hugo Claus and the Poetics of Unreliability .................................. 171

vi

Contents

LARS BERNAERTS ‘Un Fou Raisonnant et Imaginant’. Madness, Unreliability and The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short ................................... 185 DIETER DE BRUYN An Eye for an I. Telling as Reading in Bruno Schulz’s Fiction ..... 209 LUC HERMAN, BART VERVAECK Didn’t Know Any Better: Race and Unreliable Narration in “Low-Lands” by Thomas Pynchon ............................................ 231 BART VAN DEN BOSSCHE Unreliability in Italian Modernist Fiction: The Cases of Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello .............................. 247 YASMINE BADIR “He” Who Knows Better Than “I”: Reactivating Unreliable Narration in Philip Roth’s Human Stain and Jean Echenoz’ Nous trois................................... 259 ALICE JEDLIýKOVÁ An Unreliable Narrator in an Unreliable World. Negotiating between Rhetorical Narratology, Cognitive Studies and Possible Worlds Theory ............................ 281 ELS JONGENEEL The Deconstruction of the First-Person Narrator in the French New Novel................................................................ 303 PER KROGH HANSEN First Person, Present Tense. Authorial Presence and Unreliable Narration in Simultaneous Narration ........................... 317

ELKE D’HOKER AND GUNTHER MARTENS

Introduction Even though narrative unreliability has received considerable theoretical attention in recent years, the historical evolution of unreliability – the changes in perception, production and use of reliable and unreliable narrators – has not yet been thoroughly examined. Neither does there exist a comparative study of the uses of narrative unreliability in different (national) literatures. The present volume sets out to fill those gaps by bringing the concept of unreliability to bear on the experimental currents within the first-person novel of the twentieth century. In this respect, it aims both to describe theoretical conceptualisations of unreliable narration with regard to twentieth-century fiction and to trace the diverse uses and transformations of unreliable narration in different national literatures and poetical programmes, such as the French nouveau roman, Polish metafiction, and Dutch magical realism. The individual contributions to this book explore the historicity of unreliability as a narrative technique by focussing on the changes in reader reception of certain texts, on the shifting evaluation of specific conventions as either reliable or unreliable, and on the different functions of unreliability: as a vehicle for satire, psychological analysis, ethical questioning, or a sceptical world-view. In addition, the different articles in this book contribute to the ongoing debate about the possible reconciliation of recent rival conceptions of unreliability, such as cognitive, rhetorical and genre-based approaches, while some of the most prominent representatives of those theoretical currents also elaborate their position in the volume. When seen from the broader perspective of the recent evolution of literary theory, the concept of unreliability is a particularly challenging and productive one. Although it is a rather intuitive phenomenon, its theoretical delineation and practical description have come to involve very diverse theoretical and critical traditions. Unreliability initially stems from

2

Introduction

and was coined within the rhetorical and pre-structuralist frame of Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction. In this frame, the affective and experiential quality of the phenomenon as well as its ties with irony and reader invocation heralded and continue to fuel the interest in literary ethics and rhetorical approaches to narrative. When attempts were made to integrate unreliability within structuralist, poststructuralist or contextual approaches, irreconcilabilities and methodological options were highlighted. The insights from this confrontation gradually paved the way for the pragmatic and context-oriented description of unreliability within postclassical and culturalist models. Although postmodernist literature seemed to put an end to its relevance as a text-intrinsic criterion, more recently unreliability’s presupposition of a necessarily situated and embodied narrator has resurfaced and taken centre stage both within the postclassical, cognitivistconstructivist frame and within gender studies and New Historicism. As a result, central insights about narrative unreliability have been recast in terminologies imported from psychology and discourse analysis. The return of the author, which can be noted in trauma studies and cultural studies as well as in the renewed interest in intentionality, presents interesting new challenges to the ongoing debate on unreliability. Although the aforementioned tendencies move of course beyond this debate, it is clear that unreliability has acquired an almost uncanny centrality and importance to all these developments. Indeed, from a passing reference in the discussion of fictional irony, unreliability has become a theoretical touchstone for the distinction between story and discourse in narratology1 as well as one of the (very few) defining signposts of fictionality.2 This volume sets out to scrutinize the various recent attempts at redescription and to expand the body of literary texts relevant for the discussion of unreliability, both in time and in space. After all, discussions of unreliability have so far relied on a fairly limited number of texts, typically realist and modernist texts from British and American literature. In this collection, on the other hand, the texts discussed range from British, –––––––––––––

1

2

Shen: “the separability of story from discourse is a prerequisite for the discussion of unreliable narration”, Shen, Dan: “Story-discourse Distinction”, in: Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. pp. 566–567: 567. Fludernik, Monika: “Fiction vs Non-Fiction: Narratological Differentiations.” Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger. Ed. Jörg Helbig. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001), 85–103: 100f.

Introduction

3

German and American, over French and Italian, to Dutch, Danish, Polish and Argentinean literature. We have chosen to limit ourselves to twentieth-century texts not just for reasons of unity and coherence, but also for theoretical reasons: the hypothesis that the detection of narrative unreliability is a naturalization strategy typically applicable to “ultra-realist texts”3 can be maximally put to the test with reference to twentiethcentury texts which display an awareness that such a reconstruction of “what really happened” is no longer possible. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that most of the authors discussed in this collection published in the second half of the twentieth century – e.g. Thomas Pynchon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bruno Schulz, Jean Echenoz, Hugo Claus, and Julio Cortázar – and some even in the 21st century: Dennis Cooper, Jakob Ejersbo and Dave Eggers. At the same, modernism and the historical avant-garde are present through the works of Ernst Weiß, Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Luigi Pirandello. A considerable number of the articles engage with experimental and metafictional texts, thus addressing the question of how to situate unreliability in texts which seem to either disintegrate narratorial agency or proliferate the number of relevant reference worlds. The volume’s first two essays by James Phelan and Ansgar Nünning, respectively shed new light on one of the most remarkable and also controversial twists in the debate so far, namely the attempt to synthesize the rhetorical and cognitive approaches. James Phelan further differentiates his rhetorical-narratological model of unreliability by introducing a subset of strategies, related to the effects of bonding or estranging, which serve to substantiate his claim that the guidance of the implied author is central to the way in which readers experience the unreliability of narrators. Nünning reiterates his call for a cultural and contextualized approach to unreliability by contributing a history of the development of unreliable narration in British literature. Gunther Martens, in his contribution, takes issue with the widespread opinion that unreliability is only relevant to homodiegetic fiction. Instead, he aims to extend the discussion of narrative unreliability to heterodiegetic narration by taking into account rhetorical and stylistic aspects of the actual performance of narration. In the essay “Sincerely, Reliability and Other Ironies’, Liesbeth Korthals Altes –––––––––––––

3

Ibid.: 97.

4

Introduction

situates the narratological discussion of unreliability in the broader context of the post-9/11 “distrust of irony” in American literature, comparing the narratological concept of unreliability with the rhetorical topics of ethos and sincerity as ambivalently negotiated in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In the final essay of the first, theoretical, part, Tom Kindt subjects the concept of unreliability to an analytic explication in terms of intentionality and speech act theory, an approach which he illustrates by means of unusual examples in texts by Ernst Weiß and Franz Werfel. The second part consists of five essays which offer close readings of individual texts or oeuvres in the context of unreliability. This section opens with Elke D’hoker’s investigation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels which have often been called unreliable. In her essay, she sets out to qualify this common judgment through a detailed analysis of the mode, function and development of the narrative strategies in Ishiguro’s diverseoeuvre. She concludes that the focus and function of Ishiguro’s use of unreliability moves “from facts to psychology and from epistemology to ethics”. In her reading of two novels by the Belgian author Hugo Claus, subsequently, Elke Brems takes up a recent suggestion by Monika Fludernik to show that interior monologue and third-person narration may also be liable to the suspicion of unreliability. She also brings her reading of Claus’ texts to bear on the crafty and unreliable self-portrait of Hugo Claus as a writer. Lars Bernaerts continues this exploration of Flemish literature in his discussion of madness and unreliability in Johan Daisne’s The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short. From his reading of this novel, he skilfully distils two types of mad narrators: the fou imaginant and the fou raisonnant, thus challenging the distinction between the madman’s identity and his actual discourse. In his essay “An Eye for an I. Telling as Reading in Bruno Schulz’s Fiction”, Dieter De Bruyn further expands the canon of unreliable texts by analysing the metafictional work of the Polish writer Bruno Schultz, which merges the real with the fantastic in its telling. In the final text of this second part, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck signal a fundamental unease with the emphasis on naturalisation and coherence as well as with the return of the author in current approaches to unreliability. Their analysis of Pynchon’s preface to his story collection Slow Learner investigates aspects of narrative competence which may have a bearing on the authorization and interpretation of Thomas Pynchon’s early prose fiction. Their reading of the story “Low-Lands” further reveals several ele-

Introduction

5

ments that cannot solely be attributed to perspectival aberrations of a character narrator. The third part of this collection consists of articles which focus on literary texts or narrative strategies which operate on the margins of unreliability. Thus, Van den Bossche discusses Svevo’s and Pirandello’s highly selfconscious narratives, arguing that the novels in question anticipate the collapse of unreliability in postmodernist fiction. He stresses that the broader cultural context needs to be related to a close-reading of the actual texts’ interactive relation with literary repertoires and conventions. This leads him to reassert the importance of intraliterary signs of unreliability. The article of Yasmine Badir, subsequently, offers a close reading of the complex narrative situation in novels by Philip Roth and Jean Echenoz. She focuses especially on the narrative shifts that occur and on the different thematic effect these shifts have in the novels of Echenoz and Roth, respectively. In her contribution, Alice Jedliþková raises the question how (un)reliability intersects with unrealistic, yet possible and fantastic models of the fictional world. Like Herman and Vervaeck, she questions the emphasis on naturalisation and resolution in cognitive approaches to unreliability and outlines different possible readings of Julio Cortàzar’s “Silvia”. Els Jongeneel turns to the French literary tradition in a discussion of texts by Michel Butor and Robert Pinget. In her astute reading of these ‘New Novels’, she highlights the affinities between unreliability, poststructuralism and the demise of the anthropomorphic narrator in the Nouveau Roman. In the final essay of this collection, Per Krogh Hansen brings us back to the beginning with a theoretical analysis of present tense, or simultaneous, narration. Through a reading of contemporary Danish and American fiction, he questions the implications of this type of narration for the distinction between telling and experiencing and considers the possibility of narrative unreliability in relation to present-tense narration. We conclude this introduction with an expression of gratitude to a number of people who have been instrumental in bringing about this collection. We would like to thank Dirk De Geest as director of the FWO Research Community for his financial and intellectual support. The papers collected in this volume spring from the workshop on (Un)Reliability in FirstPerson Fiction organised at the Catholic University of Leuven on June 19th and 20th 2006. The workshop was organised within the framework of

6

Introduction

the FWO Research Community OLITH (wo.010.05n) funded by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research. The Research Community OLITH “Literatures, Poetics, Literary Theory: Interaction and Conflict” is devoted to the study of the evolution of the literary system and involves researchers from the universities of Leuven, Gent, Liège, Groningen, and Vienna. We further extend our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers, who commented on a draft version of this volume. We are of course also indebted to the members of the editorial board (Wolf Schmid, John Pier, Fotis Jannidis), who were willing to let this volume appear in the Narratologia series. Finally, we wish to thank all the contributors for their stimulating input and for their patience. Boston and Ghent, April 2008

JAMES PHELAN (Ohio State University)

Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita 1. Wayne C. Booth, Unreliable Narration, and the Ethics of Lolita Can we really be surprised that readers have overlooked Nabokov’s ironies in Lolita, when Humbert Humbert is given full and unlimited control over the rhetorical resources? [...] One of the delights of this delightful, profound book is that of watching Humbert almost make a case for himself. But Nabokov has insured that many, perhaps most, of his readers will be unsuccessful, in that they will identify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends. 1

Wayne C. Booth

I should have distinguished more clearly between the conclusions that were derived from rhetorical inquiry and those that were simply my unargued personal commitments. […] And sometimes, especially in chapter thirteen, I seem to forget just how difficult it is to do justice to ethical complexities, in our reading experience, in our study of rhetorical problems, and in our thought about the relative values of particular art works in constituting and criticizing selves and societies. 2

Wayne C. Booth You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

3

Vladimir Nabokov

–––––––––––––

1 2 3

Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chapter 13 (1983: 391). Booth, “Afterword”, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edition (1988: 419). Nabokov, Lolita (1991: 9).

8

James Phelan

In 1961, when Wayne C. Booth published The Rhetoric of Fiction, the dominant literary theory was of course the New Criticism. The New Critics famously regarded canonical literary works as verbal icons or wellwrought urns and just as famously ruled that interpretations based on responses of individual readers were guilty of the Affective Fallacy. In this climate, Booth’s Chapter 13 on “The Morality of Impersonal Narration,” the chapter that includes Booth’s commentary on Lolita, was a radical statement, because it viewed fictional narratives not as autonomous objects but as acts of communication whose aesthetic qualities were intertwined with their ethical effects on individual readers. Given the hegemony of the New Criticism, it is not surprising that Booth’s chapter encountered a lot of resistance from its initial readers or that its remarks about Lolita were a flashpoint for that resistance. Even from a 2006 perspective that values ethical criticism, Booth’s comments invite objections. How can Booth both acknowledge that Nabokov has marked Humbert as an unreliable narrator and complain about the morality of Lolita? Nabokov should not be impugned for his readers’ failures, should he? And isn’t Booth here and throughout Chapter 13 working with a narrow, moralistic view of the art of fiction? In his Afterword to the second edition in 1983, Booth does not say anything further about Lolita, but he does make two general responses to the objections generated by Chapter 13. (1) He defends his concerns with the relation between technique and morality as fully consistent with his conception of fiction as rhetorical action; and (2) he admits two problems with the execution of his argument. As my second epigraph indicates, these are (a) mixing his personal beliefs into his analyses and (b) underestimating the difficulties of ethical criticism. I think Booth is on target in both of these general responses, but I also think that his commentary on Lolita is more a sign of his underestimating the difficulties of ethical criticism than of his mixing his personal beliefs into that commentary. Although Booth finds the novel to be “delightful” and “profound”, his comments also make it clear that he finds nothing “delightful” in the narrative’s main action, Humbert’s violation of Dolores. With these considerations in mind, I undertake in this essay the task of doing better justice to the difficult problem of the relation between technique and ethics in Lolita. From the rhetorical perspective that I share with Booth, doing justice to the problem means developing a solution that will account for two especially notable groups of readers without jumping to castigate either those readers or Nabokov. The first group is the one that most troubles

Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability

9

Booth, those who are taken in by Humbert’s artful narration. The second is a group that is, as far as I can tell, more common today than it was in 1961. This group is determined not to be taken in by Humbert and thus resists all of his rhetorical appeals, including those that arise from his selfcondemnations at the end of his narrative. On the theoretical level, being able to account for these two sets of responses will also mean accounting for the relations between two audiences that rhetorical theory often separates, the authorial audience and flesh and blood readers. I propose to come at the problem of technique and ethics in Lolita by means of a new distinction about the technique of unreliable narration. More specifically, I want to distinguish between estranging unreliability, by which I mean unreliable narration that underlines or increases the distance between the narrator and the authorial audience, and bonding unreliability, by which I mean unreliable narration that reduces the distance between the narrator and the authorial audience. My hypothesis is that Nabokov’s specific and complicated deployment of these two kinds of unreliability, especially in Part One of Lolita, provides the grounds for our understanding of the relations between his authorial audience and the two sets of flesh and blood readers I have described above. But before I explore this hypothesis, I believe it would be helpful to place the distinction between estranging and bonding unreliability in the broader context of rhetorical theory’s approach to unreliable narration.

2. Estranging and Bonding Unreliability within a Rhetorical Approach to Narration As I argue in Living to Tell about It, unreliable narration, like character narration more generally, is a mode of indirect communication. The implied author – or if you prefer, the author (for my purposes here, the distinction isn’t a major issue, though, as I indicate in Living to Tell, my preference is for implied author) – communicates with his or her audience by means of the voice of another speaker addressing another audience. Put another way, we have one text, two speakers (one explicit, one implicit), two audiences, and at least two purposes. This model predicts nothing about the relation between implied author and narrator in any given instance of character narration, but instead imagines a very wide spectrum of possible relations. At one end of this spectrum is what I call mask narration, a rhetorical act in which the implied author uses the character narrator as a spokesperson for ideas that she fully endorses. Indeed, the im-

10

James Phelan

plied author employs the mask of the character narrator as a means to increase the appeal and persuasiveness of the ideas expressed.4 At the other end of this spectrum is narration that is unreliable along more than one of the three main axes of communication, that is, the axis of facts and events (where we find misreporting or underreporting), the axis of understanding/perception (where we find misreading or misinterpreting/underreading or underinterpreting) and the axis of values (where we find misregarding or misevaluating/underregarding or underevaluating). In most work on unreliable narration since Booth’s coining of the term in 1961, theorists and critics have focused on this end of the spectrum. Think of the common examples of unreliable narrators: Ford Maddox Ford’s Dowell in The Good Soldier, Ring Lardner’s Whitey in “Haircut”, William Faulkner’s Jason in The Sound and the Fury, Henry James’s governess in one reading of The Turn of the Screw. There are good reasons for this focus: using one text to convey substantial gaps between a narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations, and those of the implied author is no mean feat – nor is being able to account for the dynamics of that feat, as the history of theoretical quarrels about unreliability would suggest. Narrative theorists since Booth have given a great deal of attention to those dynamics without coming to a clear consensus. We debate such things as whether unreliability is located in the reader, in the text, in the author, or in some interrelation among them; whether the concept of the implied author is more of a hindrance than a help in our understanding of unreliability; whether a naïve narrator’s accurate but uncomprehending reports should be called unreliable narration, discordant narration, or something else.5 I have learned a lot from participating in these debates, but I have recently come to think that our focus on these issues in our respective laboratories of narrative theory has prevented us from paying sufficient attention to the diversity of unreliable narration existing in the wild, that is, in the almost countless number of character narrations in the history of narrative (and indeed, in some noncharacter narrations). –––––––––––––

4

5

My concept of mask narration is indebted to Ralph Rader’s concept of the “mask lyric” developed in his essay, “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms,” Rader (1976). For a sample of these debates, see especially Cohn (2000), Ansgar Nünning (1997, 1999, 2005), Vera Nünning (2004), Hansen (2005), Olson (2003), Petterson (2005), Zerweck (2001), and Phelan (2005).


11

Consequently, my approach to the problems of Lolita is not to revisit the debates about the location of unreliability or the utility of the concept of the implied author but rather to do some descriptive poetics within the rhetorical frame and then look for the payoff of this poetics in my return to the disparate responses to the ethics of Lolita. I start with the distinction I mentioned above, that between estranging unreliability and bonding unreliability. The adjectives refer to the consequences of the unreliability for the relations between the narrator and the authorial audience. In estranging unreliability, the discrepancies between the narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations and those of the authorial audience leave these two participants in the communicative exchange distant from one another – in a word, estranged. Or to put it another way, in estranging unreliability, the authorial audience recognizes that adopting the narrator’s perspective would mean moving far away from the implied author’s, and in that sense, the adoption would be a net loss for the author-audience relationship. When Lardner’s Whitey says that Jim Kendall was “kind of rough, but a good fella at heart”, he is misreading and misregarding. As the authorial audience substitutes a much harsher view of Jim, we also increase our ethical and interpretive distance from Whitey. In bonding unreliability, the discrepancies between the narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations have the paradoxical result of reducing the interpretive, affective, or ethical distance between the narrator and the authorial audience. In other words, although the authorial audience recognizes the narrator’s unreliability, that unreliability includes some communication that the implied author – and thus the authorial audience – endorses. When Stevens writes at the end of The Remains of the Day that “in bantering lies the key to human warmth”, he is underregarding because he does not see that human warmth depends on much more than bantering. Nevertheless, the statement shows that Stevens has learned something in the course of the narrative, has moved closer to Ishiguro’s ethical beliefs about human relationships than during his first unenthusiastic responses to Mr. Faraday’s bantering. As Stevens moves in this direction, the authorial audience also moves toward him not only ethically but also affectively. As the emphasis on consequences suggests, this distinction between estranging and bonding unreliability is based on the rhetorical effect of the given unreliability. The taxonomy of six types of unreliability I mention above (misreporting, misreading, misregarding, underreporting, underreading, underregarding) arises not from an analysis of effects but from an

12

James Phelan

analysis of two main variables of the communicative exchange among implied author, narrator, and authorial audience: (a) the axis of communication along which the unreliability occurs, and (b) whether the particular communication indicates that the authorial audience needs to reject the narrator’s perspective or supplement it. Because of these different bases for identifying the two classes of unreliability, the distinction between estranging and bonding unreliability cuts across the previous taxonomy of six types. More simply, any one of the six types can function as estranging unreliability or as bonding unreliability. Since most previous work has been on what I call estranging unreliability, I want to focus now on bonding unreliability by proposing six of its subtypes. As I do, I shall consider whether each subtype is more likely to occur along one of the three axes of communication than the other two, and, thus, the kind of distance that each type is likely to reduce. I do not claim that my catalogue of subtypes is exhaustive, but I hope it will both help to clarify the concept and to show why it matters.

3. Six Subtypes of Bonding Unreliability: Local and Global Effects The first subtype takes advantage of the single text with two tellers, two audiences, and two purposes, by rendering the narrator’s communication literally unreliable but metaphorically reliable. It most typically occurs along the axes of facts/events and understanding/perception, and it has the potential to reduce the perceptual, ethical, and affective distance between narrator and authorial audience. Consider this passage from Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in which Chief Bromden describes Nurse Ratched’s ability to control the passing of time in the psychiatric ward. The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. […] [E]verybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light’s screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off on that clock dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and got tired watching the film run ten times its natural speed, got


13

bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal. She’s given to turning up the speed this way on days like, say, when you got somebody to visit you or when the VFW brings down a smoker show from Portland – times like that, times you’d like to hold and have stretch out. That’s when she speeds things up. But generally it’s the other way, the slow way. She’ll turn that dial to a dead stop and freeze the sun there on the screen so it don’t move a scant hair for weeks, so not a leaf on a tree nor a blade of grass in the pasture shimmers. The clock hands hang at 6 two minutes to three and she’s liable to let them hang there until we rust.

The Chief is clearly misreporting here, as we can infer from many signals, including the internal contradictions of the passage. To take just two of the most egregious, the patients cannot sleep for ten minutes twenty times in the space of an hour, let alone eat three meals twenty times in the space of an hour. Nor can they survive without sleep and food for weeks. As typically happens with misreporting, this case of it is accompanied by another kind of unreliability, misreading. The Chief attributes to Nurse Ratched a power over the impersonal phenomenon of time, a power that she of course does not literally have. Both the misreporting and the misreading contribute to our understanding of the Chief’s psychological problems, the reasons why he is himself a patient in this psychiatric hospital: he suffers from paranoia and extremely low self-esteem. These conditions, which stem from his experience of watching the white world turn his once strong father into an ineffectual alcoholic, have led him to pretend to be deaf. While the implied Kesey guides his audience to these inferences about the Chief’s unreliability, he also guides us to other inferences that lead us to recognize that the Chief nevertheless captures some underlying truths about life on the ward and about Nurse Ratched’s role in that life. First, the Chief’s narration effectively conveys the sense that the ward is so set apart from the world outside its walls that it might as well have its own system of time, and how, within that system, the subjective experience of time’s pace can vary radically from day to day. Second, the Chief’s narration indicates that Nurse Ratched has a remarkable degree of power, and, in combination with his reports of her manipulations of patients in group meetings and in many of her other interactions, we come to share the Chief’s ethical evaluation of her because we recognize that it is endorsed ––––––––––––– 6

Kesey (1963: 70–71).

14

James Phelan

by the implied Kesey. The Chief’s analogy between Nurse Ratched and the bored kid at the projection machine is particularly telling. In the Chief’s view, Nurse Ratched’s motive for easing off “on the pace of the clock-dial” has nothing to do with helping the patients and everything to do with her own control of them. She eases off only when she perceives that they’re at the breaking point, and she does so not out of concern for them but in the same spirit as a child who gets bored by the once exciting spectacle of watching a movie projector running at high speed. More generally, in the Chief’s view, Nurse Ratched’s control of time on the ward is part of her larger role in the Combine, the Chief’s term for all the societal forces that work to enforce a passive conformity on individuals. The Chief identifies the ward as a factory for the Combine, a place to fix those who are resisting the forces of conformity, and he sees Nurse Ratched as the ever-efficient, ever-dedicated manager of that factory. Again, the implied Kesey invites his audience to recognize that the Chief is literally unreliable (there is no Combine) in his understanding but metaphorically reliable (the ward does function to enforce conformity – at the price of masculinity, among other things) in his reporting and reading, and reliable in his evaluation (Nurse Ratched’s manipulations are all in the service of undermining the patients’ self-confidence and self-esteem). The overall effect of the Chief’s narration is that we interpret his paranoia as a condition that gives him privileged access to significant metaphorical truths about the narrative world and a corresponding ability to render accurate ethical evaluations of its inhabitants. To put this in other terms, the Chief is unreliable in his reports about time on the ward and in his reading of Nurse Ratched’s power, but the metaphorical perceptual truths behind that literal unreliability reinforce the reliability of his evaluations of her. This effect contributes substantially to our sympathy for the Chief and to our desire that his situation will improve. This element of our response becomes especially important in light of the larger affective and ethical dynamics of the novel’s progression. The Chief tells us about McMurphy’s power to disrupt the Nurse’s efficient manipulation of the patients and control of the ward, but he also tells us that McMurphy comes to realize that, as someone who has been committed to the hospital, continuing to exercise his power means running the risk of never being able to leave. The implied Kesey also makes it clear that the best hope for the patients to improve and be able to function on their own is to have McMurphy continue his disruptions and thereby show them that they are not as powerless as they believe they are. Thus, the im-


15

plied Kesey puts his audience in the unusual position of desiring the sympathetic protagonist to make choices that are likely to lead to his downfall. Our bonding with the Chief is crucial to the effectiveness of these dynamics: the more sympathetic we feel toward him the more we desire McMurphy to stay on his destructive course, even as we register the risks he takes. Similarly, the Chief’s actions at the end of the narrative, after McMurphy has thoroughly exposed Nurse Ratched as a fallible, manipulative woman and been lobotomized for his efforts, are crucial to the effectiveness of the novel’s ending. The Chief exercises both his own judgments and his newly recovered physical strength, first, mercifully to end McMurphy’s life, and second, triumphantly to break out of the hospital. Just as significantly, the Chief’s narration of these events is without paranoia and utterly reliable. “I was sure of one thing: he wouldn’t have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use as an example of what happened if you bucked the system.”7 The bonding unreliability, in other words, gives way to bonding reliability as Kesey hits the perfect bittersweet notes to end his novel.8 The second, third, and fourth common subtypes of bonding unreliability are well-illustrated by passages in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so I will consider them together and then make a few remarks on their global effects. The second subtype is what I call playful comparison between implied author and narrator. In this technique, the implied author playfully uses unreliable narration to call attention to similarities or contrasts between himself as teller and the narrator as teller. Depending on how the implied author develops the relation between himself and the narrator, playful comparison can have either estranging or bonding effects. If, for example, the implied author has the narrator overestimate his abilities as a storyteller, we most likely have estranging unreliability. The first paragraph of Twain’s novel provides an excellent example of playful comparison with bonding effects. ––––––––––––– 7 8

Ibid.: 270. This brief analysis deliberately brackets some of the other ethical issues raised by Kesey’s handling of the Chief’s narration, particularly the ways in which the Chief reliably reflects his implied author’s racist and sexist attitudes. A full rhetorical and ethical analysis of the novel would address the consequences of these dimensions of the narration for our overall response.

16

James Phelan You don’t know me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly – Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is – and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book – which is mostly a 9 true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Huck is a reliable reporter about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer here, but the question of reliability gets more interesting when we consider his roles as reader and regarder. On the one hand, Huck is a clear authority on that reporting, and so in the authorial audience we have a strong warrant for taking his interpreting and evaluating as reliable. If anyone knows whether Tom Sawyer contains stretchers, Huck is the guy. On the other hand, if we do take Huck as fully reliable, then the implied Twain would be guiding us to find some ethical deficiency, however minor, in his writing of Tom Sawyer. The way out of this amusing dilemma is not far to seek: Huck’s narration here is mildly unreliable reading and regarding that arises from the implied Twain’s play with the relation between the mimetic and the synthetic components of Huck’s character. For the authorial audience Huck is as synthetic as any of the events in Tom Sawyer and so the distinction between truth and stretchers that he makes within that synthetic fiction does not hold. The implied Twain is not inviting his authorial audience to go back to Tom Sawyer and search for the stretchers, because we wouldn’t be able to find them. Furthermore, we recognize that Huck can accuse Twain of telling stretchers – and condone such telling – only because Twain licenses him to. To put all this another way, the playful comparison involves Twain’s deployment of metalepsis: he allows himself to appear on the same diegetic level as Huck (transforming himself from the author of a fiction but the journalist/biographer/historian who investigated Tom’s life and then wrote a book about it) while relying on his audience to recognize that he retains his identity as creator of that diegetic level and that as creator he gives Huck license to find fault with his diegetic equal. By giving Huck both this license to accuse him of telling stretchers and the ability to be magnanimous about those failings, the implied Twain makes Huck both mildly unreliable and immensely appealing. The result is a first paragraph that leads us to bond strongly both affectively and ethically with Huck and with the implied Twain. ––––––––––––– 9

Twain (2005: 32).


17

The third subtype of bonding unreliability is what, with a nod to Victor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique”, I call naïve defamiliarization, and it most often occurs as a kind of unreliable reading. Consider this sentence from the first chapter of Huck Finn: “But you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really any thing the matter with them.”10 Huck in his naïveté fails to recognize that what he calls grumbling the widow Douglas would call saying grace. But the freshness of his perspective allows him to capture the rote, thoughtless quality of the prayer even by someone as sincerely religious as the widow Douglas. In other words, Huck’s naïveté defamiliarizes the act of saying grace and does so in a way that both acknowledges and closes the perceptual distance between him and the authorial audience. The fourth subtype is what I call sincere but misguided self-deprecation. As the term suggests, this bonding unreliability occurs along the axis of ethics/evaluation, and it depends on the coexistence of two judgments, one about the presence of sincere self-deprecation and the other about why the self-deprecation is misguided. The passages in Chapter 31 recounting Huck’s decision to go to hell are illuminating examples. I know very well why [the words of my prayer] wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in 11 me I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.

Here we have the first steps in Twain’s use of sincere but misguided selfdeprecation. Huck judges himself to be ethically deficient, while the implied Twain guides us to judge Huck’s inability to act against Jim’s interest as a sign that he is acting according to a higher ethical standard. Huck then writes the letter to Miss Watson, telling her of Jim’s location, so that he’ll be able to pray for help to stop sinning, and he immediately feels better. But before he prays, he starts thinking about the river trip, and his reliability as reporter, reader, and regarder reinforces the previous bonding unreliability through sincere but misguided self-deprecation: ––––––––––––– 10 11

Ibid.: 33. Ibid.: 200.

18

James Phelan And I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. […] and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one 12 he’s got now; and then I happened to see to look around, and see that paper.

Thus, when he makes his decision to tear up that paper and evaluates his action most negatively, we feel our strongest sympathy and our greatest ethical approval of his actions. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” – and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, 13 and the other warn’t.

With this climactic self-deprecation, the bonding unreliability, begun in the first paragraph, reaches its apex. While Huck is sure that he’s damned, Twain’s audience is even more certain that he is saved. Our judgments depend on our inferring both that Huck is absolutely sincere in his view of himself and that he is misevaluating the ethics of his choice. Attention to Twain’s use of different subtypes of bonding unreliability also sheds light on the controversy about the ending of Huckleberry Finn. Although Twain continues to employ bonding unreliability through Huck’s naïve defamiliarizations of Tom Sawyer’s elaborate schemes, Twain does not continue with the pattern of bonding through sincere selfdeprecation. Instead, Huck passively accepts most of Tom’s schemes and their casual cruelty toward Jim. In other words, Twain employs bonding unreliability for Huck as misreader, but he does not employ it in relation to Huck as an ethical evaluator. Thus, the unreliability during the Evasion both maintains and closes perceptual distance, but, with respect to Huck’s treatment of Jim, it does not close any significant ethical distance. Indeed, Huck’s failure to evaluate the ethical problems with Tom’s treatment of Jim provides such a sharp contrast to the bonding effect of the sincere but misguided self-deprecation in Chapter 31 that it provides good grounds –––––––––––––

12 13

Ibid.: 200–201. Ibid.: 201.


19

for the complaints of many readers that the Evasion is serious flaw in the novel’s design. The fifth subtype of bonding unreliability is what I call partial progress toward the norm. This subtype typically occurs along either the axis of ethics/evaluation or along that of understanding/perception. Stevens’s comment that “in bantering lies the key to human warmth” is one example of this subtype. Another is this passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off-base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay 14 around and they would kill you.

One of the implied Hemingway’s positions in this novel is that the world is an inherently destructive place and the best response to the knowledge of that destructiveness is to create something positive to counter it, starting with taking pride in one’s dignity. Frederic’s narration here shows that he has made considerable progress in his understanding of the world’s destructiveness from the days when he was convinced that even the war “was no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies”.15 But the tone of complaint shows that he has not yet moved all the way to the implied Hemingway’s view – and understandably so, since he has just learned that his and Catherine’s son has died in childbirth. Nevertheless, the dominant effect of the passage is to close the perceptual, ethical, and affective distance between Frederic and the authorial audience. Shortly after this point, Frederic learns that Catherine too has died. His first impulse is to say a romantic good-bye to her, but that effort fails miserably. “It was”, he says, “like saying good-bye to a statue”.16 Then somehow he is able to complete the last steps of his movement toward the implied Hemingway’s views and that completion closes the rest of the perceptual, ethical, and affective distance between Frederic and the authorial audience. The understated and controlled quality of his narrative’s thoroughly reliable last sentence subtly conveys the closing of the final distance. The sentence appears to be only a report, but in this context it also functions as ––––––––––––– 14 15 16

Hemingway (1929: 327). Ibid.: 37. Ibid.: 332.

20

James Phelan

an ethical statement of Frederic’s decision not to be utterly destroyed by Catherine’s death but instead to move forward even as he acknowledges his loss: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”17 The sixth subtype is what I call, with a nod to social science research on coping strategies (Pearlin and Schooler), bonding through optimistic comparison. It occurs when the narration juxtaposes clearly estranging unreliability to something far less estranging. Just as I can better cope with my situation in life, almost no matter how bleak it looks, by comparing it with some less rosy alternative, implied authors can guide audiences to recognize one example of unreliability as “better” than another. Such comparisons within a single narrator’s discourse will take us back to “partial progress toward the norm”, so I suggest reserving this category for comparisons between narrators within a single narrative. For example, when Faulkner juxtaposes Anse’s and Darl’s narrations in As I Lay Dying, Anse’s deficiencies on the axis of ethics make Darl’s occasional deficiencies on the that axis and on the axis of perception almost endearing. As this example indicates, the flip side of bonding through optimistic comparison is estranging through negative comparison. The juxtaposition between Darl and Anse works not only to enhance our bonding with Darl but also to increase our estrangement from Anse.

5. Estranging and Bonding Unreliability and the Ethics of Lolita How then can the distinction between estranging and bonding unreliability illuminate the twin phenomena of readers being too easily taken in by Humbert and readers thoroughly resisting him? My hypothesis is that in Part One Nabokov frequently employs estranging reliability, bonding unreliability, and a complex coding of some of Humbert’s other narration, a coding in which he gives the narration many marks of bonding unreliability but ultimately marks it as estranging unreliability. For the complex coding to work, its marks of bonding unreliability must be sufficiently persuasive that the authorial audience seriously considers moving closer to Humbert before estranging themselves from him. The combination of bonding reliability, estranging unreliability, and this complicated coding almost guarantees that many flesh and blood readers will be taken in by ––––––––––––– 17

Ibid.


21

Humbert – and not just because they will miss the marks of the estranging unreliability. Flesh and blood readers will also be taken in because once any unreliability is detected it is easy to conclude that one is wise to the narrator’s tricks and therefore will not be taken in by them. Such readers respond to Humbert by saying, “yes, but”, while the implied Nabokov is asking his authorial audience to make one more move to “you almost got me to say ‘yes, but’ but I’m wise to your tricks.” Furthermore, the technique of complex coding with estranging narration ultimately privileged almost guarantees that another set of readers will build up their defenses against all of Humbert’s appeals and therefore decide that all his narration, even in Part Two where he appears to be making partial progress toward the authorial norms, is ultimately estranging. Unlike Chief Bromden, Huck Finn, Stevens, or Frederic Henry, Humbert is a highly self-conscious narrator, though one with limited aesthetic control. Humbert is very much aware of his agency and purpose as a writer, yet he has a limited ability to achieve the effects and purposes he seeks, since those purposes are ultimately quite different from Nabokov’s. One consequence of this difference is that the subtype of bonding through naïve defamiliarization is not available for Nabokov’s use. A second consequence is that bonding unreliability through playful comparison is likely to be a very attractive technique. And in fact, Nabokov employs it on the very first page, where Humbert writes, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”18. The playful comparison works to highlight similarities – and an important difference – between Nabokov and Humbert. Both are self-conscious stylists, both intend and enjoy the irony of Humbert’s statement, both are making an important disclosure while calling attention to their style. In the authorial audience, we appreciate the playfulness and the skill of both tellers, and, in that way, are drawn toward Humbert. But Humbert, unlike Nabokov, is a murderer, and his irony here suggests the authorial audience needs to be wary about his ethical judgments, as his statement plays with the ideas that the murder is less important than the style or that the style is compensation for the murder. To get at more of the effects of the bonding unreliability here we should consider it in its larger context. Humbert’s statement is the last sentence of his third paragraph, and it comes after he has been engaging in some remarkable wordsmithing. It is ––––––––––––– 18

Appel (1991: 9).

22

James Phelan

an immediate follow-up to his explanation in the previous sentence that he met Dolores’s precursor “About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.”19 But the comment applies not just to that clever circumlocution but also to the artful first two paragraphs. The first is marked by its lyrical direct address and its carefully crafted parallel structures and alliterations: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”20 The paragraph is also marked by Humbert’s luxurious celebration of the linguistic glory of her name: “Lo-lee-ta. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”21 The second paragraph continues the linguistic play with her name as Humbert runs through its many variations: Lo, Lola, Dolly, Dolores, and back once more to Lolita. “She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four foot ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”22 Thus, when Humbert opines that “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”, his jest not only calls attention to the master stylist behind his own fancy telling and, on this measure of style at least, to their similarity. But the jest also calls attention to the link between the style and the keen perceptions about Dolores it conveys. Consequently, one effect of the playful comparison is to align Humbert with the implied Nabokov along the axis of perception. To be sure, as with the “you can always count” statement itself, Nabokov includes in the first few paragraphs some important warning signals against bonding too closely on the ethical axis with Humbert (his narration raises the question of whether his image of Lolita in his arms is the image of a four foot ten school girl), but the bonding effects on the axis of perception remains strong. To put these points another way, the implied Nabokov uses the playful comparison so that an element of the novel’s aesthetics, Nabokov’s stylistic virtuosity which he allows Humbert to share, disposes the authorial audience to regard Humbert as a reliable interpreter. This disposition is of course subject to change as the narration proceeds, and, especially in light of the warning signals, it does not automatically generate a disposition to regard Humbert ––––––––––––– 19 20 21 22

Ibid.: 9. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.


23

as a reliable evaluator. But on the whole, Nabokov’s strategy is to encourage our initial bonding with Humbert. This bonding is also encouraged by optimistic comparison with the narration of John Ray, Jr., whose Foreword frames Humbert’s narration. The interrelations of reliability and unreliability in Ray’s narration are themselves worthy of an extended analysis, but for my purposes here, the most relevant feature of his narration is the inconsistency of his style. It varies from a clumsy formality (“the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates”; “this commentator may be excused for repeating”23) to a straightforward effectiveness (“he is horrible, he is abject”24), to the repetition of platitudes: “‘Lolita’ should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”25 The result is a narrator whose perceptions and evaluations we question, even if we do not have enough information to construct clear alternative views. More generally, after giving us three pages of John Ray, Jr., Nabokov has made both flesh and blood and authorial audiences more susceptible to the rhetoric of Humbert Humbert and when Nabokov employs the technique of playful comparison on the first page of Humbert’s narration, he encourages us to bond with him to a considerable extent. In much of the rest of the early chapters, however, Nabokov employs his strategy of complex coding. A particularly salient example occurs in Chapter 5, as Humbert presents his theory of nymphets: Now I wish to introduce the following idea: Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human but nymphic (that is demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets. It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the boundaries – the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks – of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious

––––––––––––– 23 24 25

Ibid.: 3, 5. Ibid.: 5. Ibid.: 6.

24

James Phelan characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of the synchrononous phenomena than on that intangible island of 26 entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes.

Having used the playful comparison to dispose us to accept Humbert’s interpretations, the implied Nabokov uses that disposition to his advantage here. We have no trouble recognizing that Humbert is literally unreliable – the distinction between demonic nymphets and human young girls is obviously literally false – but Nabokov invites us to consider whether he is metaphorically reliable. Perhaps the perceptive Humbert is on to something; surely many of us, male and female, have entertained ideas about special groupings of the opposite sex. Entertaining this possibility also means recognizing that the appeal of Humbert’s narration is that it can do more of what it does here, namely, explain the mysteries of this group and the effect its members have on those travelers whom they bewitch. To bond with Humbert here, in other words, would not mean becoming a bewitched traveler but rather seeing the world through such a traveler’s eyes. But Nabokov constructs the narration of Humbert’s theory of nymphets so that it is ultimately estranging rather than bonding. In the excerpt I have quoted, the main signal is the utter elusiveness of the qualities, those “certain mysterious characteristics” that make one girl a nymphet and another merely human. “Soul-shattering, insidious charm” should not be so “elusive” that it is evident only to the bewitched – unless of course there are no such things as nymphets, literally or figuratively, and the girls in question are just the objects of a pederast’s lust. The more one reflects on Humbert’s claims here the more they seem to be an elaborate rationalization of pederasty, even if he is not fully aware that he is rationalizing. The signals of estrangement become stronger in the next paragraph: Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, little Annabel was no nymphet to me 27 […]

––––––––––––– 26 27

Ibid.: 16–17. Ibid.: 17.


25

Here Humbert’s theory of nymphets gets thoroughly exposed as an elaborate rationalization of pederasty. By having Humbert emphasize the difference in age, Nabokov calls attention to the differences in size and power between “maiden and man.” By having Humbert extend the range of the gap between “maiden and man” to ninety years, Nabokov calls attention to the implausibility of Humbert’s claims. As a result, the idea of the man coming under the spell of the nymphet becomes misreporting, misreading, and misevaluating, and the overall effect of the passage is to estrange the authorial audience from Humbert and from one of the chief planks of his defense in Part One. Humbert of course continues to try to defend himself in Part One, and Nabokov allows him intermittent passages of bonding unreliability, though he also continues the pattern of the complex-coding. However, as I have argued in Living to Tell about It, from the end of Part One on, Humbert’s own engagement with the task of narrating his experiences with Dolores leads him to see more clearly the irreparable harm he has done to her. As a result, he eventually cannot sustain his purpose of exonerating himself, so he stops rationalizing his behavior and starts taking responsibility for ruining her life. Accompanying these changes is Nabokov’s increased use of bonding unreliability through partial progress toward the authorial norm. The clearest example of this strategy is his statement “Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert thirty-five years for rape and dismissed the rest of the charges.”28 Humbert of course is not accused of rape but rather of the murder of Clare Quilty. His willingness to dismiss the murder charge shows that he is still an unreliable evaluator of his own actions. But his willingness to sentence himself to thirty-five years for rape – indeed, his willingness to use the term “rape” for the first time – shows how far from the rationalizations about being bewitched by a nymphet he has traveled. As I try to demonstrate in Living to Tell, Nabokov’s ability plausibly to represent Humbert’s change from the beginning of his narration to this end and to make us feel moved by his alteration is a remarkable achievement. Nevertheless, if I am right about the complex coding of Humbert’s narration in Part One, then it is not surprising that some readers who have picked up on that pattern want to push even this partial progress back in the direction of estrangement. Thus, for these readers what I take as sin–––––––––––––

28

Ibid.: 308.

26

James Phelan

cere self-deprecation is an insincere ploy, just one more move in Humbert’s attempt to win the sympathy of his narratee. Like those who are taken in by the bonding unreliability of Part One, these thoroughly resistant readers seem to me to be misreading the novel. But in both cases, I submit, the misreadings are unintended negative consequences of Nabokov’s brilliant experiment with estranging and bonding unreliability. If this analysis is on target, it brings us back to the larger questions about the ethics of technique in Lolita. Does it make ethical sense – that is, is it fair – to hold Nabokov accountable for unintended negative consequences of his technique? By the same token, does it make ethical sense – is it fair – to say he has no ethical accountability other than to say more loudly what all authors can say, “Caveat Lector”? I do not want to answer “yes” to either of these questions, which leads me to think that there is something wrong with the way they are formulated. What’s wrong, I think, is that the questions enforce a separation between implied author and flesh and blood audience when the act of rhetorical reading leads to their mutual dependence. In other words, both Nabokov and his readers bear some responsibility for the misreadings, just as both bear some responsibility for the more successful communication. Since Nabokov’s experiment with unreliable narration sets up interpretive and ethical traps for readers, Nabokov must bear some responsibility for readers who fall into those traps. But his experiment also challenges readers to recognize those traps and avoid them, and they bear some responsibility if they are not up to the challenge. The larger point is that Nabokov’s experiment with bonding and estranging unreliability underlines the extent to which ethical criticism in the rhetorical mode must take into account the interrelations among implied author, narrator, authorial audiences, and flesh and blood readers.*

–––––––––––––

*

This essay, originally presented in Leuven 2006, was also published in Narrative 15:2 (May 2007).


27

Works Cited Appel, Alfred, Jr, (ed.) 1991 The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage Books). Booth, Wayne C. 1983 The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press). 1988 The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press). Cohn, Dorrit 2000 “Discordant Narration,” in Style 34: 302–316. Faulkner, William 1990 As I Lay Dying (New York: Knopf). Graff, Gerald and James Phelan, (eds.) 2005 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s). Hansen, Per Krogh 2005 “When Fact Becomes Fiction: On Extra-Textual Unreliable Narration,” in Fact and Fiction in Narrative. An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Lars-Åke Skalin, 283–307. (Örebro, Sweden: Örebro Universitet). Hemingway, Ernest 1929 A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons). Kesey, Ken 1963 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Signet). Lardner, Ring 1957 “Haircut,” in The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner, 23–33 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Nünning, Ansgar 1997 “Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Implied Author: The Resurrection of an Anthropomorphized Passepartout or the Obituary of a Critical Phenomenon?” Anglistik. Organ des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 8: 95–116. 1999 “Unreliable Compared to What?: Toward a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Grenzuberschreitlungen Narratologie im Kontext, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, 53–71 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag). 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 89–107 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing). Nünning, Vera 2004 “Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms: The Vicar of Wakefield as a Test Case of a Cultural-historical Narratology,” in Style 38: 236–252. Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” Narrative 11: 93–109. Pearlin, Leonard and Carmi Schooler 1978 “The Structure of Coping,” in Journal of Health and Social Behavior 19: 2–21.

28

James Phelan

Petterson, Bo 2005 “The Many Faces of Unreliable Narration: A Cognitive Narratological Reorientation,” in Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice, edited by Harri Veivo, Bo Petterson, and Merja Polvinen, 59–88 (Helsinki: Helsinki Univ. Press). Phelan, James 2005 Living to Tell about It (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press). Rader, Ralph W. 1976 “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms,” in Critical Inquiry 3: 131–151. Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35: 151–178.

ANSGAR NÜNNING (Justus-Liebig-University Gießen)

Reconceptualizing the Theory, History and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration: Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time (T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”)

0. Prologue: Areas of Reconceptualization and Goals of the Article Though the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator has been the subject of lots of research, controversy and (re)conceptualization for more than forty years, narrative theorists have not ceased from exploration and (re)conceptualization, recently devoting more attention and more attention to this fascinating as well as slippery concept.1 And though the various attempts at reconceptualizing the unreliable narrator have not reached a consensus, narratologists at least agree that it is a key concept of narrative theory and analysis. Ever since Wayne C. Booth first proposed the unreliable narrator as a concept, it has been considered to be among the basic and indispensable categories of textual analysis. Hardly anyone to date has modified or challenged Booth’s well-known formulation, which has become the canonized definition of the term: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not.”2 According to Booth, the distinction between reliable and unre–––––––––––––

1 2

Cf. e.g. Allrath (2005); Dernbach & Meyer (2005); Liptay & Wolf (2005); Pettersson (2005); Phelan (2005). Booth (1961: 158–159).

30

Ansgar Nünning

liable narrators is based on “the degree and kind of distance”3 that separates a given narrator from the implied author of a work. A comparison of the definitions provided in standard narratological works, in scholarly articles, and in glossaries of literary terms shows that the great majority of narratologists have followed Booth, providing almost identical definitions of the unreliable narrator. What most critics seem to have forgotten, however, is that Booth himself freely admitted that the terminology for “this kind of distance in narrators is almost hopelessly inadequate”4. There is indeed a peculiar discrepancy between the importance generally attributed to the question of reliability in narrative and the unresolved issues surrounding the concept of the unreliable narrator: “There can be little doubt about the importance of the problem of reliability in narrative and in literature as a whole [...]. [But] the problem is (predictably) as complex and (unfortunately) as illdefined as it is important”5. Booth’s canonical definition does not really make for clarity but rather sets the fox to keep the geese, as it were, since it falls back on the ill-defined and elusive notion of the implied author, which hardly provides a reliable basis for determining a narrator’s unreliability. The thesis of this article is that the concept of the unreliable narrator needs to be rethought because, as currently defined, it is terminologically imprecise and theoretically inadequate. The postulation of essentialized and anthropomorphized entities designated ‘unreliable narrator’ and ‘implied author’ ignores both the complexity of the phenomena involved and the dynamics of literary communication and the reading process, standing in the way of a systematic exploration of the cognitive processes which result in the projection of unreliable narrators in the first place. Cognitive narratologists have argued that it would be more adequate to conceptualize unreliable narration in the context of frame theory as a projection by the reader who tries to resolve ambiguities and textual inconsistencies by attributing them to the narrator’s ‘unreliability’. In the context of frame theory, the invention of ‘unreliable narrators’ can be understood as an interpretive strategy or cognitive process of the sort that has come to be known as ‘naturalization’. –––––––––––––

3 4 5

Ibid: 155. Ibid: 158. Yacobi (1981: 113).

Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches

31

As the title of this article suggests, it attempts to survey recent reconceptualizations of unreliable narration, not only showing that narrative theory has made considerable progress in dealing with this very slippery and complex topic but also offering some more reconceptualizations by outlining a synthesis of cognitive and rhetorical approaches. Narratologists have not only identified the main problems in traditional accounts, but have also provided a number of useful terminological and taxonomic distinctions as well as theoretical refinements. Attempts to reconceptualize unreliable narration mainly involve six areas: (1) the theory and definition of unreliable narration; (2) typological distinctions of different kinds of unreliability; (3) the textual clues and frames of reference involved in projections of unreliable narrators; (4) the respective roles of the reader, the text, and the (implied) author; (5) the history of unreliable narration and (6) the generic scope of unreliable narration. Let me hasten to add, however, that these are by no means the only issues that have not yet been fully resolved. I will address some other open questions in the last two sections of my article, without, however, pretending to have an ace up my sleeve. Realigning the relation between the cognitive and the rhetorical approaches, this article attempts to show that recent work in cognitive narratology and rhetorical theory provides the basis for reconceptualizing unreliable narration and to advance both our understanding of and the discussions surrounding this key notion of narrative theory. In addition to giving an assessment and critique of the standard notion of the unreliable narrator and to providing a brief summary of recent suggestions for distinguishing between different kinds of unreliability and different types of unreliable narrators, the first part of the essay outlines a cognitive reconceptualization of unreliable narration, which can shed more light on the usually unacknowledged presuppositional framework on which theories of unreliable narration have hitherto been based. Trying to combine the insights of cognitive and rhetorical approaches and examining the question of how we detect an unreliable narrator in practice, part two argues that the whole notion of unreliable narration only makes sense when we bear in mind that ascriptions of unreliability involve a tripartite structure that consist of an authorial agency, textual phenomena (including a personalized narrator and signals of unreliability), and reader response. While the third section provides a brief outline of the history of unreliable narration, the fourth section argues for a reconceptualization of the generic scope of unreliable narration, arguing that it is unjustifiable and counter-productive

32

Ansgar Nünning

to limit the study of this phenomenon to narrative fiction. The fifth part addresses a number of unresolved issues surrounding unreliable narration, making some tentative suggestions how they might be reconceptualized. The final section will then provide a brief summary and suggest that much more work needs to be done in this particular field of narratology.

1. Reconceptualizing Conventional Theories of Unreliable Narration This article’s point of departure is the fact that though there has recently been a great deal of reconceptualization in the field of narratology in general and unreliable narration in particular, we have not reached anything like a consensus as to how the theory and history of this particularly slippery phenomenon should be conceptualized. Several narrative theorists, including Monika Fludernik, James Phelan, Kathleen Wall, Tamar Yacobi, and Bruno Zerweck, have recently argued that the concept of the unreliable narrator, as traditionally defined, needs to be radically rethought and thoroughly historicized. James Phelan and Patricia Martin, for instance, have provided a groundbreaking typology of unreliable narrators, which allows the critic to distinguish different types of unreliability and various kinds of unreliable narrators from one another. Other theorists have proposed a reader-centred and cognitive approach to unreliable narration. As already stated above, cognitive narratologists have argued that instead of postulating an ‘unreliable narrator’, whose reliability or unreliability is gauged against the norms of an anthropomorphicized entity designated ‘the implied author’, it would be more sensible to conceptualize the relevant phenomena in the context of frame theory as a projection by the reader who tries to resolve ambiguities and textual inconsistencies by attributing them to the narrator’s ‘unreliability’. In the context of a cognitive narratology (M. Jahn), the reader’s projection of ‘unreliable narrators’ can be understood as an interpretive strategy or a cognitive process of the sort that has come to be known as ‘naturalization’.6 A number of empirical frames of reference and literary models can be seen to function as standard modes of naturalization by means of which readers (and, one might add, critics and most theorists of unreliable narration) account for contradictions both within texts and between the world–––––––––––––

6

Culler (1975), Fludernik (1996).


33

model of texts and their empirical world-models. Recent work on unreliable narration has also explored the textual signals and extratextual frames of reference involved in this process, which can determine readers’ decisions about a narrator’s potential unreliability. The models used for accounting for unreliable narration provide a coherent context which resolves textual inconsistencies and makes the respective novels intelligible in terms of culturally accepted frames. Since I have myself been involved in the ongoing attempts to rethink the concept of unreliable narration, I would first of all like to briefly summarize my critique of what for convenience’ sake I will call ‘conventional theories of unreliable narration’ and then outline what has come to be known as a cognitive reconceptualization of unreliable narration. A brief look at conventional accounts of the concept ‘unreliable narrator’ may be in order so as to distinguish the approach argued for in this essay from the general approach in narratology. Let us begin by asking just what it is that we know about the mysterious unreliable narrator and by presenting a critique of traditional theories of unreliable narration against the background of five hypotheses. The definition provided by Gerald Prince in his Dictionary of Narratology will suffice to indicate what is usually meant by the term ‘unreliable narrator’: “A narrator whose norms and behaviour are not in accordance with the implied author’s norms; a narrator whose values (tastes, judgments, moral sense) diverge from those of the implied author’s; a narrator the reliability of whose account is undermined by various features of that account.”7 Despite the good job Prince does in summarizing the communis opinio on the subject, this definition of the concept comprises an unholy mixture of vagueness and tautology. Nonetheless, most theorists and critics who have written on the unreliable narrator take the implied author both for granted and for the only standard according to which unreliability can be determined. One of the central problems in defining unreliable narration is the unresolved question of what standards allow the critic to recognize an unreliable narrator. The usual answer to the question “Unreliable, compared to what?” is woefully inadequate and untenable, because it specifies just one basis for recognizing the narrator’s unreliability, namely the ill-defined concept of the implied author. The trouble with all of the definitions that are based on the implied author is that they try to define unreliability by ––––––––––––– 7

Prince (1987: 101).

34

Ansgar Nünning

relating it to a concept that is itself ill-defined and paradoxical. Curiously enough, however, even the most sophisticated recent articles retain the notion of the implied author. In what are arguably the best critiques of orthodox theories of unreliable narration to date, the articles of Tamar Yacobi (1981, 1987) and Kathleen Wall (1994), the authors hold on to the implied author as though he, or rather it, was the only possible way of accounting for unreliable narration. Critics who argue that a narrator’s unreliability is to be gauged in comparison to the norms of the implied author just shift the burden of determination onto a critical passepartout that is itself notoriously ill-defined. The tenacity with which narratologists have clung to the implied author in their attempts at defining unreliability suggests, as Mieke Bal observes, that the implied author is “a remainder category, a kind of passepartout that serves to clear away all the problematic remainders of a theory”8. Introducing the implied author has certainly not managed to clear away the problems of defining unreliable narration. Some narratologists have pointed out that the concept of the implied author does not provide a reliable basis for determining a narrator’s unreliability. Not only are “the values (or ‘norms’) of the implied author [...] notoriously difficult to arrive at”9, as Rimmon-Kenan observes, but the implied author is itself a very elusive and opaque notion. One might go much further than Rimmon-Kenan and suggest that the implied author’s norms are impossible to establish and that the concept of the implied author is dispensable. From a theoretical point of view, the concept of the implied author is also problematic because it creates the illusion that it is a matter of a purely textual phenomenon. But it is obvious from many of the definitions that the implied author is a construct established by the reader on the basis of the whole structure of a text. When Chatman writes that “we might better speak of the ‘inferred’ than of the ‘implied’ author”10, he implicitly concedes that one is dealing with something that has to be worked out by the reader. Being a structural phenomenon that is voiceless, the implied author must be seen “as a construct inferred and assembled by the reader from all the components of the text”11. Toolan has made the sensible sug––––––––––––– 8 9 10 11

Bal (1981b: 209). Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 101). Chatman (1990: 77). Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 87).


35

gestion that one should look at the implied author not as a speaker but as a component of the reception process, as the reader’s idea of the author: “The implied author is a real position in narrative processing, a receptor’s construct, but it is not a real role in narrative transmission. It is a projection back from the decoding side, not a real projecting stage on the encoding side.”12 The most controversial aspect of the concept of the implied author is that it carries far-reaching, though largely unacknowledged theoretical implications. First, the concept of the implied author reintroduces the notion of authorial intention, though through the back-door. As Chatman has pointed out, “the concept of implied authorship arose in the debate about the relevance of authorial intention to interpretation”13. Providing “a new link to the sphere of the actual author and authorial values”14, the implied author turns out to be little more than a terminologically presentable way of making it possible to talk again about the author’s intention: “The concept of ‘the implied author’, with its air of being an inference from the work and thus as it were, like plot, an objective feature of the work, enables Booth to talk about the author under the guise of still appearing to talk about the work.”15 Second, representing the work’s norms and values, the implied author is intended to serve both as a yardstick for a moralistic kind of criticism and as a check on the potentially boundless relativism of interpretation. Third, the use of the definite article and the singular misleadingly suggest that there is only one correct interpretation: “The very fact that Booth and Chatman speak of the implied author already implies, suggests the existence of one ideal interpretation of the narrative text.”16 In short, the concept of the implied author appears to provide the critic again with a basis for judging both the acceptability of an author’s “moral position”, about which, according to Booth, a writer “has an obligation to be as clear [...] as he possibly can be”17, and the correctness of an interpretation. The lack of terminological clarity and the problematic theoretical implications associated with the notion of the implied author have led some ––––––––––––– 12 13 14 15 16 17

Toolan (1988: 78). Chatman (1990: 77). York (1987: 166); cf. Yacobi (1987). Baker (1972/73: 204f.); cf. also Juhl (1980: 203). Berendsen (1984: 148). Booth (1961: 389).

36

Ansgar Nünning

narratologists to argue that the concept should be abandoned. Some theorists have recognized that it has not fulfilled the promise “to account for the ideology of the text”18 and is not capable of doing what it was supposed to do: “It not only adds another narrating subject to the heap but it fails to resolve what it sets out to bridge: the author-narrator relationship.”19 Whether or not narratology is really well served with such a problematic concept as the implied author, be it of the personalized and anthropomorphicized or the depersonified variety, is an open question. Recently some prominent narratologists have again emphatically come out in favour of the implied author, while others have argued just as strongly against the concept. But given the fact that phenomena like norms and values, structure, and meaning are central problems in literary criticism and will continue to occupy the attention of theorists and critics alike, they probably should not be allowed to disappear behind a concept like the implied author, which is ill-defined and potentially misleading. As I hope to show below, the implied author is neither a necessary nor a sufficient standard by which to determine a narrator’s putative unreliability. Despite what common sense would appear to tell us, definition is a problem with the unreliable narrator because most theories leave unclear what unreliability is and whether it involves moral or epistemological shortcomings. The narratological use of the term ‘unreliability’ is very vague and fails to distinguish between moral and epistemological issues. Most definitions in the wake of Booth have emphasized that unreliability consists of a moral distance between the norms of the implied or real author and those articulated by the narrator. But other theorists have pointed out that what is at stake is not a question of moral norms but of the veracity of the account a narrator gives.20 In most work on the unreliable narrator, it is also unclear whether unreliability is primarily meant to designate a matter of misrepresenting the events of the story or whether it consists of the narrator’s dubious judgments or interpretations. Rimmon-Kenan’s definition is a case in point. She simply leaves open whether unreliability is to be gauged in comparison to the accuracy of the narrator’s account of the story or to his or her –––––––––––––

18 19 20

Bal (1981a: 42). Lanser (1981: 49f.). Cp. Toolan (1988: 88).


37

commentary and judgments: “An unreliable narrator [...] is one whose rendering of the story and/or commentary on it the reader has reasons to suspect.”21 The ‘and/or’-construction sounds very open and flexible but it is a bit too nonchalant. Most would agree that it does make a difference whether we have an deviant narrator who provides a sober and factually veracious account of the most egregious or horrible events, which, from his point of view, are hardly noteworthy, or a normal narrator who is just a bit slow on the uptake and whose flawed interpretations of what is going on reveal that he is a benighted fool. Lanser provides an answer to the question of how we may classify narrators “with respect to ‘reliability’” by positing three axes between the poles ‘dissimulation vs. honesty’, ‘unreliability vs. reliability’ and ‘narrative incompetence vs. narrative skill’.22 Conventional theories of unreliable narration are methodologically unsatisfactory as well because they either leave unclear how the narrator’s unreliability is apprehended in the reading process or they provide only highly metaphorical and vague explanations of it. The metaphors that Chatman uses in order to explain how the reader detects the narrator’s unreliability are a case in point. He resorts to what is arguably one of the two most popular metaphors in this context, that of ‘reading between the lines’. Chatman argues that readers “conclude, by ‘reading out,’ between the lines, that the events and existents could not have been ‘like that,’ and so we hold the narrator suspect”.23 Leaving aside for the moment that the repeated use of inverted commas in definitions is not particularly reassuring, I just wish to suggest that such observations fail to shed much light on how a narrator’s unreliability is apprehended in the reading process. The second metaphor that critics and theorists continually employ in order to account for unreliable narration is that something is going on ‘behind the narrator’s back’.24 Chatman, for instance, suggests that the implied author establishes “a secret communication with the implied reader”.25 Riggan not only uses almost exactly the same phrase but he also states quite unequivocally that “the presence of the implied author’s hand is always discernible behind the narrator’s back”.26 He does not, however, –––––––––––––

21 22 23 24 25 26

Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 100). Lanser (1981: 170ff.). Chatman (1978: 233). Cf. Riggan (1981: 13); Yacobi (1981: 125). Chatman (1978: 233). Riggan (1981: 77).

38

Ansgar Nünning

bother to enlighten the uninitiated as to how the hand of the omnipresent implied author behind the narrator’s back may in fact be discerned. Such metaphors, though vivid, provide only very opaque explanations of unreliable narration. From a methodological and theoretical point of view, they amount to nothing other than a declaration of bankruptcy. With regard to the question of how readers know an unreliable narrator when they see one, these metaphors are unenlightening. To explain the mechanisms that stand behind the impression that a narrator is unreliable it is not necessary to postulate an implied author but simply to have recourse to the concept of structural or dramatic irony.27 The structure of unreliable narration can be explained in terms of dramatic irony and discrepant awareness because it involves a contrast between a narrator’s view of the fictional world and the contrary state of affairs which the reader can grasp. The reader interprets what the narrator says in two quite different contexts. On the one hand, the reader is exposed to what the narrator wants and means to say. On the other hand, the statements of the narrator take on additional meaning for the reader, a meaning the narrator is not conscious of and does not intend to convey. Without being aware of it, unreliable narrators continually give the reader indirect information about their idiosyncrasies and states of mind. The peculiar effects of unreliable narration result from the conflict between the narrator’s report of the ‘facts’ on the level of the story and the interpretations provided by the narrator. The narrative not only informs the reader of the narrator’s version of events, it also provides him or her with indirect information about what presumably ‘really happened’ and about the narrator’s frame of mind. If one gives up the notion of the implied author, then it is necessary to modify Booth’s explanations of the unreliable narrator in such a way as is already suggested by his definition of the implied author as “the core of norms and choices”.28 Unreliable narrators are those whose perspective is in contradiction to the value and norm system of the whole text or to that of the reader. The phenomenon of unreliable narration can be seen as the result of discrepant awareness and dramatic irony. The general effect of what is called unreliable narration consists of redirecting the reader’s attention from the level of the story to the speaker –––––––––––––

27 28

Cf. Booth (1961: 255). Booth (1961: 74).


39

and of foregrounding peculiarities of the narrator’s psychology. Wall argues very convincingly that unreliable narration “refocuses the reader’s attention on the narrator’s mental processes”.29 What is needed therefore is a more systematic exploration of the relation between unreliability and characterization. In the only available article on the subject, Dan Shen has shown that “deviations in terms of reliability may have a significant role to play in revealing or reinforcing narratorial stance” and “in characterizing a particular consciousness”.30 In unreliable narration it is often very difficult to determine whether what the narrator says provides facts about the fictional world or only clues to his distorted and evaluating consciousness. Consequently the answer to the question “reliable, compared to what?” may vary dramatically depending on whether the standard according to which we gauge the potential unreliability of the narrator involves the events or the narrator’s subjective view of them. In sum, the link that theorists have forged between the unreliable narrator and the implied author deprives narratology of the possibility of accounting for the pragmatic effects subsumed under the term of unreliable narration. The critic accounts for whatever incongruousness she or he may have detected by reading the text as an instance of dramatic irony and by projecting an unreliable narrator as an integrative hermeneutic device. Culler has clarified what is involved here: “At the moment when we propose that a text means something other than what it appears to say we introduce, as hermeneutic devices which are supposed to lead us to the truth of the text, models which are based on our expectations about the text and the world.”31 This, of course, raises the question of what kind of models are involved in the cognitive processes that lead to the projection of an unreliable narrator. Heeding Harker’s (1989) call for a radical reorientation, I will try to outline a cognitive, or model-oriented, approach to how texts that display features of unreliable narration are read. This approach is indebted to Jahn’s valuable suggestions for a cognitive narratology and to Fludernik’s work on natural narratology.32 I will contend that we can define unreliable narration neither as a structural nor as a semantic aspect of the textbase alone, but only by taking into account the conceptual frameworks that ––––––––––––– 29 30 31 32

Wall (1994: 23). Shen (1989: 309). Culler (1975: 157). Cf. Jahn (1998); Fludernik (1993, 1996).

40

Ansgar Nünning

readers bring to the text. If we are to make sense of unreliable narration at all, it would be wise to begin by looking at the standards according to which critics think they recognize an unreliable narrator when they see one. Determining whether a narrator is unreliable is not just an innocent descriptive statement but a subjectively tinged value-judgment or projection governed by the normative presuppositions and moral convictions of the critic, which as a rule remain unacknowledged. Critics concerned with unreliable narrators recuperate textual inconsistencies by relating them to accepted cultural models. Recent work on unreliable narration confirms Culler’s hypothesis about the impact of realist and referential notions for the generation of literary effects. Culler argues that “most literary effects, particularly in narrative prose, depend on the fact that readers will try to relate what the text tells them to a level of ordinary human concerns, to the actions and reactions of characters constructed in accordance with models of integrity and coherence”.33 Riggan’s monograph on the unreliable first-person narrator provides a case in point. Despite its insights into a broad range of texts, it suffers from all of the theoretical shortcomings outlined above. A look at Riggan’s typology of unreliable narrators provides insight into the basic mechanisms that are involved in the projection of an unreliable narrator. Riggan distinguishes four types of such narrators, which he designates ‘picaros’, ‘madmen’, ‘naïfs’, and ‘clowns’. These typological distinctions can best be understood as a way of relating the text to accepted cultural models or to literary conventions. What critics like Riggan are doing is integrating previously held worldknowledge with textual data or even imposing preexisting conceptual models on the text. The models used for accounting for unreliable narration provide a context which resolves textual inconsistencies and makes the respective novels intelligible in terms of culturally prevalent frames. It is these models which determine the perception of narrators designated as ‘unreliable’, and not the other way round. The information on which the projection of an unreliable narrator is based derives at least as much from within the mind of the beholder as from textual data. In other words: whether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of the ––––––––––––– 33

Ibid.: 144.


41

implied author but between the distance that separates the narrator’s view of the world from the reader’s or critic’s world-model and standards of normalcy, which are themselves, of course, open to challenge. It is thus necessary to make explicit that customary presuppositional framework on which theories of unreliable narration have hitherto been based. An analysis of the presuppositional framework on which most theories of unreliable narration rest is overdue since research into unreliable narration has been based on a number of highly questionable conceptual presuppositions, which as a rule remain implicit and unacknowledged. The general notion of unreliability presupposes some sort of standard for establishing whether or not the facts or interpretations provided by a narrator may be held suspect. The violations of norms which interest critics and theorists “are only made possible by norms which”, as Culler wittily observes, “they have been too impatient to investigate in detail”.34 These presuppositions about unreliable narration need to be made explicit and clarified because they provide the key for reconceptualizing unreliability. Among these underlying (and unwarranted) presuppositions on which the concept of unreliable narration relies one might distinguish between epistemological and ontological premises, assumptions that are rooted in a liberal humanist view of literature, and psychological, moral, and linguistic norms all of which are based on stylistic and other deviational models. An analysis of the presuppositional framework on which most theories of unreliable narration are based reveals that the orthodox concept of the unreliable narrator is a curious amalgam of a realist epistemology and a mimetic view of literature. The epistemological and ontological premises consist of realist and by now doubtful notions of objectivity and truth. More specifically, the notion of unreliability presupposes that an objective view of the world, of others, and of oneself can be attained. In contrast to the ideal of objective self-observation it needs to be emphasized that “a maximally objective view of oneself can be attained only by others”35. The concept of unreliable narration also implies that human beings are principally taken to be capable of providing veracious accounts of events, proceeding from the

––––––––––––– 34 35

Ibid.: 160. Fludernik (1993: 53).

42

Ansgar Nünning

assumption that “an authoritative version of events”36 can in principle be established or retrieved. Theories of narrational unreliability also tend to rely on realist and mimetic notions of literature. The concept of the unreliable narrator is based on what Yacobi has aptly called “a quasi-human model of a narrator”37, and, one might add, an equally anthropomorphized model of the implied author. Amorós has provided a convincing critique of this general tendency of allocating human features to the narrative agent.38 In addition, theories of narrational unreliability are also heavily imbued with a wide range of unacknowledged notions that are based on stylistic deviation models or on more general notions of deviation from some norm or other. The notion of unreliability presupposes some default value which is taken to be unmarked ‘reliability’. This is usually left undefined and merely taken for granted. Most critics agree, however, that reliability is indeed the default value.39 Lanser, for instance, argues that “the conventional degrees zero [are] rather close to the poles of authority”40, and Riggan observes that “our natural tendency is to grant our speaker the full credibility possible within the limitations of human memory and capability”.41 To my knowledge, Wall is the first theorist of unreliable narration who sheds some light on the presuppositions on which this “reliable counterpart” of the unreliable narrator rests when she argues that the reliable narrator “is the ‘rational, self-present subject of humanism,’ who occupies a world in which language is a transparent medium that is capable of reflecting a ‘real’ world”. Vague and ill-defined though this norm of reliability may be, it supplies the standard according to which narrational unreliability is gauged. If one takes a close look at the presuppositional framework on which theories of unreliable narration are based, one can further elucidate the assumption that an unreliable narrator departs from certain norms. What is involved here are various sets of ill-defined and usually unacknowledged norms, which can, however, theoretically be distinguished. –––––––––––––

36 37 38 39 40 41

Wall (1994: 37). Yacobi (1981: 119). Amorós (1991: 42). Cf. Martinez-Bonati (1981). Lanser (1981: 171). Riggan (1981: 19).


43

One of these sets of norms includes all those notions that are usually referred to as ‘common sense’. Another set encompasses those standards that a given culture holds to be constitutive of normal psychological behaviour. Third, the habit of discussing the stylistic peculiarities of unreliable narrators shows that linguistic norms also play a role in determining how far a given narrator deviates from some implied default. Finally, many critics seem to think that there are agreed-upon moral and ethical standards that are often used as frames of reference when the question of the possible unreliability of a narrator is raised. One of the main problems with all of these tacit presuppositions that are based on unacknowledged norms and notions of deviation is that the establishment of norms is much more difficult than critics want to make us believe. Fludernik, for instance, argues that the “explicatory power of stylistic deviation breaks down at the point where one can no longer establish a norm, or where deviations from the norm are no longer empirically perceptible”.42 In both critical practice and in theoretical work on unreliable narration, however, these different sets of norms are usually not explicitly set out but merely introduced in passing, and they seldom if ever receive any theoretical examination. Let me give one typical example: in what is the only book-length study of the unreliable first-person narrator, Riggan, for instance, suggests that the narrator’s unreliability may be revealed by the “unacceptability of his [moral] philosophy in terms of normal moral standards or of basic common sense and human decency”.43 By saying this, he lets the cat out of the bag in a way that is very illuminating indeed. Phrases like these unwittingly reveal the real standards according to which critics decide whether a narrator may be unreliable: It is not the norms and values of the implied author, whoever or wherever that phantom may be, that provide the critic with the yardstick for determining how abnormal, indecent, immoral or perverse a given narrator is, but ‘normal moral standards’, ‘basic common sense’ and ‘human decency’. In other words: unreliable, not in comparison to the implied author, but unreliable in comparison to what the critic takes to be ‘normal moral standards’ and ‘common sense’. –––––––––––––

42 43

Fludernik (1993: 349). Riggan (1981: 36).

44

Ansgar Nünning

The trouble with seemingly self-explanatory yardsticks like ‘normal moral standards’ and ‘basic common sense’ is that no generally accepted standard of normality exists which can serve as the basis for impartial judgments. In a pluralist, postmodernist, and multicultural age like ours it has become more difficult than ever before to determine what may count as ‘normal moral standards’ and ‘human decency’. In other words, a narrator may be perfectly reliable compared to one critic’s notions of moral normality but quite unreliable in comparison to those that other people hold. To put it quite bluntly: a pederast would not find anything wrong with Lolita; a male chauvinist fetishist who gets his kicks out of making love to dummies is unlikely to detect any distance between his norms and those of the mad monologuist in Ian McEwan’s “Dead As They Come”; and someone used to watching his beloved mother disposing of unwelcome babies would not even find the stories collected in Ambrose Bierce’s The Parenticide Club in any way objectionable. There are a number of definable textual clues to unreliability, and what is needed is a more subtle and systematic account of these signals. Unreliable narrators tend to be marked by a number of textual inconsistencies. These may range from internal contradictions within their discourse over discrepancies between their utterances and actions (cf. Riggan, who calls this “a gaping discrepancy between his conduct and the moral views he propounds”44), to those inconsistencies that result from multiperspectival accounts of the same event.45 The range of clues to unreliability that Wall simply refers to as “verbal tics” or “verbal habits of the narrator” 46 can and should be further differentiated by specifying the linguistic expressions of subjectivity. Due to the close link between subjectivity on the one hand and the effect called unreliability on the other the virtually exhaustive account of categories of expressivity and subjectivity that Fludernik has provided are also extremely useful for drawing up a list of grammatical signals of unreliability47, which can be further differentiated in terms of the linguistic expressions of subjectivity. The ‘establishment’ of a reading in terms of ‘unreliable

–––––––––––––

44 45 46 47

Ibid.: 36. Cf. Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 101); Toolan (1988: 88). Wall (1994: 19–20). Fludernik (1993: 227–279).


45

narration’ frequently depends on the linguistic and stylistic evocation of a narrator’s subjectivity or cognitive limitations.48 Despite the above list of textual clues to unreliability it needs to be emphasized that the problem of unreliable narration cannot be resolved on the basis of textual data alone. In addition to these intratextual signals, the reader also draws on extratextual frames of reference in his or her attempt to gauge the narrator’s potential degree of unreliability. It should be stressed again then that the term ‘unreliable narrator’ does not designate a structural or semantic feature of texts, but a pragmatic phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped without taking into account the conceptual premises that readers and critics bring to texts. Consequently it seems doubtful whether the term unreliable narrator can be defined, as Zimmermann has recently maintained, solely on the basis of what she calls “intratextual dissonances”.49 What is needed instead is a pragmatic and cognitive framework that takes into consideration the world-model or conceptual information previously existing in the mind of reader or critic. It is necessary to take into consideration both the world-model and norms in the mind of the reader and the interplay between textual and extratextual information. Coming to grips with narrational unreliability is impossible both if one conceives reading as being a mere “‘bottom-up’ or data-driven process”, and if one conceives it as being nothing but “a ‘top-down’ or conceptually driven process”.50 Developing a viable theory of unreliable narration that accounts for the complex meaning effects subsumed under the concept of unreliable narration presupposes an “interactive model of the reading process”51 and a reader-oriented pragmatic or cognitive framework.52 It is only within an interactive model of the reading process that an adequate theory of unreliable narration can be elaborated. Fludernik’s explanation of irony illuminates how this might be conceptualized: “textual contradictions and inconsistencies alongside semantic infelicities, or discrepancies between utterances and action (in the case of hypocrisy), merely signal the interpretational incompatibility [...] which then requires a recuperatory move ––––––––––––– 48 49 50 51 52

Cp. Fludernik (1993: 280). Zimmermann (1995: 61). Harker (1989: 471). Ibid.: 471. Cp. Fludernik (1993: 51).

46

Ansgar Nünning

on the reader’s part – aligning the discrepancy with an intended higherlevel significance: irony”.53 An interactive model of the reading process alerts theorists of unreliable narration that the projection of an unreliable narrator depends upon both textual information and extratextual conceptual information located in the reader’s mind.54 Detaching the text from the reader and ignoring the world-models in the reader’s mind has resulted in the aporias outlined above. On the other hand, one should beware of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by rejecting textual data as a legitimate basis for explaining unreliable narration. Pragmatics and frame theory present a possible way out of the methodological and theoretical problems that most theories of unreliable narration suffer from because cognitive theories can shed light on the way in which readers naturalize texts that are taken to display features of narrational unreliability. To offer a reading of a narrative text in terms of unreliable narration can be thought of as a way of naturalizing textual inconsistencies by giving them a function in some larger pattern supplied by accepted cultural models. Culler clarifies what ‘naturalization’ means in this context: “to naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model which is already, in some sense, natural or legible”.55 The concept of unreliable narration, for instance, provides the reader with a general framework which allows him or her to “treat anything anomalous as the effect of the narrator’s vision or cast of mind”.56 To my knowledge, Wall is the only theorist to date who has at least briefly discussed the relation between naturalization and unreliable narration: “Part of the way in which we arrive at suspicions that the narrator is unreliable, then, is through the process of naturalizing the text, using what we know about human psychology and history to evaluate the probable accuracy of, or motives for, a narrator’s assertions.”57 She is certainly also right when she suggests that this kind of naturalization “is so much a part of our reading strategy with respect to both characters and narrators that, in all probability, we do not notice it”. –––––––––––––

53 54 55 56 57

Ibid.: 353. Cp. Harker (1989: 476). Culler (1975: 138). Ibid.: 200. Wall (1994: 30).


47

Noticing and clarifying those unacknowledged frames of reference provides the clue to reconceptualizing the whole notion of unreliable narration. The question of whether a narrator is described as unreliable or not needs to be gauged in relation to various frames of reference. More particularly, one might distinguish between schemata derived from everyday experience and those that result from knowledge of literary conventions. A first referential framework should be based on the readers’ empirical experience and criteria of verisimilitude. These frames depend on the referentiality of the text, the assumption that the text refers to or is at least compatible with the so-called real world. Whether a narrator is taken to be reliable or not depends, among other things, on such referential frameworks as the reader’s or critic’s - general world-knowledge, - historical world-model or cultural codes, - explicit theories of personality or implicit models of psychological coherence and human behaviour, - knowledge of the social, moral or linguistic norms relevant for the period in which a text was written and published58, - the reader’s or critic’s psychological disposition, and system of norms and values. Deviations from what is usually referred to as ‘common sense’ or general world-knowledge may indicate that the narrator is unreliable. Second, narrators who violate the standards that a given culture holds to be constitutive of normal psychological behaviour are generally taken to be unreliable. What is involved here is psychological theories of personality or implicit models of normal human behaviour. In order to gauge the potential unreliability of the fictitious child-molester Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), it does not suffice to look at textual data alone, because the process of character constitution during the reading process is inevitably influenced by the reader’s implied personality theory, as Grabes (1996) has convincingly demonstrated. Third, generally agreed-upon moral and ethical standards are often used as frames of reference when the question of the possible unreliability of a narrator is raised. When a narrative text violates one or several of these normative presuppositions, the reader can always resort to one of these frames of reference in order to naturalize the text. As the reader relates discrepancies to –––––––––––––

58

Cf. Yacobi (1987).

48

Ansgar Nünning

these frames of reference he or she brings the text into a context of coherence. Note that the choice of a particular frame of reference brings about a change in the mode of reading. A second set of models brought into play in order to gauge a narrator’s possible unreliability involves a number of specifically literary frames of reference. These include, for example, - general literary conventions59, - conventions and models of literary genres, - intertextual frames of reference, that is references to specific pretexts, - stereotyped models of characters such as the picaro, the miles gloriosus, the trickster, - and last but not least the structure and norms established by the respective work itself. The generic framework determines in part which criteria are used when a narrator’s potential unreliability is gauged.60 A narrator who is considered to be unreliable in psychological or realistic terms may appear quite reliable if the text belongs to the genre of science fiction. Both the concept of unreliable narration and the various types of unreliable narrators that have been proposed can be seen as modes of naturalization. These are based on widely accepted cultural frames which not only link a high number of disparate items but which also resolve whatever conflicts he or she may have noticed. The reader can try to account for textual inconsistencies by reading the text as the utterance of an obtuse, morally peculiar, or psychologically disturbed (i. e. unreliable) narrator. In this process accepted cultural models of ‘deviant’, but plausible human attitudes or behaviour are made use of, and the text begins to become naturalized. The postulation of an unreliable narrator can be understood as a “mechanism of integration”61 in that it resolves whatever textual contradictions or discrepancies between the textual data and the reader’s worldknowledge there may have been and leads to a synthesis at a higher level. Although relying on the implied and/or real author as the ultimate reference-point on which “reliability-judgments performed by the reader”62 ––––––––––––– 59 60 61 62

Cf. Amorós (1991). Cf. Yacobi (1987: 20f.). Yacobi (1981: 119). Yacobi (1987: 22).


49

depend, Yacobi comes to a similar conclusion: “The hypothesis of a fictional reporter’s unreliability is a mechanism for reconciling textual incongruities by appeal to a deliberate tension between the viewpoint of this informant (a character, narrator, dialogist, monologist) and that of the implied author who created him for his own purposes.”63 In calling the source from which the utterances emanate an unreliable narrator, the critic not only makes peculiar features readily intelligible but she or he also specifies how the text as a whole should be read. In the pragmatic context provided by frame theory unreliable narration can be explained as “an interpretive procedure”64: “as the result of interpretative work brought to bear on the juxtaposition between the wording of the text and the (by implication incompatible) cultural or textual norms of the text as constructed by the reader or implied as values shared by the reader and the realistic textual world”.65 Conceived in this way, the projection of an unreliable narrator is not only informed by textual data, as Chatman and other proponents of the implied author would like to make us believe, but also by the conceptual models or frames previously existing in the mind of the reader or critic.

2. Reconceptualizing the Textual Clues and Frames of Reference and the Roles of the Reader, the Text, and the (Implied) Author Proponents of rhetorical approaches to narrative have taken cognitive narratologists to task for throwing out the textual baby with the bathwater of the implied author. They have criticised the cognitive theory of unreliable narration for overstating the role of the reader at the expense of the author’s agency and the textual signals of unreliability. Moreover, Phelan has rightly pointed out that the radically constructivist and cognitive conceptualization of unreliable narration fails to identify the multiple constraints imposed not just by texts and conventions of reading but also by those who design those texts, viz. (implied) authors. The interpretive move to read textual inconsistencies as a signal of unreliability after all does not make much hermeneutic sense if it does not proceed from the as––––––––––––– 63 64 65

Ibid.: 24f. Yacobi (1981: 121). Fludernik (1993: 440; emphasis added).

50

Ansgar Nünning

sumption that someone designed the inconsistency as a signal of unreliability.66 In contrast to cognitive narratologists who seek to relocate unreliability only in the interaction of reader and text67, Phelan has re-examined the concept and reconsidered the location of unreliability in light of the recent debates surrounding the implied author and unreliable narration. Reminding us of Booth’s notion of continuity without identity between the real and the implied author, he retains the implied author, but moves him outside the text, thus re-establishing a closer link between the flesh and blood author and the implied author. Rejecting both the reader-response version of an ‘inferred author’ and the conflation of the implied author with the text, Phelan stresses the continuity that pertains between the real author and his or her implied counterpart by redefining the latter as a construction by and a partial representation of the real author, as “a streamlined version of the real author, an actual or purported subset of the real author’s capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other properties that play an active role in the construction of the particular text”.68 According to this account, the implied author is not product or structure of the text but rather the agent responsible for bringing the text into existence. Phelan convincingly argues that the notion of unreliable narration presupposes both a rhetorical view of narrative communication and the assumption that authors fashion their texts in a particular way in order to communicate sharable meanings, beliefs, attitudes, and values and norms. Phelan and Martin as well as Greta Olson have reminded us that the different models of unreliable narration all have “a tripartite structure that consists of (1) a reader who recognizes a dichotomy between (2) the personalized narrator’s perceptions and expressions and (3) those of the implied author (or the textual signals)”.69 Phelan’s rhetorical model in particular provides a timely reminder that meaning arises from the recursive relations among authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response, and that not only readers but also authors draw on conceptual and cultural schema: “But if readers need conceptual schema to construct interpretations, authors also need conceptual schema to construct structural –––––––––––––

66 67 68 69

Cf. Phelan (2005: 48). Nünning (1998, 1999); Zerweck (2001). Phelan (2005: 45). Olson (2003: 93).


51

wholes.”70 While acknowledging that the same textual phenomena can and often will be construed in different ways by different readers, his rhetorical approach is much better suited to accounting for the many ways in which readers might indeed share understandings, values, and beliefs with authors and with each other, thus opening up a useful way of exploring the ethical dimensions of narratives. In contrast to a radically constructivist and cognitive theory of unreliable narration, Phelan’s rhetorical and ethical approach to unreliable narration focuses on the interplay between authorial agency, text-centred phenomena or signals, and reader-centred elements in the reading-process. This approach leads him to argue that “while a text invites particular ethical responses through the signals it sends to its authorial audience, our individual ethical responses will depend on the interaction of those invitations with our own particular values and beliefs”.71 The concept of unreliable narration presupposes the existence of a constructive agent who builds into the text explicit signals and tacit assumptions for the authorial or hypothetical ideal audience in order to draw readers’attention to an unreliable narrator’s unwitting self-exposure or unintentional betrayal of personal shortcomings. From the point of view of a rhetorical approach to unreliable narration, Zerweck’s thesis that the “unintentional selfincrimination of the personalized narrator is a necessary condition for unreliability”72 thus needs to be supplemented by the insight that the narrator’s unintentional self-incrimination in turn presupposes an intentional act by some sort of higher-level authorial agency, though it may be open to debate whether we should attribute the constructive and intentional acts to ‘the implied author’ or ‘the real author’. A brief look at Ian McEwan’s macabre as well as grotesque short story “Dead As They Come” (1978) may serve as a convenient example to show how the cognitive and rhetorical approaches can be synthesized to solve many of the problems outlined above and to shed more light on the questions faced by any critic doing interpretive analysis: What textual and contextual signals suggest to the reader that the narrator’s reliability may be suspect? How does an implied author (as redefined by Phelan) manage to furnish the narrator’s discourse and the text with clues that allow the –––––––––––––

70 71 72

Phelan (2005: 49) Phelan/Martin (1999: 88–89). Zerweck (2001: 156).

52

Ansgar Nünning

critic to recognize an unreliable narrator when he or she sees one? In short, how does one detect a narrator’s unreliability? McEwan’s story is told by a forty-four year old, rich and egotistic mad monologist (and misogynist) who, after three failed marriages, falls madly in love with a “fashionable woman” who turns out to be a dummy, which he decides to buy and to call Helen. After a couple of months of what the narrator describes as emotional and sexual bliss and “perfect harmony” he suddenly begins to suspect that ‘Helen’ is having an affair with his chauffeur Brian.73 What makes him more and more suspicious is that “Helen was not listening at all”, that “she said nothing, absolutely nothing”, and that what he believes to see when he looks into her eyes is “quiet, naked contempt”.74 The story reaches its horrible climax, alluded to in the title, when in a frenzied fit of passionate madness the narrator conceives “two savage and related desires. To rape and destroy her. […] I came as she died.” To begin with, while the narrator’s factual reliability, i. e. his rendering of the story, is only impaired by his highly idiosyncratic view of the world and his deranged and disintegrating mind, the reader has plenty of reasons to suspect both the nameless narrator’s commentary on and evaluation of the details of the events, and the way in which the narrator reads and interprets e.g. what he deems to be Helen’s feelings. The main reason for this is that the narrator violates both many of the standards that today’s culture holds to be constitutive of normal psychological behaviour and widely accepted norms and values. Right from the very beginning the implied author leaves the reader in no doubt that the narrator’s view of the world is radically separated from any sane reader’s or critic’s worldknowledge, which will immediately tell the reader that the narrator is merely walking past a shop-window and that he is adoring a well-dressed dummy: I do not care for posturing women. But she struck me. I had to stop and look at her. The legs were well apart, the right foot boldly advanced, the left trailing with studied casualness. She held her right hand before her, almost touching the window [...] Head well back, a faint smile, eyes half-closed with boredom or pleasure. I could not tell. 75 Very artificial the whole thing, but then I am not a simple man.

––––––––––––– 73 74 75

McEwan (1979: 71). Ibid.: 72–76. Ibid.: 61.


53

The narrator’s explicit self-characterization includes a number of opaque statements like “I am a man in a hurry” and “I am not a simple man” but he also provides the reader with plenty of information about himself, unwittingly exposing many of his personal shortcomings: I must tell you something about myself. I am wealthy. Possibly there are ten men resident in London with more money than I. Probably there are only five or six. Who cares? I am rich and I made money on the telephone. I shall be forty-five on Christmas Day. I have been married three times, each marriage lasting, in chronological order, eight, five and two years. The last three years I have not been married and yet I have not been idle. I have not paused. A man of forty-four has no time to pause. I am a man 76 in a hurry.

As in most other cases, the structure of unreliable narration underlying McEwan’s story can be explained in terms of dramatic irony or discrepant awareness because it involves a contrast between the narrator’s deranged view of the fictional world and the divergent state of affairs which the reader can grasp. In the case of McEwan’s unreliable narrator, dramatic irony results from the discrepancy between the highly unusual intentions and questionable value system of the narrator and the general worldknowledge, values, and norms of the average reader. For the reader, both the internal lack of harmony between many of the statements and acts of the narrator and contradictions between the narrator’s perspective and the reader’s own concept of normality suggest that the narrator’s reliability is indeed highly suspect. The reader interprets what the narrator says in two quite different contexts. On the one hand, the reader is exposed to what the narrator wants and means to say, i. e. the narrator’s version of his tragic and fatal love-story with Helen. On the other hand, however, the statements of the narrator take on additional meaning for the reader, meaning the narrator is not conscious of and does not intend to convey. Without being aware of it, McEwan’s unreliable narrator continually gives the reader indirect information about his idiosyncrasies and deranged state of mind. In addition to the peculiar characteristics, strange beliefs, and perverse behaviour explicitly attributed to the narrator in the text, the implied author has also endowed the story with a wide range of signs and signals that invite the reader to make inferences pertaining to the narrator beyond ––––––––––––– 76

Ibid.: 62.

54

Ansgar Nünning

what is stated in the text. These “inference invitations”77 include, for instance, the bookkeeping manner in which the narrator reviews his marriages “in chronological order”, the breathless and self-centred quality of his narratorial effusions, the excess and incoherence of the information he provides, his disdain for others, and his predilection for “silent women”.78 Readers are thus invited to draw inferences pertaining to the narrator and his questionable values, constructing him as a complete egotist, misogynist, and monologist who has no respect for others, who, as the decreasing lengths of his marriages indicates, has apparently become increasingly intolerable, and who is only interested in satisfying his own needs, interests, and carnal pleasures. It is thus not just the distance that separates the narrator’s highly idiosyncratic view of the (fictional) world from the reader’s or critic’s worldknowledge, standards of normalcy, and norms and values that indicates to the reader that the narrator is highly unreliable, but also a wide range of textual features that serve as signals of unreliability. Like many other texts featuring unreliable narrators, the narrative of McEwan’s monologist is marked by a number of definable textual inconsistencies which function as clues to unreliability. Two of the most prominent of these are internal contradictions within the narrator’s discourse and discrepancies between his utterances and actions. A very amusing example of an outrageous conflict between what a narrator professes to admire and what he actually does is unwittingly provided by the narrator of “Dead as They Come”. Without being aware of it, he gives away what a compulsive monologist and complete egotist he is, not just by admitting that he prefers “silent women who take their pleasure with apparent indifference” but even more so by flagrantly, but unwittingly contradicting himself: My ideal conversation is one which allows both participants to develop their thoughts to their fullest extent, uninhibitedly, without endlessly defining and refining premises and defending conclusions. [...] With Helen I could converse ideally, I could talk to her. She sat quite still [...] Helen and I lived in perfect harmony which nothing could 79 disturb. I made money, I made love, I talked, Helen listened.

The implied author has furnished the story with many other textual signals of the narrator’s unreliability such as conflicts between story and dis––––––––––––– 77 78 79

Bortolussi/Dixon (2003: 80–81). McEwan (1979: 63). Ibid.: 70–71.


55

course, between the narrator’s representation of events and the explanations, evaluations and interpretations of them that the narrator gives. In such cases as the description of the scene in which the narrator actually buys ‘Helen’, his commentary “is at odds with the evidence presented in the scene he comments upon”.80 The reader or critic can establish such a difference by analyzing those utterances in which the narrator’s subjective bias is particularly apparent and comparing the world-view these imply with the story itself. In “Dead as They Come”, for example, the narrator’s expressive statements such as subjective comments, evaluations, and general remarks are completely at odds with the view of the events and characters that is projected by such narrative modes as description, report, scenic presentation as well as by numerous small dramatic details. In his factually accurate report of how he managed to get Helen, the narrator, for instance, mentions that the five female shop-assistants “avoided my eye” and that “[t]hey smiled, they glanced at each other” after he has made his strange request to buy “the dummy (ah my Helen)”, but he completely fails to interpret correctly why they are doing this.81 In addition to such internal contradictions the implied author (once again as redefined by Phelan) has carefully equipped the narrator with idiosyncratic verbal habits which also serve as clues to unreliability. The narrator’s stylistic peculiarities and his violation of linguistic norms and of Grice’s conversational postulates play an important role in detecting the narrator’s unreliability. There are, for instance, pragmatic indications of unreliability such as frequent occurrences of speaker-oriented and addressee-oriented expressions. One does not need to take a word-count or employ ponderous statistical methods to show that the unreliable narrator of McEwan’s story as well as those of Martin Amis’ Money (1984) or Julian Barnes’ Talking It Over (1991) are compulsive monologists as well as egotists. The vast majority of their utterances are indeed speakeroriented expressions beginning with their favourite word, ‘I’. Similarly, it is virtually impossible not to notice the plethora of addressee-oriented expressions that these and many other unreliable narrators tend to use. There are also syntactic indications of unreliability such as incomplete sentences, exclamations, interjections, hesitations, and unmotivated repetition. McEwan’s “Dead as They Come” is full of them, and so are Patrick ––––––––––––– 80 81

Wall (1994: 25). McEwan (1979: 65).

56

Ansgar Nünning

McGrath’s novels. One could also mention such lexical indications of unreliability like evaluative modifiers, expressive intensifiers, and adjectives that express the narrator’s attitudes, all of which feature prominently in McEwan’s short stories and McGrath’s novels. All of these stylistic expressions of subjectivity indicate a high degree of emotional involvement and they provide clues for the reader to process the narrator as unreliable along the axis of facts/events, the axis of ethics/evaluation, and/or the axis of knowledge/perception.82 As these examples may serve to show, the projection of an unreliable narrator does not hinge upon the reader’s frames of reference or on conventions of reading alone, as cognitive approaches suggest, because texts and those who design those texts, viz. (implied) authors, impose multiple constraints on the ways in which narrators are processed. Thus the identification of an unreliable narrator does not depend solely on either the reader’s intuition or ability of ‘reading between the lines,’ as Chatman and others want to make us believe, or on extratextual frames of reference like the reader’s world-knowledge, cultural models, and standards of normality, as cognitive narratology maintains. While the latter, just like “psychonarratology”83, has provided important new insights into how texts and narrators are processed and into the frames involved in the readingprocess, rhetorical approaches to narrative remind us that the projection of an unreliable narrator, far from being hit or miss, presupposes the existence of a creative agent who furnishes the text and the narrator with a wide range of explicit signals and inference invitations in order to draw readers’ attention to a narrator’s unwitting self-exposure and unreliability.

3. Reconceptualizing the History of Unreliable Narration Given the foregoing theoretical underpinnings, the next section will provide a brief outline of the history of unreliable narration in British prose fiction from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. What needs to be emphasized at the outset, however, is that, in the framework of an article, more than a rough outline of the development of unreliable narration cannot be offered. The focus will be on tracing some points of transition and exemplary novels that provide cornerstones in the as yet unwritten ––––––––––––– 82 83

See Phelan/Martin (1999). Bortolussi/Dixon (2003).


57

history of the subject. The following remarks will have to be provisional for the simple reason that there are a number of articles on individual authors, but no general overview of the subject is currently available. In a nutshell, the history of the unreliable narrator has yet to be written. The history of the unreliable narrator does not begin with modern fiction, but rather goes back to the end of the eighteenth century. It is not, however, in the famous works of the major eighteenth-century novelists like Defoe, Richardson and Fielding that unreliable narration originates. One has no reason, for instance, for questioning the reliability of Defoe’s narrators despite the fact that their memory is sometimes faulty and that their accounts contain the occasional inconsistency. Fielding’s authorial narrators are even less suspect, though their use of verbal irony is very impressive. Some recent commentators have suggested that the issue of unreliability is at least implicitly brought to the fore by the multiperspectival form of Richardson’s epistolary novels. But although it is certainly true that epistolary fiction tends to lay bare the subjective basis of all cognition, the general effect is quite different from what is known as unreliable narration. The same holds true for Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Smollett’s novel exposes the idiosyncrasies of the individual letter-writers, without directly participating in what McKeon has called “the undeniable turn toward extreme scepticism”84 in the second half of the eighteenth century. In sum, Defoe, Richardson and Smollett, like most other eighteenth-century novelists, sought to establish, rather than undermine, their narrators’ reliability. And even Sterne’s highly eccentric first-person narrators are ultimately quite reliable and honest, since their whimsicalities can readily be put down to their personal hobby-horses and good nature, and since their accounts neither entail an erroneous representation of the fictional ‘facts’ nor a blatantly wrong assessment of them. One of the earliest instances in British fiction of a full-fledged unreliable narrator is to be found in a novel that has received only little critical attention to date, namely in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, published in 1800. The novel is told by a muddleheaded and incredibly naive servant, aptly named Thady Quirk. His very quirky account of the history of the Rackrents, a dissolute Irish family, reveals that his sense of family honour and loyalty not only borders on the absurd, but also distorts his ––––––––––––– 84

McKeon (1987: 361).

58

Ansgar Nünning

chronicle of what he believes to be an illustrious family. Internal inconsistencies in the narrator’s discourse abound. They result from Thady’s prejudices in favour of the Rackrents and from his casuistic reasoning, which turns him into the butt of the irony. His quirky reasoning unwittingly reveals him to be an impressionable simpleton, as the following two examples may illustrate: Sir Patrick “is said also to be the inventor of raspberry whiskey, which is very likely, as nobody has ever appeared to dispute it with him”.85 The fact that Sir Murtagh revels in excessive litigation, that he “had once sixteen suits pending at a time”, is proof enough for Thady that “he was a very learned man in the law”.86 Castle Rackrent certainly provides a cornerstone in the history of unreliable narration “inasmuch as it sets out to destroy the reader’s expectations of narrative reliability”, as Solomon rightly observes. 87 In the nineteenth-century British novel, unreliable narration is still very much the exception rather than the rule. One might hazard the suggestion that the scarcity of unreliable narrators in the Victorian novel may at least partly be attributed to the fact that the epistemological premises which unreliable narration calls into question were still generally accepted. Most Victorian novelists proceeded from the assumption that an objective view of the world, of others, and of oneself can be attained. On the whole, the realist novel added little to the technique known as unreliable narration except for works cast in the comic mould of a fictional autobiography.88 But even such a comic fictional autobiography as William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., published in 1844, does not really challenge these notions, though the I-as-protagonist of this novel is a paradigmatic unreliable narrator. The novel not only abounds in internal contradictions, but the fictional editor of these memoirs also repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to them. The narrator is, however, clearly recognizable as a specific type of literary character, namely the type known as miles gloriosus or braggart. The narrator keeps saying “I hate bragging, but I cannot help saying”89, thereby unwittingly exposing his vanity, egotism, and delusions. Just before the reader gets to the conclusion, the editor once again interferes, informing the reader with charac––––––––––––– 85 86 87 88 89

Edgeworth (1980: 10). Ibid.: 15–16. Solomon (1972: 72). Cp. Riggan (1981: 28). Thackeray (1984: 70).


59

teristic irony that “the honourable subject of these Memoirs has never told the whole truth regarding himself, and, as his career comes to a close, perhaps is less to be relied on than ever”.90 Ultimately, then, Barry Lyndon, just like the vast majority of Victorian novels, does not call into doubt the notion that human beings are principally taken to be capable of providing veracious accounts of events and of others. There are, however, some noteworthy examples of unreliable narration, the most notorious of which is certainly Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). This novel in fact features two unreliable narrators, Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean. The juxtaposition of their accounts not only reveals a number of judgmental errors in Lockwood’s shallow description, but also calls into doubt the normative standards that he represents. While the main reasons for his unreliability are his lack of knowledge and his normative view of the world, Nelly Dean’s strong bias results from a high degree of emotional involvement, from her divided loyalties, and from her overt partiality. With its juxtaposition of two unreliable narrators, Wuthering Heights seriously undermines the assumption that an objective or authoritative version of events can in principle be established. Another notable example of unreliable narration in nineteenth-century British fiction would be James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). As Niederhoff persuasively argues, the unreliability of Hogg’s narrator “is clearly signposted in at least two ways: by a trustworthy editorial introduction that depicts some of the same events as the principal narrator and thus sets off his unreliability; and by the behaviour of the narrator as a character in the story – he is a liar, hypocrite, madman, and murderer”.91 The unreliable narrator fully comes into his, or rather its, own in British literature in what is known as the transition from late Victorian to modern fiction. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century novel one finds a broad range of individualized first-person narrators whose reliability the reader has reasons to suspect. It is well known who the key author in this context is, namely Henry James. Two of the most famous of his works that feature unreliable narrators are “The Aspern Papers” (1888) and “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). Neither the equally deceiving and ––––––––––––– 90 91

Ibid.: 278. Niederhoff (1994: 245f.).

60

Ansgar Nünning

self-deceived narrator-scholar in “The Aspern Papers” nor the inconscient governess in “The Turn of the Screw” are reliable reporters of the events. In comparison to the situation with James’s narrative techniques, the use of unreliable narrators in the works of a number of other lateVictorian and modernist novelists has received relatively little attention to date. A case in point is the role of the unreliable narrator in Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier (1915), which is told by the gullible John Dowell. Just as in the case of many other unreliable narrators in modernist fiction, the real focus of the novel is not on the past events as such but on the narrator’s surmises about what has happened, on his ignorance and misapprehension. This is also true for many of Conrad’s novels, of course, particularly Lord Jim (1899) and Under Western Eyes (1910). In addition, the use of the unreliable narrator in several of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels and tales has only recently received the attention it deserves, both for the complex narrative structure of Stevenson’s works and for their characteristic high degree of epistemological scepticism. The different uses of the unreliable narrator in Ford’s and Conrad’s novels would certainly also merit close attention and deserve to be explored in the light of recent work done in narratology, cognitive theory, and cultural studies. Since the end of the Second World War, the unreliable narrator has enjoyed unprecedented popularity in both the English novel and short story. Many contemporary authors no longer portray accepted norms of social relationship and human behaviour but rather focus on various forms of deviance. The use of first-person narrators in contemporary British fiction, however, often differs significantly from previous instances of unreliable narration. Contemporary British fiction often calls into question conventional notions of unreliable narration. Wall has demonstrated that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) not only “challenges our usual definition of an unreliable narrator”, but also “deconstructs the notion of truth, and consequently questions both ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narration and the distinctions we make between them”.92 The same point could be made with respect to many other post-war novels that employ first-person narrators, for instance William Golding’s Free Fall (1959), Nigel Williams’ Star Turn (1985), William Boyd’s The New Confessions (1987), and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989). Moreover, Graham Swift’s short stories and novels both foreground and challenge the prob–––––––––––––

92

Wall (1994: 18, 23).


61

lematic notions of truth, objectivity, and reliability on which realist theories of unreliable narration are based. Some of the stories in Swift’s collection Learning to Swim and other Stories, e.g. “Seraglio”, “The Hypochondriac”, and “The Hotel”, display a very high degree of epistemological scepticism, something they share with the novels of such writers as John Fowles, Nigel Williams, or Jeanette Winterson. The fact that many recent novels and short stories challenge the usual definitions of an unreliable narrator confirms Wall’s view that we perhaps “need to re-think entirely our notion that unreliable narrators give an inaccurate version of events and that our task is to figure out ‘what really happened’”.93 In reference to one of Beckett’ narrators, Rabinovitz argues that “the unreliable narrative in Murphy is in an ultimate sense not at all unreliable; for it depicts, in a truthful way, the illusions and deceptions of the outer world.”94 With regard to many contemporary British novels, the focus of the argument seems to have shifted in the opposite direction: It could equally be argued that the unreliable narrators in novels like Julian Barnes’ Talking It Over (1991), Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, or Swift’s The Sweet-Shop Owner (1981) are ultimately not at all unreliable; the stories they tell may not provide objective renderings of the events, but they depict, in a very truthful way, the illusions and self-deceptions of the narrators themselves. Despite its brevity this sketch of the history of the unreliable narrator in British fiction may serve to show that the unreliable narrator is by no means an ahistorical phenomenon. Rather, just like other narrative techniques, it should be seen as a formal response to broader cultural developments. Formal properties of novels like unreliable narration, it can be argued, reflect both the understanding of reality and subjectivity and the moral concerns and unspoken epistemological assumptions of a given period. The almost steady rise of the unreliable narrator since the end of the eighteenth century suggests that there is indeed a close connection between the development of this narrative technique and the changing notions of subjectivity. Even such a brief outline of the history of the unreliable narrator supports Wall’s recent hypothesis “that changes in how sub-

––––––––––––– 93 94

Ibid.: 37. Rabinovitz (1983: 67).

62

Ansgar Nünning

jectivity is viewed will inevitably be reflected in the way reliable or unreliable narration is presented”.95

4. Reconceptualizing the Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration Another area of research that is in dire need of reconceptualization is the generic scope of unreliable narration. So far the focus of the discussion of unreliable narration – not just in the present article, but in literary studies at large – has been almost exclusively on narrative fiction.96 The generic scope of the phenomenon in question, however, extends far beyond firstperson narrators in novels or short stories. The following brief outline of the broader generic scope of unreliable narration will have to be provisional and programmatic because no general overview of the subject is currently available. Just as the history of unreliable narration does not begin with modern fiction, the use of unreliable narrators is also not confined to narrative fiction; it rather extends to a wider range of genres. The subgenres known as the dramatic monologue97 and the memory play98 are cases in point. These hybrid genres cut across established generic categories of poetry, drama, and narrative: with its limitation to a single speaker usually revealing key episodes of his or her life, the dramatic monologue combines poetic diction with dramatic presentation and story-telling elements; similarly, the memory play is a type of drama with distinct narrative features. The dramatic monologues of nineteenth-century English literature provide ample evidence of the use of unreliable narration in poetry. There are many noteworthy examples of such unreliable narration in Victorian poetry, the most famous of which are probably Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842) and Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama (1855). Both structurally and thematically, these poems display almost all of the features of unreliable narration that have been discussed: they involve firstperson speakers whose disturbed perceptions, egotistic personalities, and problematic value-systems lead the reader to question the accuracy of their accounts. In Maud the monologist’s strong bias results from a high ––––––––––––– 95 96 97 98

Wall (1994: 22). Cf. Jahn (1998). Cf. Bennett (1987). Cf. Brunkhorst (1980).


63

degree of emotional involvement, from his divided loyalties, and from his overt partiality. Similarly, the speaker of Browning’s “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (1845) is an unreliable narrator if ever there was one. The bishop unwittingly reveals that he has fathered several bastards and that even on his deathbed he is thinking of nothing other than material wealth and sexual joy. The study of a host of other Victorian poems – e.g. Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836) and John Davidson’s “The Testament of an Empire-Builder” (1902) – and of many of Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads would also benefit from the application of the conceptual tools developed for the analysis of unreliable narration. The same is true for the ‘memory play’, which typically features an unreliable first-person narrator. Many post-war English plays prove those critics and theorists wrong who, like Elam, maintain that drama is “without narratorial mediation”.99 But the study of both unreliable narration and point of view or focalisation in drama has received hardly any attention to date. In the only available article on the subject, Brian Richardson has convincingly shown that the deployment of narratorial mediation and the appearance of unreliability in plays call “for the kind of analysis of point of view usually reserved for modern fiction”.100 Such memory plays as Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1974) and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979), which feature Henry Carr and Antonio Salieri respectively as narrators, demonstrate that post-war English playwrights make very subtle use of unreliable narration. In the stage directions of his play, Stoppard explicitly draws attention to Carr’s unreliability, something which results from the old man’s poor memory and his reactionary prejudices: “the scene (and most of the play) is under the erratic control of Old Carr’s memory, which is not notably reliable, and also of his various prejudices and delusions”.101 The main reasons for Salieri’s unreliability are his limited knowledge, the high degree of his emotional involvement, and his problematic value-system. In Amadeus dramatic irony results primarily from the tension between what the audience sees and what Salieri describes, while Travesties contains a wide range of textual clues to Carr’s unreliability. Other examples of plays which violate naturalistic stage ––––––––––––– 99

Elam (1980: 111). Richardson (1988: 194). 101 Stoppard (1974: 27). 100

64

Ansgar Nünning

conventions by relying on unreliable narration would be Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Harold Pinter’s Landscape (1968), the latter being composed of alternating and independent acts of narration spoken by two characters. Like many contemporary English novels, these memory plays call into question conventional notions of unreliable narration, because they too challenge realist notions of truth and objectivity, with similar consequences as could be observed for contemporary British fiction. Despite its brevity this sketch of the generic scope of unreliable narration may serve to show that this feature is not confined to narrative fiction. Rather, such hybrid subgenres as the dramatic monologue and the memory play demonstrate that unreliable narration appears cross-generically. But the use of unreliable narration in genres other than narrative fiction has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. It needs to be emphasized that narrative theory could and should be applied to both narration in drama102 and to such hybrid genres as the dramatic monologue and the ballad. The application of narrative theory to genres other than fiction could open up new directions of research in an age of literature that has, after all, become noted for the blurring of genre distinctions. Since both the crossing of the boundaries between fiction, drama, and poetry, and the phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘intermediality’ have become hallmarks of contemporary English literature, literary studies would arguably stand to gain by applying the categories and methods developed for the study of one genre (e.g. narrative fiction) to the study of other genres and media. If criticism and theory want to keep up with such innovative literary developments as the blurring of generic boundary lines, critics should not forget the insights which the ‘cross-generic’ application of genre-specific theories affords.

5. Epilogue: Conclusions and Areas for Further Research To sum up, by synthesizing concepts and ideas from both cognitive and rhetorical approaches, this article has attempted to advance our understanding of unreliable narration and of how readers negotiate and process texts featuring an unreliable narrator, creating a somewhat more detailed (though by no means exhaustive) inventory of the presuppositions, frames ––––––––––––– 102

Cf. Richardson (1988: 198); Nünning/Sommer (2006, 2008).


65

of reference, and textual signals involved in the projection of unreliable narrators. If the rhetorical approach with its emphasis on the recursive relations among (implied) author, textual phenomena or signals, and reader response encompasses the cognitive narratologist’s emphasis just on reader and text, then the cognitive approach can nevertheless provide more finely nuanced tools for recognizing an unreliable narrator. Though the suggested synthesis of the two approaches still leaves several questions unanswered (e.g. What is the respective degree of importance of the various items in the inventory outlined above? Are the presuppositions, goals, and analytic tools of the two approaches really compatible?), it can arguably yield new insights into unreliable narration and open up productive avenues of inquiry for narrative theory, the more so because it is just as relevant for the ways in which e.g. literary characters, events, and plots are constructed (by implied authors) and processed (by readers) and for the role conceptual schema play on the production and reception side. Though agreement has been reached that ascriptions of unreliability involve the recursive relationship among the author, whether implied or not, textual phenomena, and reader response, accounts of unreliable narration still differ significantly with regard to the respective degree of importance they attribute to each of these three factors. While cognitive narratologists single out reader response and the cultural frameworks readers bring to texts as the most important basis for detecting unreliability, narrative theorists working in the tradition of rhetorical approaches to narrative have redressed the balance. Most theorists agree, however, that to determine a narrator’s unreliability one need not rely merely on intuitive judgments, because a broad range of definable signals provides clues to gauging a narrator’s unreliability. These include both textual data and the reader’s pre-existing conceptual knowledge of the world and standards of normality. In the end it is both the structure and norms established by the respective work itself and designed by an authorial agency, and the reader’s knowledge, psychological disposition, and system of norms and values that provide the ultimate guidelines for deciding whether a narrator is judged to be reliable or not. The suggested synthesis of cognitive and rhetorical approaches is chiefly offered as a means to rethink, and to stimulate further debate on, the intricate problem of explaining how readers and critics intuitively consider narrators to be instances of unreliable narration. Much more work, however, needs to be done if we want to come to terms with the complex set of narrative strategies that ever since the days of Booth have been sub-

66

Ansgar Nünning

sumed under the wide umbrella of the term ‘unreliable narration’. Despite the productiveness of the critical industry, the question of unreliable narration is still a very fertile area of investigation. There are a number of important issues surrounding the notion of unreliable narration, for instance, which have yet to be adequately explored. Though this article will not be able to resolve them, it might at least pinpoint them, stimulating further research and discussion. First of all, cognitive accounts of unreliable narration, including the one outlined above, arguably need to be further developed. A systematic exploration of the cognitive processes which result in the projection of unreliable narrators in the first place has yet to be carried out. We need to know a lot more, for instance, about what Bortolussi and Dixon have called “inference invitations”103, i. e. the range of signs and signals with which the implied author has endowed the story and which invite the reader to make inferences pertaining to the narrator’s potential (un-)reliability beyond what is stated in the text. Another unresolved issue concerns the questions of whether it makes sense to conceive of focalizers as unreliable. What is at stake is not whether unreliable focalization or fallible filtration ‘exists’, but what we gain when we conceive of focalizers as fallible or unreliable. Manfred Jahn (1998) and Christoph Schubert (2005) have recently addressed this issue, without, however, providing full-fledged theories of unreliable focalization, or fallible filtration. Third, in addition to a cognitive turn in the theory of unreliable narration, Bruno Zerweck has called for a “second fundamental paradigm shift, one toward greater historicity and cultural awareness”104 in an article published in Style. Like some narrative theorists before him105, he argues that, “because unreliability is the effect of interpretive strategies, it is culturally and historically variable”. Therefore, the whole notion of unreliability needs to be radically historicized: in their attempt to gauge a narrator’s potential degree and kind of unreliability, readers (and critics) always draw on such extratextual frames of reference as norms and values, which are themselves subject to historical change. In short, both the history of the development of the narrative technique known as ‘unreliable narration’ –––––––––––––

103

Bortolussi/Dixon (2003: 80–81). Zerweck (2001: 151). 105 V. Nünning (1998); A. Nünning (1997). 104


67

and the history of readers’ and critics’ projections of such narrators have yet to be written. In addition to such desiderata pertaining to the theory and history of unreliable narration, the cognitive and historicized reconceptualization of unreliable narration has far-reaching consequences for other central areas of narrative theory concerned with unreliability. Though cognitive narrative theorists have at last begun to explore how decisions about a narrator’s ‘unreliability’ are made106, the question of how these decisions affect aspects of the narrated world has as yet scarcely been addressed. This curious oversight may largely be attributed to the well-known fact that the general effect of what is called unreliable narration consists of redirecting the reader’s attention from the level of the story to the speaker and of foregrounding peculiarities of the narrator’s psychology. What has so far been overlooked, however, is the equally well-known, but as yet completely unexplored fact that one effect of variations in interpretations of (un-)reliability is potentially enormous variation in the narrative world readers construct. Focussing on the interactivity between modes of representation and readers’ choices in constructing narrative worlds, future work in narrative theory ought to take into consideration that decisions which readers make about a narrator’s (un-)reliability tend to determine many aspects of the represented world that readers (re-)construct. The question of whether a given narrator is taken to be unreliable or not may, for instance, affect characterization of the protagonists and their motives (e.g. in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Nabokov’s Lolita or Julian Barnes’ Talking It Over), the setting that readers project (e.g. in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Martin Amis’s Money) or even the whole narrative world that readers construct (as in the case of Patrick McGrath’s neo-gothic novel The Grotesque, Will Self’s Great Apes, and Chuck Palahniuk’s apocalyptic novel Fight Club). In the case of Fight Club, for example, the reader is offered the following choice: if the reader decides that the narrator is awful and perverse, but otherwise factually reliable he or she will assume that the narrator provides a sober and factually veracious account of the most egregious or horrible events, which, from his point of view, are hardly noteworthy. Once the reader realizes, however, that the narrator is a schizophrenic maniac, he or she will (re-)construct a completely differ––––––––––––– 106

Jahn (1997, 1999).

68

Ansgar Nünning

ent narrative world, consisting of nothing but figments of the narrator’s deranged imagination. What is needed, therefore, is a more systematic exploration of the relation between readers’ identification of elements in the narrative discourse (including decisions about a narrator’s unreliability) and the ‘story’ or represented world that readers project. The six different types of unreliability, for instance, which Phelan and Martin have distinguished offer the reader quite different degrees of latitude as far as the projection of diverging story worlds is concerned. An alliance between narratology and possible worlds theory could thus be an important force in the current cognitive reconceptualization of narrative theory, opening up productive new possibilities for the relation between indeterminacies on the level of discourse or narrative transmission and the represented worlds on the level of the story, which are projected by the reader. Let me conclude with a few brief indications of some of the new territories to be explored that are opened up by such a cognitive framework for the analysis of unreliable narration. First, it can bridge the gap that has separated narratology and cognitive theory for much too long, to the detriment of narratological inquiry, one might add. Second, such a cognitive reconceptualization can be usefully applied in the as yet unwritten narratological history of the development of unreliable narration. Third, a cognitive theory of unreliable narration may be useful for understanding how readers make sense of a narrative as a whole. Lastly, only if we take into consideration both the cognitive strategies and the culturally accepted models and frames that readers and critics, usually unconsciously, deploy when they naturalize texts in terms of unreliable narration will we be in a position to assess possible links between the historically variable notions of subjectivity and the equally changing uses of what has come to be known as the unreliable narrator. In addition to the unresolved theoretical issues surrounding unreliable narration outlined above, there are at least six important areas which have yet to be adequately explored. One of them is the development of an exhaustive and full-fledged theory of unreliable narration integrating the insights recently provided by cognitive and rhetorical narrative theorists. Second, what is needed is a more subtle and systematic account of the clues to unreliable narration, including more sophisticated analyses of the interplay between textual data and interpretive choices. Third, the different uses of the unreliable narrator in the works of both contemporary novelists and authors from earlier periods, and the ways in which they reflect


69

or respond to changing cultural discourses, are just waiting to be explored. Fourth, the history of the development of the narrative technique known as ‘unreliable narration’ has yet to be written because no one has dared to provide an historical overview spanning the period from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.107 Fifth, since the generic scope of unreliable narration has as yet neither been properly defined nor even gauged, unreliability across different genres, media, and disciplines provides a highly fertile area of research. A small number of articles on the subject notwithstanding108, the use of the unreliable narrator in genres other than narrative fiction – for instance in dramatic genres like the memory play or in the dramatic monologue – as well as in other media and domains (including law and politics) deserves more attention than it has hitherto been given. Lastly, taking a new look at the development of narrative techniques like unreliable narration and of the history of the reception of individual unreliable narrators109 could be an important force in the current attempts to historicize narrative theory. In short, much more work needs to be done if we want to come to terms with the complex set of narrative strategies and reading processes that ever since the good old days of Wayne C. Booth have been subsumed under the wide umbrella of the term ‘unreliable narration’. The proposed synthesis of cognitive narratology and rhetorical approaches to unreliable narration is not, however, meant to be the last word on the unreliable narrator but rather a strategic move towards a better understanding of a very complex phenomenon. If we are to make sense of unreliable narration at all, we would be wise neither to rely solely on cognitive explanations, helpful and sophisticated as they may be, nor to be satisfied with rhetorical accounts based on the implied author, but instead take into consideration both the unacknowledged standards and frames of reference according to which readers and critics think they recognize an unreliable narrator when they see one, and the author’s agency and the textual signals of unreliability. Whether the end of all our exploring will really be to arrive where we started may be open to debate, but the proposed synthesis of cognitive and rhetorical approaches may arguably help us to really know the place of unreliable narration for the first time and to be able to provide –––––––––––––

107

For brief sketches see Nünning (1997a); Zerweck (2001). See Bennett (1987); Richardson (1988). 109 See V. Nünning (2004). 108

70

Ansgar Nünning

more adequate and refined accounts of the roles of the reader, the text, and the (implied) author.

Works Cited Allrath, Gaby 2005 Engendering Unreliable Narration: A Feminist-Narratological Theory and Analysis of Unreliability in Contemporary Women’s Novels (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). Amis, Martin 1985 Money [1984] (Harmondsworth: Penguin ). Amorós, José Antonio Alvarez 1991 “Possible-World Semantics, Frame Text, Insert Text, and Unreliable Narration: The Case of The Turn of The Screw,” Style 25.1: 42–70. Bal, Mieke 1981 “The Laughing Mice or: On Focalization,” Poetics Today 2.2: 202–210. Barnes, Julian 1992 Talking It Over [1991] (London: Picador, Pan Books). Beckett, Samuel 1959 Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers [1958] (London: Faber & Faber). 1969 Murphy [1938] (London: Calder & Boyars). Bennett, James R 1987 “Inconscience: Henry James and the Unreliable Speaker of the Dramatic Monologue,” Forum 28: 74–84. Bierce, Ambrose 1988 “The Parenticide Club [1946],” In The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce (London: Picador, Pan Books): 793–810. Boyd, William 1987 The New Confessions (London: Hamilton). Brontë, Emily 1963 Wuthering Heights [1847], edited by William M. Sale (New York: Norton). Browning, Robert 1970a “Porphyria’s Lover [1836],” In Poetical Works 1833–64, edited by Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press): 399. 1970b “My Last Duchess [1842],” In Poetical Works 1833–64: 367–369. 1970c “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church [1845],” in Poetical Works 1833–64: 432–435. Booth, Wayne C. 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

–––––––––––––

For the careful proof reading of the manuscript I thank my research assistant, René Dietrich.

Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches 2005

71

“Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?.” In: James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz (Eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory (Oxford: Blackwell): 75–88. Bortolussi, Marisa, & Peter Dixon 2003 Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cartwright, Kent 1984 “Nick Carraway as an Unreliable Narrator,” in Articles on Language and Literature 20: 218–232. Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse, Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press). 1986 “Characters and Narrators: Filter, Center, Slant, and Interest-Focus,” in Poetics Today 7.2: 189–204. 1990 Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press). Cohn, Dorrit 2000 “Discordant Narration,” in Style 34: 307–316. Conrad, Joseph 1924 Lord Jim. A Romance [1899] (New York: Doubleday). 1924 Under Western Eyes [1910] (New York: Doubleday). Culler, Jonathan 1975 Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Davidson, John 1908 “The Testament of an Empire-Builder [1902],” In Testaments (London: G. Richards). De Reuck, Jenny 1990 “Stereoscopic Perspectives: Transmission and Reception in Unreliable Homodiegetic Narration,” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 74: 154–168. Dernbach, Beatrice & Michael Meyer (Eds.) 2005 Vertrauen und Glaubwürdigkeit. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven (Opladen: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften). Edgeworth, Maria 1980 Castle Rackrent [1800], edited by George Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Edwards, Duane 1972 “The Narrator of Castle Rackrent.” South Atlantic Quarterly 71: 125–129. Fludernik, Monika 1993 The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge). 1996 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge). 1999 “Defining (In)Sanity: The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and the Question of Unreliability,” In Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/ Tran-

72

Ansgar Nünning

scending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig & Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 75–95. Ford, Ford Madox 1946 The Good Soldier [1915] (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Ganzel, Dewer 1984 “What the Letter Said: Fact and Inference in The Good Soldier,” Journal of Modern Literature 11.2: 277–290. Golding, William 1959 Free Fall (London: Faber & Faber). Hansen, Per Krogh 2005 “When Facts Become Fiction: On Extra-Textual Unreliable Narration,” in Fact and Fiction in Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Lars-Åke Skalin (Örebro Studies in Literary History and Criticism 4. Örebro: Örebro University Press): 283–307. Harker, W. John 1989 “Information Processing and the Reading of Literary Texts,” New Literary History 20: 465–481. Herman, David 2002 Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press). Hof, Renate 1984 Das Spiel des ‘unreliable narrator’. Aspekte unglaubwürdigen Erzählens im Werk von Vladimir Nabokov (München: Fink). Hogg, James 1981 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824], edited by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Horatschek, Annegreth 1989 “‘In True Gossip’s Fashion’? Das domestizierte Bewußtsein der Nelly Dean,” in Poetica 21: 353–388. Ishiguro, Kazuo 1989 The Remains of the Day (London: Faber & Faber). James, Henry 1976 “The Aspern Papers [1888],” In The Aspern Papers and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Jahn, Manfred 1998 “Package Deals, Exklusionen, Randzonen: Das Phänomen der Unverläßlichkeit in den Erzählsituationen,” in Nünning, Ansgar (1998): 81–106. Kipling, Rudyard 1989 Barrack-Room Ballads and other Verses [1892] (London: Methuen). Lanser, Susan Sniader 1981 The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton/ New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Liptay, F. & Yvonne Wolf (Eds.) 2005 Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film (München: etk).


73

Martin, Wallace 1986 Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press). Martinez, Matias & Michael Scheffel 1999 “Unzuverlässiges Erzählen,” in M. Martinez & M. Scheffel: Einführung in die Erzähltheorie (München: Beck): 95–107. Martinez-Bonati, Félix 1981 Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature: A Phenomenological Approach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). McCarthy, Terence 1981 “The Incompetent Narrator of Wuthering Heights.” Modern Language Quarterly 42: 48–64. McEwan, Ian 1979 “Dead As They Come[1978],” In Between the Sheets. (London: Pan Books): 61– 77. McGrath, Patrick 1990 The Grotesque [1989] (Harmondsworth: Penguin). McKeon, Michael 1987 The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press). Nabokov, Vladimir 2000 Lolita [1955] (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Niederhoff, Burkhard 1994 Erzähler und Perspektive bei Robert Louis Stevenson. (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann). Nünning, Ansgar 1993a “Renaissance eines anthropomorphisierten Passepartouts oder Nachruf auf ein literaturkritisches Phantom? Überlegungen und Alternativen zum Konzept des implied author,” in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 67.1: 1–25. 1993b “Erzählen als Mittel subjektiver Sinnstiftung. Individualität, Skeptizismus und das Problem der (un-)reliability in Graham Swifts Kurzgeschichten,” in Anglistik und Englischunterricht 50: Recent British Short Story Writing: 153–174. 1994 “Be my Confessors! Formen und Funktionen epischer Kommunikationsstrukturen in Peter Shaffers Amadeus,” in Forum Modernes Theater 9.2: 130–148. 1995 Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion. Bd. 2: Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungstendenzen des historischen Romans in England seit 1950 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). 1997a “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction,” in Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 22, 83–105. 1997b “Deconstructing and Reconceptualizing the ‘Implied Author’. The Resurrection of an Anthropomorphicized Passepartout or the Obituary of a Critical Phantom?” in Anglistik. Mitteilungen des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 8,2, 95– 116. 1998 (ed.) Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. [Unreliable Narration:

74

Ansgar Nünning

Studies in the Theory and Practice of Unreliable Narration in English Narrative Fiction]. (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). 1999 “‘Unreliable, compared to what?’ Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/ Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 53–73. 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” In: Phelan, James & Peter J. Rabinowitz (2005): 89–107. Nünning, Ansgar & Roy Sommer 2006 “Die performative Kraft des Erzählens: Formen und Funktionen des Erzählens in Shakespeares Dramen,” in Shakespeare Jahrbuch 142, ed. Ina Schabert (Bochum: Verlag und Druckkontor Kamp): 124–141. 2008 “Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity: Some Further Steps towards a Narratology of Drama,” in Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa. Narratologia, Bd. 12. (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter): 331–354. Nünning, Vera 2004 “Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms: The Vicar of Wakefield as Test-case for a Cultural-Historical Narratology [1998],” in Style 38.2: 236–252. Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative 11: 93–109. Palahniuk, Chuck 1996 Fight Club (New York: Norton). Pettersson, Bo 2005 “The Many Faces of Unreliable Narration: A Cognitive Narratological Reorientation,” in Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice, edited by Harri Veivo, Bo Pettersson & Merja Polvinen (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press): 59–88. Phelan, James 1996 Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press). 2005 “The Implied Author and the Location of Unreliability,” in James Phelan. LIVING TO TELL ABOUT IT: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press). Phelan, James & Mary Patricia Martin 1999 “‘The Lessons of Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics and The Remains of the Day,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press): 88–109. Phelan, James & Peter J. Rabinowitz (Eds.) 2005 A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Pinter, Harold 1969 Landscape [1968] (London: Methuen). Prieto, Rene 1985 “Mimetic Stratagems: The Unreliable Narrator in Latin American Literature,” in: Revista de Estudios Hispànicos 19.3: 61–73.


75

Prince, Gerald 1987 A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Rabinovitz, Rubin 1983 “Unreliable Narrative in Murphy,” in Samuel Beckett. Humanistic Perspectives, edited by Morris Béja, S.E. Gontarski, & Pierre Astier (Columbus, Oh.: Ohio State University Press): 58–70. Richardson, Brian 1988 “Point of View in Drama: Diegetic Monologue, Unreliable Narrators, and the Author’s Voice on Stage,” in Comparative Drama 22.3: 193–214. Riggan, William 1981 Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 1983 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. (London, New York: Methuen). Sabol, C. Ruth 1989 “Reliable Narration in The Good Soldier,” in Literary Computing and Literary Criticism, edited by Rosanne G. Potter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press): 207–223. Shaffer, Peter 2001 Amadeus [1979] (New York: Perennial). Self, Will 1997 The Great Apes (London: Bloomsbury). Shen, Dan 1989 “Unreliability and Characterization,” in Style 23: 300–311. Shunami, Gideon 1972/73 “The Unreliable Narrator in Wuthering Heights,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 27: 449–468. Solomon, Stanley J. 1972 “Ironic Perspective in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent,” in Journal of Narrative Technique 2: 68–73. Smollett, Tobias 1983 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker[1771] (New York: Norton). Stoppard, Tom 1991 Travesties [1974] (London: Faber & Faber). Swift, Graham 1985 The Sweet-Shop Owner [1981] (New York: Washington Square Press). 1985 Learning to Swim and other Stories [1982] (London: Picador, Pan Books). Schneider, Daniel J. 1976 “The Unreliable Narrator: James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ and the Reading of Fiction,” in Studies in Short Fiction 13: 43–49. Schubert, Christoph 2005 “Fallible Focalization. Zur Linguistik der Sichtbehinderung im fiktionalen Text,” in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 55.2, 205–226. Tennyson, Lord Alfred 1986 Maud: A Monodrama [1855] (London: Athlone Press).

76

Ansgar Nünning

Thackeray, William Makepeace 1984 The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. [1844], edited by Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Toolan, Michael J. 1988 Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London, New York: Routledge). Viswanathan, Jaqueline 1974 “Point of View and Unreliability in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Mann’s Doktor Faustus,” in Orbis Litterarum 29: 42–60. Wall, Kathleen 1994 “The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” in Journal of Narrative Technique 24: 18–42. Williams, Nigel 1985 Star Turn (London. Faber & Faber). Winterson, Jeanette 1989 Sexing the Cherry (London: Bloomsbury). Yacobi, Tamar 1981 “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” in Poetics Today 2: 113– 126. 1987 “Narrative and Normative Patterns: On Interpreting Fiction,” in Journal of Literary Studies [Pretoria] 3.2, 18–41. 2001 “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s Unreliability,” in Narrative 9: 223–229. 2005 “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un-)reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata,” in Phelan, James & Peter J. Rabinowitz (2005). Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35: 151–178. Zimmermann, Silke Cathrin 1995 Das Ich und sein Gegenüber. Spielarten des Anderen im monologischen Erzählen. Dargestellt an ausgewählten Beispielen der europäischen Erzählkunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier).

GUNTHER MARTENS (FWO, University of Ghent & Free University of Brussels)

Revising and Extending the Scope of the Rhetorical Approach to Unreliable Narration 1. Introduction The study of unreliable narration has resulted in a very rich number of definitional and descriptive criteria, but continues to operate without a well-defined notion and definition of its counterpart, namely narrative reliability. Nünning acknowledges that “the norm of reliability supplying the standard according to which narrational unreliability is gauged” is “vague and ill-defined”.1 In the following, I will argue that most theorists of narrative unreliability tend to stick to potentially ahistorical notions of privilege, competence and narrative authority when talking about reliability. I will take issue with the widespread assumption that heterodiegetic narration is reliable by definition or by necessity. As such, this article aims to contribute to the “ongoing debate about whether unreliability is a property of first-person narrators only, or whether it can also be attributed to third-person narrators”.2 Theorists like Zerweck claim that there is a package deal between narrative unreliability and homodiegetic narration which excludes both “impersonal narrative mode and extreme metafiction” from unreliability.3 Such a priori condi––––––––––––– 1 2 3

Nünning (2005a: 96). Nünning (2005b: 496). “In order for a text to be naturalized by readers as unreliable it must be mediated by a strongly anthropomorphized narrator-character. The concept of unreliable narration is inapplicable if a narrative is transmitted in an impersonal mode or if a text is extremely metafictional. […] there is no need for readers to resolve ambiguities or inconsistencies of a normative or factual nature on a higher level. In both cases, the impersonal narrative mode and extreme metafiction, the naturalizing interpretive strategies of readers do not result in positing unreliable narration” (Zerweck 2005: 155–156). Zerweck argues that specific (radical) postmodern) texts thwart attempts at naturalization and are beyond the paradigm of unreliability.

78

Gunther Martens

tions are in striking contradiction with Zerweck’s main claim that unreliability needs to be defined according to variable “cultural and historical frames of reference”. In a first step, I will question and test some of the common assumptions underlying the theory of unreliable narration. I will argue that a more extended range of stylistic and narrative phenomena qualifies for a description in terms of unreliability on a rhetorical rather than a logical basis. This brings me to outline some of the tenets on which competing rhetorical approaches are based. Phelan challenged the impression created by contextual and cognitive approaches that unreliability exists mainly or solely “in the eyes of the beholder”.4 He invited theorists of unreliability to consider “multiple constraints on readerly agency, constraints imposed not just by texts and conventions of reading but by the designers of those texts, implied authors”.5 In view of the fact that (hypothesized) authorial intention and frame-bound authorization of information seem to have become the common ground between rhetorical and cognitive approaches, I will attempt to differentiate between various types of rhetorical narratology and further indicate in what ways a rhetorical version of narratorial agency can be relevant to the debate on unreliability. I will tackle embodiment as a central issue in this debate, inviting narrative theory to reconsider the authoritativeness and agency it attributes to various forms of narration and narrative techniques. In a final step, I will argue that the more technical rhetorical aspects of figurativity and style should also be made to bear on the way in which we discuss homodiegetic unreliability.

2. Unreliability and Homodiegetic Narration Although the existing theoretical models of unreliability are very different in terms of methodological background, three lines of argument tend to resurface that aim to limit unreliability to personified, homodiegetic narrators. First, the classical understanding of unreliable narration which ties unreliability to the homodiegetic regime of character narration is based on the assumption that unreliability is inferred out of an embodied speaker as a character with a very specific habitus, with traumas, experiences, social backgrounds and other ontological properties. Underlying this assumption –––––––––––––

4 5

Fludernik (2005: 42). Phelan (2005a: 48).

Extending the Scope of the Rhetorical Approach to Unreliable Narration

79

is the intuition that words (discourse) can only be refuted by actions within the narrated world (story). In unreliable narration, […] the story undermines the discourse. We conclude, by “reading out” between the lines, that the events and existents could not have been “like 6 that”, and so we hold the narrator suspect. Unreliable narration is thus an ironic form.

Consequently, it has proven very intuitive to link unreliability with character traits (and thus: character narrators) so as to discuss madmen, picaros, naifs, clowns, “mad monologists” as unreliable narrators by disposition because of the deranged or perverted value system subtending their actions and the selective framing and representation of these actions. Fludernik has pointed out that this approach introduces “already semanticized”7 agents into the description of narratorial agency. At the same time, Nünning’s plea to model narrative agency in relation to readers’ cultural frames explicitly calls for a (methodologically more advanced) semanticization and contextualisation of narrative forms beyond the textual signals.8 The culturalist or cognitive model thus rests on the central claim that “the reader’s or critic’s world-model and standards of normalcy”9 constitute a prerequisite of reading rather than emerging as a result of reading. It is precisely in this area that the debate on unreliability has recently witnessed a surprising rapprochement: Both rhetorical narratologists adhering to the implied author (Phelan) and cognitive-culturalhistorical narratologists (Nünning) shift the focus of unreliability to reader dispositions (e.g. the reader’s assumed inclination to join the “authorial audience”). Both fail to take into account that standards of normalcy are not a prerequisite, but in fact an often abundantly anticipated and prefigured effect of the text’s narrative and rhetorical strategies. A second recurring tacit assumption of the debate is that unreliable narration operates through indirection and inference of implied meaning and that it thus elicits and allows for the reader’s heightened activity.10 The epiphany or “detective”11 element of unreliability is located in the reader’s inference of an alternative course of events or a changed view on ––––––––––––– 6 7 8 9 10 11

Chatman (1978: 233). Fludernik (1999: 76). Nünning (2004: 359). Nünning (1999a: 61). Schubert (2005). Cp. Phelan (2005: 80): “If the narration is reliable, the authorial audience does not need to reconfigure it [...].” Fludernik (2005: 55).

80

Gunther Martens

the identity of the speaker qua character. This effect is supposed to clash with default “reliable” narration. Especially heterodiegetic narration is said to be either very explicit in general or otherwise irrelevant in terms of unreliability because it lacks the central tension between the actual narration and the narrator’s (prior) psychological motivation and embodiment as character.12 The stress on implication and the functional variety of implied meanings contained in the increasingly complex taxonomies (e.g. Phelan’s) of underreporting, underregarding, misregarding etc. takes for granted (or at least strongly suggest) that there is an inescapably thetic impulse behind ‘normal’ and more explicit forms of naming and narrating.13 It may be observed that there is a more experimental grey zone between the implied meaning of underreporting and the explicitness of (over)reporting: the unreliability of the narrators in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) and Christian Kracht’s Faserland ([1995]) resides precisely in an insistent naming of brands and detailed descriptions of surface phenomena. Thirdly, when talking about homodiegetic unreliable narration, theorists are generally careful to distinguish between aberrant, idiosyncratic perceptions of characters (focalization) and the genre-bound quasiinstitutionalized narratorial functions liable to narratorial unreliability. In order to clarify the difference between characters with limited focalisation and narrators, Chatman introduced the distinction between unreliable narrators and fallible characters.14 In this setup, a narrator may frame charac––––––––––––– 12

13

14

According to Phelan/Martin, only homodiegesis “allows the lack of full coherence between the roles of character and of narrator when that lack both serves the larger purpose of the narrative and when it is registered only after the incoherence operates” (Phelan/Martin 1999: 93). Judging by the statement: “the homodiegesis blocks our access to conclusive signals from Ishiguro” (1999: 103), Phelan and Martin clearly assume that heterodiegesis provides a more direct access route to the author’s intention. For related statements, see Phelan (2005a: 80, 201). In contradistinction to homodiegetic unreliability, Phelan indeed posits the “stipulative function of narrative reporting” (Phelan 2005a: 115). On the other hand, it could be argued that the homodiegetic nature of the narration is not that central to Phelan’s and Martin’s approach, since the subjectivist overtones of the mechanism of required inference ultimately leads Phelan and Martin to coin “character-to-character equivalents” (Phelan/Martin 1999: 98) for the same phenomenon of dramatic irony in dialogues, which one could encounter in heterodiegetic fiction as well. Phelan’s type of rhetorical narratology focuses on the experience of irony as connivance and on the “authorization” of information through figurations of the narratee and titles. Chatman (1990: 149).


81

ters as fallible in moral or ideological outlook, in which case these characters are deemed fallible as perspective bearers, not as narrators. On the other hand, it has become common practice in film studies to attribute unreliability to the process of focalization, which raises the question of media-specificity. Studies of unreliability in film tend to give pride and place to the question of the consistency and “authenticity of the focalizing instance”.15 At any rate, the underlying attribution of privileged functions of “performative authoritativeness”16 has become less outspoken over recent years, as both narration and perception have to some extent come to be associated with performativity. In addition, there is an awareness that any type of narration involves such marked omissions, indirectness and rearrangement of information.17 Finally, the issue of embodiment has been given a more dynamic twist in debates concerning performativity and postdramatic, anti-illusionist aesthetics. In fact, cognitive theorists (but also other postclassical reader-oriented narratologies, e.g. gender narratology) assume that all types of narrativity are at least implicitly embodied18, and it is surprising that so far only the spectrum of first-person unreliable narration has offered the examples for that claim.

3. Unreliability and Heterodiegetic Narration Most approaches to unreliable narration stipulate a “package deal” between unreliability and first-person-narration (the term is applied by Yacobi19, although Yacobi herself argues emphatically against its assumption). But what exactly would make third-person narration (and especially: overt heterodiegetic, i.e. authorial narration) incompatible with unreliability? In order to refute this claim, I refrain from taking a few obvious paths in that direction, e.g. Genette’s estimate of the homodiegeticizing effect inherent in extensive overt heterodiegetic narration20 or the typical psychoanalytic claim that any heterodiegetic narration can in fact be revealed, –––––––––––––

15 16 17 18 19 20

Helbig (2005: 134). Culler (2000: 26). “It is also arguable that all narrators report less than they know” (Phelan/Martin 1999: 109). See also Phelan (2005a: 52). Fludernik (1996: 17–19, 30). Cf. Yacobi (1983). Genette (1988: 80-81). Genette’s example is the extended usage of present tense narration by the overt narrator of Tom Jones.

82

Gunther Martens

through specific instances of failure and local ‘lapses’, as a concealed autodiegetic one.21 In order to exempt authorial narration from the “increased interpretability”22 attributed to unreliability, theorists (especially those subscribing to speech act theory) posit a distinction between “worldcreating utterances” and “world-reflecting utterances”23: The heterodiegetic narrator enjoys total verbal freedom. He can say whatever he wants, without breaking any appropriateness conditions and without losing his credi24 bility. He may also choose to limit his knowledge or to hide some of the facts.

As has frequently been noted, heterodiegetic narration can (and often will) signal that it does not know specific occurrences within and aspects of the story world.25 This does not fundamentally detract from the mimetic and interpretive authority of the narration, which is held to be reliable by definition, because the discourse is primarily deemed responsible for bringing the very fictional world into being (according to a rigid speech-theoretical definition of fictionality). Contradictions and incongruence may occur in third-person narrator discourse, but these “can be amplified into contradiction without fundamentally affecting the reliability of that narration”.26 This is said to reflect a “cognitive frame based on cultural and traditional expectations”.27 Consequently, Jahn’s approach reduces the words of a heterodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator to a stylistic default, a degree-zero which fulfils the institutional function of creating the fictional universe. If value judgments are expressed, these are held to amount to “authorial in–––––––––––––

21

22 23 24 25 26

27

For a variation of this argumentation, see Bayard’s (2001) psychoanalytical rereading of Agatha Christie’s Roger Ackroyd, in which he argues that the narrator’s unreliability is not just temporary, but structural and to be maintained throughout, even against the conventional solution. Cf. Yacobi (2000: 715). Schubert (2006). Ryan (1981: 530). Ibid.: 525. Cf. Füger (2004). “Die Verläßlichkeitsfrage kommt […] beim heterodiegetischen Erzählen auch dann nicht auf, wenn die Unverläßlichkeit bis zur Widersprüchlichkeit verstärkt wird.” (Jahn 1998: 101; my translation). Ibid.: 100; my translation. According to Jahn (ibid.: 102), heterodiegetic unreliability is conceivable only in a case in which the biographical author’s young age and writing skills cast doubts on the text’s narrative competence. Jahn’s example is amenable to Yacobi’s genetic hypothesis for explaining inconsistencies in a text and does not seem to require (nor enable) qualitative attention to the stylistic specifics of the narrator’s performance.


83

tentionality”, which turns textual signals into the direct mouthpiece of their author, often perceived as conventionalized and outdated moralizing typical of classical omniscient narration.28 Contrary to this opinion (which is in fact related to the speech theoretical accounts of narrative agency mentioned earlier), I argue that in creative realizations of its potential, telling-type texts with overt narrators qualify for infractions on reliability which cannot simply be reduced to the playful self-cancellation of fictionality.29 In fact, this refers to a broader debate: Aczel points out that in standard narratology, stylistic and idiomatic features, as part of the actual performance of narration, are not considered to affect the institutional valency of narration.30 Especially omnicommunicative, overt, in Stanzel’s term: authorial31, telling tactics need to be relieved from this overburdening stress on “world-creating utterances” and illusion-enhancing or -dispelling effects in order to arrive at the versions of rhetorical and stylistic agency they afford. Typically, overt narration occurs “across the division of person”32, sharing the “plethora of addressee-oriented expressions”33 with homodiegetic unreliable narration. The attempt to embody other speakers or minds representatively is not simply passive, but strategical and persuasive in its own register. In less personifying terms, the textual information puts pressure on the coherence of the narratorial instance as communicative relay. The attempt to embody a multitude of voices and minds may not fit easily with modernist and postcolonial desires to render each voice in its unique authenticity. But, if carried out with sufficient sty––––––––––––– 28

29 30 31

32 33

One begins to sense the (somewhat drastic) consequences of the cognitive turn for the definition of narratorhood when one compares structuralist and cognitive explications of the “external corrective” in Cervantes’ Don Quixote: Whereas in Martinez/Scheffel (2000: 96–97), the sublation of giants into windmills is expressive of the logical privilege and necessary mimetic reliability of heterodiegetic narration, Palmer (2004: 204) links it to equivalent floating, necessarily embodied minds and their respective “embedded narratives”. Allrath (2005: 78). Aczel (2005: 635). Despite the fact that it has become common practice to use ‘authorial’ as a shortnotation for ‘of the author, what may or may not perspire of the author into the text’, I use the terms authorial to designate a very specific type of overt narratorial mediation which foregrounds the performance of narration both by means of stylistic expressivity and/or commentary. For recent stylistic-rhetorical approaches to overtness, see Aczel (2005), Martens (2008), Martens/Biebuyck (2007). Cohn (2000: 264). Nünning, this volume, 55.

84

Gunther Martens

listic sophistication, it can turn reliability into a matter of degree rather than an absolute necessity. In this respect, it is often disregarded that according to Susan Lanser authorial narration, although “always in danger of constructing its own hegemony” is also “a powerful tool for dislodging an existing authority”.34 In addition, Lanser has explicitly outsourced a particular brand of authorial narration that makes use of the first-person plural under the name of “communal voice”. This type of narration (appeal to ‘we’ and to the impersonal mode) can, in modernist and postmodernist realisations, no longer rely on the backup of a collectively shared value system. In the absence of such a clear-defined organon, it becomes an effort and a constraint rather than a hallmark of “performative authoritativeness”.35 Further research is needed in order to provide a more representative overview of such creative usages of disembodied, anonymous narrators with particular attention to their stylistic and rhetorical processuality. While rhetorical and stylistic features can affect the trustworthiness of heterodiegetic utterances, it should be noted that this modalization of the reliability of framing discourses is related to their pragmatics and their performance, and not to their referential truth value. Obviously there is a historical dimension of knowledge change likely to sediment in heterodiegetic comments. Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Love. Victorians to Moderns (1992) documents some of this ignorance and popular bias in relation to sexuality: In addition to ignorance about venereal disease, Victorians were also troubled by the theory that every sexual experience may leave its mark on a woman. In Thérèse Raquin (1867) Zola argued that men and women pollute each other’s temperaments by kissing, breathing, and having sex: “These modifications, which have their origin in the flesh, are speedily communicated to the brain and affect the entire individual.” A likely source of popular thinking on the organic exchange between men and women in sex was the phrenology of O.S. Fowler, who explained how “all the secretions” of the 36 body “partake” of the state of mind and body at any given time.

If this belief – both scientifically outdated and gender-biased – were to be ascribed to an embodied character, we would feel inclined to relegate this to the intrafictional perspectivization and to the fallibility of the character ––––––––––––– 34 35 36

Lanser (1992: 135). Culler (2004: 26). Kern (1992: 155f.). The reference is to the beginning of chapter 22 of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.


85

involved. In its guise as authorial comment, this utterance may be wrong and biased as well, but it still needs to be evaluated in its relation to the narrativization. In the phrenological statement mentioned above, there is of course an additional gender bias that remains unreflected, but we cannot dub this narratorial statement unreliable in terms of narrative information distribution. In his writings of the Plaisir du Texte-period, Roland Barthes considered the narration of Balzac’s Sarrazine to be steeped in culturally specific knowledge. According to Barthes, these “cultural codes of knowledge and wisdom which the text keeps referring to”37 were essentially readerly (lisible) and thus ideological. However, overt heterodiegetic narration may involve rhetorical techniques which may require intense activity and reconfiguration from the part of the reader, such as abrupt summary, simile, iterative portrayal, and especially the phenomenon of oscillating, metaleptic motivation of stylistic features I will discuss more closely in the following section.

4. Modalizing the Reliability of Framing Discourses: Some Cases Attempts to describe unreliability in relation to third-person narration have remained very scarce so far. In their critical round-up of narratological theory, Herman and Vervaeck note that “quite a few postmodern narrators are extradiegetic and heterodiegetic, but this does not prevent them from being totally unreliable”.38 They also link the constructivist model of unreliability with gender aspects, pointing to the possibility of an ambivalent, subversive mimicry of the historical sedimentations of authority in heterodiegetic narration. They go on to “conclude that the decision concerning reliability largely lies with the reader”39 and even venture the prognosis that a process of typification of unreliable narration may have taken place so that in the end a correct, coherent and truthful account might be perceived as “necessarily unreliable”.40 In a similar vein, Yacobi explicitly votes against “package-dealing unreliability” with character narration when she repeatedly argues that “fictional unreliability is not a character trait attaching to the (probabilistic) portrait of the narrator but a –––––––––––––

37 38 39 40

Barthes (1974: 98). Herman/Vervaeck (2005: 88). Ibid.: 89. Ibid.; cf. Zerweck (2001: 170).

86

Gunther Martens

feature ascribed (or lifted) ad-hoc on a relational basis, depending on the (equally hypothetical) norms operative in context”.41 Nevertheless, most narratologists have always been anxious to exempt psycho-narration and other forms of overt narratorial rendering of deranged or limited characters from unreliability, because the agents behind aberrant perceptions are perceiving and not narrating. As long as one invests a heterodiegetic narrator with the primary duty or burden to generate the fictional world (Ryan’s “worldmaking statements”), any manifestation of the narratorial discourse, whatever its rhetorical or stylistic nature, will be bound to be reduced to supplying an “external corrective”.42 Nevertheless, such narrators can prove quite prone to at least the ‘assumption’ of some of the verbal characteristics of the quoted characters. Dorrit Cohn was among the first to systematically discuss unreliability in relation to the heterodiegetic domain in her analysis of Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig. Cohn’s argument can be summarized as follows: while the voluble heterodiegetic narrator in the novella is offering a kind of “corrective information” to the fallibility of the protagonist Gustav Aschenbach, the narrative discourse in turn harbours a highly abstract and suspicious rhetoric which makes that judgmental narrator increasingly appear a target of a higher level irony. By unreliability through discordance, Cohn means “the possibility for the reader to experience a teller as normatively inappropriate for the story he or she tells”.43 Fludernik mentions Cohn’s attempt to link unreliability with heterodiegetic narration, but holds the view that the rhetorical and textual inconsistencies at this “higher level” mainly lead to a metafictional disruption of the autonomy and factuality of the speaker.44 Cohn adds that heterodiegesis does not enable factual unreliability, but that it allows for evaluative unreliability (dubbed discordance). [H]eterodiegetic novels [do not allow for] factual unreliability: the fictional events presented in a novel of this type, unlike those presented by an embodied narrator in first-person novels, cannot be understood as falsified or distorted by the narrator, since the belief in their accuracy enables for the reader the existence of the imagined world. Discordance, in sum, is the only aspect of the general category of unreliability that po-

––––––––––––– 41 42 43 44

Yacobi (2005: 110); cf. Yacobi (2000: 712). Fludernik (1993: 159). Cohn (2000: 307). Fludernik (2005: 46).


87

tentially applies across the division of person to all novels told by a prominent narrator whose discourse is foregrounded in the text.45

In Cohn’s view, it is in fact more adventurous to read against the grain the assumed reliability of frame narration, because the divergence does not reside in the (elided, implied, euphemized, to be inferred) content of the narrated, but in the performance of the narration itself. I will now identify a number of situations and features qualifying for a rhetorical-performative rather than an institutional description of unreliability, which all come to the fore in overt narrators across the division of person. Such rhetorical unreliability conveys an overall sense of incompatibility of speech acts and translates in signals of distancing (self-) irony, as Cohn illustrated, even in the midst of emphatically judgmental rhetoric. It is clear that infractions and interferences of the kind described above need not entail a fundamentally different view on sequences of events. At the same time, this indicates how strongly the scope of narrative ironies has remained restricted to mimetic aspects of representation. When Cohn’s definition of discordance refers to the aptness of speakers, she is in fact using rhetorical rather than standard fictional-narratological terminology. It will be noted that, in Cohn’s argument on Death in Venice, the author’s ethos is an important instance in judging the inappropriateness and effectiveness of the narrator’s performance: since Thomas Mann is normally assumed to be a master of style and self-conscious irony, the involuntary deconstruction of the text ultimately leads Cohn to assume the “absurd” existence of a “second author” of Death in Venice. Central to heterodiegetic unreliability is Cohn’s claim that “ideological characterization can be achieved by way of a vocal presence alone (i.e., when such presence is not supported by psychological characterization)”.46 The mention of voice is of particular importance here, since Cohn deliberately aims to contradict what she terms an “overly disjunctive” account of “modal and vocal categories”47. According to Cohn, the access route to discovering unreliable narration in heterodiegetic (as well as homodiegetic) fictional narration lies in scanning for narratorial “nonmimetic, opaque sentences”48 pointing to “conspicuous narratorial presence, i.e. sentences subjective, received by the ––––––––––––– 45 46 47 48

Cohn (2000: 311). Cohn (1990: 796). Ibid.: 784. Ibid.: 799.

88

Gunther Martens

reader with the qualified credence one grants to the opinions of an individual speaker”.49 Before one goes on to equate such sentences with “opinionated” and “ideological”50 narratorial statements (such as the phrenological statement discussed above), Cohn’s proposal clearly envisages “the possibility for the reader to experience a teller as normatively inappropriate for the story he or she tells”.51 This centers the description of unreliability on the performance of discourse internally (e.g. marked stylistic or attributive incoherence), rather than on the (in)coherence between discourse and story.52 This recentering has the added benefit that it avoids the problematic and methodologically self-defeating twist affecting any discussion of unreliability in terms of story-discourse-coherence, namely that any type of unreliable discourse can be recuperated as a reliable mimetic depiction of a troubled speaker. It is precisely this paradox which leads Zerweck to ultimately deny Nabokov’s Lolita, one of the most frequently cited examples of unreliable narration, its relevance to unreliability.53 This decision is based on a rather narrow view, as if style would necessarily entail an intentionality incompatible with unwitting self-exposure. The surprising “lucidity”54 effect of unreliable narrators affording insight into normality through idiosyncracy certainly holds valid, but one should not cast it as a reversal of the unreliable mode, since it challenges the attempt to project a unified utterer and the quest for coherence itself. To give an example of a performance-bound description of (heterodiegetic) unreliability, I will turn to Hermann Broch’s novel The Sleepwalkers, the object of Dorrit Cohn’s dissertation55 and an important source of inspiration for her concept of psycho-narration: While the gnomic narrator discourse seems to keep the reader at a safe distance from the obsessions of Broch’s short-sighted and highly fallible protagonists – including the many explicit references to what the characters are not able to see and know –, this distance breaks down when the generalizing discourse is in turn infected by idiosyncratic metaphors and catchphrases taken from –––––––––––––

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Ibid.: 798. Ibid.: 797. Cohn (2000: 307). For a similar argument, Wall (1994: 37). Zerweck (2001: 165). Fludernik (1999: 89). Cohn (1966).


89

those characters’ language.56 To give an example: Broch’s novel frequently aims to generalize and translate the obsessive concerns of typical representatives of the Weimar Republic into gnomic statements concerning the existential “homelessness” of mankind. The “narrator’s ex cathedra statements in gnomic present tense”57 at times resonate rather ironically with specific instances of thought representation: “due to her envy, she approved of such a distribution, because whoever possesses aims to destroy, yet whoever only uses can suffice to render the object unusable. This holds true for all mankind and also for the Queen of England.”58 This echo-effect can be summed up by means of terms borrowed from stylistics, such as “toning up or down”, “colouring” or “infection” (Spitzer); its narrative effect has been described by Monika Fludernik: It is disconcerting to find the characters’ diction invade the very territory of narratorial purity and to see such mimetics assume a hold over its mediating narrative, when one had expected the mediating narrative to control the mimesis of the represented fic59 tional world.

Jahn mentions the phenomenon of colouring and infection, but he interprets it as ironic or dissonant quotation and consequently as a sign of “interpretive authority”.60 According to Fludernik, the phenomenon should be seen as an “expansion of figural viewpoint”.61 Due to the polyfocalised and multiperspectivist nature of the novel’s heterodiegetic regime and particularly its dissonant transgression of individual characters’ understanding in terms of articulation, style and diction, the breakdown of this register is all the more spectacular. Especially for texts projecting a semblance of semblance of uninvolvement by making use of gnomic generalizations, elaborate usage of epithets and adjectives or by offering inside views of other characters, the breakdown of those very techniques associated with “the delivery of a broad range of information with authority”62 is a marked phenomenon, which introduces a kind of involuntary self-irony that ––––––––––––– 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Martens (2006a: 66–89). Cohn (1978: 126). Broch (1986 [1930]: 366; my translation and italics). Fludernik (1993: 333). For further examples, see: Martens (2006a: 86ff.). Jahn (1998: 98). Fludernik (1993: 334). For a similar claim, see Jedliþková’s contribution to this volume, 291. Phelan (2005: 200).

90

Gunther Martens

brackets the traditional epistemological scope and confidence of the narrative techniques involved. In a more recent contribution to the debate, Monika Fludernik ventures into the domain of unreliability in third-person narration by singling out, amongst other examples I cannot go into here, the case of “dramatic monologue”.63 With good reason, Fludernik maintains that dramatic monologue can be judged unreliable because of its often highly dialogic and argumentative nature tends to anticipate the reaction of imagined interlocutors. Monika Fludernik suggests that dramatic monologue (normally situated within the perceiving frame) may silently assume (or even usurp) some of the narratorial functions of transmission and address and may thus become liable to the suspicion of unreliability. This expansion of scope has become more feasible precisely in Fludernik’s constructivist framework as in numerous other postclassical approaches: the narratorial functions mentioned by Ryan, especially the creative and the testimonial, have lost their watershed distinctiveness as hallmarks of narrating activity, since both perception and the reading process of narrativization are credited with the construction and the assertion as real of what is purportedly described. The extension of scope advanced by Fludernik stresses the rhetorical aspect vis-à-vis a hypothetical interlocutor. This attention to rhetoricity in turn is in keeping with recent caveats stemming from within the cognitivist realm itself. In his book Fictional minds, Alan Palmer warned against too rigid a concentration on the intricacies of receptive faculties foregrounded in the cognitive approach. The privileging of the apparently mimetic and rather glamorous categories of free indirect thought and direct thought over the diegetic and seemingly uninteresting category of thought report […] does not take into account the riches to be discovered in the analyses of states of mind in the mode of thought report [and in] general and distant 64 descriptions.

––––––––––––– 63

64

Fludernik (2005: 55). According to Genette (1988: 89f.), (dramatic) monologue does not belong to the narrative mode, unless one can infer hints of implied narratorial framing or address. Recent work on drama and narrative (Jahn, Sommer & Nünning) refutes Genette’s position, as already anticipated by Cohn’s critique of Genette’s (paratextual and quantitative) presupposition of the non-narrative nature of quoted monologues and dialogues. Following both Fludernik’s lead and also Nünning’s suggestion (this volume, 62f.), I will discuss a case of dramatic monologue below. Palmer (2004: 57/59).


91

Another type of unreliability potentially affecting the heterodiegetic is to be detected in texts that put the speech position of the narrator itself – oscillating between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic speech positions – into question. The potential of this oscillation is already explored in texts predominantly featuring unreliable autodiegetic I-narrators, as in Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel (1959) and in the locutions of self-distancing enacted by the narrator in Lolita. Particularly striking cases of such uncertainty are to be found both in the Nouveau Roman and in radically postmodern literature. According to Zerweck, such oscillation can only be interpreted as metafictional experimentation and hence as a signal of a (rather triumphant, generalized) condition of postmodernism which puts the whole question of unreliability to an end. Such unresolved oscillation between homo- and heterodiegetic speech positions, however, may nevertheless attenuate reliability when it precisely problematizes the conventional intuitions related with homo- and heterodiegetic narration on a local, historically and culturally determined basis: “narrator properties such as invisibility or temporal distance” may in specific historical instantiations have been the access to essentially reliable guides65, but they “do not guarantee reliability” under all possible circumstances, for instance when exploited for the purposes of satire and parody.66 Jelinek’s prominent Inarrators (e.g. in Die Kinder der Toten, 1995) are impossible to situate univocally. On the one hand, those texts feature a markedly authorial narrator which can randomly dispose of its creatures.67 At the same time, the narrator is a highly personalized character, acting as a bystander or even as a victim of the fictional world. The violence exerted by Jelinek’s prominent I-narrator quotes and imitates, but does not manage to obtain a privileged speech position. The violent and markedly performative nature of the narrator’s behaviour externalizes and acts out the violence hidden in stereotypes, clichés, media formats and in the argumentative structure of proverbs (syllogism, tautology). The highly prominent narrator takes on the linguistic persona of a butcher serving and preparing the abject: “You want additional servings of dead people? I’ll be happy to chop off some more!”68 The metaphoric violence of cutting to pieces, devouring and pre––––––––––––– 65 66 67 68

Fludernik (1996: 165–166). Herman/Vervaeck (2005: 88); cf. Cohn (1990: 499), fn. 15. Stanzel (1979: 260). “Noch ein paar Stück Tote? Ich schneide Ihnen gern noch mehr ab!” (Jelinek 1995: 510, my translation).

92

Gunther Martens

paring is a reaction to the mass media which serve information uncritically, bent on the illusion of “live presence”, as a dish which can be easily digested: “This being is being carpeted flatly/interpreted shallowly and flexed thoroughly, so that it can be chewed through more easily.”69 Although in Jelinek’s postmodernist novel, representation in a mimetic sense is problematized and “signs of the narrated [i.e., story]” are visibly outweighed by “signs of the narrator [i.e., discourse]”70, the latter keep resonating with the former (through metalepsis and stylistic means such as rhetorical syllepsis). Consequently, doubts concerning the reliability and instability of the mediator are very much central to the novel’s preoccupation with a world governed by mass mediatization, infotainment and populism. The question whether this narrator is “strongly personalized” or coherently embodied at the level of story (i.e. endowed with an individual psychology as cause of the misrepresentation) is unanswerable. At any rate, it is not of primary importance for this type of unreliability, since the narrator rather functions as a compound, collective subject, an almost involuntary, anonymous relay of gossip, ideology and euphemism.71 In short: I-narrators which trespass the border between ‘I as witness’ and ‘I as creator’ and which usurp the tone and profile of an authorial narrator, may qualify for a particularly meaningful version of unreliability. This may lead one to identify this oscillation between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic speech positions as a “source of a novel kind of unreliability”72, i.e. an unreliability inherent in its rhetorical and stylistic overtness. –––––––––––––

69

70 71

72

“Dieses Sein wird flach ausgelegt und tüchtig durchgewalkt, damit es leichter durchzukauen ist” (ibid.: 504, my translation). On the elaborate metaleptic potential of culinary metaphors – complicated by Jelinek with images of extreme instrumentalization – see also Biebuyck/Martens (2008). Zerweck (2001: 156, quoting Margolin). In an interview, Jelinek stressed the “communal” aspect of the prominent narrators in her work: “That is certainly the most difficult question of all, as it is really the task of our “nice dissertation writers” (liebe Dissertanten) to determine for each text who this “we” is, because it is not a unified ‘we’ that speaks. It is constantly changing, and it would make an interesting dissertation to trace this collective ‘we.’ Sometimes the ‘we’ is an ironically meant, common way of speaking, at other times it is a negative ‘we,’ a kind of silent, menacing ‘we.’ Which ‘we’ is speaking must be determined with each individual text or from the context. If I were to write an article or dissertation about myself, this ‘we’ would interest me greatly.” (Jelinek, in: Bethman 2000: 61). Grabienski et al. (2006: 217). Cf. Gymnich (1998: 159); Allrath (2005: 178).


93

5. The Overtness of Unreliable Narration What conspicuous narrators can share “across the division of person”73 is their overtness. Overt narration (from the French ‘to operate’) “can comment both on the content of the narration (story world) and on the narrating function itself; the address to a narratee is a part of this meta-narrative performance”.74 Both authorially inflected narration and unreliable narration may contain a “plethora of addressee-oriented expressions”.75 Both unreliable I-narrators and authorial narrators can be termed types of overt narrators, i.e. narrators bent on thematizing the activity of production in the representation of events, but in the case of the autodiegetic I-narrator the overtness is motivated by both intradiegetic psychological and rhetorical parameters. A potential distinctive feature is supplied by Wolf Schmid, who notes that the talkative and bragging I-narrator in the skaz-tradition, typically betraying intellectual and linguistic limitations, does not manage to give a convincing account of the mindset of other characters.76 This watershed distinction undoubtedly holds true for the majority of first-person fiction, but as always most of the narratological borders and “package deals” are open to experimentation. The talkative unreliable narrator of the Brenner-crime series by Wolf Haas provides such a form of wrapping in mimetic guises such heterodiegetic faculties, resulting in highly enjoyable parodist meta-comments on the schematic nature and expectations of the genre.77 Wolf Haas’ crime novels have been praised for their immersion into local contexts, moods and sounds. When looking at the narrator’s profile, one can see that Haas’ talkative narrator constitutes an interesting experiment with two distinctive types of narration: the heterodiegetic narrator is highly digressive and engages in judgmental, complacent commenting by means of a distinctive, semi-oral diction. While this profile does not render him unreliable as such, his unreliability becomes evident when the narrator frames the protagonist as fallible but fails to provide correctives to his somewhat idiosyncratic and unperceptive detective’s gaps in general knowledge on other occasions. The narrator’s unreliability hinges on rhetorical specifics when the narrator relates events by ––––––––––––– 73 74 75 76 77

Cohn (2000: 264). Fludernik (1993: 443). Nünning (2005: 103); this volume, p. 55. Schmid (2005: 170). Martens (2006b).

94

Gunther Martens

means of deliberately far-fetched, even botched comparisons and extended imagery borrowed precisely from the idiosyncratic specialized interests of his protagonist. The question whether the convivially talkative narrator is indeed absent from the story he tells is cunningly exploited at the end of the series of Brenner novels, when the narrator's involvement as a character in the conclusion of the series is hinted at through a ludicrous climax, although at the same time the final Dadaist desintegration of the verbal texture of the narration into “The Matrix”-like streams of the narrator’s favourite stopgap word ‘ding’ evokes the novel’s philosophical and stylistic background in Austrian avant-garde experimental concrete poetry. Haas’ anti-detective illustrates how suspense can be achieved through unsuspected means, namely through the endless anticipations of what readers trained in the schematic representations of crime fiction would expect, conveyed both through second-person address and strategic framebreaking. This becomes most tangible whenever the frequent secondperson address evolves into longer stretches of you-narration which, through their drastic conversational, hyperbolic tone, challenge and stretch the reader’s experiential repertoire: “But whenever you jump from a mountain, […]”; “whenever you commit suicide, your first thought will not be […]”.78 Although oscillation between heterodiegesis and autodiegesis and rhetorical aspects such as quasi-metaleptic tropes may not qualify for downright unreliability, they cast serious doubts about the reliability of heterodiegetic narration in general. In a final step, I will now argue that the more technical rhetorical aspects of figurativity and style should also be made to bear on the way in which we discuss homodiegetic unreliability. In order to illustrate the close interaction between metanarrative utterances and the framing of unreliability, I would briefly like to refer to Thomas Mann’s picaresque novel Confessions of Felix Krull. In the following example, Felix Krull comments on a series of petty thefts he carried out during his youth: Without doubt one will counter my argument and claim that, what I carried out there, was ordinary theft. In the face of such a claim I turn silent and retreat into myself. Of course, I am able nor planning to prevent someone from applying this paltry, inexpressive terminology, if anyone should feel inclined to do so. But one needs to distinguish sharply between the cheap, trite expression barely managing to approximate life

––––––––––––– 78

My translations, quoted in Martens (2006b: 72).


95

on the one hand – and the living, original act, perennially young and new, radiating 79 with unrivaled novelty.

The embodied narrator tries to dodge a sensitive issue of his biography (his youthful “petty thefts”) by means of intensive reader address and extradiegetic communication. Throughout the novel, which is no less selfaware and metafictional than Nabokov’s Lolita, such direct reader addresses are specifically inserted in order to convince the reader of the aesthetic value of seemingly immoral actions. In narratological terms, the narrator effects the opposite of what he claims to be doing: he does not retreat into silence (“I turn silent and retreat into myself”), leaving it up to the reader to judge his behaviour, but goes on to formulate two possible evaluations in a highly rhetorical way. The hyperbolic style is clearly that of the telling I, digressing and retrospectively looking back on youth, but in fact the gestures of politeness and decency are a striking continuation of the cunning strategies of the picaro. Whoever delights in the rhetorical craftedness and elegance of Krull’s apologetic discourse is almost forced to accept the narrator’s elaborate theory that success does not reside in the obedience to commonly accepted values, but in the artful execution of treachery and conmanship, which holds the exclusive potential of aesthetic self-fashioning as an aristocratic individual. The narrator repeatedly laments that his stylistic command does not suffice, that memories have faded due to old age and spatial distance. The narrator’s almost ritualized laments, however, tend to obfuscate that the telling I is still exerting the same old tactics, that the stylistic elegance of the mock-confession itself is part of the picaresque behaviour and that the reader is his final ‘victim’.

6. Other Rhetorical Approaches to (Dis)embodied Overt Narration In his contributions both to the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory and to this volume, Nünning calls for a synthesis between cognitive and ––––––––––––– 79

“Ohne Zweifel wird man mir entgegenhalten, daß, was ich da ausgeführt, gemeiner Diebstahl gewesen sei. Demgegenüber verstumme ich und ziehe mich zurück; denn selbstverständlich kann und werde ich niemanden hindern, dieses armselige Wort zur Anwendung zu bringen, wenn es ihn befriedet. Aber ein anderes ist das Wort – das wohlfeile, abgenutzte und ungefähr über das Leben hinpfuschende Wort – und ein anderes die lebendige, ursprüngliche, ewig junge, ewig von Neuheit, Erstmaligkeit und Unvergleichlichkeit glänzende Tat” (Mann 1973: 37, my translation).

96

Gunther Martens

rhetorical approaches to unreliability and narration in general.80 Typically, American branches and terminologies of rhetorical narratology (Phelan, Rabinowitz, Kearns) have been primarily interested in a comprehensive account of “narrative as an interaction between an author and an audience through the medium of a text for some purpose” rather than in formal “linguistic patterns of the text”.81 In the Boothian tradition of rhetorical narratology, a lot of attention is devoted to textual aspects that can be interpreted as purposive expression of the author’s design and evaluation of the fictional world, such as the prefiguration of the narratee by means of a character or the homonymy between a character’s words and the title of the novel.82 According to the functional-structuralist model of the Tel Aviv school (Yacobi, Sternberg), the functional integration mechanism invokes “aesthetic, thematic and persuasive goals” of the work “as a guideline to making sense of its peculiarities”83, which may “reliably connote some purpose” other than signalling an individual narrator’s perspectival unreliability. Yacobi’s model strongly operates on the extra-textual levels of genetic and generic decisions, with due attention to intertextuality and paratextual elements such as prefaces, epigraphs84 and even chapter divisions85 as indicators of the author’s intentions and evaluations. In this model, the rhetorical repair-mechanism seems incompatible with the attribution of narratorial unreliability.86 Although Yacobi’s model has the benefit of highlighting the active nature of authorizing information, it sees different integration mechanisms at work behind the rhetorical and the (intratextual) narratorial mediation.87 The main divisive issue between the (admittedly very diverse) approaches to “rhetorical constraints” (Phelan) or the inference of purpose is the extent to which a text’s capacity to “guide” or profile narratees and addressees – with the resulting overjusti––––––––––––– 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Nünning (2005a). Phelan (2005: 500). Phelan/Martin (1999). Yacobi (1981: 117). Yacobi (2005: 116). Ibid.: 114. Ibid.: 112. “to hypothesize a fallible narrator is to assume the ironic mastery of a deliberate communicator behind the scenes. […] a fictive speaker’s reliability is determined […] in relation, concordant or conflictual, to the hypothesized norms and goals of the author” (Yacobi 2005: 112/121). For further positions concerning hypothesized author’s norms in relation to unreliability, see Schmid (2005: 174); Kindt/Müller (2006).


97

fications or gaps as key to unreliability – presupposes rather than elicits actual readers’ scripts or routines for “processing” or “repairing” those texts. Although this debate has reached the stage where some contenders argue that any attempt at comparison or synthesis leads to desertion88, I argue it is fruitful to foreground the specific stylistic performance of the narration, which not only enables attention to local rhetorical and stylistic infractions on reliability (including the reliability of narrative forms traditionally associated with authority), but also inevitably gives less weight to questions of inference of intention or of a reader’s cognitive desire for coherence. The recourse to the author’s intention may appear as a potential or even the ultimate referential check which might keep readers from applying a specific version of “common sense” in an overly relativist and ahistorical fashion; yet the presupposition of mastery and intentionality is neither productive nor necessary for the purposes of stylistic and rhetorical analysis, as even Genette recognizes.89 The scope of rhetorical narratology needs to be extended to include less straightforwardly deictic forms of rhetorical patterning as an additional index of the way in which narratorial agency is being shaped and mediated in texts. It is striking that, apart from some passing remarks, rhetorical narratologists are reluctant or even methodologically opposed to engage in the analysis of the more formal aspects of rhetorical meaning patterning (tropes like metaphor, metonymy and catachresis) and their interconnectedness. Rhetorical narratology needs to take into account how tropes acquire narrative function and may even negotiate a narration’s denominative power.90 The rhetorical approach presented here highlights the interaction between the readers’ expectations and the way in which texts anticipate or thwart these expectations. That it can be useful to strengthen the attention to rhetorical aspects of unreliability (i.e. the actual stylistic performance of narration) can finally be illustrated by means of the work of Thomas Brussig. Brussig’s Helden wie wir (1995) retells the events leading up to a pivotal moment in German history, the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The narration is in the hands of a wildly immature and ignorant I-narrator with an unresolved pubertal crisis. The narrator, who failed to write down his ––––––––––––– 88 89

90

Shen/Xu (2007: 55). “Figurativeness is thus never an objective property of discourse but always a phenomenon of reading and interpretation, even when the interpretation is in manifest conformity with the author's intentions” (Genette 1993: 118). See Martens/Biebuyck (2007).

98

Gunther Martens

own biography and is now giving an interview to an American journalist, claims that he has single-handedly caused the borders to open by exposing his penis to the flabbergasted border guards. This grotesque finale is the culmination of a personal biographical round-up which takes the form of a therapeutic confession narrative. The development of this narrative, however, fails to bring the ‘telling I’ beyond the obsessions and limitations of the ‘experiencing I’: already the experiencing I is excessively concerned with how his actions will be represented by dominant media (preferably in capital letters), even during the events which he invariably perceives as heroic. The ‘telling I’ fundamentally fails to understand that he has been involved and complicit in an intricate mechanism of state supervision and dictatorial oppression: “I have never been able to grasp the scope of that which I do not know, but in moments like that I was given at least an inkling of it.”91 But at the same time his naiveté may also appeal to some higher kind of lucid understanding on the part of the reader: the limited understanding brings out the ludicrous idealism and idiosyncrasies of the whole system. Brussig’s humoristic portrayal of the GDR state apparatus has been blamed for banalizing the real dangers and violence of the system. Brussig’s novels and their filmic adaptations have been central in a wave of Ostalgie (nostalgia for East-Germany), which countered the hegemonic version of history by indulging in the oddities and idiosyncrasies of GDR everyday life as personal history. Thomas Brussig’s Leben bis Männer (2001) is a variation of this predicament. This dramatic monologue involuntarily characterizes a mediocre but eloquent football coach who made his career in the former GDR. The way in which he deplores the historical change reveals his unacknowledged but deeply-rooted ‘authoritarian disposition’. His involvement in the system is rendered through the lens of his personal obsessions as a trainer of young football players, who lost young talents both to girlfriends and political circumstances. The title itself is a short-hand notation of the phrase the speaker uses time and again to delimit his function and duty as a provincial and third-rate football coach on all levels: “children, boys, pupils, youths, juniors, through men”.92 The text does not lack the ––––––––––––– 91 92

“Ich habe das ganze Ausmaß dessen, was ich nicht weiß, nie erfahren, aber in solchen Momenten weht mich zumindest eine Ahnung an” (Brussig 1995: 143, my translation). “Kinder, Knaben, Schüler, Jugend, Junioren, bis Männer” (Brussig 2001: 26, 28, 79, my translation).


99

textual signals (linguistic habits, ticks and euphemisms) of unreliability, but the added parameter of a delineation of “accepted cultural schemata” would cause more problems: witness the debated issue whether the border patrols were to be personally blamed and punished for the shooting of people who tried to escape from the GDR. A discussion of the unreliability of this narrator in terms of “the reader’s value system” would then force us to engage in an endless debate about the historical responsibility and moral freedom of the individual in relation to the political system. This debate about the historical evaluation of a political reality might be interesting, but it is a typically retrospect and sublime discussion. In a similar vein, Solbach criticizes Nünning’s emphasis on extratextual readerly norms, arguing that these are no less difficult to arrive at than Chatman’s textual norms: “the proposal to take readers and their cultural norms as reference parameter entails historical problems. […] In the end, the only solution is to take the specific discursivity of the narrator as point of departure.”93 In this respect, it is indeed far more productive to look at the way in which the attempts of Brussig’s protagonist to persuade and legitimate with verbal means are undermined and counteracted by discourse markers that reveal through performative contradiction the failure to hide his latent racism and misogyny. Hence, the unreliability of this narrator does not primarily relate to aspects of his (ideological, social, psychological) embodiment as a character, but to the (in)felicity and excessive selflegitimations of his argumentative strategies. Beyond the ideological context, it is thus shown that a hegemonic phenomenon like football can easily start to act as a (metaphorical) yardstick for other domains of reality (political, moral decisions). Especially this interdiscursive capacity is explored throughout this monologue, with a lot of attention to verbal violence (ballistic metaphors) and sometimes with aphoristic quality: “Screaming is passionate thinking.”94 Of course we are all led to believe –––––––––––––

93

“der Vorschlag, die Leser und ihre kulturellen Normen als Bezugsgröße zu wählen, bringt historische Probleme mit sich. [...] Es bleibt letztlich nur der Weg, die spezifische Diskursivität des Erzählers selbst zum Ausgangspunkt zu machen” (Solbach 2002: 143, my translation). Solbach’s underlying concern that this emphasis – especially with reference to older texts such as Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1668) – may easily lead to relativism and ultimately complacent reading, seems to be partially addressed by Nünning’s recent reapproval of the implied author. 94 “Ich übrigens brülle nicht. Es sieht aus wie Brüllen, aber in Wirklichkeit ist es Denken, sehr leidenschaftliches Denken” (Brussig 2001: 9f.; my translation).

100

Gunther Martens

that football is not just a game, but also a war, a philosophy, etc. By inserting such conceptual metaphors into the intensely apologetic speech context, Brussig’s football coach minimalizes both the political and ideological context and his own authoritarian behaviour. This leads to nonsensical but seductive argumentative ploys like the suggestion that the Americans used the atomic bomb twice because their version of football does not abide by the ‘elegant’ and turn-based rules of European soccer.95 The text culminates in a ludicrous but seductive theory of football styles based on national stereotypes (the English “long pass” as colonial gesture etc.), leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the unreliability of this text resides primarily in its involuntary self-portrayal as narrator-persona or in its involuntary deconstruction of ludicrous, yet cunning apercus and rhetorical ploys.

7. Conclusion Taking into consideration rhetorical aspects clearly has its repercussions for the description of unreliability as well as of narrator profiles in general. Although some may ultimately wish to maintain the distinction between the more spectacular ‘surprise’ effect of homodiegetic unreliable narration and the more modest stylistic factors attenuating the performance of a heterodiegetic narrator’s authority, the redescription of unreliability in rhetorical terms allows to avoid the paradox besetting many existing approaches which study unreliability in terms of involuntary selfcharacterisation or necessary personalisation, namely their claim that any successful type of unreliable narration can be reinterpreted as the most reliable depiction of that disturbed character’s troubled mind or of a more general ontological state of affairs.96 The results of the present re-evaluation of the concepts of reliability and unreliability in relation to first- and third-person narration go beyond the mere recognition that there are no fully reliable narrators because “the very conventions of narration – selection, orderliness and relative brevity – conspire against the fullest knowledge”.97 The description of unreliability in rhetorical terms allows for a less normative approach to narrative overtness and may open up a less –––––––––––––

95 96 97

Brussig (2001: 21). Phelan, this volume, 16; Zerweck (2001: 163). Wall (1994: 39).


101

normative perspective on the ‘evolution’ (I would prefer to say: the functional history) of the development of narrative techniques. Instead of casting the history of narrative techniques as a gradual development from the “squeaky”98 mechanics of overt and necessarily reliable narration to the autonomous floating of troubled psyches and their postmodern ontological proliferation, much is to be gained by highlighting the varying realisations and performances of narrative forms. This may help to turn the attention towards the ways in which texts anticipate and prefigure potential addressees across the divide of world-creation and world-reflecting. The question whether the narrator under scrutiny is firmly embodied (or not) by means of psychological or social ontological properties to be inferred within a storyworld then becomes less central: the link with such embodiment (existence as character in a storyworld) may indeed be a “likely correlation”, but it is not an “imperative nor an inclusive linkage”.99 Hence approaching unreliability from the point of view of rhetorical narratology need not be restricted to tangible phenomena of reader and audience guidance (‘collusion’) underlying narrative irony. In this respect, a much wider range of rhetorically marked features and peculiarities (e.g. marked metalepsis, shifts in master tropes, and epithetic redundancies) in the discourse of even anonymous heterodiegetic narrators can result in an even more fatal undoing of that narrator’s authoritativeness.*

Works Cited Aczel, Richard 2005 “Voice,” in: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge): 633–636. Allrath, Gaby 2005 (En)Gendering Unreliable Narration. A Feminist-Narratological Theory and Analysis of Unreliability in Contemporary Women's Novels (Trier: WVT Verlag). Allrath, Gaby/Surkamp, Carola 2004 “Erzählerische Vermittlung, unzuverlässiges Erzählen, Multiperspektivität und Bewusstseinsdarstellung,” in Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies, eds. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler): 143–179.

––––––––––––– 98 99 *

Chatman (1978: 248). Yacobi (1981: 224). The author is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).

102

Gunther Martens

Barthes, Roland 1974 S/Z, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Bayard, Pierre 2001 Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery behind the Agatha Christie Mystery (New York: The New Press). Bethman, Brenda L. 2000 “My Characters Live Only Insofar as They Speak: Interview with Elfriede Jelinek,” in Women in German Yearbook 16: 61. Biebuyck, Benjamin/Martens, Gunther 2008 “Metonymia in memoriam. Die Figürlichkeit inszenierter Vergessens- und Erinnerungsdiskurse bei Grass und Jelinek,” in Literatur im Krebsgang. Totenbeschwörung als memoria in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1989, eds. Anke Gilleir & Arne De Winde (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi): 243-272. Broch, Hermann 1986 “Esch the Anarchist (1903),” in: The Sleepwalkers (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). Brussig, Thomas 1998 Helden wie wir (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer). 2001 Leben bis Männer (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer). Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). 1990 Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Cohn, Dorrit 1966 The Sleepwalkers. Elucidations of Hermann Broch’s trilogy (Paris & The Hague: Mouton). 1978 Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP). 1990 “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective,” Poetics Today 11.4: 775–804. 2000 “Discordant Narration,” in Style 34.2: 307–316. Culler, Jonathan 2004 “Omniscience,” in Narrative 12:1: 22–34. Fludernik, Monika 1993 The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: the Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge). 1999 “Defining (In)Sanity: The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and the Question of Unreliability,” in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 75–95. 2005 “Unreliability vs. Discordance. Kritische Betrachtungen zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzept der erzählerischen Unzuverlässigkeit,” in Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, eds. Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (München: edition text+kritik): 39–59. 2006 Einführung in die Erzähltheorie (Darmstadt: WBG).


103

Füger, Wilhelm 2004 “Limits of the Narrator’s Knowledge in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: A Contribution to a Theory of Negated Knowledge in Fiction” in Style 38.3: 278–289. Genette, Gérard 1988 Narrative discourse revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). 1993 Fiction and Diction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Grabienski, Olaf/Kühne, Bernd/Schönert, Jörg 2006 “Stimmen-Wirrwarr? Zur Relation von Erzählerin- und Figuren-Stimmen in Elfriede Jelineks Roman Gier,” in Stimme(n) im Text. Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen, eds. Michael Scheffel et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter): 196–232. Gymnich, Marion 1998 “Identitätsspaltung oder epistemologische Verunsicherung,” in Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, eds. Ansgar Nünning et al. (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier): 147–164. Helbig, Jörg 2005 ““Follow the White Rabbit!”: Signale erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im zeitgenössischen Spielfilm,” Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, eds. Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (München: edition text & kritik): pp. 131–146. Herman, Luc/Vervaeck, Bart 2005a “Focalization between classical and postclassical narratology,” in Pier, John, ed. The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology (Berlin: De Gruyter): 115–138. 2005b Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press). Jahn, Manfred 1998 “Package Deals, Exklusionen, Randzonen: das Phänomen der Unverläßlichkeit in den Erzählsituationen,” in Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, eds. Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT): 81–106. Kern, Stephen 1992 The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Harvard: Harvard UP). Kindt, Tom 2005 “L’art de violer le contrat. Une comparaison entre la métalepse et la nonfiabilité narrative,” in La métalepse. Entorses au pacte de la représentation. Ed. John Pier & Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS): 167–178. Kindt, Tom / Müller, Hans-Harald 2006 The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter). Lanser, Susan S. 1992 Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP).

Mann, Thomas 1954

Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag).

104

Gunther Martens

Martens, Gunther 2006a Beobachtungen der Moderne in Hermann Brochs Die Schlafwandler und Robert Musils Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Rhetorische und narratologische Aspekte von Interdiskursivität (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag). 2006b ““Aber wenn du von einem Berg springst, ist es wieder umgekehrt.” Zur Erzählerprofilierung in den Meta-Krimis von Wolf Haas,” in Modern Austrian Literature 39.1: 65–80. 2008 “Narrative Mediacy and Agency: The Case of Overt Narration,” in Point of View, Perspective, Focalization: Modeling Mediacy, eds. Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert and Peter Hühn (Berlin: de Gruyter). (= Narratologia; forthcoming) Martens, Gunther/Biebuyck, Benjamin 2007 “On the Narrative Function of Metonymy in Heine’s Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, Chapter XIV,” in Style 41.3: 342–365. Martinez, Matias/Scheffel, Michael 2000 Einführung in die Erzähltheorie (München: C.H. Beck). Nünning, Ansgar 1999 “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context. Eds. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr Verlag): 53–73. 2005a “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing): 89–107. 2005b “Reliability,” in: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge): 495–497. Palmer, Alan 2004 Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Phelan, James 2005a Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). 2005b “Rhetorical Approaches to Narrative,” in Routledge Dictionary of Narrative Theory. Edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. (London: Routledge): 500–504. Phelan, James and Martin, Mary Patricia 1999 “The Lessons of “Weymouth”: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives in Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State UP 1999): 88–109. Ryan, Marie Laure 1981 “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction,” in Poetics 10.6: 517–539. Schmid, Wolf 2005 Elemente der Narratologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). Schubert, Christoph 2005 “Fallible Focalization. Zur Linguistik der Sichtbehinderung im fiktionalen Text,” in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 55: 205–226.


105

Shen, Dan; Dejin Xu: 2007 “Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction,” in Poetics Today 28.1: 43–87. Solbach, Andreas 2002 “Grimmelshausens ‚Courasche’ als unzuverlässige Erzählerin,” in Simpliciana 24 (2002), 141–164. 2005 “Die Zuverlässigkeit der Unzuverlässigkeit. Zuverlässigkeit als Erzählziel,” in: Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film. Eds. Fabienne Liptay & Yvonne Wolf (München: edition text+kritik): 60–71. Wall, Kathleen 1994 “The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” Journal of Narrative Technique 24: 18–24. Yacobi, Tamar 1981 “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” in Poetics Today 2: 113– 126. 2000 “Interart Narrative: (Un)Reliability and Ekphrasis,” in Poetics Today 21.4: 711– 749. 2005 “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell): 108–123. Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicising Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35, 1: 151–178.

LIESBETH KORTHALS ALTES (University of Groningen)

Sincerity, Reliability and Other Ironies – Notes on Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 1. Introduction “People, friends, please: TRUST YOUR EYES, TRUST YOUR EARS, TRUST YOUR ART!”1 Such an exhortation, in the midst of the preface to Dave Eggers’ first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is typical of the author’s tone. Not surprisingly, his work has been understood by many critics (though not all) as belonging to a more general current in American literature, which rejects post-modern irony in favour of emotionality, sharing and truthful commitment. Throughout his novel, Eggers and his narrator/alter ego Dave seem to rally their readers to an ethics of sincerity and authenticity. Whatever critics may think, the author claims his writing is not ironic, although it shows a lot of hyperbolic selfrelativisation and “formal fun”2 in metafictional games. Both the author and the narrator insist on the importance of an emotional “lattice”3 and communion to be achieved with friends, including readers. But how reliable are the voices of both the author and the narrator, and how sincere is this ethics of sincerity and pathos? Can we know? Does it matter? In this paper, I will explore the notion of sincerity, which functions as one of the (extra-literary) norms to assess a narrator’s reliability. Like reliability, sincerity seems to belong to a personalising kind of reading, which imagines ‘characters’ on the basis of textual ‘voice’, and which definitely has its limitations. Three perspectives will be highlighted here. First, I will discuss some non-literary models, which may play a role in the encoding and decoding of (in)sincerity in literature. These models are ––––––––––––– 1 2 3

Eggers (2000: 34). Ibid.: 33. Ibid.: 221.

108

Liesbeth Korthals Altes

changing over time, and within one culture there may be competing models of the human subject, of the adequacy of language to reality and to the speaker’s intention, which all have their bearing on the value attributed to sincerity. Each has its own conventional forms of expression or semiotics, and its own ethics of communication; each sets it off in specific ways to one or more of its opposites (i.e. prudence, irony, dissimulation or lying). Even a semiotics for which sincerity is ultimately expressed and guaranteed by natural – bodily – signs or indexes, will appear to be conventional and culturally defined. These examples will hopefully trigger further and more systematic research into this connection between changing cultural models and narrative devices, thus reinforcing historical awareness in narratology.4 Secondly, I will briefly discuss some characteristics of sincerity in literary representation and communication. Literature is indeed a tricky place to search for sincerity or reliability. It is often unclear whose voice is speaking, and with whom it is communicating. This is especially challenging when the reader, on the basis of the written words of a text, constructs in his mind images and voices of characters who address each other, possibly narrated by a narrator, and ultimately brought on stage by an author. Which signs express whose truthful intentions? The resulting indetermination has been considered a flaw, by Austin for instance, for whom literature is an infelicitous speech act. Or is the desire for sincerity to be judged, as it is by Lionel Trilling, as “regressive and retrospective, looking back to the selfhood of a past time, standing between the self and the disintegration which is essential if it is to develop its true, its entire, freedom”?5 Following Derrida and Hillis Miller, I will argue that far from being an “infelicitous” speech act, literature exposes the complex rhetoricity and intensive hermeneutic work normally required in communication, a fortiori with respect to voice phenomena such as (in)sincerity and (un)reliability. Thirdly, Eggers’ book will be briefly discussed, as it offers a good case for reflection on how textual clues, as well as cultural models and contexts, may trigger readings in terms of sincerity and/or irony.

––––––––––––– 4 5

See Bruno Zerweck (2001: 158f.) who argues for a historical approach of a notion such as unreliability. Trilling (1972: 47).

Sincerity, Reliability and Other Ironies

109

2. An Old Debate Sincerity has been defined as the adequation of speech or writing to one’s intention and character, to one’s inner self and one’s deeds. Although it is a necessary element of truth-telling6, it does not guarantee a truth claim – as reliability would – but rather the speaker’s commitment to his/her ‘saying’ and ‘said’, and to the values and meanings implied. According to Williams, “Sincerity consists in a disposition to make sure that one’s assertion expresses what one actually believes.”7 In a well-known essay on Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling similarly defined it as the “congruence between avowal and actual feeling”.8 The notion has a double ethical dimension: a communicative relation between one’s speech and ‘the Other’ with whom one interacts, and that between speech and ‘the Self’. Cultures differ, however, in the value they assign to this character trait and communication attitude. Not surprisingly, sincerity has been cultivated as an ideal in many religious, philosophical or pedagogical traditions of moral self-fashioning. Yet, since sincerity can also strongly increase a speaker’s vulnerability and obnoxiousness – to speak one’s mind is often not appreciated socially – many cultures restrict its use in public exchange. Education and all sorts of trainings in codes of conduct and professional skills entail control over sincerity, in order to avoid the untimely betrayal of one’s thoughts and emotions through bodily and verbal expression, or the unstrategic hurting of other people’s feelings. As I have already mentioned, sincerity can be set in opposition to various other notions, ranging from prudence and irony to dissimulation or lying. In fact, its relation to these other concepts is not necessarily one of clear opposition – as we will see, prudence or irony can be constructed as its contrary, but also as a complex form of sincerity. However, tension or even conflict between the ideal of sincerity and transparent communication on the one hand, and ideals of self-possession – if not self-masking – and indirect communication on the other, seems to pop up under various guises at regular intervals in cultural history. As a disposition towards one’s self and towards communication, sincerity is often invested with ––––––––––––– 6 7 8

Williams (2002). Ibid.: 96. Trilling (1972: 2).

110


specific values. Associated in turn with rationality, or with innocence, transparency, naivety (used in a positive sense), it became a crucial virtue, set off as the right stance against the depraved use of language defined by rhetoric, irony, and dissimulation. Conversely, it has been rejected as inefficient, illusory, and naive in political and social interaction. Although this appears to be a systematic opposition, in every historical period and cultural setting, sincerity has functioned in very specific semantic and axiological associations, the distinction of which requires more thorough research, involving conceptions of Self, and of language in relation to Self, the Other and the world. In the following, I will only point out a couple of significant positions, which still seem relevant today. In ancient rhetoric, sincerity already elicited specific interest, though not under that name. In the three pisteis or means of persuasion distinguished by Aristotle and Cicero, ethos, pathos and logos, attention is called to aspects of communication that come close to what speech act theory nowadays subsumes under sincerity. Whereas logos comprises rational argumentation, and pathos the appeal to emotions, ethos encompasses for Aristotle “three things making the orator himself trustworthy […]. These are good sense, goodness and goodwill [towards the audience]”. Speakers are wrong if out of “wickedness they do not say what they think”.9 Sincerity belongs to ethos, as it contributes in an important way to the favourable impression of trustworthiness, but also to pathos, as it adds to the impression that the expressed emotions are genuine. The projected image of the character of the speaker (if trustworthy) is considered a strong persuader. In turn, the display of trustworthiness is expected to trigger in one’s interlocutor the desire to answer in a similar way.10 Ethos involves both moral and intellectual qualities, and tends to be generalised into the more general disposition of a person, which allows its translation as ‘character’. For Aristotle, it is the combination of an ethos of trustworthiness and logos that insures persuasiveness. In that respect, Jacob Wisse argues that Aristoteles’ is a “rational ethos”, while Cicero advocates an “ethos of sympathy”11, stressing the necessity of an emo–––––––––––––

9

10

11

Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2, 1, 5–7: 78a6–20. It would be interesting to compare rituals of mutual reassurance among humans to the rituals of approach and communication among apes; see for instance Frans de Waal, whose ethological work on apes brings out the Machiavellian versus the Rousseauistic tendencies in respectively chimpanzees and bonobo’s (de Waal 1982, 1996). Wisse (1989: 32–34, 234f.).


111

tional appeal. This leads to a discussion in De Oratore about whether emotions expressed by the orator should be truly experienced and, thus, sincere in order to be effective. This debate has had a long history, among others in the theory of acting (it was labelled much later as ‘le paradoxe du comédien’ after Diderot’s 1773 work). Cicero insists on the importance for the speaker to actually experience the displayed emotions, as it will allow him to convey them better. The orator should ‘inflame’ himself through his own words, just like an actor. This does not mean that the expressed emotions are in fact sincere, in the sense of corresponding to one’s general ethos, but that they are sincerely meant at that moment. Contrary to some scholars who interpret Cicero’s stance as an ethos of sincerity, Wisse shows that Cicero very much insists on the ‘art’ an orator needs to bring out emotions, and that if one does not feel them veritably, they should be feigned.12 The discussion of the role of sincerity in persuasion draws the attention to the intricate relation between sincerity as nature or character (i.e. the expression of an ‘inside’) or as an art or even artifice (i.e. addressed to an outside), between ethics and rhetoric. In the Renaissance, as John Martin shows, two notions play a crucial role in the formation of an “increased sense of subjectivity and individualism”, those of sincerity and of “prudence”.13 The latter was clearly important in a world where the court was central and theatricality reigned. Selffashioning included among the virtues “prudent accommodation” – which goes back to Aristotle’s phronesis – “honest dissimulation” and even deception.14 Sincerity was considered to be better kept to the private realm, especially concerning political and religious matters. The force of dissimulation, from a rhetorical and interactional perspective, is clear, as is argued in the Trattato della prudenza (1537–38), which was composed by the Sienese nobleman and evangelical Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini, and which is quoted by Martin: “to project an impressive image of himself, training himself to be all things to all men, while at the same time preserving his own inner freedom and remaining detached from the world in spite of his dealings with it”.15 The capacity to cultivate a certain ambiguity or ––––––––––––– 12 13

14 15

Ibid.: 195–198, 221, 261–262. Martin (1997: 1312). In this very rich study, Martin pursues and corrects New Historicist analyses of the construction of individualism in the Renaissance, and takes issue with Burckhardt’s famous study The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. Ibid.: 1314. Ibid.: 1324.

112


mystery about one’s beliefs and judgements in daily interactions was – and still is – considered an important social skill for those who want to achieve a specific goal, for which persuasion of others is required.16 Machiavelli famously enlarged such prudence to encompass outright insincerity and lie, crucial social and political skills: “one must know how to disguise his nature well, and how to be a fine liar and hypocrite”.17 In this perspective, the ultimate goal justifies the immorality of the means. It appears, however, that the non-congruence between “avowal and actual feeling”18, or between inner self and outward self does not always lead to clear-cut dichotomies (as is the case with Machiavelli), with sincerity on the one hand, and insincerity on the other. Conceptions of Self and of communication can very well accommodate a certain lack of sincerity, and for instance defend the (lucid) usage of masking or irony, without automatically advocating insincerity.19 Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis in “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture” of the construction of the individual in Hobbes is highly interesting in this respect: in Hobbes, the ‘natural person’ originates in the ‘artificial person’, the mask, the character on stage […]. There is no layer deeper, more authentic, than theatrical selfrepresentation. This conception of the self does not deny the importance of the body […] but it does not anchor personal identity in an inalienable biological continuity. […] what distinguishes a ‘natural’ person from an ‘artificial’ person is that the former is considered to own his words and actions. […] A great mask allows one to own as 20 one’s own face another mask.

This imagery of surface and exteriority – meant to protect an inner self – was challenged by images of the outward expression of an inner self. This counter-movement occurred under the influence of religious and ethical changes from the 15th century on, when an ethics of individualism ––––––––––––– 16

17 18 19

20

There is an interesting parallel to this debate in political and management theory: should politicians and managers rely on openness and sincerity (mostly as a rhetorical effect rather than as a nature), or work hard on becoming ‘a rat’ (Joep Schrijvers’ Hoe word ik een rat? – How do I become a rat – was the best sold self-help book on management in Holland in 2002). See also on the related issue of trust in politics: Ankersmit/te Velde (2004). Quoted in Martin (1997: 1324). Trilling (1972). To jump to narratology: this makes the reliance on clues to unreliability of the ‘noncontradiction’ type stand out as corresponding to quite a limited conception of self, problematised much earlier than in our (post-)post-modern age. Quoted in Martin (1997: 1317).


113

emerged in which sincerity was explicitly a key notion, and emphasis was placed on the actual expression of feeling and of one’s inner self.21 It culminated in the Protestant tradition of Calvin and Luther, who elevated sincerity to a defining virtue and “gave a new legitimacy to the expression of one’s emotions”.22 Calvin’s emblem, Martin reminds us, was a hand-held heart offered to his readers and to God, with the inscription reading: Prompte et cincere.23 The ideal, as exemplified in the Psalms, was to “set open [one’s] whole heart as it is”. “Deceitful persons”, on the other hand, “keep back a part of their meaning to themselves and cover it with the varnish of dissimulation, so that no certainty can be gathered from their talk. Therefore must our talk be sincere, that it may be the very image of an upright mind.”24 These protestant values of sincerity and transparency were later adopted by the French Revolutionaries, with Rousseau as a famous intermediary. Dissimulation was associated with the practices at the royal court, which relied on appearances, and on the disciplined and selfconscious use of the body as a mask. The Republicans, consequently, valued instead the unmediated expression of the heart above all other personal qualities. Transparency was the perfect fit between public and private; transparency was a body that told no lies and kept no secrets. It was the definition of virtue, and as such it was imagined to 25 be critical to the future of the republic.

It is well known how, in their turn, the poets and philosophers of Early German Romanticism elevated irony – as a rhetorical figure and as an existential attitude – to the artistic expression of a Self that is conscious of its divided nature, a heritage assumed in different ways in our times by Modernism and Postmodernism.26 Finally, that kind of pervasive irony, as –––––––––––––

21

22 23 24 25 26

Before the Renaissance, ‘sincere’ referred to an unadulterated substance, Trilling reminds us, arguing that the 16th century witnessed the ‘invention of sincerity’, which became a moral category responding to a growing moral and social imperative to make one’s feelings and convictions known (Trilling 1972). Martin (1997: 1330). Ibid.: 1327. Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms (1571), quoted in Martin (1997: 1331). Hunt (1992: 96–97). Witness, for instance, Paul de Man: “The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity” (De Man 1983: 214).

114


an existential attitude conveyed by specific stylistic devices, would be severely criticised as ‘nihilistic’ by Hegel and, later, by other, contemporary crusaders against irony, among whom Jedediah Purdy.27 Let me conclude this – admittedly very rough – historical sketch with some remarks on the treatment of sincerity in speech act theory, and the subsequent critique it elicited from a deconstructive perspective. Within the theory of language, this debate seems to reproduce the older debate I have just mentioned. In speech act and communication theory, sincerity is considered as one of the basic conditions for meaningful human communication. It entails the projection of the image of a trustworthy speaker, suggesting a basis for reciprocity. For performative speech acts such as a marriage ceremony or in the law, Austin noted that sincerity is a necessary condition. These are binding performances: a person has to stand for his word, and any deviation from this rule is sanctioned.28 For Searle, sincerity is one of the four “felicity conditions” of an utterance.29 Habermas similarly distinguishes three validity claims an utterance must meet for rational communication to be possible: (a) what the speaker says is true, (b) the speech act is right with respect to the existing normative context, and (c) the manifest intention of the speaker is meant as it is expressed, which amounts to “truthfulness or sincerity for the manifestation of subjective experiences”.30 Although Habermas is acutely aware that “stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the exception in the communicative practice of everyday life”, this does not diminish the importance of such a conception of rational exchange, on the contrary.31 Despite its utopian character, Habermas strongly defends such a ‘discourse ethics’, in which –––––––––––––

27

28 29 30 31

Very similar formulations can be found in Flaubert, Baudelaire or Laforgue. See for instance Hamon (1996). For a contemporary defense of irony as a fundamental attitude required for pluriform democracy, see Rorty (1989). Purdy’s For common things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today (1999), which received international attention, describes the devastating effect of the absence of sincerity in American society, as it has fallen prey to irony. L’histoire se répète… Austin (1962). Searle (1969). Habermas (1996: 126). See Habermas (1996: 118–131). See also from a cognitivist narratological point of view Nünning (1999: 63), who distinguishes several norms which go into the “presuppositional framework” of the narratological notion of reliability (“common sense”, “normal psychological behaviour”, “agreed-upon moral and ethical standards”, “linguistic norms” – among which sincerity would feature.


115

understanding is cooperatively reached, as an indispensable condition for democracy. The assumptions underlying speech act theory and communication theory have come under severe attack, especially from the side of a deconstructivist conception of language, as could be expected. Derrida’s scathing polemics with Searle – somewhat nastily renamed “SARL” – in Limited Inc. is a famous case in point. Hillis Miller32 gives a lively analysis, first, of how Austin ‘bogs down’ in How to do things with words, and secondly, of Derrida’s quarrel with Searle (or rather, with Derrida’s reaction on Searle’s quarrel with him). Following Derrida, Hillis Miller argues that speech act theory is based on several unwarranted assumptions: that there is an autonomous and sincere self, which is a necessary condition for speech acts to be “felicitous”33; that the regular case of language use consists of performative speech acts meeting the conditions of validity, among which sincerity; and that literature, as a non-sincere kind of speech act, is parasitic with respect to this normal language use. Rather than a stable ‘pact’, the assessment of the sincerity of a speaker in the practice of communication is, in Hillis Miller’s words, a leap of faith which involves an unavoidable interpretive risk. However, Hillis Miller and Derrida do not simply deride or discard sincerity as a condition for a viable contrat social; they merely expose it as a fragile convention.34 From this perspective, irony and unreliable narrators may appear the more sincere mode of expression: they highlight the risks of communication and the hermeneutic work that are in fact the norm. A ‘semiotics’ of sincerity would thus have to account for competing models, which function in specific cultural contexts and have different values attached to them. Such a semiotics would have to involve a more precise study of the signs that are conventionally used to signal sincerity –

––––––––––––– 32 33 34

Hillis Miller (2002). Ibid.: 32. Derrida, pace Searle, is in fact the last to simply reject the analyses of speech act theory: “I am convinced that speech act theory is fundamentally and in its most fecund, most rigorous and most interesting aspects […] a theory of right or law, of convention, of political ethics or of politics as ethics. It describes […] the pure conditions of an ethical-political discourse insofar as this discourse involves the relation of intentionality to conventionality or to rules” (Derrida 1988: 96–97).

116


or, for that matter, irony, which will be discussed in the next paragraph).35 Among these signs, the ones that are expressed by the body feature prominently. As an attitude towards one’s own saying, sincerity entails the idea that communicative expression is indexical for a lived truth. This truth is not just expressed by words, but confirmed by the body’s expression. The signs conveyed by the body are indeed often experienced as indexical (in the Peircean sense of signs functioning on the basis of a contiguity relation with their object), natural and true, because they stem directly from an impulse, involving no rhetoric and hence no deceit. Theories that insist on the immediacy of bodily expression tend to share a distrust of language – which always runs the risk of misunderstanding, or misleading – and a dream of direct and transparent exchange between true interiorities. It is not surprising that bodily aspects of enunciation – such as blushes, stammering, intonation, searching for words, halted syntax and so on – tend to be interpreted as symptoms of the sincere expression of an inner self, or of a feeling which lies beyond words. As a consequence, liedetectors concentrate on bodily symptoms, because insincerity is equally supposed to be expressed by the body. Written language that wants to convey an impression of sincerity often relies on the linguistic expression or suggestion of such bodily enunciation marks. However, the bodily and linguistic symptoms of truthfulness can be detached from their authentic indexical function, and can used as devices to suggest sincerity. The clues for insincerity are not really easy to distinguish from those for sincerity, seeing that the natural sign appears just as rhetorical as any other conventional sign, in need of hermeneutic work on intentions.

3. Sincerity and Literature Sincerity and irony are certainly a hot issue in contemporary culture and its self-understanding. Literature is especially relevant in this reflection, as it thematises and interrogates attitudes towards language in its social and ethical functioning which are considered fundamental in a specific culture. ––––––––––––– 35

See also the reflection on a “rhetoric of sincerity” by Joan Livingston-Webber (1994), who analyses linguistic/stylistic devices such as dialect, orality and “first impulse speech” markers, which students tend to receive as ‘authentic’ and ‘sincere’, whereas “trained academics tend to find this kind of authenticity marker suspect and seem to prefer irony (especially about the self) as a marker of sincerity or authenticity”.


117

It can do so through plot, theme and characters, but, perhaps more interestingly, also by performing them in its own use of language. However, to talk about sincerity or reliability with respect to language use in literature is far from evident, despite the bulk of scholarly work that has been done on the related issues of unreliability and irony. Like the notion of voice, sincerity and reliability seem to belong to a psychological and moral vocabulary, and to a reading which ‘figuralises’ the words of a text as characterising a human person, which calls for a few critical remarks. 3.1. On Voices and Figuralisation ‘Voice’ is a notion on which much narratological work has been done, but which has also been a favourite target of poststructuralist critiques.36 An important attempt to renew the narratological (mainly Genettean) description of voice from a cognitivist and linguistic perspective comes from Monika Fludernik, who argues: Narrative discourse […] invites a reading in terms of mimetic representation, and it is for this reason alone that certain stylistic textual effects are immediately recuperated or naturalised in terms of verisimilar ‘voice’, ‘characters’, perceptions and conscious37 ness.

In a true cognitivist fashion, she insists that voice is constructed by the reader, “derived from implication and illocution” from textual clues, such as deictic markers and expressive features of discourse.38 However, the case for the linguistic ‘empirical’ basis for the retrieval of voice in texts must not be overstated, as Fludernik herself recognises. Textual elements are interpreted by a reader as signs of a ‘voice’ on the basis of a more general pre-understanding, which is confirmed or corrected by further reading. Where do these expectations come from? I would argue that they originate from all sorts of textual information which readers can interpret as an expression of a character’s ethos. For example, a character’s values, preferences, and affective, cognitive and social habits can all be inferred from textual elements such as language use, behaviour and action. Actually, the reader’s expectations are shaped by all means of direct and indirect characterisation, which will be interpreted within the ––––––––––––– 36 37 38

See Blödorn (2006); Gibson (1996) and Korthals Altes (2006). Fludernik (1993: 347, 452f.). Ibid.: 88.

118


frame of literary and more general cultural models for selves, as well as real-world knowledge and experience. They can also be influenced – whether justified from a ‘theoretical’ point of view or not – by the extratextual ethos of the author, projected upon the voice of a narrator or of a central character. Two points have to be made here, one about figuralisation, the other about clues for voices and, more specifically, for the sincerity or reliability of these voices. In the construction of ‘voice’ in literature, the real-life verisimilitude that is frequently invoked by narratologists (including Fludernik) is a tricky yard-stick, as real-life ideas about Selves have changed significantly over time. In the recent past only, psycho-analysis, philosophy, or Marxist-inspired theories of sociolects weaving into individual speech have led to conceptions of human discourse and subjectivity that discard the coherence, unity and ‘distinctness’ of the human person and his or her voice, which some narratologists seem to hold as a model. Besides, literature, and not only of the modernist and post-modern kind, often stages precisely the complexity and non-consistency of selves. Moreover – and this has been a main point of criticism from a poststructuralist perspective – not all narratives stage such personalised ‘voices’, or gain to be read as such. This is certainly recognised by Fludernik, for instance when, with reference to Ann Banfield, she discusses the possibility of narrative with an “empty center”. Yet, in such cases, she argues, readers do what they can to naturalise away such “anomalies”.39 One could contend, instead, that readers may enjoy complex games in which traditional expectations about selves get frustrated, or that they seek in the experience of reading the dispossession and dissemination of selves and voices. They may be content to perceive mere ‘subjectivity-effects’, slots which offer the experience of perceptions, emotions, opinions or value-judgments, the textual experiencer of which remains indeterminate, either because there are several candidates at the same time, as in dual voice (or in characters without distinct contours, as occur in Sarraute’s novels), or because there is no distinct character. Discourse produces affective and axiological vectors, which can, but need not, coalesce into a distinct voice. Narratology must allow for these various conventions of reading and inscribing subjectivity into discourse. Readers can be very inventive in finding clues to construct a voice, and from there, a persona, just as they can refrain from ––––––––––––– 39

Fludernik (1993).


119

doing so, and construct alternative frames to make sense of their reading experience.40 Of course, the question then is whether reading in terms of sincerity, irony, reliability still holds. However, before this issue is addressed, a remark on clues is in place. Narratologists have often tried to assess the reliability of voices: their sincerity, their limitation in knowledge, their irony etc. In this process, textual clues are deemed to play an important role. Unreliability, for instance, and specifically irony, have been described as triggered by textual incongruities of various kinds that readers stumble upon and interpret as clues, which induce them into searching for plausible interpretations.41 If one focuses on sincerity, however, it has to be noted that many of the signals listed for unreliability – especially those foregrounding the subjectivity of the speaker – might just as well be interpreted as stressing a narrator’s or a speaker’s sincerity. This holds especially true for the signals which Greta Olson identifies as (8) “an accumulation of remarks relating to the self as well as linguistic signals denoting expressiveness and subjectivity”; (9) “an accumulation of direct addresses to the reader and conscious attempts to direct the reader’s sympathy”; (10) “syntactic signals denoting the narrator’s high level of emotional involvement, including exclamations, ellipses, repetitions, etc.”, and (11) “explicit, self-referential, metanarrative discussions of the narrator’s believability”. 42 Moreover, stylistically neutral words or sentences can become expressive or evaluative to a reader on the basis of his expectations about an enunciator’s more general ethos, or of his knowledge of the context. So, to put forward textual clues as triggering a reading in terms of either sincerity/reliability or insincerity/unreliability goes too far. In fact, it seems to work rather with a loop – or in traditional terms, according to the hermeneutic circle. Textual elements serve as clues on the basis of which readers construct and adapt hypotheses about the ethos of a fictional character or voice, but readers also pick textual elements as clues on the basis of such hypotheses, into which have gone all kinds of textual information, personal values and extra-textual knowledge – of literary conventions and –––––––––––––

40

41 42

See also Tamar Yacobi, who convincingly argued that readers can interpret incongruities in texts on the basis of various kinds of hypotheses, and a (certain kind of) psychological reading is just one of them (Yacobi 1981; 2001). See for instance Nünning (1999), and Olson (2003: 97–98) who nicely lists fourteen kinds of signals for unreliable narration. Olson (2003: 97–98).

120


aesthetic norms, of common psychology, etc. The same clues can often be used for very different demonstrations, for instance to advance sincerity or irony. 3.2. Sincerity versus Irony The questions about voice raised above become quite acute when one deals with the attribution of irony versus sincerity to voices in literary texts. In such a case, any approach of voice as a linguistic manifestation of subjectivity stumbles upon language’s capacity to blur the equation of ‘one man, one voice’. Indeed, as Fludernik observes, in the case of dual voice, free indirect discourse and irony, deictic elements and evaluative expressive markers are “no longer a reliable tool of interpretation” leading to one distinct voice or speaker position.43 Instead, the reader has to infer to whom the evoked perspective can be attributed. This means in fact that such markers never are sufficient, since any utterance can hold irony if the right frame is constructed around it.44 Fludernik agrees with Banfield that irony is not in fact a purely linguistic phenomenon but can [only] be explained as the result of interpretive work brought to bear on the juxtaposition between the wordings of the text and the (by implication incompatible) cultural or textual norms of the text as constructed by the 45 reader or implied as values shared by the reader and the realistic textual worl”.

As Booth did in A Rhetoric of Irony, she then relies on “our moral conventions as well as the stylistic conventions and the interpretive norms which one constructs for the text as a whole” to “determine the ironical reading”.46 I think she is right in highlighting, on the strictly linguistic level, the importance of such textual and extra-literary frames, but this should be extended to all constructions of the ethos of characters and voices in texts, not only to the case of irony. Furthermore, her recourse to extra-literary norms and knowledge seems quite unreflected. As Andrew Gibson rightly observes, “But who is the ‘we’ deemed to share a set of ‘moral convictions’? Fludernik is treating specific hermeneutic decisions –––––––––––––

43 44 45 46

Fludernik (1993: 228). This is also the gist of Stanley Fish’s rejection of Booth’s idea of ‘stable irony’ in “Short people got no reason to live: Reading irony” (1989). Banfield (1983: 440). Fludernik (1993: 351).


121

as objectively valid universals.”47 I don’t think we should want to do without the hermeneutic dimension in assessing voices and their sincere or ironic stance, quite the contrary. Yet, much could be gained from an approach which explicitly takes into account the various cultural models of Self and communication in the interpretation of literary works. As for the question whether a reading in terms of sincerity or irony always implies a figuralising reading, in light of poststructuralist criticism, any personalising reading of voice seems obsolete.48 In fact, I would argue that the absence or indetermination of a distinct origin of a textual utterance does not eliminate the need for the assessment of implied meanings and value positions. If one dismisses the notions of voice, or of subject positions altogether, then one is unable to establish a phenomenon such as irony or, a fortiori, sincerity. In both cases, what the reader foregrounds is something like the value of the implied values, a perspectivation of the ‘said’ by the ‘saying’ (i.e. in an utterance considered sincere, a persuasive affective and moral commitment is attached to the said; in an utterance suspected to be ironic, a distance is hypothesised between the saying and the axiological and argumentative implications of the said). This approach allows one to distinguish irony or sincerity effects even in (post)modernist texts with blurred voices and “absent characters”. Actually, works like Beckett’s or Sarraute’s frequently stage voices – however anonymous, indeterminable and shifty – that manage to give readers the impression of being ironical or, instead, sincere. In any case, the reader himself is directly challenged: where do I stand in deciding whether to take this utterance as sincere or ironic? Sincerity, just like irony and other forms of unreliability, is the result of a complex hermeneutic calculus, which can have quite different outcomes with different readers.

–––––––––––––

47 48

Gibson (1996: 150). Research in linguistic pragmatics and rhetoric argues that to become ironic, an utterance must contain or imply a value judgement, and a contrasting value position from which the other is ‘judged’ (Berrendonner 1981, Kaufer 1982). This happens, as Sperber and Wilson (1981) have argued, when an utterance is perceived in its context as if set in quotes (‘mentioned’ instead of used), as the echo of an utterance or a thought of which the speaker wants to stress the inadequacy. The origin of the echo can be a precise target, or more generally, the doxa, but the victim position stands open for anyone who would adhere to the evaluation expressed, including the utterer or the reader himself.

122


4. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Heartfelt Sentiment in a Post-ironic Age? Dave Eggers belongs to a young generation of American writers who defend the value of lived experience and shared emotions against fashionable cynicism and post-modern ironic relativisation.49 As a writer, he engages in various activities, besides writing, which have in common some form of social commitment He has published Voice of Witness, a series of oral history-based books illuminating human rights crises around the world. Next to that, he has set up the project 826 Valencia, “a non-profit organisation to support young people between 8 and 18 by developing their writing skills”, which has been extended to several American cities. He is also responsible for the publication of The Future Dictionary of America, which aims to raise money for progressive projects, against G.W. Bush. Finally, he is in charge of the internet review McSweeney’s Quarterly and the publishing house of the same name, which makes books and articles available without the intermediary of commercial publishers. On the basis of such information about his personal life and his professional and social activities, the reader may shape an image of the author’s extra-textual ethos as ‘sincerely committed’ to social cohesion, which can have an impact on his appreciation and interpretation of Eggers’ work. Especially in cases of ambiguity, some readers tend to rely on such a writer’s ethos in order to disambiguate his work. Eggers’ first big work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), tells the reader in some five hundred pages (including more than eighty pages of playful peritext, such as prefaces, acknowledgements and so on), how an adolescent loses both his parents and becomes responsible for the education of his younger brother. The anxieties and adventures of this too-young surrogate father, on the brink of adult life, are evoked with humour and emotion. Writing, for Eggers, seems to stand under the imperative of ‘saying the real’, truth to lived experience. AHWSG (as the author himself abbreviates his title) claims to be a work of fiction, but at the –––––––––––––

49

See also Wallace (1997, 1996); Thorne/Blincoe (2000). In Eggers’ case, sincerity and irony go hand in hand, as Bob Wake has observed: “As contradictory as it may sound, Dave Eggers appears to have discovered a heretofore unknown strain of smart-ass irony that bonds tightly with sincerity, with vulnerability, and with honest human emotion. […] It’s a shocking assault on our hipper-than-thou Age of Smart-Ass Irony”. In fact, the notion of New Sincerity has been increasingly popular after 9/11.


123

same time most of its material is acknowledged as autobiographical, and the narrator seems to coincide with the author. Eggers calls it a memoir; critics frequently label it a ‘novel’, or ‘fiction’, perhaps due to the evident work on tone and the metafictional dimension. The autobiographical reading and the impression of sincerity are reinforced by devices suggesting non-literary communication and an anti-aesthetic stance, such as the colloquial speech in dialogues and the on-going monologue or rather address to the reader, the marked expression of subjectivity, the abundant use of pathos, the narrator’s honest self-criticism (which includes hyperbole, as in the title), and the expression of ‘first impulse speech’ (cf. infra).50 Moreover, in the epilogue, which contains a kind of poetical statement, two pages are enclosed in almost illegibly small characters. These pages are entitled Irony and its Malcontents and include a manifesto against the abhorred I(rony)-word. In a somewhat pedantic lesson on literary irony, Eggers insists that, unfortunately for critics, “there is almost no irony whatsoever” in his novel, though it has a lot of “formal fun”.51 Irony, in his view, is a despicable cultural phenomenon, which destroys all authenticity and real emotion. The author, instead, tries to establish a pact of trust between himself/his narrator and his reader. ‘Honestly’, whoever reads this novel, cannot but read it non-ironically – that is, sincerely. What is at stake is the courage to express oneself, despite the banality of one’s experience. Every existence “is worth documenting”; to write is to send a “messy fucking letter” to a reader one hopes to find sympathetic. The novel thus offers a low-threshold communication, which seems to echo the urge for self-exhibition that is pervasive in contemporary mediaculture: an ethics, and a rhetoric, of sincerity. Yet, does the reader have to take this expansive emotionality at face value, as a sincere expression of heart-felt emotions? Or should he interpret it as another kind of irony than the rejected smart-ass kind, as the ironic echo of the pathos and rhetoric of sincere self-exhibition that have become the rule in the media and in literature? There would be nothing new in a rejection of irony that is ironical itself. In her stimulating work on irony, Linda Hutcheon stresses that postmodern irony keeps open the ––––––––––––– 50

51

In an apparent desire to overcome the indirectness attributed to literary communication, the author urges his readers in preface and postface to get in touch with him: put notes in the boot of his car, send him emails, and so on – a glance on his web-site confirms that there is a lot of emotional exchange going on between the author and his audience. Eggers (2000: 33).

124


implied alternative positions, thus offering a double-edged irony, also practiced by Flaubert or Baudelaire. But on the basis of what clues, and according to what models and frames, would a reader want to conclude that the book is indeed a plea for sincerity and communion, or rather an ironic staging of such a longing? Interestingly, much of Eggers’ public appears to take his work as sincere, perhaps because they are grateful for this case for real feeling instead of high-brow distancing, or because they are reacting to the display of emotionality which indeed is invasive. To introduce a hint of irony in this display of sincerity does actually transform the meaning of the text. As Hutcheon observed, it is up to the reader to decide, as he or she ultimately is the ironist! So after the clues for sincerity that are briefly mentioned above, let me now focus on the clues for an ironical reading. One of the textual clues for an ironic reading could be the playfulness of the text, which exhibits itself in a theatrical way and shows a great deal of meta-textual awareness. For example, a dramatic technicolour curtain frames the cover of the paperback edition, on which the hyperbolic title also features. In the second edition, the plethoric prefaces are joined by an epilogue that requires – literally and symbolically – turning the book around, just as irony invites turning around the evaluation of what is being said. Moreover, quite a conspicuous signal is the apparent incompatibility between, on the one hand, the diatribe against irony and the almost overthe-top claims to the right to feeling or even sentimentality, and on the other hand, the almost provocative reference to Swift in the heart of the argument against irony, hyperbolic self-exhibition, and the thematisation of (in)authentic self-presentation on a reality TV show. In the middle of the novel, indeed, there is a long section in which the narrator describes how madly he wanted to feature in a reality TV show. Now, such a show precisely markets the sincere display of feeling, as that is what the public buys. In the interview in which he defends his candidacy, Dave, the advocate of trust, asks the presenter how she wants him: as a pitiful orphan, an average American, a freak, or a failed writer. However intimate the details, however outrageous the exhibitionism, his inner self remains unscathed, he claims: “These things, details, stories […] are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see”52, suggesting that the snake lives on elsewhere, under a fresh skin. Sincerity, –––––––––––––

52

Ibid.: 215.


125

then, may be no more than such a snake’s skin – a mask that can be dropped – and trustworthiness may be reduced to a cleverly crafted effect. What does this suggest about the proclaimed ideal of immediate and sincere communication? This incongruity may invite the reader’s suspicion, just as the promise of a “transfiguration of the commonplace”, which according to the narrator Dave can be achieved by writing. He tells the TV lady that writing makes emotion circulate, and offers it for universal sharing: I own none of it. It is everyone’s. It is shareware. [...] I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I do not claim exclusivity. Have it. […] make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff. (216)

This “transfiguration” is more than welcome, as Dave is throughout the novel uncertain that he even has an identity. Through TV he would see himself reflected as a whole, his triviality “electrified”, and thus transcended. However, the reader may be justified in being suspicious about this pretense of authentification, as the novel has just expanded on the many guises Dave could summon up. In that respect, this novel can be read at least as well as an ironic mention of self-exhibitionist literature, thematising the impossibility of a sincere and authentic representation. Eggers’ book circulates in a ‘culture of narcissism’, which presents the self and individual experience as a value, while at the same time emptying them of their uniqueness by their serial reproduction in the media. In this analysis, Eggers shares with other artists of his generation the rejection of conventional aestheticism, and the fascination for the real and the authentic. However, he seems to me too conscious a writer not to realise that in literature, any return to the real cannot escape mediation through language.53 What makes his book interesting, in my view, is precisely the longing for sincerity, and the ironic reflection on this longing. The two readings that are sketched here rely on quite different framings. The first reading takes literature as a form of communication and as a representation of human emotions. This reading is neatly thematised in ––––––––––––– 53

Herein lies the main difference with more die-hard detractors of irony such as Jedediah Purdy. In Eggers’ circles (as in the McSweeney Quaterly), most reviews of Purdy’s book are quite critical: Jesse Walker playfully suggests that ‘Jedediah Purdy’ may be the well-chosen pseudonym of a skillful ironist, who just pretends this diatribe against irony and Todd Pruzan stages Purdy in Las Vegas, making fun of sincerity while enjoying the adulation of the mob and the girls.

126


the text itself. The second, ironical reading takes this representation and the whole language of ‘sincere’ self-presentation as an echo, an ironic mention of, and hence reflection on, discourses that are pervasive in contemporary media and arts. The same clues, plus their interpretation, then function as signs at a second level of interpretation. In the first case, the book performs the desire of emotion-sharing; in the second, it exhibits it. Yet, in the reading experience, both may exist at the same time.

5. Conclusion This paper has hopefully contributed to the insight that narratology has much to gain from the acknowledgement of the various cultural frames that go into literary interpretation, and into its own analytical terminology. Just like irony, or unreliability, sincerity is an interesting notion, precisely because it allows us to relate the use of language in literary works to the way it is used in general social life and communication, and to the ideals that are held on this use. The assessment of sincerity or of irony in literature pertains not only to the concrete situation of language games – of commitment to what is said, of complex argumentation strategies and affiliations as in irony – but also to the way it participates in the on-going negotiation and perspectivation of values in culture. Perhaps literature can also fulfil an ethical and cognitive function, by training hermeneutical skills that are needed in everyday life. Literature actively involves the reader in deciding on the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of words, for which no textual clues will give the ultimate guarantee. This seems no luxury since – as Habermas knew well enough despite his ‘ethics of communication’ – sincerity is far from being the rule in actual human interaction.

Works Cited Ankersmit F.R./te Velde, H. 2004 Trust: Cement of Democracy? (Leuven: Peeters). Austin, J.L. 1962 How to do Things with Words. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts. Blödorn, Andreas, D. Langer, M. Scheffel (eds.) 2006 Stimme(n) im Text. Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen (Berlin: De Gruyter).


127

Booth, Wayne 1961 The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Chicago University Press). de Waal, Frans. 1982 Chimpanzee Politics. Power and Sex Among the Apes (New York: Harper). 1996 Bonobo. The Forgotten Ape (Berkeley: University of California Press). Derrida, Jacques 1988 Limited Inc. (transl. from the French by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman) (Evanston, Il. : Northwestern University Press). Eggers, Dave 2000 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Simon and Schuster) Fish, Stanley 1989 “Short people got no reason to live: Reading irony”, in Doing what comes naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 179–196. Gibson, Andrew 1996 Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narratology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Habermas, Jürgen 1996 The Habermas Reader, ed. William Outhwaite (Cambridge etc.: The Polity Press). Hamon, Philippe 1996 L’Ironie littéraire. Essai sur les formes de l’écriture oblique (Pais: Hachette). Hillis Miller, J. 2001 Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Hutcheon, Linda 1994 Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony (London etc.: Routledge). Hunt, Lynn 1992 The family romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press). Kaufer, David and C.M. Neuwirth 1982 “Foregrounding Norms and Ironic Communication,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68: 28–36. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine 1980 L’énonciation de la subjectivité dans le langage (Paris: Armand Colin). Korthals Altes, Liesbeth 2006 “Voice, irony and ethos: the paradoxical elusiveness of Michel Houellebecq’s polemic writing in Les Particules élémentaires,” in Andreas Blödorn, D. Langer, M. Scheffel (2006): 165–193. Livingston-Webber, Joan 1994 Contribution to American Dialect Society Mailing List. Tue, 12 Apr 1994. Online: http://www.americandialect.org/americandialectarchives/aprxx94015. html (consulted 14 November 2006). Martin, John 1997 “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: the Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” in American Historical Review, 102.5: 1309–1317, 1320– 1342.

128


Nünning, Ansgar. 1999 “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Transcending Boundaries: Narratologiy in Context. Eds. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr Verlag): 53–73. Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability. Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” in Narrative 11.1: 93–109. Pruzan, Todd 1999 “Jedediah in Love,” in: McSweeneys Quarterly. Online: http://www.mcswee neys.net/1999/10/12jedediah.html. (last accessed 19 November 2006). Purdy, Jedediah 1999 For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Rorty, Richard 1989 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press). Searle, J.R. 1969 Speech acts. An essay in the philosophy of language (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1981 “Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction,” in Radical Pragmatics, P. Cole ed., Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 311.1: 295–318. Thorne, Matt and Nicholas Blincoe 2000 All Hail the New Puritans (London: Fourth Estate). Trilling, Lionel 1972 Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard University Press). Bob Wake 2006 “[Review] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers”, in http://www.culturevulture.net/Books/Heartbreaking.htm, consulted on 14 November 2006. Wallace, David Foster 1996 Infinite Jest: A Novel (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company) 1997 A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company) Williams, Bernard. 2002 Truth and Truthfulness. An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton University Press). Wisse, Jacob 1989 Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam: Hakket). Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicising Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35.1: 151–178.

TOM KINDT (University of Göttingen)

Werfel, Weiss and Co. Unreliable Narration in Austrian Literature of the Interwar Period* If one day the ultimate history of unreliable narration should see the light of day, it should certainly contain a chapter on the novels and novellas of the Austrian interwar years. Focussing on Viennese authors like Arthur Schnitzler, Albert Ehrenstein, and Leo Perutz, Bohemian writers like Franz Kafka, Ludwig Winder, and Franz Werfel, and Moravian novelists like Hermann Ungar and Ernst Weiss, this chapter will demonstrate that few periods of literary history gave rise to a similar variety of epic works experimenting with techniques of unreliability. In what follows I shall try to provide a brief preview of this important section of the as yet unwritten history of unreliable narration.1 My paper is divided into two parts: I begin by outlining an explication of the unreliability category, and then turn to an application of the clarified concept to two narrative texts of the Austrian interwar period – namely Werfel’s novella Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig,2 and Weiss’ novel Männer in der Nacht.3

1. The Concept of Unreliable Narration To prepare the ground for the analysis of the two texts, it might seem unnecessary to systematically explicate the unreliability concept. The theory of unreliable narration is obviously one of the current boom-sectors of ––––––––––––– *

1 2 3

I would like to thank Tilmann Köppe and Jan Christoph Meister for their criticism of an earlier draft of this paper. On the idea of a history of unreliable narration, see Nünning (1998b: 34–35). Werfel (1920). Translated as Not the Murderer in 1937. Weiss (1925). The title can be translated as Men at Night.

130

Tom Kindt

what Manfred Jahn and Ansgar Nünning have called the ‘narratological industry’.4 Since the 1990s, both the phenomenon and concept of unreliable narration have given rise to a lively debate and have been eliciting a range of fundamental responses: it has been ‘refigured’ (Currie), ‘reexamined’ (Phelan), ‘reconceptualized’ (Nünning), ‘rethought’ (Baah), and ‘reconsidered’ (Olson) – to refer to just a few recent contributions on unreliability.5 The reason why I nevertheless plead for a systematic explication of the concept is the simple fact that the existing responses to unreliable narration leave one important question unanswered. They focus on the ascription of unreliability, but they fail to unfold the presupposition of a meaningful discussion of the concept’s usage: a clarification of the category itself.6 This omission has had a considerable effect on the suggestions put forward for retaining, remodelling, or replacing the concept of unreliability. I will proceed by successively addressing three problems a convincing discussion of unreliable narration should resolve: the problems of scope, definition, and attribution.7 1.1 The Problem of Scope I agree with the members of the Nünning School and other participants of the ongoing debates on unreliability that Booth was not well-advised to define the concept of the unreliable narrator with reference to the category of the implied author. I do not think, however, that the advocates of a reconceptualization of unreliability provide convincing justification for their attempt. Generally, they do no more than criticise the canonical definition as empirically inadequate. Booth’s understanding of unreliable narration, the argument goes, gives a false impression of how unreliability is attributed to narrators during reception.8 Such considerations, I believe, simply miss the point: Booth’s aim in The Rhetoric of Fiction is to sketch a definition of unreliable narration, he is not claiming and not trying to –––––––––––––

4 5 6 7 8

Jahn/Nünning (1994: 300). See Currie (1995), Phelan (1996, 2005), Nünning (1998, 1999, 2005), Baah (1999), and Olson (2003). On the explication of scientific concepts, see especially Carnap (1950), and Danneberg (1989). On these problems, see also Kindt (2004, 2005, 2008). See, for example, Nünning (1998, 1999), and Zerweck (2001).

Austrian Literature of the Interwar Period

131

supply a description of empirical reception processes. In the “Afterword to the 2nd edition” of the monograph he makes this pretty clear: This book [...] does not provide a complete ‘theory of fiction’, or a ‘structuralist typology of narrative possibilities’, or a developed doctrine of ‘textuality’, let alone of ‘intertextuality’. It does not, indeed it does not, develop an adequate ‘Rezeptionstheorie’, 9 or an anatomy of criticism, or even a poetics of fiction.

Booth’s characterization of the unreliable narrator seems problematic for other reasons than its opponents normally assume. To understand unreliability in the way suggested in The Rhetoric of Fiction amounts to an undesirable limitation of the concept’s scope. In his well-known definition, Booth is not only specifying the meaning of the term “unreliable narrator”, he is at the same time trying to put forward a particular idea about what literary texts mean and how they are understood: “For a lack of better terms I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not.)”.10 This alliance is problematic for several reasons, in particular because it prevents critics and theorists who do not share Booth’s notion of work meaning and textual interpretation from using the concept of unreliability. Recent suggestions to explicate unreliable narration with reference not to the implied author but to the empirical author or the empirical reader reflect the outlined problem of Booth’s definition – but they do not resolve it. It is easy to see that such proposals impose similar constraints on the usage of the unreliability concept. Instead of trying to substitute the link to the implied author, it seems more advisable to modify the original definition of unreliability by simply eliminating the formulation in question. The consequence of such a move would be a characterization of unreliable narration which on the one hand helps to keep in mind that literary works are the crucial frames of reference for assessing the credibility of their narrators, but on the other hand does not advocate a particular idea of the meaning of the work or of the method for determining it. The attribution of unreliable narration, to put it another way, should be understood as part of a general textual interpretation which may vary according to the interpretive approach chosen. To propose such a modification of Booth’s definition results from the conviction that the question of the specific meaning of a work and its reconstruc–––––––––––––

9

10

Booth (1983: 404). See Booth (1961: 158–159).

132

Tom Kindt

tion cannot be appropriately discussed in the context of deliberations about the form that the analysis of narrative texts, dramas, or lyric poetry should take. This should instead be addressed in the context of interpretation theory and literary theory.11 1.2 The Problem of Definition If one tries to explicate the category of unreliability one has to account for an apparent ambiguity of the concept which can be traced back to The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth defines unreliable narration with reference to the norms of the work. However, in his exemplary interpretations of literary texts he does not seem to be interested in checking whether a narrator spoke in accordance with the work’s ideology, he focuses instead on the question whether the statements of a narrator can be taken at face value. It took narratology nearly forty years to take note of the discrepancy between the original and widely adopted definition of the unreliability concept and its application in the interpretation of literary texts. Not until the late 1990s was it perceived that debates on and analyses of unreliable narration used one term to refer to at least two concepts: a narrator who is a credible spokesman for the implied or postulated norms of the work but who presents the story in a misleading way, and conversely, a narrator who does not coincide with the ideology of the text but who gives an accurate account of all the events he focuses on. Against the background of observations like this, a number of typologies of unreliable narration have been put forward in recent years.12 However different these proposals may seem, they all have two features in common: on the one hand they suggest a differentiation between narrators which are morally non-exemplary (I would propose to call them ‘axiologically unreliable narrators’), and narrators which present the story in a misleading way (I would propose to call them ‘mimetically unreliable narrators’); on the other hand they seem to assume that it is possible to represent these two concepts by just one definition. This has led to a somewhat bewildering situation: We possess one well-defined concept of unreliability which is rarely applied (the idea of axiologically unreliable narration) and one undefined concept of unreliability which is frequently used (the idea of mimetically unreliable narra––––––––––––– 11 12

On this idea, see Kindt/Müller (2003a, 2003b, 2006). See, for example, the Phelan/Martin (1999), Martinez/Scheffel (1999), Cohn (2000), Olsen (2003), Fludernik (2004), and Phelan (2005).


133

tion). I have elsewhere provided a detailed account of how a definition of mimetic unreliability can be developed with the definition of axiological unreliability as a starting point.13 Due to lack of space I will confine myself to presenting definitions for both fundamental types of unreliable narration: Axiologically (un)reliable narration: A narrator is axiologically reliable if and only if he/she speaks for and/or acts in accordance with the norms of the work, he/she is axiologically unreliable if and only if he/she does not. Mimetically (un)reliable narration: A narrator/narration is mimetically reliable if and only if (due to the compositional strategy underlying the work) his/her/its utterances are fictionally true and provide the relevant information with regard to the events narrated; a narrator/narration is mimetically unreliable if and only if (due to the compositional strategy underlying the work) some of his/her/its utterances are not fictionally true or do not provide the relevant information with regard to the events narrated.

These clarifications do not only prevent us from confusing the category of reliability with the idea of “cognitive superpowers” or the concept of “total moral integrity”14 or from equating the opposition reliability vs. unreliability with dichotomies like subjectivity vs. objectivity.15 The given definitions also straightforwardly point to the conditions of applicability of the two unreliability concepts: the presupposition of an attribution of axiological unreliability is that the narrating instance is a “personal narrator” in the sense defined by Marie-Laure Ryan16; the presupposition of an attribution of mimetic unreliability is that the narrating instance is a “reporting narrator” in the sense defined by Kendall Walton.17 1.3 The Problem of Attribution I would like to conclude my sketchy explication of the unreliability concept by outlining a heuristics for the attribution of the category of mimetically unreliable narration. This heuristics is based on the assumption that literary works are the result of communicative utterances and that mimetic –––––––––––––

13 14 15 16 17

On this, see Kindt (2008: 46–52). See, for example, Nünning (1993), Koebner (2005), and Solbach (2005). See, for example, Meindl (2004). See Ryan (1981: 518). Ryan takes a somewhat different view on the problem of unreliability, see Ryan (1981: 530–534). See Walton (1990: 368).

134

Tom Kindt

unreliability can be understood as a cancelling of the communicative contract that is constitutive for factual and fictional discourse alike. An explication of this contract and guideline for the attribution of mimetic unreliability can be derived from the notion of rational communication which Herbert Paul Grice developed in his seminal reflections on Logic and Conversation.18 “Our talk exchanges”, he claimed, “do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts.”19 Summing up these reflections he formulated his well-known ‘Cooperative principle’, i.e. the assumption that it is rational for participants in communicative situations to observe the following rule: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”20 Grice specified the Cooperative principle by introducing a list of conversational maxims and subordinating them to the categories of quality, quantity, relation, and manner which can be described as the fundamental dimensions of the communicative shapeliness of utterances. The Gricean account was originally modelled with regard to everyday communication, but it can easily be transferred to the field of literary fiction. There are just two differences concerning the application of Grice’s general and specifying rules of conversation that we must bear in mind. First, the cooperativeness of a fictional utterance can obviously not be verified with regard to the conversational maxims; the cooperative attitude of an author becomes manifest in the creation of a narrator who, in his exchange with an assumed recipient, observes the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims. Secondly, the communicative shapeliness of a fictive utterance can as a matter of course not be determined with reference to any extratextual context of communication; to check whether a narrator reports in accordance with the principle of cooperation and the accordant maxims of conversation we have to consider his general narrative situation as well as the individual purpose and the particular stage of his report.

––––––––––––– 18 19 20

On this idea, see Kindt (2005) and, most recently, Heyd (2006). Grice (1967/89: 20). Ibid.: 26.


135

Grice’s reflections on Logic and Conversation do not only allow for explicating the idea of a communicative contract that is constitutive of different types of discourses. By discussing the various ways of violating this fundamental conversational agreement Grice additionally provides a stable basis for a redescription of unreliability and other forms of deviant narration. To understand the role of these narrative devices it is important to remember that the conversational norms which Grice introduces are not meant to be necessary or sufficient conditions for cooperative communication; they are just a differentiated illustration of the Cooperative principle. In other words: a speaker may violate conversational maxims within an utterance even though he is, in fact, interested in cooperative talk exchange. Based on the example for such a situation that Grice labels “flagrant violation” or “exploitation” of conversational maxims, it is easy to define how deviant narration functions. In the case of exploitation “some maxim is violated at the level of what is said”, but “the hearer is entitled to assume that that maxim, or at least the overall Cooperative principle, is observed at the level of what is implicated”.21 In terms of this definition, deviant forms of fictional narration such as mimetically unreliable narration can be understood as ‘mediated exploitations’ of conversational rules: although we are in these cases confronted with fictive narrators who flout the maxims of conversation and ignore the principle of cooperation we assume the literary work in question to be the result of cooperative communication. Against the background of this explication of the communicative contract and its violation, one can now easily characterize the detection of mimetic unreliability. First, we have to check whether a narrator/narration violates the maxims of conversation, for example, by contradictions (which violate the maxim of quality), by redundancies (which violate the maxim of quantity), by disordered reports (which violate the maxim of manner), or by passing on trivial information (which violate the maxim of relation). Secondly, we have to find out if we are justified to assume that we are confronted with a mediated exploitation of the conversational maxims. We have, to put it another way, to ascertain whether there is a plausible compositional strategy which motivates the reconstructed violations.22 ––––––––––––– 21 22

Ibid.: 30. For different types of such strategies, see Kindt (2005: 175–178).

136

Tom Kindt

2. Unreliability in Austrian Interwar Literature After these preliminary remarks on the unreliability concept I will now try to give an idea of the challenging narrative literature of the Austrian interwar period by examining the above mentioned works of Werfel and Weiss. In the present context I will of course not be able to unfurl fullfledged interpretations of the two texts; instead I will content myself with investigating their narrative conceptions, considering in particular the question of the narrators’ credibility. Such reconstructions will however transcend mere narratological considerations; the attempt to motivate the highlighted narrative features of Werfel’s novella and Weiss’ novel will shed light on some problems that have been of fundamental importance for a great number of Austrian authors in the years in question.23 2.1 Werfel: Nicht der Mörder… Besides Kafka, Franz Werfel is without doubt the most famous exponent of the so-called ‘Prague German Writers’.24 Werfel was just 21 years old when, due to the publication of his poem collection Weltfreund25 in 1911, he became one of the leading figures of literary expressionism in the German-speaking world. The novellas and voluminous novels he wrote during the 1920s and 1930 – e.g. Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit26 or Die vierzig Tage der Musa Dagh27 – met with even greater success than his early poems, most of them became bestsellers. The German annexation of Austria in 1938 forced Werfel to emigrate to the United States where he, unlike many exiled writers from Germany and Austria, stayed productive and passably successful. Werfel died in Los Angeles in 1945. In the present section, I will examine Werfel’s first longer piece of prose, his novella Nicht der Mörder..., published in 1920. In this text, Karl Duschek, the son of a highly esteemed general of the Austro-Hungarian ––––––––––––– 23 24 25 26 27

For a more detailed reconstruction of the anthropological and ethical ideas of the Austrian interwar writers, see Kindt/Müller (2004). On Werfel, see Jungk (1990). The title can be translated as Friend of the World. The book was first published in 1928; translated as The Hidden Child and The Pure in Heart respectively in 1931. The book was first published in 1933; translated as The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in 1935.


137

Dual Monarchy, is looking back on the first decades of his life. Duschek’s memoirs, written in American exile, focus on three episodes of his youth which was affected by his problematic relation to his father. The introductory chapter gives an account of the son’s first act of rebellion against the father’s severe regime. Being raised in a cadet school, the 13 year-old Duschek meets his father only at the weekends which normally turn out to be a continuation of his everyday life at school. One day, however, the father does not try to find out if the son is aware of the contents of the curriculum, he instead takes him out to a nearby fairground. At a market stall where one has to knock over puppets suspended on wires, Duschek takes the opportunity and throws the balls towards his father – immediately after this attack, he has a mental breakdown. In the second part of his autobiographical notes, Duschek describes some events that took place a dozen years later. In the meantime, he became a lieutenant but lost contact with his father. Living in depression, he associates himself with a circle of drug taking anarchists that stand up for the idea of a “fatherless society”, i.e. a society without hierarchies guided solely by love and understanding. After the anarchists’ plan to assassinate the czar failed and most of the would-be rebels got arrested, Duschek comes to the decision to kill his father. Yet he refrains from carrying out this plan: chasing after his father with a weapon in hand, he realizes that he is not trying to kill a representative of the patriarchal state but a “human being”, an “old” and “invalid man”.28 In the third chapter, Duschek reports on his last days in Europe before he left for the United States. Walking through his hometown again, he visits the fairground where he once attacked his father. Here, he comes to know that one day ago the owner of the market stall where the attack had taken place was killed by his own son. Duschek, agitated by this information, writes a letter to the district attorney arguing for the innocence of the culprit. “Not the murderer”, he claims, “the murdered one is guilty”.29 The third chapter is followed by a short epilogue in which Duschek comments on the lessons he learned from his experiences. Looking back on his life, he arrives at the conclusion that mankind should forbear from destruction and try to create a ‘new reality’: “It is only the new reality that matters.”30 ––––––––––––– 28 29 30

“Mensch”, “Greis”, “Kranker” (Werfel 1920: 314–315, my translation). “Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig” (ibid.: 331, my translation). “Einzig um die neue Wirklichkeit geht es” (ibid.: 335, my translation).

138

Tom Kindt

To live in accordance with this philosophy, Duschek plans to have children. Since the first publication of the novella, critics have generally agreed that its narrator Duschek has to be understood as a mouthpiece of its author Werfel. The novella, so the standard interpretation goes, is an epic manifesto for the anarchistic ideas of Werfel’s friend Otto Gross, a student of Freud who tried to derive the scenario of a matriarchal society from the Freudian psychoanalysis: “The views that Werfel expresses in this novella, the ideas of matriarchy and the patriarchal state, the analysis of the psychological damage caused by patriarchy, are taken almost word for word by Gross.”31 While there can be no doubt that Gross’ ideas were of some influence on Werfel’s work during the late 1910s and early 1920s, a narratological analysis of Nicht der Mörder… gives reason to challenge the credibility of the novella’s narrator and therefore the assumption that Duschek’s opinions are what Werfel tried to convey through the text. In the context of this paper, it should be sufficient to dwell on two features of the novella that allude to the narrator’s unreliability. Firstly, there are several text passages in which the difference between story and discourse becomes blurred (what can be seen as a violation of the maxim of manner), and secondly, there are several more or less blatant inconsistencies in the narrative (what can be seen as a violation of the maxim of quality).32 Duschek presents his memoirs from the perspective of the ‘experiencing I’: except for the short epilogue, the ‘narrating I’ hardly ever comes to the fore, whether through the use of prolepses or through comments on the events presented.33 In some text passages, however, Duschek’s attempt to give an authentic account of his experiences results in a curious blending of story and discourse level. Instead of evoking the past, these representations seem to question that there is anything to be represented at all; they raise the suspicion that Duschek’s narrative is, at least in parts, simply made up. A demonstrative example for the text passages in question is the description of the anarchists’ detention by a troop of soldiers: “I lunged at the major. […] How strange! The corpulent major turned thinner and ––––––––––––– 31 32 33

Michaels (1983: 156). On the difference between ‘story’ and ‘discourse’, see Martinez and Scheffel (1999: 22–26). On the concepts of the ‘experiencing I’ and the ‘narrating I’, see Stanzel (1979: 271– 273).


139

thinner, and his throat was getting more and more unsubstantial – how now? – this bloke is nothing but a raw handkerchief that I am swaying”.34 In addition to these incidents of disordered narration, a couple of inconsistencies can be found in Nicht der Mörder…. To give a characteristic example: at first, Duschek remarks that smoking was “the only vice” he “did not fall for”35; some pages later, he asserts that he “never touched a woman or a card”.36 There is no need to register all the inconsistencies in the novella but one further contradiction that lies at the heart of the narrative conception of the text should be referred to: while Duschek’s memoirs evoke the impression that he is re-experiencing his youth by reporting on it, he claims at the same time to be cured of ‘the illness of childhood’37 and therefore to be unable to describe his youth: “I am ‘awakened’ […] and my memory can hardly recall the awful extravagances of my youth.”38 In other words, the way in which Duschek narrates, leads the reader to suspect that he does not actually have as distant a view on the narrated events as he purports to have. In the light of these findings, it seems advisable to at least modify the standard interpretation of Nicht der Mörder…. One way to do this could be to read the novel not as a confession of an awakened one but as the monologue of a madman. As a consequence of his nervous breakdown at the fairground, one might argue, Duschek went mad and never recovered again. Although such an interpretation could be supported with reference to the important role mad characters played in literary expressionism, it does not seem to be conclusive.39 To understand Nicht der Mörder… as a madman’s monologue makes it quite difficult to account adequately for the complexity of Duschek’s life-story. Furthermore, this interpretation seems to be at odds with Werfel’s oeuvre of the late 1910s and early 1920s. Considering this, it seems more plausible to interpret the novella as –––––––––––––

34

35 36 37 38 39

“Ich warf mich auf den Major. […] Merkwürdig! Dieser dicke Major wurde immer dünner, geringer, der Hals immer wesenloser, wesenloser – was soll das? – der ganze Kerl ist ja ein grobes Taschentuch, das ich hin- und herschwenke” (Werfel 1920: 288, my translation). “Das einzige Laster, dem ich nicht verfiel” (ibid.: 216, my translation). “Weder ein Weib, noch eine Karte je berührt” (ibid.: 240, my translation). “Die Krankheit der Kindheit” (ibid.: 315, my translation). “Ich selbst bin … ‘erwacht’ … und mein Gedächtnis kann kaum mehr die furchtbaren Überschwenglichkeiten meiner Jugend wiederholen” (ibid.: 266, my translation). On the figure of the madman in German expressionism, see e.g. Anz (2002: 82–89).

140

Tom Kindt

evidence of Werfel’s ideological reorientation in the postwar years. By resorting to devices of unreliable narration, he tried to challenge Gross’ anarchistic ideas, yet without completely exposing them. 2.2 Weiss: Männer in der Nacht Ernst Weiss, born in Brno in 1882, was already in his thirties when he established himself as a writer.40 After studies in Vienna, Berlin and Bern he had to lead a ‘double-life’ as physician and novelist for over a decade before he was able to live by his writing. Although Weiss’ novels – from his debut feature Die Galeere41 to his last book Der Augenzeuge42 – enjoyed an excellent reputation amongst the literary critics and writers of the interwar period, they never became popular successes. This might be due to the demanding narrative shaping of most of his books since the 1923 short novel Die Feuerprobe.43 Inspired by Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy and his idea of ‘existence-communication’, Weiss developed a subtle conception of unreliable narration which resulted in a series of six firstperson novels he worked on from 1920 up to 1940, when he eventually committed suicide in his Parisian exile.44 In the following paragraphs, I will not address these novels. Rather, I will take a closer look at one of the only two third-person novels Weiss wrote during the last twenty years of his life: his so-called ‘Balzac novel’ Männer in der Nacht which was first published in 1925. The book, written on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Balzac’s death, is based on real incidents. In 1838 the notary Sebastian Peytel, an old companion of the famous author of the Comédie humaine, was accused of having killed his wife. Balzac, assuming his friend to be innocent, attended the trial against Peytel but failed to prevent him from being sentenced to death. The novel is built around these events but it naturally exceeds a simple fact-based historical report. Most of the story is told from Balzac’s point of view and some of the central plot elements are obviously fictitious additions to the ––––––––––––– 40 41 42 43 44

On Weiss, see Kindt (2008). The book was first published in 1913; the title can be translated as The Galley. Weiss finished the novel in 1939; the book was first published posthumously in 1961; translated as The Eyewitness in 1977. The title can be translated as The Ordeal. See Müller (1992), Müller and Tatzel (1998), and Kindt (1999).


141

historic occurrences, e.g. the dramatic encounter between the novelist and his convicted companion in the night before the execution. In view of such observations it has become common to understand Männer in der Nacht as a typical piece of fiction in the tradition of the 19th century historical novel. However, a closer look at the way in which the story is told quickly reveals that such a conclusion is misguided. If one analyses the shaping of the novel from a Gricean perspective, one comes across certain narrative features which indicate that Männer in der Nacht, contrary to classic historical novels, is not primarily conceived to give an authentic account of past events. An examination of the narrator’s compliance with the maxims of conversation in fact suggests that the novel is yet another of Weiss’ epic experiments in unreliable narration.45 In the present context, two aspects of the novel’s narrative fabric deserve special attention: the embodiment of voice and point of view (which can be seen as a violation of the maxim of manner) and the time data that are constitutive for a reconstruction of the plot (which can be seen as a violation of the maxim of quality). The heterodiegetic narrator of the novel does not present the events in a more or less uniform way; his report is rather an assembly composed of reporting passages, quotations from letters, interrogation transcripts, and embedded narratives by, for example, Balzac and Napoleon. The collage of extra-, intra and metadiegetic voices in some passages becomes so complex that it becomes difficult to tell who the narrator of the paragraphs in question is. The shaping of perspective has a similar effect. The extradiegetic narrator, using variable internal focalization, often does not clearly indicate whose figure’s point of view he is taking; moreover, if he switches from one perspective to another there are mostly no univocal textual markers for a transition of point of view. Even more perplexing than the configuration of voices and perspectives are the discrepancies in the time data that can be found in different parts of the novel. The opening of Männer in der Nacht is modelled on the typical exposition of 19th century novels: “In the evening of November 3rd 1838, the novelist Balzac, staying in his country house in Les Jardies, was handed over a letter by his old servant François; the message ––––––––––––– 45

This might have been the reason for Weiss to refer to Männer in der Nacht not as a “historical novel” but as “einen sozusagen historischen Roman“, a “quasi historical novel” (Guillemin and Weiss 1925: 390, my translation).

142

Tom Kindt

stemmed from Balzac’s school day friend Sebastian Peytel, a the notary from Belley.”46 The letter, written by a lawyer in order of Peytel, includes a description of the events that caused his detention. The second part of the novel begins just as the first part: again, Balzac is staying in his country house and receives a message from Peytel. This time the letter comprises a transcript of an important interrogation of the novelist’s friend. Strangely enough, the narrator notes that the document dates from “November 30th, 1830”.47 Further information on the historical embedding of the events is not suitable to resolve the conflict of time data – quite the contrary: the only other date that is explicitly referred to in the novel fits neither of the quoted text passages. In a long embedded narrative about Napoleon’s rise and fall, Balzac says: “I might be willing, but I don’t have the power which today, in 1836, only results from millions in gold …”48 It should be evident that the highlighted oddities in Männer in der Nacht cannot plausibly be motivated with regard to the narrator or plot of the novel alone. In contrast to Nicht der Mörder…, an explanation of the narrative features of Weiss’ text requires a more or less elaborate reference to the poetics underlying the novel’s composition. This does, of course, not mean that a legitimate evaluation of the narrator’s credibility in Männer in der Nacht necessitates extensive investigations in Weiss’ biography and literary œuvre. The novel itself holds some relevant clues for an explanation of its form: One of the main subjects of Männer in der Nacht is the problem of man’s inability to face up to reality. Even Balzac, who is praised for his ability to understand the way of the world and to read the minds of his fellow human beings, is not able to see things as they are. By insistently refusing to believe that his friend is a murderer, he becomes an example of what Peytel calls the “infernal stupidity” of man: “If we really wanted to, we could master … the evil in us, but not our infernal stupidity.”49 Based on this observation, it seems quite easy to ex–––––––––––––

46

47 48

49

“Am Abend des 3. November 1838 bekam der Dichter Balzac durch die Hand seines alten Dieners François in seinem Landhaus von Les Jardies einen Brief von seinem Jugendfreund, dem Notar Sebastian Peytel in Belley” (Weiss 1925: 7, my translation). “30. November 1830” (ibid.: 79, my translation). “Ich habe wohl Willen und Kraft, aber es fehlt mir die reale Herrschaft, die heute, 1836, einzig und allein die Millionen in Gold geben können” (ibid.: 35, my translation). “Das Böse in uns …, es wäre einem untertan, wenn man unbedingt wollte. Aber das infernalisch Dumme nie” (ibid.: 153, my translation).


143

plain the narrative conception of Männer in der Nacht: The confusion of the novel’s extradiegetic narrator, which mirrors the confusion of its different intradiegetic narrators, is an expression of man’s restricted cognitive capabilities. In conclusion, it should be added that Männer in der Nacht is more than a document of cognitive scepticism. A comprehensive interpretation of the book would show its existentialist implications.50 By disclosing man’s cognitive limitations, the novel indicates that one should try to accept life rather than attempting to understand it. In this paper, I have tried to achieve two main objectives: First, I have tried to sketch an explication of the unreliability concept and to outline a heuristics for its application. Second, I have called attention to the remarkable repertory of devices and strategies of unreliable narration that has been developed in Austrian interwar literature and that has so far found scant attention in the debates on unreliability. Although Werfel’s novella Nicht der Mörder… and Weiss’ novel Männer in der Nacht might not be characteristic examples of Austrian interwar fiction in every respect, they seem to be highly typical for the literary period in question in their attention to the problem of self-acceptance with recourse to techniques of unreliable narration. There is, of course, a lot more to be said about the oeuvres of Werfel and Weiss in particular and about Austrian interwar literature in general.

Works Cited Anz, Thomas 2002 Literatur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler). Baah, Robert 1999 “Rethinking Narrative Unreliability,” in Journal of Literary Semantics 28.3: 180–188. Booth, Wayne C. 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago UP). 1983 “Afterword to the Second Edition: The Rhetoric in Fiction and Fiction as Rhetoric: Twenty-One Years Later”, in W. C. B.: The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: Chicago UP): 399–457. Carnap, Rudolf 1950 Logical Foundations of Probability (Chicago: Chicago UP).

––––––––––––– 50

For such an interpretation, see Kindt (2008: 136–142).

144

Tom Kindt

Currie, Gregory 1995 “Unreliability Refigured: Narrative in Literature and Film,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53: 19–29. Danneberg, Lutz 1989b “Zwischen Innovation und Tradition: Begriffsbildung und Begriffsentwicklung als Explikation,” in Christian Wagenknecht (ed.): Zur Terminologie der Literaturwisenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler): 50–68. Fludernik, Monika 2005 “Unreliability vs. Discordance. Kritische Betrachtungen zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzept der erzählerischen Unzuverlässigkeit,” in Liptay and Wolf (2005): 39–59. Grice, Herbert Paul 1967/87 “Logic and Conversation,” in: H. P. G.: Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, London): 1–143. Guillemin, Bernard and Weiss, Ernst 1925 “Balzac als Romanfigur. Ein Gespräch,” in Ernst Weiss: Die Ruhe in der Kunst. Ausgewählte Essays, Literaturkritiken und Selbstzeugnisse 1918–1940 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau): 390–394. Heyd, Theresa 2006 “Understanding and Handling Unreliable Narratives: A Pragmatic Model and Method,” in Semiotica 162: 217–243. Jahn, Manfred 1998 “Package Deals, Exklusionen, Randzonen: das Phänomen der Unverläßlichkeit in der Erzählsituation,” in Nünning (1998a): 81–106. Jahn, Manfred and Nünning, Ansgar 1994 “A Survey of Narratological Models,” in Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 27: 283–303. Jungk, Peter Stephan 1990 A Life Torn by History: Franz Werfel 1890–1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Kindt, Tom 1999 “‘Gerade dadurch, daß er sich selbst am stärksten behauptet, soll er sich wandeln.’ Zur Konzeption der Ich-Romane von Ernst Weiß,” in Juni. Magazin für Literatur und Politik 29: 131–140. 2004 “Erzählerische Unzuverlässigkeit in Literatur und Film. Überlegungen zu einem Begriff zwischen Narratologie und Interpretationstheorie,” in Herbert Hrachovec et al. (eds.): Kleine Erzählungen und ihre Medien (Wien: Turia & Kant): 55–66. 2005 “L’art de violer le contrat. Une comparaison entre la métalepse et la nonfiabilité narrative,” in John Pier and Jean Marie Schaeffer (eds.): Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de représentation (Paris: Édition de l’Ehess): 167–178. 2008 Unzuverlässiges Erzählen und literarische Moderne. Eine Untersuchung der Romane von Ernst Weiß (Tübingen: Niemeyer).


145

Kindt, Tom and Müller, Hans-Harald 2003a “Wieviel Interpretation enthalten Beschreibungen? Überlegungen zu einer umstrittenen Unterscheidung am Beispiel der Narratologie,” in Fotis Jannidis et al. (eds.): Regeln der Bedeutung (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter): 286–304. 2003b “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation,” in T. K. and H.-H.M. (eds.): What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter): 205–219. 2004 “‘Es ist nicht die ‚mittlere Linie‘, die wir einschlagen wollen.’ Ernst Jünger und die Moderne der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Lutz Hagestedt (ed.): Ernst Jünger. Politik – Mythos – Kunst (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter): 193–203. 2006 The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Koebner, Thomas 2005 “Was stimmt denn jetzt? “Unzuverlässiges Erzählen” im Film,” in Liptay and Wolf (2005): 19–38. Liptay, Fabienne and Wolf, Yvonne (eds.): 2005 Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film (München: edition text + kritik). Martinez, Matias and Scheffel, Michael 1999 Einführung in die Erzähltheorie (München: Beck). Meindl, Dieter 2005 “(Un-)Reliable Narration from a Pronominal Perspective,” in John Pier (ed.): The Dynamics of Narrative Form. Studies in Anglo-American Narratology (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter): 59–82. Michaels, Jennifer E. 1983 Anarchy and Eros. Otto Gross’ Impact on German Expressionist Writers (New York etc.: Lang). Müller, Hans-Harald 1992 “Zur Funktion und Bedeutung des “unzuverlässigen Ich-Erzählers” im Werk von Ernst Weiß,” in Peter Engel and H.-H. M. (eds.): Ernst Weiß – Seelenanalytiker und Erzähler von europäischem Rang (Bern etc.: Lang): 186–196. Müller, Hans-Harald and Tatzel, Armin 1998 “‘Das Klarste ist das Gesetz. Es sagt sich nicht in Worten.’ Ernst Weiß’ Roman Die Feuerprobe. Eine Interpretation im Kontext von Weiß’ Kritik an Kafkas Proceß,” in Euphorion 92: 1–23. Nünning, Ansgar 1993 “Erzählen als Mittel subjektiver Sinnstiftung. Individualität, Skeptizismus und das Problem der “(un-)reliability” in Graham Swifts Kurzgeschichten,” in Anglistik und Englischunterricht 50: 153–174 1998b “‘Unreliable Narration’ zur Einführung: Grundzüge einer kognitiv-narratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens,” in Nünning (1998a): 3–39. 1999 “Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of ‘Unreliable Narration’: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (eds.): Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext. Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context (Tübingen: Narr): 53–73.

146 2005

Tom Kindt

“Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration. Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches. In: James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.): A Companion to Narrative Theory (Oxford: Blackwell): 89–107. Nünning, Ansgar (ed.) 1998a Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur (Trier: WVT). Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” in Narrative 11: 93–109. Phelan, James 1996 Narrative as Rhetoric. Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State UP). 2005 Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Phelan, James and Martin, Mary Patricia 1999 “The Lessons of “Weymouth”: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day,” in David Herman (ed.): Narratologies: New Perspectives in Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State UP): 88–109. Ryan, Marie-Laure 1981 “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction,” in Poetics 10: 517–539. Solbach, Andreas 2005 “Die Unzuverlässigkeit der Unzuverlässigkeit. Zuverlässigkeit als Erzählziel,” in Liptay and Wolf (2005): 60–71. Stanzel, Franz K. 1979 Theorie des Erzählens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Walton, Kendall L. 1990 Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1990). Weiss, Ernst 1925 Männer in der Nacht. Roman (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). Werfel, Franz 1920 “Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig,” in F. W.: Die schwarze Messe. Erzählungen. Ed. by Knut Beck (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989): 214–335. Yacobi, Tamar 2001 “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s (Un)Reliability,” in Narrative 9.2: 223–229 Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35.1: 151–178.

ELKE D’HOKER (FWO, Catholic University of Leuven)

Unreliability between Mimesis and Metaphor: The works of Kazuo Ishiguro 1. Introduction Amidst the wealth of more or less reliable first-person narratives in contemporary British fiction, the oeuvre of Kazuo Ishiguro stands out because of its sustained exploration of the possibilities and limits of the single narrative voice. Critics are remarkably unanimous, moreover, in their interpretation of these explorations as typical examples of narrative unreliability and many reviewers too call Ishiguro’s narrators unreliable as a matter of course.1 Yet, this apparently self-evident interpretation masks the considerable differences that exist between Ishiguro’s I-protagonists.2 Christopher Banks’ straightforward description of a semi-fantastic world in When We Were Orphans (2000) is rather different from Stevens’ meandering account of a fairly straightforward world in The Remains of the –––––––––––––

1

2

David Mesher states that Ishiguro’s “diverse fictions are linked […] by the author’s consistent interest in narrative unreliability, a technique he has used with great effect in the development of his plots, in the complexity of his characters, and in the manipulation of his readers,” Mesher (1998). Similarly, Rebecca L. Walkowitz claims “That familiar category, ‘unreliable narrator,’ would seem to characterize the first person protagonist in every one of Ishiguro’s five novels to date,” Walkowitz (2001: 1067). And in his critical introduction to Ishiguro, Brian W. Shaffer calls it “unsurprising” that Ishiguro’s “first-person narrators make for ‘unreliable’ narrators’,” Shaffer (1998: 7). In an interview given after the publication of When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro himself has objected to this interpretation. He “shakes his head in mild disagreement” when the interviewer calls Banks an unreliable narrator and explains: “The traditional unreliable narrator is that sort of narrator through whom you can almost measure the distance between their craziness and the proper world out there. That’s partly how that technique works, I think. He [Christopher Banks] is perhaps not quite that sort of conventional unreliable narrator in the sense that it’s not very clear what’s going on out there,” Richards (2004).

148

Elke D’hoker

Day (1989). Similarly, Ono’s and Etsuko’s guilty narratives in An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and A Pale View of Hills (1982) respectively, are very far apart from Kathy’s innocent and naïve tale in Never Let Me Go (2005). The fictional universe of The Unconsoled (1995), finally, is so utterly strange as to make Ryder’s narrative quite incomparable with any of the foregoing accounts. It is precisely this variation, of course, that makes the case of Ishiguro an interesting one for an analysis of the forms and functions of unreliable narration in contemporary British fiction. For with a perhaps unprecedented zeal for innovation, Ishiguro has modified and manipulated the familiar technique of unreliable narration to suit both mimetic and metaphorical ends. In this paper, therefore, I propose to analyse Ishiguro’s idiosyncratic use of narrative unreliability in all six of his novels. I will do so against the background of contemporary narrative theories and I hope that my analysis can shed new light both on the poetics of Ishiguro’s extremely rich oeuvre and on the function of narrative unreliability in contemporary British fiction.

2. Unreliability as a Double Distance In most reviews and some articles, the term narrative unreliability is applied to Ishiguro’s work in a rather off-hand manner. His narrators are called unreliable because their subjective and elliptical narratives are an invitation to read between the lines and to arrive at conclusions about story and narrator alike. Yet, Ishiguro’s minimalist style which works through suggestion, control and understatement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for unreliability. It is not because the narrator refuses to be explicit about certain events and feelings that he or she is by necessity unreliable. The same holds true for Ishiguro’s focus on the inner lives of his protagonists. Even though it is true that, as Kathleen Wall has argued, “the purpose of unreliable narration is to foreground certain elements of the narrator’s psychology”, a narrative focus on the workings of the mind does not necessarily entail the unreliability of the narrator.3 In short, if we wish to analyse the forms and functions of unreliable narration in Ishiguro’s work, a more precise definition is called for, which I will turn to at present. –––––––––––––

3

Wall (1994: 21).

Unreliability between Mimesis and Metaphor

149

The current debate about unreliability has largely revolved around the question whether unreliability should be seen as an intentional structure on the part of the author or as an interpretative strategy on the part of the reader. Yet, since both approaches are more alike than their proponents sometimes care to admit4, I propose to focus on what they share, namely a definition of unreliability in terms of distance. For Wayne C. Booth, who first introduced the concept in The Rhetoric of Fiction, narrative unreliability is only one of many kinds of distance that characterise narration. More specifically, it is the distance “between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator”.5 This distance, he continues, may involve either “moral” or “intellectual” qualities of the narrator and can further be recognised as a kind of irony, whereby “the speaker is himself the butt of the ironic point”, since “the author and reader are secretly in collusion, behind the speaker’s back, agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting”. The chief critic of Booth’s definition, Ansgar Nünning, concurs with Booth’s approach of unreliable narration as a form of “dramatic irony or discrepant awareness”.6 Yet he locates the discrepancy or distance not between implied author and narrator, but between narrator and reader: “whether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of the implied author but between [sic] the distance that separates the narrator’s view of the world from the reader’s or critic’s world model.”7 While Nünning quite rightly draws attention to the role of the reader in the interpretation of narrative unreliability, he overstates his case somewhat when he wants to completely erase the implied author from this interpretation. Indeed, his assertion that “a narrator may be perfectly reliable compared to one critic’s notions of moral normality but quite unreliable in comparison to those other people hold”8 undermines the very idea of unreliability as a distinct technique or a rhetorical strategy.9 It fails to do justice to sev–––––––––––––

4 5 6 7 8 9

Cf. Olson (2003). Booth (1961: 304) Nünning (1999: 58). Ibid.: 53, 61. Ibid.: 64. It seems to me that Nünning’s analysis of unreliable narration in the context of frame theory is highly relevant as a description of the way the reader arrives at an interpreta-

150

Elke D’hoker

eral historical texts which appear ironic only to the postmodern reader10 and it is belied by many other fictional texts in which narrative unreliability forms an integral part of their meaning. Moreover, as James Phelan has accurately observed in his highly interesting study of character narration Living To Tell About It: “the interpretive move to read an inconsistency as a sign of unreliability rests on the assumption that someone designed the inconsistency as a signal of unreliability”.11 Phelan argues instead that the interpretation of unreliability (as a form of “rhetorical reading”) involves a “feedback loop among implied author’s agency, textual phenomena and reader response”. Or as Nünning himself attempts to resolve the matter in his 2005 contribution to The Companion to Narrative Theory: “whether a narrator is regarded as unreliable not only depends on the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of the text as a whole (or of the implied author) but also on the distance that separates the narrator’s view of the world from the reader’s or critic’s world-model and standards of normalcy, which are themselves, of course, subject to change”.12 It is important to underscore, furthermore, that the ironic structure of the text and the distance between narrator on the one hand and the reader and implied author on the other results from yet another kind of distance, namely “the distance that separates the narrator’s account from the actual course of events”.13 In its typical form, indeed, unreliable narration hinges on a “conflict between the narrator’s report of the ‘facts’ on the level of the story and the interpretations and judgments provided by the narrator”.14 In fact, the interpretation of unreliability depends to a large extent on the reader’s ability to recognise that conflict and gauge that distance so as to arrive at a version of what really happened and at an interpretation of the narrator’s frame of mind. And as Kathleen Wall, Ansgar Nünning and several other critics have pointed out, the narrator’s deviant interpretation or judgement of the narrative events is signalled primarily through the ––––––––––––– 10 11 12 13 14

tion of unreliability by taking into account certain textual and contextual clues, but that it fails to provide a useful definition of narrative unreliability. Cf. Vera Nünning (1998). Phelan (2005: 38). Nünning (2005: 95). Nünning (1999: 62). Ibid.: 58.


151

narrator’s peculiar verbal habits and through several kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions in the text itself. Nünning’s reference to ‘interpretation’ and ‘judgment’ as the two axes on which unreliability may reside points to the two distinct types of unreliable narration – epistemological and ethical – recognised in these or other terms by most critics. Susan Lanser has suggested that we call a narrator untrustworthy when “his commentary does not accord with conventional notions of sound judgment” and unreliable when he falls short in understanding or interpreting certain events, but her terminology has not gained currency in critical discourse.15 In Living To Tell About It James Phelan has further elaborated on this distinction, adding “unreliable reporting” or the “axis of character, facts, and events” to the axes of “knowledge and perception” (unreliable interpreting) and of “ethics and evaluation” (unreliable evaluating).16 Yet, he hastens to point out that deviations on the first axis rarely – if at all – occur separately from the other two axes. Thus he argues that “not all underreporting […] constitutes unreliability” and that “misreporting is typically a consequence of the narrator’s lack of knowledge or mistaken values, and consequently, it almost always occurs with misreading or misevaluating”.17 After all, the reader has to be able to recognise and, possibly correct, the narrator’s misreporting of facts or events on the basis of the latter’s limited awareness or problematic value-scheme. In most cases, however, the unreliable narrator’s account of events can be trusted, but not his or her interpretation or evaluation of these events. This has lead Kathleen Wall to argue that “convention in unreliable narration almost dictates that we trust scenic presentations”.18 Although much more can be (and has been) said about the concept of narrative unreliability and on the way it is apprehended by the reader, I will conclude here with a brief working definition: unreliable narration is –––––––––––––

15 16 17 18

Lanser (1981: 170f.) Phelan (2005: 50). Ibid.: 52, 51. Wall (1994: 20). In his definition of unreliability in The Art of Fiction, David Lodge says something similar but in a different way: “Even a character-narrator cannot be a hundred per cent unreliable. If everything he or she says is palpably false, that only tells us what we know already, namely that a novel is a work of fiction. There must be some possibility of discriminating between truth and falsehood within the imagined world of the novel, as there is in the real world, for the story to engage our interest,” Lodge (1992: 154).

152

Elke D’hoker

a form of structural irony which involves the implied author and the reader against the narrator and which results from the narrator’s aberrant or misguided interpretation or evaluation of the narrative events. Alternatively, drawing on the crucial notion of distance, one could describe narrative unreliability as operating through a double distance: an ironic distance between the narrator and the implied author/reader, which is mediated by a distance between the interpretations and evaluations of the narrator and the facts of the fictional world.

3. Perfect Unreliability in The Remains of the Day This theoretical framework leaves us somewhat better armed to tackle the question of unreliability in Ishiguro’s oeuvre. I will start with his third novel, The Remains of the Day, which has been singled out on two occasions to function as an exemplary case in the ongoing debate about unreliable narration.19 It is not surprising that precisely The Remains of the Day was selected for this purpose. Not only is it Ishiguro’s best-known and most successful book, it is also the one that achieves the greatest degree of narrative closure. Moreover, as I hope to show, of all Ishiguro’s novels, The Remains of the Day uses the technique of unreliable narration in its most perfect and traditional form. In her article “The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration”, Kathleen Wall has convincingly shown that it are primarily the “verbal habits or tics” of Stevens which incriminate him.20 His elevated diction, his frequent shifts from ‘I’ to ‘one’, his recurring emphasis on dignity and professionalism, his defensive tone and all too strenuous denials alert the reader to certain preoccupations and past events which Stevens fails to acknowledge, even to himself. Consequently, the reader quickly registers a contrast between what Stevens narrates and what his narration implies. This awareness of a distance between past events and Stevens’ representation of these events becomes even more evident following certain contradictions between Stevens’ factual descriptions and his evaluations. On two occasions for instance, we can detect a contrast between Stevens’ dejected feelings and his triumphant rationalisations through observations of other characters about his tears. –––––––––––––

19 20

Cf. Wall (1994); Phelan (2005). Wall (1994: 23).


153

Conflicting evidence about Lord Darlington’s moral and political worth, to give another example, clearly suggests that Stevens’ opinion may be less than accurate in this respect. Also inconsistencies within Stevens’ own narrative, such as his repetition and dislocation of the scene in which Miss Kenton is (supposedly) crying in her room, mark a contrast between Stevens’ real and professed feelings about her. By interpreting these and similar textual signals, the reader is able to reach a different understanding of the events than the one Stevens offers. Briefly summarized, this alternative understanding concerns Stevens’ repressed feelings for Miss Kenton, which form the unacknowledged main reason for his visit, and his submerged guilt about his long service for Lord Darlington, whose less than honourable association with Hitler casts a great shadow on Stevens’ achievement as a butler and on the severe personal sacrifices he made for this. Because of this superior knowledge, a distance opens up between the narrator and the reader who is able to interpret many of Stevens’ utterances in a different light. Stevens’ definition of dignity as “not removing one’s clothing in public” or of great butlers as wearing “their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze”, become highly ironic when read in the context of Stevens’ sexual repression.21 Similarly, Stevens’ comments on the physical circumstances of his journey, such as his references to the gathering “mist” or the “circuitous” route he follows, gain an additional meaning when read as metaphors for Stevens’ narration as a whole.22 In his reading of The Remains of the Day, Phelan also emphasises that the interpretive efforts of the reader are rewarded and confirmed when Stevens himself gains some more insight in his past mistakes on his symbolic journey to the West counties.23 As Stevens’ self-awareness increases and the distance between the experiencing self and the narrating self widens, so does the distance between the implied author and the narrator and between the narrator and the reader diminish. However, the distance never fully closes.24 Stevens remains an unreliable narrator, who achieves only a –––––––––––––

21 22 23 24

Ishiguro (1989, 221, 43). Cf. Shaffer (1998: 65–66). Ishiguro (1989: 169–170, 70). Phelan (2005: 59). Kathleen Wall, who puts great emphasis on the variable ironic distance in The Remains of the Day, seems in two minds about the ending. At one point she argues that “Stevens’ recognition, at the end of the novel, that in order to salvage some sense of dignity

154

Elke D’hoker

partial understanding of his mistakes and sacrifices, who continues to defend aristocracy over democracy and who is still unable to open up to other people. As Brian Shaffer has argued, “the novel ends on a pathetic and ironic note”, since Stevens’ plea for “bantering” is but an old habit cast in a new guise.25 In all, The Remains of the Day presents us with a fairly conventional form of unreliable narration. Stevens’ narrative not only informs the reader of his version of the events but also indirectly provides information about what ‘really happened’ and about the narrator’s moral and psychological frame of mind. And even though critics may (and do) differ about the interpretation and, especially, evaluation of the latter, they are largely in accord about the facts themselves.26 The novel’s near-perfect realisation of the technique of narrative unreliability also provides the reader with the three kinds of “pleasure” which Booth recognised as the effects of unreliable narration.27 In encouraging the reader to ‘read between the lines’, the –––––––––––––

25 26

27

from his life he has had to create interpretations that do not quite square with events […] mitigates the ironic effect of the narration and closes the distance between the implied author and the narrator, between the narrator and the implied reader”. Further on, however, she recognises Stevens’ attempts at “a more accurate evaluation of his motives and the consequences of his behaviour” as “woefully, even painfully, inadequate” and suggests that the ironic gap “narrows”, Wall (1994: 23, 37). Shaffer (1998: 87); Ishiguro (1989: 258). See James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin’s distinct evaluations of Stevens’ behaviour in the final chapter of the novel, Phelan (2005: 53f.). Kathleen Wall goes even further and maintains that the text eludes a definite interpretation “by making it difficult to judge Stevens’ own level of awareness of the contradictions that pepper his narrative and of the problematic values that have colored and determined his life,” Wall (1994: 37). Wall’s remark points to a more general problem for more subtle forms of narrative unreliability where the narrator is neither a madman nor a benighted fool, namely the problem that the unintentional self-incrimination of the narrator has to square with a certain psychological veracity. The rhetorical requirements of the technique of narrative unreliability have to be checked by the principles of mimesis. Yet, I would argue that The Remains of the Day is highly successful in maintaining this balance and that the precise level of awareness of Stevens at given moments of his narrative is secondary to the general ironic structure. James Phelan too focuses more on the conventions which are necessary for unreliability to operate as a rhetorical strategy when he takes this ambiguity concerning Stevens’ level of awareness as the basis for a more general rule, namely that “character narration allows for some divergence between the roles of a character narrator’s disclosure functions and narrator functions when that divergence serves the larger purposes of the narrative” (Phelan 2005: 37). Booth (1961: 300–305).


155

novel affords the “pleasure of collaboration”. In confirming and rewarding these interpretative efforts, subsequently, the reader is awarded the “pleasure of deciphering”. And in sharing with the reader a mildly ironic view on the narrator, Ishiguro also allows for the “pleasure of collusion”. Given Stevens’ increasing self-reflexivity and his – at least partly successful – attempts to come to a better understanding of the past and a more accurate version of the events, however, the ironic distance is not as large as with more unreflectingly naïve or mad narrators. Hence, “[w]e do not feel the same degree of arrogant superiority to Stevens that we do to those narrators whose accounts indicate fissures and inconsistencies of Grand Canyon proportions, yet who manage to ignore or attempt to paper over the contradictions or questionable motives that criss-cross their lives like cracks in old walls”.28 In all, The Remains of the Day offers a subtle but neat version of narrative unreliability which has no doubt contributed to the novel’s enormous popular success. It remains now to be seen whether also the opposite is true and the relative lack of popular success for Ishiguro’s other novels can be attributed to their divergent uses of narrative unreliability.

4. Etsuko’s and Ono’s Permanent Uncertainties It is generally assumed that Ishiguro uses the same technique of unreliability in all five of his novels. The similarities in style, formal diction, narrators and thematic concerns appear to underscore this assumption. Yet, as I hope to show, the degree and kind of unreliability in Ishiguro’s novels differs considerably. In fact, at least one of his novels stretches this traditional technique to such a point that an application of the concept ceases to be meaningful. In what follows, therefore, I will briefly discuss the narrative situation in each of Ishiguro’s five remaining novels, paying special attention to the way in which these novels deviate from the more ‘traditional’ use of unreliability in The Remains of the Day. In A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko gives an account of the four-day visit of her youngest daughter Niki and relates memories of her early married life in post-war Nagasaki, when she was pregnant with Keiko, who has recently committed suicide. She focuses especially on her brief friendship with Sachiko and her daughter Mariko, who were at that time about to ––––––––––––– 28

Wall (1994: 37).

156

Elke D’hoker

emigrate to America. Etsuko’s narrative shares with that of Stevens in The Remains of the Day a formal, emotionally restrained language, the use of understatement, and a peculiar silence concerning certain past events. The narrator’s ponderous reflection that “[m]emory […] can be an unreliable thing” clearly hints at the questionable reliability of her own narrative.29 Similarly, all too explicit denials such as “I have no great wish to dwell on Keiko now” or “But such things are long in the past now and I have no great wish to ponder them yet again”, become ironic in view of the fact that Etsuko is clearly obsessed with Keiko’s memory.30 If Etsuko’s narrative distance to the fictional world appears at first to be but a matter of understatement and emotional restraint – of a kind with the self-control she exercises in conversations – a number of strange contradictions towards the end of her narrative are suggestive of more active distortions. In the penultimate chapter of A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko recalls the unsettling scenes on the day before Sachiko and Mariko left for America. Etsuko tries to placate Mariko who doesn’t want to leave. Yet in the midst of that conversation, the pronouns shift and Etsuko seems no longer to be addressing Mariko, but rather her own daughter. “If you don’t like it over there, we can always come back”, she tells her.31 This confusion between Mariko and Keiko is repeated in the final chapter when Etsuko tells Niki that “Keiko was happy” on their outing to the hills around Nagasaki, an outing which she earlier described as having been made with Sachiko and Mariko.32 Since Etsuko does not register an awareness of these contradictions, it is clear that her reliability has become suspect. Yet, if reading Etsuko as an unreliable narrator allows for a meaningful interpretation of her frame of mind – she is riddled by guilt about Noriko’s unhappiness in England and feels responsible for her death – this –––––––––––––

29 30 31 32

Ishiguro (1991: 156). Ibid.: 11, 91. Ibid.: 173, my italics. Ibid.: 182. While these anomalies, indicative of a closer connection between Sachiko and Etsuko, appear only at the end of the novel, there is one similar hint in the beginning of Etsuko’s tale when she mentions that people found the woman with her “American lover” odd and unfriendly. Immediately afterwards she comments “It was never my intention to appear unfriendly, but it was probably true that I made no special effort to seem otherwise”. However, this odd sequence might easily go unnoticed because it is not immediately backed up by similar suggestions, Ishiguro (1991: 13).


157

reading does not manage to ‘solve’ the strange contradictions and ambiguities of Etsuko’s narrative and the reader is left wondering about ‘what really happened’. Did Etsuko project her feelings of guilt on these people she knew in Nagasaki, or did she invent these figures in order to talk about her feelings in a roundabout way? Put differently, do Sachiko and Mariko function as ‘real people’ in the fictional world or as fantastic creations of Etsuko’s troubled consciousness?33 The confusion is further heightened by the parallels the novel also draws between Etsuko and Mariko as children troubled by their wartime experiences, and between Etsuko and the strange woman who appears to haunt Mariko. Moreover, since there is no obvious difference between Etsuko’s story of Sachiko and her other memories of Nagasaki, or for that matter, her account of Niki’s visit in England, the reader is bereft of the means to dismiss the first memory as ‘fabrication’ and accept the others as ‘fact’.34 It is clear, in other words, that Ishiguro has here violated the unwritten convention that in unreliable narration we usually trust scenic presentations, unless lying is highly motivated.35 (In thus undercutting the very facts of Etsuko’s narrative, Ishiguro moves beyond the traditional form of unreliability where the reader is invited to reconstruct the “truth” of the story by disregarding the narrator’s misguided interpretation of otherwise accurately represented events. Because the reader cannot be sure about the ex––––––––––––– 33

34

35

Barry Lewis lists a number of different interpretive possibilities: “Either (a) Etsuko is confusing different sets of memories; or (b) Etsuko is merging memory and fantasy; or (c) Etsuko is projecting her guilt about forcing Keiko to leave Japan on to her memories of Sachiko in a similar situation; or (d) Etsuko is projecting her guilt about the above onto a fantasy of a woman called Sachiko and her child” (2000: 36). In addition, one could interpret Sachiko as Etsuko’s split-off bad self, unconsciously intended to prove that Etsuko – who is far more caring and responsible than Sachiko – was not such a bad mother after all. Yet this unconscious strategy backfires and self and double merge again. In an interview with Gregory Mason Ishiguro sees this as a weak point in this novel: “The trouble is that the flashbacks are too clear, in a way. They seem to be related with the authority of some kind of realistic fiction. It doesn’t have the same murkiness of someone trying to wade through their memories, trying to manipulate memories, as I would have wanted. […] And for that reason, the ending doesn’t quite come off. It’s just too sudden. I intended with that scene for the reader finally to realize, with a sense of inevitability, “Of course, yes, she’s finally said it.” Instead, it’s a shock. I didn’t quite have the technical sophistication to pull it off, and the result is that it’s a bit baffling. Fortunately, a lot of people enjoy being baffled,” Mason (1989: 337–338). Cf. Wall (1994: 20).

158

Elke D’hoker

act nature or extent of Etsuko’s distortion of fictional facts, it becomes also more difficult to appreciate the ironic structure of the novel. Even though there clearly is a distance between what the narrator says and what the whole structure shaped by the implied author means, the width and the implications of that distance remain uncertain. The reader is bereft of the means to find out what really happened in Nagasaki, or to what extent Etsuko really neglected her daughter and, hence, deprived of the pleasures of deciphering and collusion which traditionally accompany unreliable narration. In An Artist of the Floating World we meet with Masuji Ono. In the thirties a celebrated painter, whose career was closely linked to the rise of Japanese militarism, he is now a retired widower, living with his youngest daughter in a house partly destroyed by the war. His account focuses on the marriage negotiations for his youngest daughter Noriko, yet he also returns in his memories to earlier moments in his life and career. The restrained and understated tone of Ono’s narrative strongly resembles that of Etsuko in A Pale View of Hills. Again, emphatic denials, strange silences and red herrings such as his “small laughs” or his repeated reference to respect and esteem alert the reader to certain unspoken preoccupations and doubts.36 Remarks on the failings of memory and the limits of selfknowledge are ways in which Ishiguro further signals to the reader Ono’s suspect reliability. Similarly, Ono’s attempt to justify himself to an unidentified narratee is a clear sign that he has something to hide.37 Indeed, from certain hints and half-spoken objections made by other characters, the reader comes to suspect that Ono is not just in disgrace because of his association with the military regime and the subsequent war, but because of some personal wrongdoing as well. As in The Remains of the Day, Ono’s growing self-awareness and public admission of his guilt and responsibility appear to confirm this interpretation. Yet, in a surprising twist, Ishiguro qualifies this reading – and the reader’s smug satisfaction – –––––––––––––

36

37

These “small laughs” are a recurring feature in all of Ishiguro’s novels. They are usually an indication of embarrassment, or of another emotion which is there but remains unacknowledged or inexplicit. From Ono’s addresses to this “you”, we can assume that he is a young man and a fellow-citizen, possibly one of the new and energetic office workers who symbolize the radical break with the pre-war generation of Ono. It is precisely against the criticism of these men, represented in the novel by his son-in-law Suichi, that Ono seeks to defend himself.


159

by having Ono’s eldest daughter Setsuko suggest that their father was not really an important figure at all and has really nothing to be ashamed of. Ono who considered himself a leader, was really no more than a follower, an “ordinary man” with only limited insight.38 Ono’s short-sightedness initially makes for a clear ironic distance between the narrator and the implied author/reader. Certain of his comments take on an additional ironic meaning, as when he muses: “I cannot recall any colleague who could paint a self-portrait with absolute honesty; however accurately one may fill in the surface details of one’s mirror reflection, the personality rarely comes near the truth as others would see it”.39 Similarly, his portrayal of the Hirayama boy who continues to sing military songs that have now become an embarrassment or his depiction of his grandson Ichiro’s hiding beneath a coat when viewing a scary movie, become ironic metaphors for the narrator himself.40 In addition, certain inconsistencies – among them a displacement of memories concerning the conflict with his pupil Matsudo – can be ‘solved’ by attributing them to Ono’s feelings of guilt and failure. Yet, a number of contradictions in An Artist of the Floating World defy such a resolution. They are mostly the result of an open or implied disagreement between the narrator and other characters and involve the credibility of Ono’s scenic descriptions. Let me give a few examples. In the beginning of his narrative, Ono records a conversation with Setsuko in which she suggests that the marriage negotiations for Keiko failed because of her father’s past deeds and urges him to take “certain precautionary steps” to ensure that it does not happen again.41 Later on, however, Ono refers to a second meeting in which Setsuko strongly denies ever having suggested such a thing. She also denies that her father’s reputation as a painter was known to Dr. Saito, thus opposing Ono’s carefully recorded memory of receiving a warm welcome by Dr. Saito upon his first arrival in the neighbourhood. Setsuko’ negation of Ono’s status as an artist and cultural leader also contrasts with certain of Ono’s detailed accounts of moments of success and influence. While Ono’s false modesty on these occasions may call into question the accuracy of his judgement, there is no evidence to suggest that the veracity of these scenes themselves should ––––––––––––– 38 39 40 41

Ishiguro (2001: 200). Ibid.: 67. Cf. Shaffer (1998: 48). Ishiguro (2001: 49).

160

Elke D’hoker

be doubted. As in A Pale View of Hills, in other words, Ishiguro departs from the convention in unreliable narration that scenic descriptions are to be trusted in the absence of evidence to the contrary.42 Because the implied author provides no hints which would allow the reader to arbitrate between Etsuko’s and Ono’s version of events, the exact nature of Ono’s career and the degree of his guilt remains unclear. This openness has resulted in considerable disagreement among critics about the final evaluation of Ono’s life, ranging from approval of his courageous confession over criticism of his vanity and opportunism to downright dismissal of Ono as “both wrong and insignificant”.43 As in A Pale View of Hills, in short, this ambiguity lessens the ironic distance between reader and narrator and deprives the reader of a sense of superiority vis-à-vis the unreliable narrator. If we compare Ishiguro’s first two novels with The Remains of the Day, it becomes clear that the narrative situation in all three novels is very much alike. We have three elderly narrators who are looking back on certain traumatic past events and in the process of narration betray more of their obsessions, guilt feelings and uncertainties than they are aware of. The ending of all three novels, moreover, leaves the narrator reconciled to a more accurate – but by no means perfect – understanding of past mistakes. The main difference between these novels resides in the aporia and contradictions that are left unresolved at the end. In The Remains of the Day the picture fits quite perfectly and the reader is encouraged to “unravel the spool of narrative that he [Ishiguro] has wound so tightly and precisely”.44 In A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World on the other hand, the spool of narrative is much less tightly wound and the reader is frustrated in his or her attempt to arrive at a nice, coherent interpretation. Still, this difference is perhaps more a matter of degree than of kind, since narrative unreliability remains a useful concept for the analysis of all three of these novels. In Ishiguro’s fourth novel, on the contrary, the narrative situation changes more drastically. The Unconsoled breaks with the mode of unreliability that culminates in The Remains of the Day and also sets the pattern for Ishiguro’s last two novels. ––––––––––––– 42 43 44

Cf. Wall (1994). Howard (2001: 405), Lewis (2000: 54), Shaffer (1998: 61). Teverson (1999: 250). Precisely because it encourages the reader’s activity, Teverson calls The Remains of the Day an open text, while I would argue that the text is closed because few if any aporia or enigmas remain.


161

5. From Mimesis to Metaphor (and Back Again) Mr. Ryder, the narrator of The Unconsoled, is a famous pianist who visits an unnamed Mid-European city to give a recital and, as it turns out, to help people solve their personal and cultural crises. After a few pages already, it becomes clear that the fictional world of The Unconsoled is not a realistic world, but a fantastic one which operates according to the mechanisms of dreams and the unconscious. Physical reality is unstable, time elastic, and strange people turn out to be childhood friends or foes. Ryder suffers from strange amnesia – he has forgotten that the city he is visiting is also the place where his wife and son live – and to compensate for this, he is gifted with extra-sensory perceptions: “he overhears conversations well out of listening range; has knowledge of other people’s actions when not present; and can access the memories, fantasies and thoughts of other people”.45 Moreover, everyone responds to these absurdities and uncanny situations as though they were perfectly normal. It is not just the narrator who is out of tune with reality, reality itself is tilted at an angle.46 The world of The Unconsoled is so thoroughly fantastic that the distinction between fact and fabrication in Ryder’s narrative ceases to be meaningful. This prevents the reader not only from finding out what really happened, but also from attributing the narrative contradictions or inconsistencies to the narrator’s limited awareness or aberrant world-view. It seems to me, therefore, that unreliable narration might simply not be a meaningful framework with which to ‘naturalize’, as Nünning would have it, the fictional world of The Unconsoled.47 Nevertheless, just like Ishiguro’s other novels, The Unconsoled can quite meaningfully be interpreted in relation to Ryder’s traumatised psychology. Yet, this interpretation only becomes available when the reader –––––––––––––

45 46

47

Lewis (2000: 104). Ben Howard even argues that in The Unconsoled it is Ryder who carries “the voice of reason and the perspective of sanity” (2001: 410). “More than once”, he argues, “Ryder appears to be the only balanced person on the scene, and though he is inclined to exaggerate his own importance, he stands at the center of nearly every situation, lending stability and coherence to a world on the verge of chaos” (2001: 410–411). I disagree therefore with several other critics, among them David Mesher who argues that the novel is so strange that it forces “even the most ‘realist reader’ to recognise its narrative unreliability” and Wai-chew Sim who calls Ryder “radically unreliable” (1998: 24).

162

Elke D’hoker

reads the text in a metaphorical or even allegorical way (cf. Adelman and Lewis). Thus, several characters make sense as alter egos of the narrator, and many odd events can be made intelligible when read as externalisations of Ryder’s hopes and fears. In this way, the reader can arrive at a ‘better’ understanding of Ryder’s narrative than the narrator himself, but only when his fantastic tale is read in a non-realistic way. Given the historical (and perhaps structural) link between narrative unreliability and realism, it seems again doubtful whether Ryder can still be called an unreliable narrator. In a plea for a historical and cultural turn in the conception of narrative unreliability, Bruno Zerweck has argued that unreliability ceases to operate in radically meta-fictional or experimental texts48 and the same could be said perhaps for patently fantastic or allegorical texts such as The Unconsoled. That this general ‘rule’ is again best placed on a continuum, however, is made clear by When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, novels which read as odd mixtures of the fantastic universe of The Unconsoled and the more realistic world of The Remains of the Day. As I will show in what follows, both novels also combine a realistic depiction of the narrators’ traumatised inner consciousness through unreliable narration with the metaphorical mode of writing of The Unconsoled, which makes them interesting test cases for the theory of narrative unreliability. In the first part of When We Were Orphans Christopher Banks relates different moments in his career as an English detective in the 1930s and fills the reader in on his childhood in Shanghai, and especially on the mysterious disappearance of his parents when he was still a child. Banks’ formal and understated narrative in this part resembles that of Ishiguro’s first three novels. With great care and wariness he scrutinises his memories, trawling for clues to find out who he is, why he has become a detective and what has happened to his parents twenty years ago. Because Banks is less riddled by guilt than Etsuko, Ono, and Stevens, his narrative is less bent on hiding things or justifying himself, which makes it somewhat less unreliable than Ishiguro’s first three novels. Still, there are a few oddities and contradictions which suggest Banks’ slightly distorted view of himself and his past.49 ––––––––––––– 48 49

Zerweck (2001: 165f.). I am thinking for instance of Banks’ rather excessive ambition to become a celebrated upper-class detective or of the contradictions between Banks’ view of himself as a normal schoolboy who blended well with the group and the reminiscences of classmates who thought him an “odd bird”, Ishiguro (2000: 5).


163

In the second part of the novel, however, the story becomes more and more surreal. Banks decides to return to Shanghai to solve the mystery surrounding his parents’ supposed kidnapping twenty years before. In the beleaguered International Settlement in Shanghai a lot is expected of him and Banks comes to believe that in solving this crime, he will also be able to forestall the impending war and to root out all “Evil”. In a more typical form of unreliable narration, this would count as a clear sign of the narrator’s increasing madness. Yet, in When We Were Orphans all other characters happily go along with Banks’ beliefs and find nothing odd in his aspirations, nor in his firm conviction that when his parents are found, their life in Shanghai will continue where it broke off many years earlier. In his search for the house where his mother might have been held captive, Banks ends up in the midst of the hostilities in the Chinese quarter where he suddenly meet his long-lost childhood friend Akira, moves through labyrinths and is miraculously saved by Japanese soldiers. In a scene reminiscent of the neat ending of traditional detective fiction, the mystery of his parents’ is solved, but many of the odder scenes and expectations remain unexplained. Save from doing away with the second part of the novel as one long dream or hallucination, moreover, these oddities cannot simply be attributed to the narrator’s befuddled understanding or his increasing madness. Although there is evidently an ironic distance between implied author and narrator, between narrator and reader, interpreting the narrator as unreliable does not help to solve matters, nor to normalise the fictional world. Nevertheless, some of Banks’ delusions can be understood psychologically, for instance as the result of the all too sudden break-up of Christopher’s happy childhood and his concomitant desire to restore happiness and harmony for himself and for the world at large. Thus Banks’ belief that he will find his mother in the house where she was taken to twenty years ago shows how he has “mummified his childhood to cope with the trauma of parental loss”.50 And the surreal quest in the Chinese quarter is then but a rehearsing of the rescue games he played with Akira as a child. In this way, it is not just Banks’ narrative which reflects his traumatised psychology, the settings and events themselves become metaphors for his inner consciousness. Ishiguro has again moved from mimesis to metaphor in order to highlight the narrator’s inner life. At the end of the novel, how–––––––––––––

50

Sim (2005: 30).

164

Elke D’hoker

ever, the realist paradigm is restored: Banks is back in England and looks back, much like Ono and Stevens, on the choices and sacrifices he has made: “for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do, we will be permitted no calm”.51 These thoughts could also have been expressed by that other orphan in Ishiguro’s last novel: the – for Ishiguro – young narrator Kathy H. Like its predecessor, Never Let Me Go again combines the realistic with the fantastic, be it in a different and perhaps more conventional way. While Kathy’s narrative itself remains realistic and straightforward throughout, the setting and context of her tale are thoroughly strange. The story takes place in a parallel world, another “England, 1990s” where clones are created to provide ordinary people with the necessary organs to cure them of cancer and other diseases. The clones are given a relatively happy and sheltered childhood in homes, but in their adolescence, they are confronted with their fate and they start donating in their twenties until, usually after four donations, they “complete”. The reader only learns this piecemeal since Kathy is addressing her story to a narratee who is a clone like her. The distance between narratee and reader thus corresponds to the quite considerable distance between narrator and reader. In spite of this distance, however, Kathy is perhaps the most reliable of Ishiguro’s narrators. Like Banks she was thrown out rather abruptly of a golden childhood and she returns in memory to find out where and why it happened and whether there is no way of mending this rupture and regaining some of that happiness. Needless to say, like Banks, she is disappointed. At times Kathy’s obsessive hunting for clues in the past leaves her guilty of overreading and at other moments she fails to understand certain aspects of the ordinary world ‘out there’ that are quite clear to the reader. Yet, all in all there are few noticeable distortions of the fictional world so that it is hardly necessary for the reader to construe an alternative version of the facts. Still, Kathy’s narrative does demonstrate certain aspects of the human mind that have fascinated Ishiguro from the start: the fabrication of soothing stories to mediate an all too harsh reality, the avoidance or negation of traumatic events, the capriciousness of memory and the need to justify and rationalise one’s behaviour. As in When We –––––––––––––

51

Ishiguro (2000: 367).


165

Were Orphans, moreover, these all too human characteristics are highlighted metaphorically through the fantastic dimension of the story. Indeed, as several critics have noted52, Never Let Me Go is not so much a dystopian novel that warns against the dangers of cloning, nor a straightforward science fiction work depicting an elaborate future world. The main function of the surreal setting is metaphorical so that Kathy’s fated, all too short existence becomes but a symbol of our finite, predetermined and massively restricted human condition.

6. Conclusion: Ishiguro’s Poetics and Relative Reliability The preceding summary readings have, I hope, sufficiently demonstrated that all but one of Ishiguro’s novels depart from the convention of unreliable narration in one important respect. They make it very difficult, if not downright impossible, for the reader to accurately judge the distance between the narrator and the fictional world and hence frustrate the reader’s attempts to arrive at a truer version of the facts. In the novels before The Remains of the Day, this is mainly due to certain persistent contradictions and ambiguities. In the novels after The Remains of the Day, it are the fantastic events which resist being normalised through references to the narrator’s unreliability. In both sets of novels, in other words, the reader is left to wonder ‘what really happened’. That Ishiguro’s narrators are, in spite of these deviations, still called unreliable is due to the ironic distance – between implied author and narrator, between narrator and reader – that continues to exist in all narratives, albeit in differing degrees. This distance allows the reader to interpret certain stylistic oddities, textual inconsistencies or displacements in the context of the narrator’s frame of mind so as to arrive at a different, better understanding of the narrative than the narrator. Ishiguro’s novels thus display the kind of “double communication” which Phelan considers typical of unreliability and which Nünning describes as follows: “The reader interprets what the narrator says in two different contexts. On the one hand, the reader is exposed to what the narrator wants and means to say. On the other hand, however, the statements of the narrator take on an additional meaning for the reader, a meaning the narrator is not conscious of and does not want to convey”.53 In this way –––––––––––––

52 53

Cf. Harrison (2005). Phelan (2005: 50); Nünning (1999: 58).

166

Elke D’hoker

Ishiguro’s narratives form both a fallible account of certain fictional events and an entirely accurate reflection of the narrator’s traumatised psychology. This exploration of the narrator’s troubled consciousness is indeed the most important and consistent feature of Ishiguro’s work. All of his narrators have suffered certain traumas and are trying to come to terms with their pain in and through their narratives. Feelings of loss, guilt and quiet despair are paramount and inevitably colour their tales. Since the trauma or loss is too overpowering or painful to confront head-on, their narratives are riddled by extreme denials, displacements, projections, digressions and over-interpretations. Or, following Phelan’s typology, in trying to confront the past and its traumas, each narrator is – to a greater or lesser extent – guilty of sins of omission or distortion on the axes of reporting, reading and evaluating. In tirelessly exploring these tricks of memory or consciousness in very different settings and circumstances, Ishiguro suggests that they are not so much the result of psychic deviations or of motivated lying, but are rather entirely ordinary aspects of human consciousness. Importantly, Ishiguro’s deviant use of narrative unreliability further underscores this central tenet of his work. In more typical forms of narrative unreliability, the reader is in league with the implied author against the narrator, “agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting”.54 We have seen how this effect is realised most fully in The Remains of the Day where the reader can smile ironically and pitifully at Stevens’ – too little, too late – conclusion that “in bantering lies the key to human warmth”. In the other novels, however, this sense of superiority is lessened because the reader is frustrated in his or her attempt to arrive at a more accurate version of the facts. In fact, the irresolvable contradictions and unsettling fantastic events of these novels put the reader in pretty much the same position as the narrator: filtering memories, reading expressions, weighing the evidence in a vain attempt to arrive at the truth of the past or at the one correct interpretation of events. In short, Ishiguro’s deviant use of the technique of unreliable narration loosens the superior bond between implied author and reader and brings the reader closer again to the narrator.55 ––––––––––––– 54 55

Booth (1961: 158). This is in fact further underscored through the novels’ repeated emphasis on the activity of reading. Etsuko, Ono, Stevens, Banks and Ryder are all readers, who try to make sense of their past, of other people, of the world at large. They are also often literally


167

This loss of superiority does not mean, however, that the reader is discouraged from evaluating the narrator in a moral or ethical sense.56 One only has to take a look at the critics’ often stern judgements of Ishiguro’s narrators as megalomaniacs, narcissists or neglectful parents to see that his work certainly invites a moral response. In fact, it is precisely because Ishiguro’s novels refuse to provide an authoritative version of the facts and, hence, a clear view of the narrator’s guilt that the novels appeal to the norms and values of the individual reader for an interpretation of and a judgement on the narrator. In A Pale View of Hills it remains an open question whether Etsuko really neglected Keiko and whether she has failed as a mother in bringing her to England. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ono’s exact responsibility for the death of his son and wife and for the imprisonment of Kuroda remains unclear. The Unconsoled shrouds in a veil of mystery Ryder’s possible mistreatment of Sophie and Boris and When We Were Orphans is unclear about Banks’ neglect of his adopted daughter and his failure to act in the case of his parents. By thus leaving the ultimate guilt question unsettled, Ishiguro avoids the position of a moral arbiter and leaves the final judgement to the reader.57 And in most of Ishiguro’s novels, the reader faces the difficult job of judging a case in which the facts have gone missing. Through his original exploration of the possibilities and limits of narrative unreliability, Ishiguro has effectively shifted the focus and function of that narrative technique from facts to psychology and from epistemology to ethics. Throughout his work itself, moreover, another shift can be noted: Ishiguro’s increasing preference for metaphor over mimesis. While Ishiguro’s work was initially praised for its accurate depiction of Japan in his first two novels and of England in The Remains of the Day, critics have since drawn attention to the importance of metaphor in the setting of these novels: think of the wasteland around Etsuko’s Nagasaki apartment, –––––––––––––

56

57

engaged in reading and rereading letters, dissecting memories, analysing dreams, scrutinizing people’s expressions and reinterpreting past conversations. Hence, the actual reader of Ishiguro’s novels finds his or her activity prefigured in the text itself. I disagree therefore with Kathleen Wall who has argued that Ishiguro’s interest in the psychology of the characters works to the detriment of a moral interest in his work, Wall (1994: 38). Phelan detects a similar transferral of judgement in the final scene of The Remains of the Day where “Ishiguro […] invites our own ethics to play a crucial role in shaping our response to the scene” (2005: 60).

168

Elke D’hoker

the Bridge of Hesitation on which Ono likes to linger, or the meandering route which Stevens follows in his trip to the West of the country. With The Unconsoled, as we have seen, Ishiguro breaks far more radically with the realist paradigm. The inner struggles, traumas and memories of the narrator are no longer mimetically reflected in his narration but metaphorically represented through the events and characters in the fictional world itself. In the last two novels, we get a mixture of both approaches. While these narratives mirror the narrators’ preoccupations, fears and hopes in the realistic mode of unreliable narration, the events in When We Were Orphans and the entire context in Never Let Me Go also function as metaphors for both the narrator’s situation and for the human condition at large. And this particular combination of metaphor and mimesis to highlight the workings of the mind seems to me the greatest innovation of Ishiguro’s highly original use of unreliable narration. By way of conclusion, I would like to turn the tables and look at what the case of Ishiguro can tell us about unreliable narrators in general. It has once again become clear, I believe, that narrative unreliability should be seen as a continuum, not just in the sense that some narrators are more unreliable than others, but also in the sense that in some cases, reading the narrator as unreliable is a more useful interpretative strategy than in others. In this way, Ishiguro’s works can offer a slight corrective to Nünning’s cognitive approach to unreliability. While I agree with Nünning that the interpretation of narrative unreliability depends to a certain extent on the reader’s world view, literary knowledge and ethical principles, Ishiguro’s works clearly show that in some cases this interpretation is more warranted than in others and, importantly, that this is not a matter of a clear-cut distinction but rather of an ongoing continuum. In An Artist of the Floating World and even more in The Remains of the Day, an interpretation in terms of narrative unreliability seems very much the only option. In A Pale View of Hills, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, unreliability is only one – and perhaps an increasingly unlikely – paradigm by which narrative inconsistencies or oddities in the texts can be made sense of. And the case of The Unconsoled shows, finally, that in some cases narrative unreliability is simply no longer a useful category to interpret a given text. In addition, novels such as When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go which operate through a mixture of realism and fantasy, of mimesis


169

and metaphor also suggest that the link between unreliability and realism is not nearly as strong as one might have thought.58 For while Ishiguro remains committed to a form of psychological realism, witness his interest in memory, trauma, identity and in unconscious processes such as Verneinung, repression and dislocation, he stages these processes through realistic as well as metaphorical techniques. Again, however, this is a matter of gradation with utterly realistic works on the one end of the continuum and radically fantastic works on the other. And if The Unconsoled has shown that unreliability becomes irrelevant at the fantastic end, Ishiguro’s other works are evidence of the fact that a highly interesting and innovatory combination of both approaches is possible in the middle.

Works Cited Booth, Wayne C. 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago UP). Harrison, John M. 2005 “Clone Alone,” The Guardian 26 February. http://books.guardian.co.uk. [accessed 5/05/2006]. Howard, Ben 2001 “A Civil Tongue: The Voice of Kazuo Ishiguro,” in Sewanee Review 109,3: 389–418. Ishiguro, Kazuo 1991 A Pale View of Hills first published 1982 (London: Faber) 2001 An Artist of the Floating World first published 1986 (London: Faber). 2005 Never Let Me Go (London: Faber). 1989 The Remains of the Day (London: Faber). 1995 The Unconsoled (London: Faber). 2000 When We Were Orphans (London: Faber). Lanser, Susan Sniader 1981 The Narrative Act. Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP). Lewis, Barry 2000 Kazuo Ishiguro (Manchester: Manchester UP). Lodge, David 1992 The Art of Fiction (London: Penguin). Mason, Gregory 1989 “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” Contemporary Literature 30,3: 335–346.

––––––––––––– 58

Cf. Nünning (1999), Zerweck (2001).

170

Elke D’hoker

Mesher, David 1998 “Kazuo Ishiguro,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 194: British Novelists Since 1960, Second Series, ed. Merrit Moseley The Gale Group, 1998. Literature Resource Centre Online. [accessed 17/12/2002] Nünning, Ansgar 1999 “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” In Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, eds. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, 53–73 (Tübingen: Narr. Verlag). 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,” In A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds David Rabinowitz and James Phelan, 89–123 (Oxford: Blackwell). Nünning, Vera 1998 “Unreliable Narration und die historische Variabilität von Werten und Normen: The Vicar of Wakefield als Testfall für eine kulturgeschichtliche Erzählforschung,” In Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, ed. Ansgar Nünning, 257–285 (Trier: Wissenschaftlichen Verlag). Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” Narrative 11,1: 93–109. Phelan, James 2005 Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell UP). Richards, Linda 2004 “January Interview: Kazuo Ishiguro,” January Magazine 20 April http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/ishiguro [accessed 24/11/2004]. Shaffer, Brian 1998 Understanding Ishiguro (Columbia: U of South Carolina P). Sim, Wai-chew 2005 “Kazuo Ishiguro,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 25,1: 80–115. Teverson, Andrew 1999 “Reading in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day,” Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Litteratures and Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9: 251–258. Walkowitz, Rebecca 2001 “Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds,” ELH 68: 1049–1076. Wall, Kathleen 1994 “The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” Journal of Narrative Technique 24: 18–24. Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” Style 35,1: 151–178.

ELKE BREMS (Catholic University of Leuven)

A Sophisticated Form of Lying: Hugo Claus and the Poetics of Unreliability 1. Introduction Hugo Claus (1929–2008) is the showpiece of Flemish literature. He is a versatile artist: he makes movies, paints and writes poetry, theatre and novels. And he is a genius in being interviewed. This last characteristic led to the publication of a large volume entitled Hugo Claus. Groepsportret in 2004.1 In that book, subtitled A Life in Quotes, the journalist Mark Schaevers has collected a large number of quotations from interviews with Hugo Claus between 1951 and 2004. He has ordered them alphabetically around keywords, such as “absurd”, “acting”, “Artaud”, and “autobiographical writing”. In his afterword Schaevers makes clear that Hugo Claus himself has had a large say in the composition of this collection and even in rewriting some of his own quotes. As usual, Claus is the director of his own portrait. Schaevers observes that Claus prefers concealing to revealing and characterizes him as a lover of contradictions, paradoxes and lies. The title ‘Group Portrait’ refers to Claus’ many talents as an artist but also to his constantly changing view of things, to his resistance to a fixed and coherent image, and to the tension he always raises between reality and representation. The alphabetical structure of the book aims at erasing all hierarchy or logic relation between the quotes and makes it impossible – and perhaps irrelevant – to decide whether one quote is more true than another. Yet it is possible to reconstruct some of Claus’ opinions and evolutions and to discern themes in his self-discourse. One of the main themes Claus brings up in these interviews is his unreliability. In 1994 he proudly announces to one of his interviewers: “In me, –––––––––––––

1

The title may be translated as Hugo Claus. A Group Portrait.

172

Elke Brems

madam, you meet someone you can not rely on.”2 Unreliability is indeed Claus’ trademark. In that respect the keyword “Lie” in the Group Portrait is one of the most consistent and convincing ones. To quote just a few lines: “Lying is to me as essential as breathing”; “Writing is a sophisticated form of lying”; and “This book needs only to contain one sentence: he who doesn’t lie, lives like a beast”, a phrase which Schaevers has chosen as the motto for his book.3 The variations on that theme are indeed innumerable in this book. This book by Hugo Claus and Mark Schaevers plays with genres such as autobiography, biography, encyclopaedia, journalism and fiction. In this mixture of genres Claus acts as the first person narrator who leads and misleads the reader through his fragmentary discourse. In the story/stories Claus tells and writes about himself he is proud to be unreliable. The reader is warned form the beginning (the motto) not to trust this narrator. Paradoxically, however, this also works as a truth claim: the narrator is not lying to us about his (un)reliability. As editor, Mark Schaevers is clearly subordinate to Hugo Claus and he only confirms Claus’ proud unreliability. Turning to Claus’ fiction, one may wonder whether his firstperson narrators are reliably unreliable in the same way as the author or whether Claus also uses narrative unreliability in a different way in his fiction. In order to answer these questions, I will discuss two instances of narrative unreliability in Claus’ fictional work.

2. The Temptation “Nuns have always fascinated me”4

In 1980 Hugo Claus published the novella De Verzoeking5, which records the interior monologue of sister Mechtild, a very old and ill nun, who leads a lonely life in a convent. The story records one day out of her life, when she is being publicly celebrated for her virtuous life. Through ––––––––––––– 2 3

4 5

“In mij, mevrouw, heeft u er een op wie u niet kunt bouwen” (Schaevers 2004: 187), all translations from this collection are mine. “Liegen is voor mij net zo essentieel als ademen”; “Schrijven, dat is de wat chiquere vorm van liegen”, “Er dient in dit boek maar één zin te staan: wie niet liegt, leeft als een beest” (ibid.: 220, 221). “Nonnen hebben mij altijd gefascineerd”, ibid.: 262. The title may be translated as The Temptation.

A Sophisticated Form of Lying

173

flashbacks we learn of her past, especially of her marriage and subsequent miscarriage. Seeing that loss as a sign from God, she went into a very strict convent, where she has spent the rest of her life doing penance in a very harsh and extreme way. Sister Mechtild hates the celebration they are holding for her today. She misbehaves for instance by not washing herself so that they have to use lots of deodorant on her to hide the awful smell. In the end she urinates on the carpet and locks herself in the toilet. The novella registers the thoughts, memories, and perceptions of Mechtild: we hear and see the world from her perspective. While sometimes complaining that her perception is blurred, she does register apparent trifles such as the clicking of someone’s false teeth. Her thoughts and memories are fragmented and associative. It is not entirely clear at first whether Mechteld is the narrator of the novella or whether this is an interior monologue in which she functions as focalizer. Yet, there is no evidence of a conscious narrating on her part. Moreover, as will become clear later on, several aspects of the style do point in the direction of another narrator who is in control of the narrative. De Verzoeking can thus most accurately be characterised as the interior monologue or stream of consciousness of Sister Mechthild. In his contribution to this volume, Ansgar Nünning writes: “Another unresolved issue concerns the questions of whether it makes sense to conceive of focalizers as unreliable.”6 He mentions work by Manfred Jahn and Christoph Schubert on this subject but concludes that “full-fledged theories of unreliable focalization” have not yet been provided. I believe that it does make sense in De Verzoeking to call Mechtild an unreliable or fallible focalizer. Monika Fludernik mentions the possibility of fallible focalization in a monologue, when it involuntarily allows for an alternative interpretation of the events.7 That is clearly the case in this novella. The associative and fragmented character of Mechthild’s stream of consciousness is not sufficient to characterise Mechtild as unreliable. It is, rather, coherent with this type of interior monologue in general. Put in Nünning’s terms: the reader easily ‘naturalizes’ Mechtild’s rather chaotic interior monologue.8 It is only when pieces of dialogue are represented (within her monologue) and the voices of other characters are recorded by ––––––––––––– 6 7 8

Nünning, this volume, p. 66. Fludernik (2005). De Verzoeking was written as a monologue for the theatre, before it was published as a novella. Nünning (1999).

174

Elke Brems

Mechtild, that the reader is made to doubt Mechtild’s mental state. The other nuns e.g. give her valium so that she wouldn’t misbehave too much. The prioress tells the canon it is embarrassing to bring Sister Mechtild in public nowadays (“‘We can no longer bring her among people’, mother superior says quietly”)9 or she apologizes for Mechtild’s behaviour (“Forgive sister Mechtild. Her health lately...”).10 The reactions of the others lead us to interpret Mechtild’s obvious confusion and exaltation as dementia or senility. That would make her an unreliable focalizer, in the sense of epistemological unreliability: she can’t understand what is going on anymore because she is going senile. In that case the ‘others’ (the prioress, the canon, the bishop) function as normative centres of the story, which would seem appropriate with their generally accepted social status. However, these other characters are portrayed as unreliable as well, not in an epistemological, but in a moral sense. Mechtild registers snatches of their conversation during the festivities and it is not difficult for the reader to interpret those characters as hypocritical and stupid. It is therefore hard to maintain those ‘others’ as the norm by which to test Mechtild’s reliability. In fact her (un)reliability remains ambiguous throughout the novella. Mechtild is blind and therefore confused in her perception of reality. To give but one example: she seems to mistake the voice of her former husband Joseph for that of one of the guests. Blindness can function as an easy clue to establish unreliability. On the other hand, in literary tradition blindness is often linked with insight.11 Sister Mechtild is known for her visions (and even for her stigmata), it is suggested that she sees more than the others, that she has a more authentic sight, aimed towards the interior, the inner truth. The interpretation of Mechtild’s blindness according to this stereotype is certainly supported by bringing the rest of Claus’ oeuvre into the interpretational framework. In Claus’ literary oeuvre there is a recurring character-type that can be described as idiotic, silly, naive, but who nevertheless seems to function as a kind of normative instance in the –––––––––––––

9

10 11

“‘Wij kunnen haar niet meer onder de mensen brengen,’ zegt moeder overste stilletjes.” Claus (1980: 44, my translation). “Vergeef zuster Mechtild. Haar gezondheid de laatste tijd....” (ibid.: 47, my translation). Characters such as a blind seer or a blind prophet can be found in ancient myths (e.g. Tiresias) but are also popular in contemporary products of ‚phantasy’ like comics, card games or computer games. Those characters are said to be gifted with ‚second sight’.


175

story (e.g. Bennie in De Metsiers). Naivety goes together with innocence and purity. Mechtild would certainly fit this type: in her simplicity she is free from social conventions and norms; she can be more ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ and, hence, reveal persons and situations as being hypocritical and absurd.12 Yet purity as such never occurs in Claus’ oeuvre. Thus Bennie in The Metsiers has an incestuous relationship with his sister (and possibly with his mother). Mechtild’s purity is also questionable. She tries to resist any pleasure or any relief from her sorrow and suffering. She refuses blankets because they give her warmth and shelter, she refuses to scratch when she itches (“I need to scratch, but I don’t. Ankles, knees, calves, they hurt. Good. It is getting worse by the day, by the hour.”13), she refuses to wash herself because she wants to be repulsive, especially towards her heavenly groom, Jesus Christ. She doesn’t want to please him, on the contrary, she wants to repel him. (“That he would turn away from me, pinch his nose, that he would acknowledge: she is filth”14). She literally wants to be filth: she wants to be impure. She neglects her body, lets it rot and become grotesque. She would like to die as soon as possible and tries to catch all kinds of diseases: pneumonia, diabetes etc. This death wish and the selfwilled destruction of her female body – which has failed in giving birth to a living baby – have an erotic dimension. An absence of capitals when referring to Christ – he – suggests that she doesn’t discern between the different men in her life, be they earthly of heavenly. The harsh punishment she gives her own body seems to result from a persistent longing and desire she tries to retain and obstruct: “When I see you in the darkness of my sleep, I wet my bed. It is your fault. I can not see you. I can not think of you. [...] It is the haughtiness of pleasure and that pleasure needs to be crushed, or there shall be no penance and only penance can please you.”15 ––––––––––––– 12 13 14 15

In that sense she can also be linked with the mythological figure of Cassandra whose prophetic insight is interpreted as insanity. “Ik zou moeten krabben, maar ik doe het niet. Enkels, knieën, kuiten, zij doen zeer. Zo is het goed. Het verslechtert met de dag, met het uur.” Claus (1980: 13, my translation). “Dat hij zich van mij afwende, zijn neus dichtknijpe, dat hij erkenne: zij is drek!” (ibid.: 24, my translation). “Ik zie u beter dan met mijn ogen. Als ik u in het donker zie van mijn slaap, doe ik in mijn bed. Het is uw schuld. Ik mag u niet zien. Ik mag niet aan u denken. [...] Het is de hovaardij van het genot, en dat genot moet vermorzeld worden, anders is er geen boete en alleen boete kan u behagen” (ibid.: 17, my translation).

176

Elke Brems

The mixed feelings of pain and pleasure and an ambiguous eroticreligious desire are familiar, as they are typical for mystical experiences and in that sense Mechtild can be placed in a long tradition of mystics. In other words: her behaviour and experiences can be ‘naturalized’ by the reader in that context. That would make Mechtild less ambiguous, more comprehensible and reliable. In all, different possibilities present themselves to naturalize Mechtild’s behaviour and discourse. However, there is another level in this novella where unreliability can be established. What is most conspicuous about this text is its style. It is a typical Clausian mixture of the literary with the scatological, of the beautiful with the banal. On the one hand, the text is the interior monologue of a nun who is obsessed with her body, with filth and disease and whose thoughts are a mixture of realistic flashbacks and hallucinations. On the other hand the text is highly poetic and full of literary references. Intertextual references are a hallmark of Claus’ writing16 and in this novella too, there are plenty. The story can for instance be read as an elaboration of the RomanCatholic Stations of the Cross, there are references to the Flemish poet Suster Bertken and to the Flemish mystic Hadewijch, but also to classical myths like e.g. the oracle tales.17 Some critics have even discarded this at first sight very simple story because they couldn’t identify all the intertextual references.18 The story is also open to many symbolic interpretations: birds like the robin, the pigeon and the magpie can have symbolic meanings. There is also an abundant use of metaphors which link all kinds of isotopies together. Without going into it in too much detail, it is clear that the text can not only be read as an authentic recording of a nun’s inner thoughts, but also as a deliberate literary construction, a stylistic exercise. This is corroborated by the first issue of the story which had a very striking lay-out and resembled a collection of poems more than a story. Each page only contained a fragment of the story, thus leaving lots of blank spaces. Pink ink was used, which only enhanced the sense of mannerism and play. The ––––––––––––– 16 17

18

See e.g. Claes (1984). I already mentioned the likeness between Mechtild and Cassandra and between Mechtild and Tiresias. The latter also possesses the gift of speaking the language of the birds. In this novella too, there is a lot of emphasis on Mechtild’s obsession with birds. See e.g. Borré (1981) who calls the novella “another succesful intellectual-competitive egotrip for the attention of the insiders” (“weer een suksesvolle intellektueelkompetitieve egotrip ter attentie van de insiders”, my translation).


177

reader’s attention is thus drawn away from the nun as focalizer to a narrator behind her: a narrator who is concerned with intertextuality, lay-out, style, cultural references, poetry. We can hardly imagine Sister Mechtild herself to have such a sophisticated literary and intellectual background. In any case this narrating instance makes the novella more than just an unmediated representation of Mechtild’s emotions and experiences. The narrator, using focalisation and interior monologue, reveals himself through his style. The deliberate interference of style and content becomes more and more obvious towards the end. Mechtild seems to lose all coherence in her thoughts, her monologue becomes a rambling of self-made words and all syntax is lost: He, he, salt like broom, bitter like iodine, smelling of rotten eggs, he is in my clothes, snores there, dances there, he is thin, he is dead, he is deformed, and with my foolish impatience I don’t want words anymore, nor reasons, each time, works, virtues, I want, Domine, deformed as I am to your image, frumpish, gooseberrying, the mug prophetical, washful over jaws, help, whurring, freeish, freesidish, help, with walking, moron19 ing, shitting, him, him, him.

This rambling is immediately followed by the sentence “Along my thighs, the lukewarm stream”.20 Mechtild urinates: her physical incontinence runs parallel with her verbal incontinence. While the urine runs out of her bladder onto the Persian carpet, she seems to come into a trance, in which she speaks like an oracle and which has an unmistakable erotic connotation. (The reference to the fragment in which she wets the bed is clear, the link with her miscarriage in the car can also be made.) In this climactic scene, the two instances of the text are brought together: Mechtild in her perverse purity, her hallucinations and physical repulsiveness and the narrator in his tangling of the verbal and the physical, the style and the content. Both reach a level of excess, exuberance. The style draws attention to itself, the ‘writing’ is foregrounded, the pleasure is not only physical but also textual. Hence, we can also consider the narrator as unreliable in a moral sense. He lets us believe we are hear––––––––––––– 19

20

“Hij, hij, zout als brem, bitter als iodiumtinctuur, stinkend naar rotte eieren, hij zit in mijn kleren, snurkt er, danst er, hij is mager, hij is dood, hij is mismaakt, en met mijn onwijs ongeduld wil ik geen woorden meer, geen redenen, telkens, werken, deugden, ik wil, Domine, mismaakt als ik ben naar uw beeld, treutig, kriekelend, het bakkes profetig, wasserlijk over kaken, help, smorrend, vrijlijk, vrijkantelijk, help, met lopen, bielen, meuren, hem, hem, hem.” Claus (1980: 65, my translation). “Langs mijn dijen, de lauwe stroom” (ibid.: 65, my translation).

178

Elke Brems

ing the voice and the confessions of the nun and makes us question her reliability (blindness or insight? visions or senility?) instead of his own. By doing so he addresses moral issues like hypocrisy, innocence, purity, perversity and guilt, appealing to the reader to take a critical attitude towards them. Yet we catch him when he proudly shows off his erudition and his deliberate use of style and structure; he is the master-composer, directing Mechtild’s bladder and mouth. His priority does not lie in the ethical dimension of the story but in the aesthetical dimension. The reader sees through the seemingly moral stance of the narrator and judges him as unreliable.

3. The Sorrow of Belgium “You can also use words so as not to be understood”, Louis said.21

In 1983 Hugo Claus published his long awaited and best-selling novel Het Verdriet van België.22 The novel contains the story of the childhood and adolescence of Louis Seynaeve during the years 1939–1948, largely covering the Second World War. During the early eighties, when the novel was first published, Flanders was in the midst of a process of demystification of its (collective and national) war memory. The moral complexity of the war society and the untruthful political discourses during and after the war were exposed. In other words, the unreliability of the existing ‘stories’ and ‘narrators’ of the war was being revealed.23 The Sorrow of Belgium has often been read against that background. According to a realist-mimetic reading of the novel, it is a war-novel about collaboration, repression and the typical mixture of Flemish nationalist and Roman-Catholic ideologies. Such a mimetic-realist interpretation is to be found in the metaphor of the ‘portrait’ that critics often use in connection to this novel: the novel would then be a – or even the – portrait of Belgium or at least of the Belgian Second World War period. The title Het verdriet van België has become a cliché, a well-known expression with which to indicate a certain kind of ‘Belgitude’ (typically Belgian attitude), not only in literary, but also e.g. in economic or political discourse. ––––––––––––– 21 22 23

Claus (1990: 516). The novel was translated as The Sorrow of Belgium in 1990. Cf. Beyen (2004).


179

The idea of the novel as a (satirical) portrait of a nation characterizes the narration as stable and identifiable. The text is believed to be a reliable source of information, opinions, and data. However, the relationship between language and reality in this novel is much more complex than such a reading would suggest.24 Crucial in this complexity is the composition of the novel. It consists of two parts: The Sorrow (288 pages in the first Dutch edition) and of Belgium (486 pages). Part I consists of 27 numbered chapters, part II is one long batch of text without any further substructures. The first part is a transparent account, a Bildungsgeschichte, which describes Louis Seynaeve’s education in a convent school, the difficult communication with his parents and the oppressive friendship with a classmate. It is a quest for knowledge in which Louis tries to understand the code of the adult world; it holds the promise of adulthood. The successful completion of this quest is suggested by the significant term ‘The End’ on page 288. But the end is only the beginning. In the course of the second part Louis Seynaeve is revealed to be the writer of a story which strongly resembles the first part (The Sorrow). That story is Louis’ contribution to a literary competition. So the first part is merely an appendix to the second, it is embedded in the second. The second part then becomes the frame, the first is only secondary. Part II offers a completely different narrative than Part I: it is not transparent or coherent but confusing and polyphonous; the structure is fragmentary. Louis’ attempts to understand the world and his hope to participate in it no longer seem to hold. The world can no longer be deciphered or read. This postmodern second part of the novel invites us to reread the first part and, hence, read the entire novel as a discontinuous narrative rather than a straightforward Bildungsroman. The rather traditional embedded first part is to be read (or at least can be read) as a construction of Louis. He uses adult symbols, genres and codes in order to create a seemingly coherent story with which he wins the literary competition. The novel then deals not so much with the Second World War or with Belgian society in general, as with storytelling itself. It is not so much about reality as about language. Louis uses the well-known elements of a good story to create a seemingly authentic account. Not only Louis, but also Hugo Claus has written a prize-winning story. Claus received the Belgian State Prize for The Sorrow of Belgium. Or rather: according to the ––––––––––––– 24

See also Brems/Vanasten (2005).

180

Elke Brems

report of the jury he received it mainly for the first part of the novel, which in fact only makes sense in a whole that proves how manipulative storytelling can be. In other words, the jury considered the most convincing narrator to be the most reliable, the one who holds history in his hands.25 Both parts of the novel have a third person narrator, but, as I have shown, for the first part we can assume that it is Louis himself who writes the story in which he is the main character. To the reader of the second part Louis is revealed as the unreliable heterodiegetic narrator of the first part. The unreliability does not lie in the inability of the narrator to give a realistic account of ‘what happened’, but rather in his storytelling talent: storytelling is rhetoric, manipulation. The narrator is not concerned with representing reality but with shaping language into a reliable and convincing account. In the second part the narrator holds a different view on literature and uses a different style. In this part the third person narration sometimes gives way to a first person narration. ‘He-Louis’ then becomes ‘I-Louis’. This indicates that the narrator in this part is also Louis Seynaeve, only older and wiser. He has now been influenced by literary and artistic expressionism which has changed his world view and artistic ideas and that could have altered his style completely. It would be naive to interpret that second story as more authentic and judge Louis as a narrator in the second part to be more reliable, simply because he uses a different artistic discourse and poetics. When the I-narrator appears, the distance between Louis as a narrator and Louis as a character collapses. Those are probably the most reliable parts in the narration: he shows himself, comes out of his hiding place of third person narrator. He even shows the reader how his story is ‘a work in progress’, he shows us the mechanisms of his narration: He woke up with a crust inside his nostrils. He picked at it. Started a new notebook. [...] he wrote: “Dondeyne had hidden one of the seven Forbidden Books under his tu-

––––––––––––– 25

Comment by Hugo Claus: “Of course I should have returned half of the prize money, but my craving for festive travels and debaucheries used to exceed my ethics.” (“Ik had natuurlijk de helft van het prijzengeld terug moeten sturen, maar mijn honger naar feestelijke reizen en vreterijen was indertijd groter dan mijn ethiek.” Claus (1999, my translation).


181

nic and then coaxed me into coming along.” He scratched out the word “me” and sub26 stituted “Louis”.

The sentence Louis here writes in his new notebook is actually the first sentence of the (first part of the) novel we are reading. In this fragment we see him writing and replacing ‘I’ by ‘him’, thus choosing a third-person narrator. It becomes even more complex when, two pages further, we read: A dark-blonde woman, hair dyed chestnut now with a hint of the earlier red rinse still showing through, well preserved despite her thirty-seven years, although marked by that secret malaise called melancholia, stepped resolutely into the office of the representative of Belgian justice. (If you are looking at my new notebook, Mama, please desist.) A woman of a certain age, my mother, walked smartly into the Judge Advocate’s chambers. (Off you go, Mama, I told you!) [...] Mevrouw S., chain-smoker, out of breath after climbing the rather short flight of stairs, pushed open a padded door and stepped into the room streaming with sunshine where 27 the Judge Advocate awaited her.

The new notebook mentioned in the previous quote apparently does not only serve to write the first part in, but here also serves for the second, which gives that part too the aura of the literary exercise of an adolescent would-be-writer (a less successful attempt though, because it did not win a literary prize, neither in the novel nor in reality). While Louis is writing in the notebook he is aware that his mother might read in it and he addresses her directly. In the fragment quoted above, Louis tries to find the right style in which to describe the anecdote of his mother going to the Judge Advocate. Firstly he writes a very literary, long winding sentence in which he introduces his mother as if the reader has never heard of her, as if he is beginning a new story. In his second attempt he calls her ‘my mother’ and writes a simple, short sentence. His third attempt is taking a distance again and is written in an impressionist style. Here, the mother is called ‘Mevrouw S.’ (S. stands for Seynaeve). You see the narrator at work, picking a style and choosing the distance he wants to install between himself and the character of the woman/the mother. Meanwhile we see him addressing his mother as a possible reader of his ‘work in progress’. ––––––––––––– 26 27

Claus (1990: 533). Ibid.: 534–535.

182

Elke Brems

On the last pages of the novel too the narrator drops his mask of third person narrator and turns to a first person narrative mode. ‘Louis’ and ‘I’ coincide. The narrator allows the reader insight into his rhetoric. He creates holes in the texture of his story, thus revealing the ‘mechanism’ of storytelling. Pointing out the inevitable unreliability of the storyteller, he himself as a narrator gains an aura of reliability. That way he deconstructs and constructs reliability at the same time, leaving the issue ambiguous and unsolved.

4. Conclusion In my first paragraph I have discussed how Hugo Claus uses his ‘unreliability’ as a trademark and is the unreliable author of the stories about himself. In the second paragraph I have discussed one of his novels (De Verzoeking), which stages a focalizer whose reliability can be questioned. On top of that unreliable focalization by Mechtild the reader notices another layer of narration, a voice that is not Mechtild’s, but the narrator’s. This narrator uses the ‘authenticity’ of the interior monologue as an object for his literary exercise. In my third paragraph I have tried to prove that The Sorrow of Belgium is a story about storytelling as much as it is about reality or ideas. The first part of the novel as well as the second shows us ‘storytelling in action’. In each of his novels Hugo Claus shows the reader how conscious he is about the possibilities, ambiguities and manipulative characteristics of ‘narration’. In fact he even seems convinced that narrative representation is by nature unreliable. Nünning writes: “The concept of unreliable narration also implies that human beings are principally taken to be capable of providing veracious accounts of events and of others, that “an authoritative version of events” [...] can in principle be established or retrieved.”28 It is clear that Hugo Claus does not believe in the capability of human beings to give a reliable account of events. Unreliable narration is not only used as a narrative technique by Hugo Claus, it is also essential to understand his poetics. He undermines the realist-mimetic code and foregrounds the ‘narration’. The strength of his work lies in the combination of telling a good story the reader can believe in and emphasizing that stories are not made with pieces of reality but with language. ––––––––––––– 28

Nünning (1999: 62).


183

Claus’ concept of man (including himself) is not optimistic. In his work unreliability is not just a possible narrative mode, it is a crucial characteristic of mankind. Apart from being a strategy in his work, unreliability is also one of the main themes of Claus’ literary oeuvre. And this in itself of course complicates Claus’ use of narrative unreliability. For, as Nünning has shown, the concept of unreliability is mostly defined through the questionable standard of ‘common sense’. And it is precisely this idea of ‘common sense’ as a mechanism to distinguish between normal and abnormal, the known and the ‘strange’, the community and the outsider, which Hugo Claus tries to destabilize in his literary work.

Works Cited Beyen, Marnix. 2004 “Der Kampf um das Leid, ” in Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen. 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen (Berlin: DHM): 67–94. Booth, Wayne C. 1995 The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Borré, Jos 1981 “Claus’ egotrips,” in De Morgen 10 October 1981. Brems, Elke en Stéphanie Vanasten 2005 “Als de oorlog woedt of broeit of loeit,” in Nieuwste Tijd 4: 1, 29–34. Claes, Paul 1984 De mot zit in de mythe: Hugo Claus en de oudheid (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij). Claus, Hugo 1980 De Verzoeking (Antwerpen: Pink Editions and Productions). 1983 Het Verdriet van België (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij). 1990 The Sorrow of Belgium (New York: Pantheon). 1999 “De 7 mijlpalen van Hugo Claus,” in Humo 6 april 1999. 2004 Hugo Claus. Groepsportret. Een leven in citaten. Bijeengebracht door Mark Schaevers (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij). Fludernik, Monika 2005 “Unreliability vs. Discordance: Kritische Betrachtungen zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzept der erzählerischen ’Unzuverlässigkeit’,” in Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, edited by Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik). Nünning, Ansgar 1999 “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hyoptheses,” in Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, eds. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tubingen: Narr). Verhaeghe, Annie 1984 “De verzoeking van Hugo Claus: een analyse à la Roland Barthes,” in Spiegel der Letteren 26: 3–4, 267–277.

LARS BERNAERTS (Ghent University)

‘Un Fou Raisonnant et Imaginant’. Madness, Unreliability and The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short 1. Introduction In 1965 the Belgian film director André Delvaux finished his adaptation of De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen1, a Flemish novel written by Johan Daisne in 1947. Delvaux skilfully evoked the unique atmosphere of this magical realist novel, which consists of the lengthy confession of Godfried Miereveld (Godfried Antfield). In the novel, Antfield describes three moments of his life in meticulous detail. First, he talks about a graduation ceremony in the school where he has replaced judge Brantink as a teacher for six months. At this graduation ceremony he says goodbye to his favourite pupil, Fran. In the second scene Antfield attends a traumatic post-mortem examination of an anonymous corpse because his friend, professor Mato, asks him to. Thirdly, Antfield describes what happens in the hotel where he runs into Fran again shortly after the autopsy. Among the things Delvaux changed in his film is the opening scene. While the novel begins with the first-person narrator commenting on his current stay in a mental institution before he starts the monologue about his past, the opening scene of the film shows Antfield at home with his wife and children long before his stay in the institution. Why did Delvaux rewrite this scene, nevertheless retaining Antfield’s perspective by means of focalisation and off-screen comments? Changing the opening scene inevitably alters the viewer’s reception of the story, and that is what the film director had in mind. Obviously, he did not want the viewer to be biased in any way. For the viewer as well as the reader, the space of the institution as the narrator’s point of narration is a highly marked one. Since it ––––––––––––– 1

The book was translated as The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short by S.J. Sackett in 1965.

186

Lars Bernaerts

hints at the abnormal mental state of the narrator, the reader is biased, on the alert for deviations in story and discourse. In other words, the foreknowledge that the narrator is mad brings the reliability/unreliability dichotomy to the fore. But why will we say that madness entails unreliability? This paper focuses on the mad first-person narrator in Dutch2 twentieth-century novels in order to refine the notion of madness in the theory of narrative unreliability. The profiles of the fou raisonnant and the fou imaginant will be introduced and, in the second part of this paper, they will be analysed in the novel De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen. When the narrator is assumed to be mad, the reader’s expectations are restructured on the basis of certain frames of reference. Ansgar Nünning has noticed that “just like other narrative techniques, [unreliable narration] should be seen as a formal response to broader cultural developments”.3 In the case of the mad narrator, the reference to the history of madness is important: the interpretation of literary madness depends on the culturalhistorical context of its production and consumption. By way of illustration I will discuss two moments in the history of madness which influence our interpretation of madness and its relation to narrative unreliability. In the theory of unreliability, the mad first-person narrator has been discussed as “the madman”4 and “the mad monologist”5, and insanity has been defined as a key to unreliability by Monika Fludernik.6 Taking these interpretations as a starting point, I would suggest that the mad narrator’s unreliability concerns two areas that have not yet been thoroughly investigated: his discourse and his representation of reality. De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen will offer a particularly illuminating example of a firstperson narrator whose madness affects both his argumentation and his depiction of reality. The narrator, indeed, tellingly calls himself “senseless, un fou raisonnant et imaginant”.7 I will flesh out the fou raisonnant and fou imaginant, not as a mere substitute for literary types already specified –––––––––––––

2 3 4 5 6 7

I am using the term ‘Dutch literature’ here for literary works produced in the Dutch language, in Flanders and the Netherlands. Nünning (1997: 94). Riggan (1981). Nünning (1998a), Allrath (1998), Sims (1998). Fludernik (1999). Daisne (1965: 209).

Un Fou Raisonnant et Imaginant

187

elsewhere (‘the madman’, ‘the mad monologist’), but as two distinguishable faces of the mad first-person narrator.

2. Unreliability and the History of Madness As Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning and Bruno Zerweck8 have explained on the basis of examples taken mainly from English literature, the phenomenon of unreliable narration is subject to cultural and historical developments. The cultural-historical background of the text and the reader are decisive in the reader’s judgement of the narrator. Likewise, the production and consumption of literary representations of madness are determined by the history of madness. What belongs to the necessarily ill-defined category of madness is historically determined. In general, madness carries the semantic cores ‘deviation’ (of behaviour, utterances, reasoning, etc.) and ‘mental state’, but in the course of time various interpretations of madness have become especially influential. Our reception of literary madness is affected by dominant views in the conceptual history of madness, such as the well-known ideas of René Descartes and Sigmund Freud.9 In Michel Foucault’s view, Descartes is responsible for the exclusion of the mad from discourse. 10 When Descartes formulated his ideas about the subject in his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), he defined it as a coherent thinking self. Thus, the dividing line between reason and madness, sanity and insanity was introduced and became an active frame of reference. Descartes formulated the premises that could later be attacked through the mad narrator’s performance. This is, however, only one part of the story. Allen Thiher stresses the double legacy of Descartes by also pointing out the philosopher’s conviction that reason is unassailable, so that “madness cannot affect the products of pure reason”.11 In this interpretation we can find an explanation for the repeated use of rational argumentation in the discourse of twentieth-century mad narrators. Descartes taught us there is reason in madness. ––––––––––––– 8 9

10 11

Nünning (1997: 90–95), Vera Nünning (1998b), Zerweck (2001). For an extensive survey of these and other leading figures and ideas in the history of madness and psychiatry, see the studies by Foucault (1972), Thiher (1999) and Porter (2002). Foucault (1972). Thiher (1999: 95).

188

Lars Bernaerts

While Descartes provides the basis for considering madness as a source of unreliability, Sigmund Freud’s immense legacy made it possible for the madman to function as a speaking subject in the way he does in twentieth-century literature. In the Histoire de la folie Foucault explains how, in the psychoanalytical situation, Freud retraces the guilt that had been imposed on madmen through the internalisation of constraint: the evolution of psychiatry led to the “interiorisation of the juridical instance, and the birth of remorse in the inmate’s mind”.12 Since insane patients had been taught to embody constraint, the pressure eventually came from within. This process has left clear traces in first-person narratives of madness. Because Freud effectively dissolved the silence traditionally associated with madness, literary texts could exploit this internal perspective as a rich soil for the mad first-person narrator. In this way, psychoanalysis has to a certain extent become a frame of reference for generations of readers and it has undeniably left its traces in twentieth-century novels. In addition, psychoanalysis can serve as a decoding device, what Tamar Yacobi would call an “appropriate integration mechanism” for “explaining ostensible discordance”.13 ‘Mad’ narration or focalisation is in most cases based on the delusions of the narrator or focaliser and can thus often be decoded in the way Freud interpreted dreams. In his remarks on the Schreber case or on the Gradiva novella14, for example, Freud elaborates on the connection between the psychic construction of dreams and the construction of delusions.15 The same operations of Verneinung, Verschiebung, Verdichtung (negation, displacement, condensation) and symbolisation lead to the specific appearance of hallucination and delusions. When Godfried Antfield in Daisne’s novel finds out that an important episode in his life never actually occurred, he realises that his delusion allowed him to “dispel sinful shades”.16 His guilty conscience about his sinful feelings for one of his pupils crystallised in his imagination into the –––––––––––––

12 13 14 15

16

Foucault (1967: 267). Yacobi (2005: 109). Freud (1973 [1910]), Freud (1969 [1907]). Freud compares Traumarbeit (dreamwork) with Wahnbildungsarbeit (work of delusion-formation): “the patient speaks with the characteristic vagueness and obscurity which may be regarded as marks of an especially intense work of delusion-formation, if it is legitimate to judge paranoia on the model of a far more familiar mental phenomenon – the dream” (Freud 1968a: 38). Daisne (1965: 209).


189

murder of Fran. When reality becomes unbearable, the madman represses a part of reality or substitutes it as a whole. Against this background, mad ‘unreliability’ becomes intelligible and ready for integration, which opens the door to reading it as a reliable representation of madness. In brief, Freudian psychoanalysis, which is common knowledge to a certain extent, can function as a means of naturalisation.17 This psychoanalytic understanding of neurosis and psychosis can also be connected to the theory of unreliable narration. When the psychotic Inarrator substitutes reality with delusional ideas as in De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen and Hugo Claus’s De verwondering, the reader can recognise this operation as misreporting, misreading and misregarding. In reading, he tries to perform the opposite manoeuvre so as to recover what actually happened. In the case of neurosis the narrator will have repressed a part of his world and is thus guilty of underreporting, underreading and underregarding.18 In order to decode the words and visions of the narrator, the reader will depend on the reactions of other characters. In De verwondering, for example, the nurse who looks after the narrator in the mental home gives away that they found him screaming in front of the classroom, whereas he himself tells ofhis quest to a mysterious castle which has ended in the mental home. If the reader wishes to integrate the nurse’s comment, he has to judge either her or the narrator as unreliable. The second option is more plausible because of the narrator’s problematic mental state implicit in his stay in the institution.

––––––––––––– 17

18

Cf. Culler: “to naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model which is already, in some sense, natural or legible”, quoted in Nünning (1999: 67). In the case of the mad narrator, neurosis and psychosis, as roughly defined by Freud in “Neurose und Psychose” and “Der Realitätsverlust bei Neurose und Psychose”, seem to be psychological equivalents for the narrative operations that James Phelan has distinguished (1999, 2005: 31–65). In “Neurose und Psychose” Freud states that “the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world” (1968b: 151). In “Der Realitätsverlust bei Neurose und Psychose” Freud discusses the difference concerning the connection with reality. His basic assumption is that in psychosis reality is altered, whereas in neurosis reality is escaped from: “neurosis does not disavow the reality, it only ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it” (1968c: 185).

190

Lars Bernaerts

3. Madness and Unreliability: Theory and Readings A narrator’s madness does not necessarily entail narrative unreliability. Highly marked texts like écrits bruts, written by mental patients, that undoubtedly contain a large share of inconsistencies, do generally not incite the reader to call the narrator unreliable. The distance between the implied author and the narrator is minimal, so there is no room for unreliability. To put it differently, most readers will apply a genetic principle here to explain incoherence, rather than a perspectival principle.19 These texts are often less accessible because they consistently follow the alternative logic of the mental patient. The most ‘natural’ way to read this logic is to trace it back to the writer. Moving on to literary texts by ‘insane’ authors the stakes are raised, because the literariness of the text is called into question and the reader’s choices are more difficult to predict. In Dutch literature several writers with a psychiatric history gained the status of literary author in the twentieth century. Jan Arends and J.M.A. Biesheuvel in particular use their background as a mental patient quite explicitly in their prose, introducing mad first-person narrators who are admitted to a mental institution. The narrator in Jan Arends’ famous short story “Keefman” (1972) can unmistakably be understood as unreliable. He stubbornly accuses and insults the psychiatrist he addresses, while at the same time inconsistently trying to convince his addressee that he, the patient, would be an excellent psychiatric nurse. Judging by the reviews of their work, Arends’s and Biesheuvel’s subjective, overt narrators are predominantly understood in terms of the author’s background. Readers, who are informed by reviews as well as paratextual elements, again activate the genetic principle to reconcile apparent incongruities in the text. Instead of holding the narrator responsible for the incoherence, these readers construct a seam rather than a gap between the implied author and the narrator, thereby accepting the narrator’s account as a reliable representation of madness, because most narratives of unreliable mad narrators are accurate representations of madness and of the madness of psychiatry. Arends’s Keefman is often taken to be a sincere character who represents the ideas of the author. Reading Keefman as ––––––––––––– 19

In “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem” (1981: 114–119) Tamar Yacobi distinguishes five principles for integrating a text’s contradictions: the genetic, the generic, the existential, the functional and the perspectival principle.


191

a full-blooded unreliable narrator would be tantamount to ignoring paratextual elements and foreknowledge about the author. When we leave the peripheral area of ‘insane’ writers, the idea of sincerity as a counterindication for unreliable narration remains a subject of discussion. Sincerity is a relevant matter in the tension between an unreliable narrator’s account and a reliable representation of madness. 3.1. The Fou Raisonnant The mad first-person narrator has attracted a lot of attention in the theory of unreliable narration. Although the theory has concentrated on English literature, the profile of the narrating madman as it took shape through the critical work of William Riggan, Ansgar Nünning and Monika Fludernik proves to be very useful for understanding the Dutch and Flemish version as well. The image of the mad monologist sketched by Nünning, Gaby Allrath and Dagmar Sims20 is that of an overt, autodiegetic narrator with a certain intellectual power who self-confidently justifies his dubious acts and behaviour. To a large extent this characterisation can be applied to the most salient mad first-person narrators in modern Dutch literature: the firstperson narrators of Johan Daisne’s De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (1947) , Maurits Dekker’s Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben (1929) (Why I am not insane), Hugo Claus’ De verwondering (1962) (Wonder) and Gerard Walschap’s Het gastmaal (1966) (The Banquet) and Het avondmaal (1968) (Dinner) all fit the description of the mad monologist. These overt narrators are self-conscious madmen, who look back on their lives and try to justify their acts. Their self-consciousness is marked by their intelligence: Godfried Antfield is a teacher and a lawyer, Victor-Denijs De Rijckel in De verwondering is a teacher, the anonymous narrator of Het gastmaal and Het avondmaal punctuates his monologue with references to literature and philosophy. Their unreliability can be intimated from self-incrimating statements such as Vladimir Wirginszki’s repeated assurance that he is neither normal nor mad in Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben), Godfried Antfield’s awareness of his mental oversensitivity, or the tendency of Walschap’s narrator to confidently state his superior understanding of the world. All ––––––––––––– 20

Nünning (1998a), Allrath (1998) and Sims (1998).

192

Lars Bernaerts

of these narrators consider themselves outsiders and long for recognition, also from the narratee.21 However, in the effort of justifying their acts and behaviour the narrators get bogged down. Their discourse embodies the deviations and contradictions they deny in the story of their life. The most striking textual clues to unreliability in these texts reside in their refusal or inability to produce a reliable account of facts and events. Near the end of the novel, the narrator of Het gastmaal writes: “I falsified my image and problem, and it was useless to them; I wrote because I wanted to write; I wanted to write because it relieved me, and it relieved me, whatever I wrote”.22 And Victor-Denijs De Rijckel, the protagonist of De verwondering, concludes his report for his psychiatrist as follows: I will note down, arrange everything. Not now. Now I am too hurried, because Korneel demands that the pack of paper is covered with writing. I have written the start. How it started. But this is not the way it started. It was entirely different. Still I have to 23 try. I have to keep my distance, like Korneel says.

De Rijckel feels the pressure of his psychiatrist to produce a reliable, objective report, and he has to admit that he is not able to do so. The conceited madman in Het gastmaal rejects the idea of a trustworthy report, whereas his self-disparaging counterpart in De verwondering has at least a vague understanding that he is simply not capable of producing a reliable account. In the description of the mad monologist this misleading rhetoric, characterised by justification and contradiction, has quite rightly been foregrounded. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of this rhetoric have not yet been adequately analysed. Starting from the analysis of the aforementioned Dutch novels, I will add some observations to the understanding of the rhetorical strategies the mad narrator uses to rationalise and comment on his discourse. Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben, De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, De verwondering, Het gastmaal and Het avondmaal are all narratives produced with clear-cut intentions. They are presented as an ––––––––––––– 21

Cf. Allrath (1998: 62). “[I]k vervalste mijn beeld en probleem, en daar hadden zij niets aan; ik schreef omdat ik wilde schrijven; ik wilde schrijven omdat het mij verlichtte, en het verlichtte mij, al eender wat ik schreef” (Walschap 1966: 116, my translation). 23 “Ik zal het allemaal noteren, ordenen. Nu niet. Nu ben ik te gehaast, want Korneel eist dat het pak papier beschreven wordt. Ik heb het begin geschreven. Hoe het begon. Maar zo begon het niet. Het was helemaal anders. Toch moet ik het proberen. Ik moet het, zoals Korneel zegt, afstandelijk houden” (Claus 2004: 452, my translation). 22


193

apology, a confession or a report for the psychiatrist. In the narrator’s strained effort to be loyal to the speech objectives which govern these rhetorical modes, he blunders inevitably. On the one hand, the narrator pretends to know what he is doing with words, on the other hand the words do a lot more than he wants them to. In that respect, he only purports to observe the rules of logic and rationality. Monika Fludernik’s article “Defining (In)Sanity” specifies this feature as a “hold on to rationality by means of rational discourse patterns”.24 In her reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” she repeatedly points out that the narrator conspicuously combines deviant behaviour with rational logic. Fludernik calls it “mental imbalance and intellectual lucidity” and an “insane use of reason and rational discourse”.25 It is striking how rational patterns abound in the manuscripts of the narrator of Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben. In his defense against the diagnosis of his psychiatrists he interlaces his narration with rationalising comments with which he hopes to prove his sanity but these eventually turn against him. In my view, the contradiction in the discourse of the fou raisonnant, as I will call the streamlined version of the mad monologist, should therefore be understood as hypercorrection.26 Vladimir Wirginszki realises he has to display his mental capacities to convince the psychiatrists. Therefore he incorporates the psychiatric discourse in his narrative, as he anticipates their reader response: After reading this statement you can say: this man is raving mad. No, he is not, he is 27 merely being completely frank, he is only undressing for you. I can see you smile about these words; I warn you: do not laugh too quickly. It is I who is showing you this child. You can see it through my eyes and you are guided by

––––––––––––– 24

Fludernik (1999: 88). Ibid.: 89, 81. The reference to ‘rational discourse patterns’ implies a kind of rhetorical and linguistic normality that includes speaking coherently and purposefully. 26 The term is borrowed from linguistics where it basically means ‘language error made in the effort to avoid language errors, an error due to a desire to use language correctly’. From a pragmatic point of view, ‘speaking correctly’ means here having clear intentions (as they are inferred from speech acts), being self-conscious, psychologically and linguistically coherent. 27 “Na het lezen van deze mededeeling, kunt Gij zeggen: deze man is volslagen gek. Neen, dat is hij niet, hij is slechts volkomen openhartig, hij kleedt zich alleen voor U uit” (Dekker 1929: 55; my translation). 25

194

Lars Bernaerts

my will. Do not think that you are impervious to the influence of the will of somebody 28 you call insane.

Vladimir’s empathy is delusive: by asserting that he knows how his psychiatrists think the narrator manipulates the narratee and the reader, although the perlocutionary effect of his manipulation remains uncertain. Moreover, the lucidity is misleading, for in trying to convince his audience, he takes rationality to its extremes and fails.29 Yet, this lucidity is misleading, for in trying to convince his audience, he takes rationality to its extremes and fails. An excess of rationality brings us back to madness. I would thus argue that hypercorrection is a form of inconsistency which can be interpreted as a sign of narrative unreliability. Vladimir Wirginszki (Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben) imitates normal behaviour in an obsessive way; Victor-Denijs De Rijckel (De verwondering) makes every effort to satisfy his psychiatrist’s demand for an objective report. Yet, the reader records both the narrator’s desire to talk rationally and the moments of excess and overdrive. Closely connected to the madman’s hypercorrection is his explicitness about his rhetoric. In their elaborate reasonings mad narrators often clarify their speech objectives and explain why they mention something or other. In Het gastmaal the narrator writes: “For the sake of logic I begin with an accurate description of the incident that became the cause of this account” and later on, “By way of captatio benevolentiae I admitted that I had found nothing strange in what he confided to me”.30 Witness finally the following example from Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben: Imagine this: the madman, who defends himself in writing, congratulates his physicians with the fact that they, without much effort, succeeded in proving his insanity on the basis of the piece with which he wanted to demonstrate his full value. He recog-

––––––––––––– 28

“Ik zie U glimlachen om deze woorden; ik waarschuw U: lach niet te vroeg. Ik ben het, die U dit kind laat zien, Gij ziet het door mijn oogen en Gij wordt geleid door mijn wil. Denk niet dat Gij ongevoelig zijt voor den wilsinvloed van iemand dien Gij krankzinnig noemt” (Dekker 1929: 17; my translation). 29 Rationality comes down to ‘having a sense of reality’ as well as ‘observing the rules of logic’. 30 “Ter wille van de logica vang ik aan met een nauwkeurige beschrijving van het incident dat aanleiding werd tot dit geschrift”; “Bij wijze van captatio benevolentiae erkende ik dat niets in zijn confidenties mij vreemd had geklonken” (Walschap 1966: 16, 66; my translation)


195

nises, however, not only the fact of their success, but proves to a smaller or a larger 31 extent, in what way they must have reached their conclusion.

In these passages, Vladimir Wirginszki looks back on his account and talks of his strategies and intentions. What is striking here is the recurrence of illocutionary verbs. In his explicitness the narrator frequently puts his speech acts into words: he defends himself, he congratulates his narratee, he demonstrates and recognises. To understand the rhetoric of the mad narrator in these novels is to identify the speech acts performed in the act of telling. Contradiction arises when explicit and implicit speech acts collide, when the speech acts of the narrator are at odds with the ones the reader discerns.32 In short, in Waarom ik niet krankzinnig the narrator defends himself in the attempt to convince the narratee that he is not insane, but to the reader it is quite clear that the narrator incriminates himself in his apologia.33 The foregoing observations concerning the overrational rhetoric of the mad narrator can adequately be summed up by the concept of a fou raisonnant, a term I borrow from De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen. Fou raisonnant designates the rhetorical dimension of the mad narrator’s discourse. It stands for his inclination to rationalise, to reason hypercorrectly, to be explicit about his narrative intentions and to try to manipulate the narratee. In this way, the fou raisonnant is the equivalent of the mad monologist. I have introduced this term, however, because it allows for a companion term, the fou imaginant, which reveals another aspect of the mad narrator. After all, the narrator’s unreliability concerns not only how he depicts things but also what he depicts. In other words, the mad narrator can also be unreliable because the depiction of the world is falsi-

–––––––––––––

31

32

33

“Denk u eens even in: de krankzinnige, die zich schriftelijk verdedigt, wenst zijn geneesheren geluk met het feit, dat zij er, zonder veel moeite, in geslaagd zijn krankzinnigheid te bewijzen aan de hand van het stuk, waarmee hij zijn volwaardigheid wilde aantonen. Hij erkent echter niet alleen het feit van hun welslagen, maar toont bovendien in meerdere of mindere mate aan, op welke wijze zij tot hun conclusie gekomen moeten zijn” (Dekker 1929: 43; my translation). I am suggesting that unreliability is not just a matter of truth (is the statement true?) but also a matter of felicity (is the speech act succesfully performed?) and succesful conversation. Infelicitous speech acts can give rise to unreliability. I recall that the narrator’s unintentional self-incrimination is one of the conditions of unreliable narration Bruno Zerweck (2001) distinguishes.

196

Lars Bernaerts

fied by delusion or hallucination. Since this aspect of the mad narrator has often been overlooked, I will elaborate on it in what follows. 3.2. The Fou Imaginant William Riggan was probably the first scholar who tried to give a full account of the madman as an unreliable first-person narrator. In Picaros, Madmen, Naifs and Clowns he considered the madman as one of four distinguishable literary types of unreliable narrators. Riggan’s research on the unreliable first-person narrator has been criticised, however, because he unquestioningly adopts Booth’s problematic concept of the implied author.34 In addition, the typology he presents is insufficiently underpinned, since he does not begin with a clear-cut characterisation of the picaro, the madman, the clown and the naïf. In fact, Riggan’s work offers interesting readings of particular texts, rather than a systematic understanding of the unreliable narrator as such. One of the merits of this study is that it refers to novels of several national traditions, including nineteenth century Russian novels, whose influence should not be underestimated with regard to both the fou raisonnant and the fou imaginant. The twentieth-century narrating madman would not have the same appearance without his predecessors in the work of Dostoevsky and Gogol, who introduced mad first-person narrators even before Freud’s theories. Their influence in the later generations of mad, monologising narrators has yet not been given the scrutiny it deserves. The influence of Russian literature can be discerned in Dekker’s Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben35, Daisne’s De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen and Walschap’s diptych Het gastmaal and Het avondmaal. Daisne’s novel links the idea of baldness of the mad inmate in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” to the narrator’s urge to have his hair cut short. Moreover, Daisne’s protagonist repeatedly identifies with characters in the work of Dostoevsky. Just as in later descriptions of the mad monologist as a literary type in the work of Nünning, Allrath and Sims, Riggan uses the ‘madman’ in the first place as a denominator for the type of mentally disturbed narrators ––––––––––––– 34 35

Nünning (1998a: 90, 2005: 57–58). The book was originally published as a Russian novel by Boris Robazki, a pseudonym Maurits Dekker adopted mainly to fool his critics. The influence of Dostoevsky is strongly palpable in the narrator’s rhetorical moves.


197

who stress and even analyse their own personality, like the narrators of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. In contrast to the ‘fool’ or ‘clown’ narration, ‘mad’ narration in Riggan’s account is not endowed with a purifying humour in the interaction between the narrator and the reader. When analyzing Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” Riggan stresses other features of the mad narrator than those treated in the theory of the mad monologist. The sudden outbreak of madness as well as the disruptive force of madness in the depiction of reality are not characteristic of the mad monologist, although this is certainly a dimension of the mad narrator, a dimension that fits the description of the fou imaginant. The prominence of the mad monologist in the theory leads to a limited perspective on the unreliable mad first-person narrator, whereas the intrusion of delusional worlds (cf. what Freud calls Realitätsverlust) is an important part of mad unreliable narration. In Gogol’s text the reader is unmistakably directed towards substitution of the represented world when for example the narrator reports a conversation between two dogs. There is no reason to integrate this anomaly with a generic principle (e.g. to consider it as a fable or a fairy tale): the speaker’s misreporting is evident and becomes even more apparent when he is admitted to a mental hospital. The unreliability of the fou imaginant consists mainly in the narrative presentation of an alternative, imagined world as if it were the textual actual world.36 In many recent novels, the representation of delusional worlds by the unreliable narrator raises ontological and epistemological questions in representing delusional worlds. Their misreporting or misreading of reality can be connected to the clinical symptoms of hallucination and delusion respectively.37 In De verwondering and De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen the delusion is part of the ‘secret’ that is suggested or exposed at the end of the novel. The reader of De verwondering is urged to revise the story of the teacher who sets out for a castle with one of his pupils, when ––––––––––––– 36

37

In terms of possible worlds, the delusional world of the fou imaginant is a textual alternative possible world that deviates from the textual actual world and which is a product of mental acts (Ryan 1991). Phelan’s (2005: 49–51) distinction proves again useful here. Given that a hallucinating person perceives things that are not there, the deficit of the narrator is situated on the axis of facts and events. A delusion, however, in clinical or psychoanalytic terms amounts to an interpretation of reality, which is situated on the axis of knowledge and perception

198

Lars Bernaerts

the nurse of the narrating I claims they found him screaming in front of the classroom.38 The world represented in the teacher’s narration is the projection of an inner world, like a dream that has been brought into reality. Improbabilities in this world, corrections in lucid moments and comments of other characters help the reader to track the range and intensity of the unreliability. To sum up, the important investigation of the rhetoric of the mad monologist has to be supplemented with an exploration of the cracks in the depiction of reality. The twin terminology of the fou raisonnant and the fou imaginant proves to be particularly useful here. This terminology will be put into practice in my reading of Daisne’s novel.

4. ‘Un Fou Raisonnant et Imaginant’: The Case of Antfield. Monika Fludernik has observed that “there seems to be a connection in cases of generally agreed-upon examples of unreliability with a kind of detective scenario: readers experience a moment of revelation (not to say: epiphany) when discovering the ‘truth’ or the secret about the narrator persona”.39 According to Fludernik the reader takes pleasure in discovering the true facts that the implied author conveys. In De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, the surprise of the reader is mirrored in the surprise of the ingenuous narrator, when in the end he finds out things about Fran that put the experienced (and narrated) events in a different perspective. Godfried Antfield’s mental state is no secret to the reader, as he reflects on his current situation in the first sentences of the novel: “Yes, everything considered, there has always been ‘something’. Hence I am here now and am well here, as everyone should be in the place where he really belongs.”40 In other words, the reader knows from the start that the narrator lives in a mental institution. The question then arises why and how Antfield has ended up there. Since he introduces his writings as a confession, the reader expects an answer to this question. Without further ado, the narrator starts to relate the experiences that have defined him: the parting from his favourite pupil Fran for whom he felt a deep love, the hideous autopsy ten years later and the subsequent ––––––––––––– 38 39 40

Claus (2004: 605). Fludernik (1999: 78). Daisne (1965: 21).


199

encounter with Fran in the hotel. The narrator regularly announces that he “must still tell the most important part, the worst”41, anticipating the scene in the hotel room where he and Fran meet. This scene is the key to the understanding of the novel. The experiencing I is dismayed at what Fran reveals to him: she has had an affair with judge Brantink when she was at school. In addition, her description of her father fits that of the corpse examined by professor Mato. Quite unexpectedly for the reader, Antfield then kills Fran at her own request with the gun she has with her. All of a sudden a lot of unexplained details from earlier scenes become comprehensible. Or is it all too coincidental to be trustworthy? Although a nice resolution of inconsistencies is thus presented, other textual signals cast doubt on the reliability of the narrator’s account. In the end, the reader discovers, together with Antfield, that Fran might still be alive after all, which brings Antfield to the conclusion that perhaps the shot “was never even fired except inside me, indeed in one of the many visions which make human existence so senselessly confused”.42 The most disruptive moment in the narration is of course this negation of a meticulously described experience. This disclosure is the most striking argument to qualify the narrator as unreliable, but in this novel unreliability is coupled with narrative ambiguity. In other words, even the last revelation does not really solve the matter. In order to analyse more precisely the manner of unreliability in De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, Antfield’s self-characterisation will be considered in terms of the twin terms of fou raisonnant and fou imaginant. 4.1. Antfield as Fou Raisonnant The very first word of Antfield’s narrative already marks the narrator as a monologist: “Yes”. In the course of his monologue a large number of textual clues to unreliability as listed by Nünning can be identified.43 The expressive style of Godfried Antfield betrays an emotional involvement that is not kept within bounds and that leads to a coloured version of the facts. Especially when he writes about Fran, exclamations and reiterations pile up: “Fran, Fran, FRAN! I stood thunderstruck, stunned, transfixed, a root–––––––––––––

41 42 43

Ibid.: 81. Ibid.: 209. Nünning (1998a: 27–28).

200

Lars Bernaerts

ed block of trembling stone. She looked so rich, so glorious there; and I so fishy, the down-and-outer!”44 This emotionality does not, however, stand in the way of an opposite tendency, viz. to create order in the narration. This dichotomy, chaos versus order, is fundamental to the text, as it is made visible in the narrator’s name and in the leitmotiv of the title. ‘Godfried’ means ‘God’s peace’ while ‘Antfield’, ‘a field of crawling ants’, implies restlessness. The obsession with having his hair cut is also identified as part of Antfield’s extreme need to bring order into chaos. Chaos is linked to nervousness and madness, order to rationality. Yet, it is a rationality which contains additional signs of unreliability. In spite of its associative style the monologue is structured by the speech objectives that Antfield mentions. He wants to confess (“this long confessional”) and justify himself (“this dreary apology for my life”) in order to come to terms with himself, but he also wants to instruct his audience he is aware of, as he announces in this passage: I stand on the so-called seamy side, like a man balancing perilously on the farthest point of the thinnest edge. But as a caricature does violence to reality in order to make it better appear, perhaps not a few would be able to recognize their own portraits, precisely in the overwrought state that I have been in and can only offer here, just that, in my folie raisonnante, as though under a magnifying glass, and, before it is too late, be able to draw from my experience a lesson never to allow themselves to drift irretrieva45 bly away from that path.

The narrator does not only make his intentions explicit, he also describes himself as an outsider and a madman. By way of justification he urges us to interpret his confession as a lesson for the reader. The narrator is thus rationalising his acts and behaviour, adding reason in retrospect. Antfield’s self-characterisation is not unambiguous. He considers himself ‘overwrought’, ‘a fool’, ‘senseless’ and ‘fou’, which is perfectly understandable within the scope of his sincerity. Indeed, he suffers from an inferiority complex and this explains the depreciating self-characterisation. In his sincerity the narrator reconstructs himself as an inferior being and as a madman, thus creating an existential reality. The unreliability in the narrator’s rhetoric springs from a self-underestimation instead of the overestimation that typifies the mad monologist. The confessing writer misjudges situations and reactions due to his mental state, but for the ––––––––––––– 44 45

Daisne (1965: 114). Ibid.: 126, 207, 138–139.


201

reader it is not clear where ‘magical’ coincidence ends and misjudgement starts. After the post mortem examination Antfield believes a piece of the corpse is stuck to the sole of his shoe, when he passes two laughing policemen. His immediate reaction is telling: “that such a thing should happen to me, me!” and “I, just I, had had to step on it! What might that hideous sign mean as omen?”46 The narrating I who already knows the answer to this last question evokes the expressive reaction without distance to the experiencing I. To the reader the exaggeration functions as a textual clue that Antfield’s perspective is unreliable. The inferiority complex is so radical that it affects his ability to interpret and evaluate correctly. His feelings of guilt and inferiority determine his perspective to such an extent that he begins to project his inner world on reality. In his rhetoric he compensates (‘hypercorrects’) for this loss of reality in metanarrative comments: It will seem to you as though I had made up a story, a depressing, horrifying story, of 47 which only a few of the softer features were borrowed from life. There is an example of that “something” of mine: I always see the truth in duplicate or triplicate and can never come to a singular conclusion. Hence it is that I seldom or never have been able to think “clearly.” As soon as I want to deliberate on something, 48 everything always becomes mixed up. I am intensely frightened at having to try to write it [the conversation with Fran in the hotel room] down here. The loveliest, the most terrible dialogue of my whole life, which was at the same time a conversation with the dead – how would I be able, how 49 would I dare, to want to reconstruct it here?

He exposes awareness of his failure and justifies his account. As a hypercorrection these remarks tend to confirm and even reinforce the impression of unreliability. His sincerity has a contrary effect, since he is still giving the account he criticises. In De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen unreliability is activated as a relevant integration principle as the narrator admits that his vision is and was clouded, and as he reconstructs his past from a pathologically self-depreciative stance. ––––––––––––– 46 47 48 49

Ibid.: 104. Ibid.: 126. Ibid.: 25. Ibid.: 155–156.

202

Lars Bernaerts

4.2. Antfield as Fou imaginant The hotel scene remains a serious conundrum in the interpretation, because in the end the narrator finds out that the conversation with Fran never took place. He finds a piece of paper announcing a performance of hers in town, so he could not have killed her in the hotel and they could not have met in that room. Nonetheless I contend that no definite answer is offered to the careful reader as to what did actually take place. In that respect De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen is on the border between narrative ambiguity and narrative unreliability.50 When reading Antfield’s narrative, the reader is repeatedly warned that the narrator is not capable of perceiving the world in a normal way. Antfield writes for example: “As soon as I want to deliberate on something, everything always becomes mixed up.”51 In spite of these indications, most readers are surprised by the startling disclosure that the murder did not occur except in the protagonist’s mind. Still, in rereading the novel it is possible to find hints that the scene is indeed a delusion, as the false reality of the fou imaginant is composed of familiar and overdetermined elements. The hotel scene is made up of estranging components mentioned earlier in the novel which should offer hints to the reader. Conspicuously, the scene is related by a consonant narrator, so the reader is given the thoughts of the experiencing I, the focaliser. That way, the delusive perspective of the character is by no means corrected by the narratorr52. Before Antfield goes to Fran’s hotel room he takes a nap in his own room. When he wakes up, he finds that he “had not dreamed – also a rarity”.53 A few moments later, in Fran’s room, he wonders whether the situation “wasn’t all a cruel deceit, a desperate dream image”.54 The repeated references to dreams already undermine the realism of the whole scene. Fur––––––––––––– 50

51 52 53 54

In “Unreliability Refigured” Gregory Currie explains how narrative unreliability is akin to and sometimes tangled with narrative ambiguity. In the case of an ambiguous narrative a crucial question of the story is not answered at all and this nonanswering is perceived as intentional (1995: 24). Unreliable narratives provide an answer to these questions, but the final answer can not be reconciled with the answer provided by the narrator. Daisne (1965: 25). The staging of a fou imaginant almost automatically involves internal focalisation in order to present the imagined world as the textual actual world. Ibid.: 145. Ibid.: 150.


203

thermore, Antfield stresses the fact that Fran’s room is identical to his own. He is surprised to see her wearing the same nightgown “as ten years ago, at the fashion show at school!” but he immediately adds that “that strip of light seemed not to have been an insane illusion!”55, thus integrating the improbability and spurring on the reader to do the same. If we accept that the conversation in the hotel was imagined by Antfield, we can clearly observe how the protagonist deals with wishes and traumas in his delusions. Most importantly, he fulfils his platonic love for Fran in declaring his love to her. At the same time he processes his feelings of inferiority and guilt in dreaming up Fran’s answer to him. Firstly, Antfield channels his inferiority complex by imagining that Fran confesses she has had an affair with Brantink, the man who was replaced as a teacher by Antfield. Secondly, the protagonist shoots Fran at the end of the scene so that he can get rid of his feelings of guilt (“dispel sinful shades”56) and at the same time turn them into actual guilt. The shock that brings him to take refuge in a delusional world is the confrontation with death and decomposition during the autopsy in the afternoon. From Fran’s monologue he gathers that the examined corpse must be her father’s. All these strange details are suspicious because of the coincidence and the dreamlike atmosphere. Yet, when re-reading the scene, the reader can make sense of these oddities by relating them to earlier events. In this the reader composes an alternative version of the facts, and at the same time he can reconstruct a psychic reality. The hotel scene can be understood in psychoanalytical terms as filling a lack, as wish fulfilment, as a projection. Even though an interpretation of this sort aims at restoring coherence in the story, it does not necessarily expel narrative unreliability. In other words, the textual indications that help us to integrate the events in a psychological model do not hold us from constructing a textual actual world that deviates from the narrator’s account. The need for this alternate reading shows the relevance of narrative unreliability in the case of Antfield. To conclude, I want to formulate two restrictions to the reliance on the perspectival principle as a plausible mechanism to place the text’s inconsistencies. Firstly, after the narrator reports that Fran is still alive, a number of points are still not cleared up. For example, the newspaper on which Antfield relies does not have a date so it could be an old newspa–––––––––––––

55 56

Ibid. Ibid.: 209.

204

Lars Bernaerts

per. When he asks the director for confirmation, the latter confirms after a thoughtful look but he does not add any clarification. It is possible to assume that the director just gives his confirmation to reassure the patient. Narrative unreliability is beset by narrative ambiguity, and the experience that we are not offered a fully coherent story remains. From this point of view, the perspectival principle remains a relevant and even natural way of looking at the inconsistencies in De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, but it is insufficient. The second comment concerns the author’s poetics: the discordance and ambiguity in the novel can be naturalised as a feature of magical realism. De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen has been introduced as a milestone in Flemish magical realism. According to the author, reality and dream represent two poles that are linked and rendered visible in the magical-realist work.57 The reader can naturalise the numerous inconsistencies as part of the magical-realist idea that the magnetism between reality and dream produces a higher truth.58 In the quest for the most relevant strategy, magical realism competes with (but still does not exclude) narrative unreliability. To put it differently, the reader can rely on a literary frame of reference or on standards of normality and normativity59, but neither of them covers every single discrepancy. The reader is thus trained to accept incompatibilities as part of any reading, of any world.

5. Conclusion The narrator of De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen explicitly styles himself as a reasoning and imagining madman, thus inviting the reader to question his reliability. His sincere self-characterisation is not reliable, so there is more reason and logic in Antfield’s madness than he admits. Sincerity, as opposed to pretended normality, paradoxically enhances narrative unreliability. The narrator’s madness is on the one hand characterised by an excess of rationality that rhetorically takes shape in hypercorrection and explicit and incompatible speech acts. Due to his mental state he unreliably presents interpretative and evaluative remarks in his reasoning as if they were facts and events. On the other hand Antfield is unreliable as a –––––––––––––

57 58 59

Daisne (1973). Ibid.: 15. Cf. Nünning (1999: 62–69).


205

perceiving agent, when the reasoning narrator keeps in the background, as, for example, in the hotel scene. At the end of the novel this scene is presented as false memory but the reader cannot in retrospect determine the exact moment where reality had ended. Although the experiencing I is responsible for the doubtful perception in these scenes, the narrating I is of course responsible for its representation. The unreliability of the fou imaginant, which is the dominant mode in De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, varies in force and range. Finally, the madman’s unreliability does not necessarily entail but equally does not exclude a reliable representation of madness. Although the mad narrator has a lot to compensate for (as the discussed cases show), his mental state does not always result in narrative unreliability. If it does, distinguishing the unreliability of the fou raisonnant from that of the fou imaginant yields more insight into the variable relations between madness and unreliability.

Works Cited Allrath, Gaby 1998 “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ Textuelle Signale für die Ermittlung von unreliable narration,” in Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, edited by Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT): 59–79. Arends, Jan 1979 “Keefman,” in Keefman (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij [1972]): 7–39. Claus, Hugo 2004 De verwondering, in De romans. Deel I (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij): 427–663. Currie, Gregory 1995 “Unreliability Refigured: Narrative in Literature and Film,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53,1: 19–29. Daisne, Johan 1965 The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short (New York: Horizon Press). 1966 De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (Brussel: Manteau [1947]). 1973 Wat is magisch-realisme (Amsterdam & Brussel: Paris-Manteau [1958]). [Dekker, Maurits] Robazki, Boris 1929 Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben (’s-Gravenhage: Leopold’s Uitgeversmaatschappij). Fludernik, Monika 1999 “Defining (In)Sanity: The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and the Question of Unreliability,” in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 75–95. Foucault, Michel 1967 Madness and Civilization (London: Tavistock).

206

Lars Bernaerts

Freud, Sigmund 1968a “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911)” in The Case of Schreber. Papers on Technique and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 12 (London: The Hogarth Press): 1–82. 1968b “Neurosis and Psychosis (1924 [1923])”, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press): 147–153. 1968c “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (1924)”, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press): 181–187. Nünning, Ansgar 1997 “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction,” in Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22.1: 95–101. 1999 “Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 53–73. 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Malden: Blackwell): 89–107. Nünning, Ansgar et al. (ed) 1998 Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, unter Mitwirkung von Carola Surkamp und Bruno Zerweck (Trier: WVT). Nünning, Vera 1998 “Unreliable narration und die historische Variabilität von Werten und Normen: The Vicar of Wakefield als Testfall für eine kulturgeschichtliche Erzählforschung,” in Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, edited by Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT). Phelan, James & Martin, Patricia 1999 “The Lessons of “Weymouth”: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day,” Narratologies, edited by David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State UP): 88–109. Phelan, James 2005 Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell UP). Porter, Roy 2002 Madness. A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford UP). Riggan, William 1981 Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press).


207

Ryan, Marie-Laure 1991 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Sims, Dagmar 1998 “Die Darstellung grotesker Welten aus der Perspektive verrückter Monologisten: Eine Analyse erzählerischer und mentalstilistischer Merkmale des Erzählertypus mad monologist bei Edgar Allan Poe, Patrick McGrath, Ambrose Bierce und James Hogg,” in Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, edited by Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT): 109–129. Thiher, Allen 1999 Revels in Madness. Insanity in Medicine and Literature (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press). Walschap, Gerard 1966 Het gastmaal (Hasselt: Uitgeverij Heideland). 1968 Het avondmaal (Hasselt: Uitgeverij Heideland). Yacobi, Tamar 1981 “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” in Poetics Today 2,2: 113– 126. 2005 “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Malden: Blackwell): 108–123. Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35,1: 151–178.

DIETER DE BRUYN (Ghent University)

An Eye for an I. Telling as Reading in Bruno Schulz’s Fiction 1. Introduction As Ansgar Nünning has pointed out on many occasions in recent years, our understanding of narrative unreliability would benefit from a more reader-centred approach: whether a narrator is described as unreliable or not depends on the referential frames or cognitive schemata by which the reader naturalizes textual inconsistencies.1 In addition to this cognitive turn, Bruno Zerweck has convincingly argued for a subsequent historical and cultural turn within the theory of unreliable narration.2 His central thesis is that, “because unreliability is the effect of interpretive strategies, it is culturally and historically variable”.3 In his overview of important trends in unreliable narration, however, Zerweck mainly focuses on British and American literary history. One of his main hypotheses is that “[w]ithin the context of the novel, the literary phenomenon of the unreliable narrator came fully into being with the realist novel of the late eighteenth century”.4 But what if such a strong realist tradition is absent in a particular national literature? Of course, one cannot simply deny the existence of, for instance, a Realist current in Polish literature. However, as Stanislaw Eile stresses in his excellent monograph on modernist trends in twentieth-century Polish fiction, “Realism in Poland had shallow roots in nineteenth-century literature and was greatly overshadowed by Romantic poetry.”5 Realist novels of the type we know from other traditions were published of course, espe––––––––––––– 1 2 3 4 5

Cf. e.g. Nünning (1999). Zerweck (2001). Ibid.: 151. Ibid.: 159. Eile (1996: 15).

210

Dieter De Bruyn

cially at the end of the nineteenth century, but they were never fully recognized. In a country which had disappeared completely from the map of Europe since the end of the eighteenth century, the romantic paradigm and its patriotic programme were simply too influential to allow for the emergence of novels focusing on the individual fate of contemporary man. The rise of the novel in Poland was not only determined by the omnipresence of Romanticism, but also by particular sociological circumstances. Unlike most of the western world, cultural life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland was not dominated by the bourgeois middle class, but by the landed gentry or szlachta. As Zdzislaw Najder has stated, the development of the typical structure of the Polish novel has been seriously influenced by traditional gentry attitudes, which are reflected, for instance, in “a strong political involvement of literature, an interest in broad social and national affairs rather than in psychological analyses, and a feeling of civic responsibility and obligation on the part of both writers and readers”.6 As a consequence, many novels at the time, in their blind “pursuit of authenticity and didacticism”7, were devoid of any noticeable aesthetic qualities. Thus, not only was it difficult for Polish prose fiction to keep up with the Realist tradition elsewhere because of the Romantics’ reticence, it also developed into a different, highly utilitarian type of novel. When the first ‘mature’ realist novel appeared at the end of the nineteenth century (i. e. Lalka (The Doll, 1890) by Bolesáaw Prus), early modernist writers of the Young Poland (Máoda Polska) generation were already expressing their deep disregard for Realism and the traditional form of the novel.8 Since realism in Poland had produced a rather insipid type of novel, twentieth-century fiction writers apparently started to treat it as an antimodel much earlier than elsewhere. Examples of this sharp anti-realist reaction can be discerned already at the turn of the century (e.g. Karol Irzykowski’s 1903 novel Paáuba (The Hag)), but the most innovative and appealing results were achieved in the 1930s by such avant-garde writers as Stanisáaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (‘Witkacy’), Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz. According to Eile, these authors lie at the basis of a typically Polish version of literary Modernism, which “is in effect closer to –––––––––––––

6 7 8

Najder (1970: 651). Eile (1996: 28). Ibid.: 15.

Telling as Reading Bruno Schulz’s fiction

211

literary trends in Russia, central Europe and, to some extent, France, than to Beach’s ideal of ‘Exit Author’”.9 In his opinion, the differences with the situation elsewhere, in particular in the English-speaking world, are striking: The old resentment of Realism, characteristic of the core of the Polish cultural elite, gave impetus to non-mimetic trends at a time when in the English-speaking world Realism was modernized rather than rejected. When Beach announced the departure of the author (1932), Polish writers defiantly demonstrated their egos and blended autobiography with their fictitious worlds. When Modernist narrative techniques imposed discipline on the rambling narration of the Victorian novel and attempted to grasp evasive reality, writers in Poland paraded unrestrained, all-inclusive narratives of a Rabelaisian kind and indulged in the grotesque or fluid world of surrealistic dreams.10

As I have shown elsewhere11, what is also shared by these Polish modernist novels is a certain penchant for reflexivity, for turning in upon themselves. Given this self-reflexive and metafictional bias, these anti-Realist fictions are perhaps not likely candidates for narrative unreliability, especially not if one takes Zerweck’s minimal conditions into account. Nevertheless, I will try to show in this essay that the notion of unreliable narration can offer some new insights into the nature of Polish modernism. More particularly, I will argue that Bruno Schulz’s fiction can be characterised by narrative unreliability.12 First, I will examine how literary critics until now have dealt with the rather protean I-narrator of Schulz’s stories. Next, I will show how a closer analysis of some of his stories might reveal that the I-narrator’s telling is the result of his (subversive, provisional) ‘reading’ of all kinds of ‘texts’, and not of his ‘looking’ at ‘reality’. Finally, I will argue that as soon as the reader recognizes the specific unreliability of the narrator’s account, the text is transformed into a metafictional dramatization of the literary process, which urges the reader on to the self-conscious problematization of his or her own reading of these stories as fundamentally unstable and unreliable.

––––––––––––– 9

10 11 12

Ibid.: 31. Ibid.: 16. De Bruyn (2006). Bruno Schulz’s fiction consists of two collections of stories, Sklepy cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops, 1933) and Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą (Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1937) as well as a few scattered stories.

212

Dieter De Bruyn

2. (Mis)reading the Narrator Polish avant-garde writers such as Schulz “defiantly demonstrated their egos and blended autobiography with their fictitious worlds”.13 In a comment on his first story cycle, the author evokes such an approach himself: I think of [Cinnamon shops] as an autobiographical [novel]. Not only because it is written in the first person and because certain events and experiences from the author’s childhood can be discerned in it. The work is an autobiography, or rather a spiritual genealogy, a genealogy par excellence in that it follows the spiritual family tree down to those depths where it merges into mythology, to be lost in the mutterings of mythological delirium.14

This short excerpt offers us a balanced approach to the narrative situation in Schulz’s ‘novel’15: a first-person narrator (named Józef/Joseph) mixes autobiographical events and experiences with mythological elements. Many critics have identified the I-narrator all too easily with Schulz as a historical person, instead of treating him more subtly as multifaceted and elusive fictional character. In order to gain a clear insight into these critical strategies, one has to take the particular Polish literary-historical context into consideration. Wáodzimierz Bolecki has shown that Schulz’s prose, immediately after its publication in the 1930’s, clashed with the horizon of expectations of most Polish critics in two particular ways: It went against the the generally accepted rules for reading epic literature and instead, demanded to be read as a lyrical work.16 Bolecki’s two-branched model can be applied to the majority of critical readings of Schulz’s fiction up to now. Whereas ‘poetic’ readings of the author’s highly figurative language can easily avoid problems connected with the narrator, any approach starting from the rules and conventions of traditional fiction must necessarily deal with the ––––––––––––– 13 14 15

16

Cf. supra. Schulz (1988: 114). There is no critical unanimity about the exact genre to which Schulz’s collections of stories belong. Many critics refer to them neutrally by ‘prose’, ‘stories’ or ‘fiction’. As we have just seen, Schulz himself calls Sklepy cynamonowe (which is his most cyclic collection) an ‘autobiographical novel’. Because of its inherent heterogeneity, only few critics consider Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, Schulz’s second collection, a real novel. This notwithstanding, the stories of both collections undoubtedly make up one fictional whole around the I-narrator’s childhood experiences with his enigmatic father. Bolecki (1996 [1982]: 304).


213

problematic narrative situation in the stories under scrutiny. Consequently, what should be examined is the strategies which have been applied by this second category of critics in order to “naturalize textual inconsistencies and peculiarities”17 evoked by Schulz’s unusual narration. A very useful analytical model of readerly strategies of naturalization was developed by Tamar Yacobi, who distinguishes between five principles according to which textual contradictions are generally resolved: the genetic, the generic, the existential, the functional, and the perspectival.18 Reading strategies based on one (or a combination) of the first four principles allow the reader to ascribe certain textual inconsistencies to the author as a historical person, to generic conventions, to real-world models, or to the text’s supposed goals. Only in the last case does one have to consider issues related to point of view: “What distinguishes the perspectival mechanism, or the unreliability hypothesis, is that it brings discordant elements into pattern by attributing them to the peculiarities of the speaker or observer through whom the world is mediated”.19 Since most of Schulz’s critics, as I have stated earlier, consider the author in person to be the mediator of the fictional events, it seems obvious that only few have questioned the reliability of his narration. What should be analysed, then, is how critics over the years have naturalized certain undeniable oddities of the narrator’s account. In the majority of Schulz’s stories, the I-narrator looks back in a dreamlike manner on certain childhood experiences with his weird father (Jakub/Jacob) and the rest of the family in a small Galician town. In Joseph’s childlike imagination some of these events are transformed into the most incredible stories of a mythological nature: the father undergoes several metamorphoses (into a bird, a cockroach, a large crustacean), the boy regularly finds himself wandering the perpetually transforming labyrinth of his hometown, all of which takes place in an equally complex timeframe. As might be expected, the grotesque and fantastic character of the narrator’s juvenile adventures clashed with generally accepted epic norms. Although some early critics did appreciate Schulz’s imaginative prose, many of them regretted his violation of what Bolecki calls the “criterion of the comprehensibility of the narrative work”.20 Since they lacked aes––––––––––––– 17 18 19 20

Zerweck (2001: 154). Ibid.: 154. Yacobi (2001: 224). Bolecki (1996 [1982]: 305).

214

Dieter De Bruyn

thetic standards by which to evaluate Schulz’s stories, several critics condemned his prose as morally reprehensible. This strategy of naturalization brings both the the genetic and the generic principles into play. One of the most severe attacks of a genetic nature was launched by Ignacy Fik, who attributed certain immoral elements in the works of Schulz and some of his contemporaries directly to their authors’ conduct in real life: Fik simply called their work the “literature of sick maniacs”.21 In their “Dialogue on Schulz”, Kazimierz Wyka and Stefan Napierski similarly accused the Polish avant-gardist of “antihumanism” and of “creating chaos”.22 Wyka and Napierski believed that Schulz’s stories, instead of being innovative, were born out of epigonism. More specifically, by associating this prose with the decadent fin de siècle art of Young Poland, these critics added a generic argument to the process of naturalization: Schulz’s fiction could only be comprehended if it was read by means of the well-known code of the decadents. Still, in the 1930’s more valuable attempts were made to resolve textual oddities in Schulz’s fiction according to the generic principle. Most frequently, his extraordinary literary universe was interpreted within the framework of the fantastic, the grotesque, expressionism or surrealism. Characteristic is Michaá Chmielowiec’s statement that “one does not have to ‘understand’ Schulz’s prose, because it is purely fantastic, totally free of any argument”.23 However modest, these attempts paved the way for the future reception of Schulz’s fiction. More specifically, after the Second World War subsequent publications further elucidated the grotesque24, the surrealist25 or the expressionist26 traits of his stories. At the same time, new interpretations of a genetic nature came to the surface under the influence of Marxist literary theory. The instigator of this historical approach was the famous literary critic Artur Sandauer. In “The Degraded Reality. A Contribution on Bruno Schulz” (1956), his famous introductory essay on Schulz’s artistic work, Sandauer proposes to interpret Jacob’s odd behaviour within the context of the decline of nineteenth-century traditional trade practices in favour of twenti––––––––––––– 21 22

23 24 25 26

Fik (1961 [1935]). Wyka (2000: 422). Chmielowiec (1938: 5). Cf. e.g. Samojlik (1965). Cf. e.g. Dubowik (1971), Speina (1971). Cf. e.g. Speina (1974), Wyskiel (1980).


215

eth-century base commercialism.27 In fact, Schulz’s own father ran a textile business in difficult economic circumstances.Writing down the heroic struggle of this strange man against modern consumerism, Schulz thus sought to retrieve the old dignity of his father’s way of trading. In other words, the narrator’s (or, in point of fact, Schulz’s) account might be considered a perfectly reliable, nostalgic ode to Jakub Schulz. Even though this approach is only part of Sandauer’s interpretation, it clearly indicates that the position of the narrator as the mediator of an idyllic past world was not questioned. Most critics were of course aware of certain inconsistencies and exaggerations in his descriptions, but these could easily be ascribed to Joseph’s often youthful perspective or to the author’s failing memory. In brief, most critics, though they did struggle with Schulz’s eccentric literary universe, always fell back on other principles of naturalization than the perspectival, as a result of the strong authorial control in his work. Yet, a few critics have actually put into question the reliability of the narrator, whose apparent naïveté and implausible phantasms may indeed be considered a deliberate narrative strategy. From the 1970’s onwards in particular, certain critics have cast light on the narrator’s rhetoric devices. Wáadyáaw Panas, for instance, states that Schulz’s narrator approaches the world as a highly conventional ‘text’ (or a combination of such ‘texts’) which should be thrown away and named anew according to one’s own taste.28 Moreover, the regular appearance of “statements of the metalinguistic type”29 clearly signals the narrator’s awareness of the linguistic nature of his activity. In yet another paper on Schulz’s fiction, Panas further elucidates this technique of “laying bare the literariness” of the text.30 He argues that Schulz’s prose could be called ‘homophonic’, since the narrator seems to be in control of his and the other characters’ speech. On the other hand, unlike the nineteenth-century homophonic novel, there are clear textual signals of “an indecisive and wavering narrator, who is vacillating between different positions, a narrator-Hochstapler”.31 As a result, his narrative activity comes to the surface and he –––––––––––––

27 28 29 30 31

Sandauer (1964). Panas (1974: 169). Ibid.: 166. Panas (1976: 82). Ibid.: 78. An excellent example of this narratorial wavering may be found in the story “Cockroaches” “But even at the time, I could not tell whether these pictures were im-

216

Dieter De Bruyn

becomes a “revealed narrator, who incessantly underlines his own creative deeds”.32 Krzysztof KáosiĔski and Wojciech Wyskiel, for their part, have exclusively focused on those passages in which the narrator directly addresses the reader.33 According to KáosiĔski, such apostrophes serve as a means to expose the narrator’s illusory monologue. More specifically, “the narrator’s reservations, by creating an illusion of communication, disorganize the uniformity of the represented world and lay bare its illusory nature”.34 Wyskiel focuses more on the absence of a genuine understanding between the narrator and the implied reader: either the narrator demonstrates “complete indifference” towards the reader, or he directly addresses him by means of “apostrophes of an obtrusive nature, but devoid of any real explanations”.35 As a result, the narrator’s account turns out to be problematic and deceptive36, forcing the actual reader to actively look for other ways of grasping the represented world. A comprehensive overview of the narrator’s metanarrative statements and other rhetoric strategies was provided by Bolecki37, who argued that the main characteristic of Schulz’s narration is “the wavering nature of the role of the narrator” which results from the continuously shifting of point of view between the young boy and an adult or at times even impersonal mediator.38 The function of this type of narration is the “destabilization of ––––––––––––– 32 33

34 35

36 37 38

planted in my mind by Adela’s tales, or whether I had witnessed them myself” (Schulz 1989: 76). Panas (1976: 82). An example may be found at the end of the story “The Book”: “Have we to some extent prepared the reader for the things that will follow? Can we risk a journey into our Age of Genius?” (Schulz 1989: 130). KáosiĔski (2000: 196). Wyskiel (1977: 258). A good example of this strategy appears in the opening pages of “The Book”: “Besides, any true reader – and this story is only addressed to him – will understand me anyway when I look him straight in the eye and try to communicate my meaning. A short sharp look or a light clasp of his hand will stir him into awareness, and he will blink in rapture at the brilliance of The Book. For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?” (Schulz 1989: 117). In a more recent publication, this dialectic of seduction and deception of the reader by the narrator has been effectively called “a kind of humbug” (Sproede 2000: 148). Bolecki (1996 : 253–259). Ibid.: 258.


217

the conventional form of the narrative act and the role of the narrator”39. Instead of this, the narrative act presents itself as an act of ‘reading’: “Everything is read by the narrator, the world on which he reports, is like a ‘text’ which is reconstructed during the ‘act of reading’, and like a ‘piece of writing’ which is explained to the reader during the act of exegesis”.40 Unfortunately, in spite of these pertinent remarks, Bolecki does not avail himself of the opportunity to question the narrator’s reliability, nor does he draw any conclusions regarding his own reading of the narrator’s ‘act of reading’.

3. The Narrator’s (Mis)reading As we have seen, even those critics who acknowledge the protean quality of Schulz’s narrator continue to believe in a hierarchy of narratorial positions, presided over by the fully reliable author Bruno Schulz. Consequently, the perspectival principle is immediately turned into the functional: the authorial voice ‘controls’ and ‘plays’ with several narratorial voices in order to destabilize “the conventional form of the narrative act and the role of the narrator”.41 As a result, the reader is invited by the author to join him in the text’s interpretation. In a critical evaluation of the main developments in Schulz studies, Eile has made the following statement: Despite many digressions and metafictional comments articulated by the first-person narrator and the main character, his father, the extensive use of figurative language renders [Schulz’s] message rather confusing and consequently open to a variety of esoteric readings, which often demonstrate the inventiveness of critics rather than representing a convincing explication of the text.42

What Eile seems to overlook, is that many critics have been mislead exactly by the numerous meta-poetic statements in the text: instead of being treated as part of Schulz’s confusing narration, those comments have often been regarded as authorial intrusions which render the text’s interpretation less difficult. As a consequence, such critics indulge in a kind of circular reasoning: they adopt discursive parts of a certain text in order to elucidate ––––––––––––– 39 40 41 42

Ibid. Ibid.: 259. Cf. supra. Eile (1996: 97).

218

Dieter De Bruyn

the same text. In order to avoid such fallacies, Mark Currie proposes to differentiate between a certain metafictional discourse which may (or may not) emanate from fictional texts, and its actual representation in the text.43 Whether this discourse is implicitly represented or in the form of explicit comments is not relevant. Of importance is the extent to which the immanent textual self-consciousness is complemented by the critical selfconsciousness of the reader, who may (or may not) realize the metafictional potential of a certain narrative text. According to me, Currie’s reader-centred and non-essentialist definition of metafiction as “a borderline discourse […] between fiction and criticism, […] which takes that border as its subject”44, may offer some new interpretive possibilities when applied to Schulz’s narrative strategies. More specifically, the appearance of metapoetic comments in the text could be regarded within the context of a broader metafictional strategy to stimulate the external reader to take part in the production of the text. The key figure in this strategy is of course the narrator, whose unreliable discourse may (or may not) urge the reader on to the active problematization of what is narrated. Moreover, by frequently representing the narrative act as the result of a highly problematic ‘act of reading’, Schulz’s fiction forces the reader to question his own position in the literary process in general and his own reading of Schulz’s stories in particular. In order to find out how this metafictional strategy really works, a few typical examples of the narrator’s ‘telling as reading’ will be discussed in detail. As has already been suggested, instead of directly presenting past experiences, Schulz’s narrator reports on his exegesis of different childhood ‘texts’. What he reads, is the ‘text’ of a world long gone, of course, but also particular texts such as a map of his hometown, a collection of advertisements or a stamp album. This ‘act of reading’ is clearly foregrounded on many occasions. “August”, for instance, the opening story of Sklepy cynamonowe, starts with such an image: “Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears.”45 An even clearer example of a story simply emanating from an exegetic act may be –––––––––––––

43 44 45

Currie (1985: 15). Ibid.: 2. Schulz (1989: 3).


219

found in “The Street of Crocodiles”. The story starts with the description of an old map of the narrator’s hometown. Whereas the city centre is depicted in detail, “the area of the Street of Crocodiles shines with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known”.46 According to the narrator, the cartographer has depicted this peripheral district so vaguely for ethical reasons: “In order to understand these reservations, we must draw attention to the equivocal and doubtful character of that peculiar area, so unlike the rest of the city”.47 Thereupon, the narrator starts describing an everyday visit to this particular part of town in all its ambiguousness. According to him, the whole area is some kind of red-light district, where a tailor’s shop may turn out to be “an antique shop with a collection of highly questionable books and private editions”48 and where a woman on the streets suddenly takes on traits of a prostitute. In general, the area of the Street of Crocodiles is repeatedly depicted as a cheap and shoddy imitation of the wellknown metropolitan commercial districts. Gradually, however, the narrator starts intimating his reservations regarding his own fantastic descriptions: “We spoke of the imitative, illusory character of that area, but these words have too precise and definite a meaning to describe its half-baked and undecided reality.”49 Finally, it turns out that the narrator has simply been mislead by his own expectations: Our hopes were a fallacy, the suspicious appearance of the premises and of the staff were a sham, the clothes were real clothes and the salesman had no ulterior motives. The women of Crocodile Street are depraved to only a modest extent, stifled by thick layers of moral prejudice and ordinary banality. In that city of cheap human material, no instincts can flourish, no dark and unusual passions can be aroused.

––––––––––––– 46 47

48 49

Ibid.: 63. Ibid.: 64. On many occasions, the narrator’s doubts are emphasized grammatically by the use of plural (‘we’, as in this example) or impersonal (‘one’) constructions. Especially when events start to take on a sexual connotation, the narrator tries to escape responsibility by means of such strategies. At times, sexually connoted incidents even urge the narrator to explicit non-reporting (e.g.the double dotted line in „Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies – Continuation”). Sproede correctly considers all these narratorial games and gestures as “a way to excuse the narrator” (Sproede 2000: 144). Ibid.: 66. Ibid.: 70.

220

Dieter De Bruyn

The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s mouldering newspapers. 50

Again, these last words of “The Street of Crocodiles” might be interpreted metaphorically, but an equally valid explanation would be that the text once again lays bare its literariness: the Street of Crocodiles is merely a story with the same name, the result of the provisional and highly subversive reading by the narrator of its inferior paper existence (as an incomplete map or a shoddy torn paper collage). A similar narrative strategy may be discerned in the introductory trilogy of Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą, consisting of “The Book”, “The Age of Genius” and the novella “Spring”. This time, the object of the narrator’s attention is some mythical Book, of which he is convinced that he has beheld it in his early childhood, but the existence of which is denied by his father: My father […] approached me cautiously one day and said in a tone of gentle suggestion: “As a matter of fact, there are many books. The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older.” At that time I already held quite a different opinion. I knew then that the Book is a postulate, that it is a goal.51

In other words, Joseph considers it to be his duty to somehow retrieve the ideal Book, to restore its wholeness. Again, in the absence of the Original, of something real, the narrator is condemned to the reading of its imitations, of ordinary books: The exegetes of The Book maintain that all books aim at being Authentic. That they live only a borrowed life, which at the moment of inspiration returns to its ancient source. This means that as the number of books decreases, the Authentic must increase.52

Hence, by reading its shoddy paper versions, Joseph believes he may get closer to the Authentic. The first incarnation of the original Book the narrator happens upon, is “some crumpled script” which has been kept by the servant girl, Adela.53 Although the script in question contains but a bunch of suspect advertise––––––––––––– 50 51 52 53

Ibid.: 71–72. Ibid.: 120. Ibid.: 127. Ibid.: 165.


221

ments, Joseph considers it to be “the unofficial supplement” of the Book.54 The exegesis of the script incites the narrator to the wildest speculations about the exotic characters figuring in the subsequent advertisements, such as Anna Csillag, who keeps the secret of hair growth. Once again, however, the narrator is aware of the provisional character of his extraordinary stories: Well, perhaps next time, when we open our old script, we may not find Anna Csillag and her devotees in their old place. Perhaps we shall see her, the long-haired pilgrim, sweeping with her cloak the roads of Moravia, wandering in a distant land, through white villages steeped in prose and drabness, and distributing samples of Elsa’s balm to God’s simpletons who suffer from sores and itches.55

As in “The Street of Crocodiles”, the narrator admits that his stories are merely tentative readings of a ‘text’, of a script, the characteristic of which is precisely “[that] it unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations”.56 In “The Age of Genius”, Joseph, who is still under the influence of the enigmatic szpargaá (script), chooses another way of reading its hidden essence. Inspired by a sudden beam of light, the boy starts making his exegetic comments in the form of hasty drawings on old Bibles, newspapers and magazines. In other words, the narrator’s ‘act of reading’ is transformed in a ‘graphic act’ of a palimpsestic nature. This same circling of the narrator around an unreachable semantic core has been described by Renate Lachmann as a phantasmatic production of imaginative arabesques foreclosing any attempt at punctual identification or interpretation.57 The idea of an arabesque, with its ornamental and repetitive structure, is indeed wonderfully consistent with the activities of the narrator, who perpetually weaves new stories around his long lost childhood, the mythical Age of Genius that will remain inaccessible forever. Finally, the narrator’s subversive ‘act of reading’ reaches its climax in Schulz’s much-discussed novella “Spring”. Once again, the narrator immediately presents his story as the result of an exegetic activity: “This is the story of a certain spring that was more real, more dazzling and brighter than any other spring, a spring that took its text seriously”.58 The novella ––––––––––––– 54 55 56 57 58

Ibid.: 121. Ibid.: 127. Ibid.: 129. Lachmann (1992: 454). Schulz (1989: 143).

222

Dieter De Bruyn

tells about a storyteller who plans to read the ‘text’ of a certain spring, which subsequently tries to read the ‘text’ of any spring. While reading the universal text of spring, however, this particular spring experiences certain difficulties: How boundless is the horoscope of spring! [Who can blame spring that it learns to] read it in a thousand different ways, interpret it blindly, spell it out at will, happy to be able to decipher anything at all amid the misleading divinations of birds. [Spring reads this text] forward and backward, [loses] its sense and [finds] it again in many versions, 59 in a thousand alternatives.

As might be expected, the narrator’s reading of this laborious exegesis of the text of spring will be equally tentative: “[Therefore], my story, like that text, will follow many different tracks and will be punctuated by springlike dashes, sighs, and dots”.60 Hence, as Michaá Paweá Markowski has stated, “Spring” is the result of a “double defective exegesis”.61 Consequently, what the narrator seems to indicate is that the actual reader of “Spring” in turn might want to consider his or her own reading as being equally defective and unreliable. As a matter of fact, those readers who, after having read the narrator’s opening lines, still think that they will find an interpretive key to “Spring” are disappointed once more in the course of the novella. As soon as the narrator proposes one single reading (in the form of the “story [about] a princess kidnapped and changed for another child”62 of the ‘text’ of spring (which is represented physically by Rudolph’s stamp album), a teleological scheme is installed which eventually makes the story end in a fiasco. Once more, the narrator is aware of his own ‘usurpation’: In my blindness, I undertook to comment on the text, to be the interpreter of God’s will; I misunderstood the scanty traces and indications I believed I found in the pages of the stamp album. Unfortunately, I wove them into a fabric of my own making. I have imposed […] my own direction upon this spring, I devised my own program to explain its immense flourishing and wanted to harness it, to direct it according to my own ideas.63

In other words, any reading of the text of spring, just as any narrative account, is merely an arbitrary and provisional selection of data. Therefore, ––––––––––––– 59 60 61 62 63

Ibid.: 144. Ibid. Markowski (1994: 292). Ibid.: 70. Ibid.: 202.


223

Schulz’s foregrounding of the narrator’s telling as an act of reading could be interpreted as an attempt to expose this fallible eye of the unreliable Inarrator.

4. Conclusion It should be clear that Bruno Schulz’s fiction cannot be considered a classical example of narrative unreliability. Although the narrator is strongly personalized it would prove rather useless to attempt to reconstruct behind his back the childhood events which he constantly distorts and deconstructs. If any illusion of a coherent story world is evoked, it is that of a fantastic reality where personal childhood events “[merge] into mythology, to be lost in the mutterings of mythological delirium”.64 Moreover, Schulz makes use of a highly self-conscious narrator, who intentionally exposes his own mistakes and (literal) misreadings.65 If the narrator is so overtly suspect, can it then be meaningful to continue naturalizing textual inconsistencies with recourse to narrative unreliability? In his historical reconstruction of unreliable narration, Zerweck has cast similar doubts with regard to certain postmodern texts, the most radically metafictional of which can be considered to “[mark] the ‘end’ of unreliable narration”.66 The historical reason for this pragmatic shift is that “contemporary unreliable narrators represent normal features of human cognition and knowledge within our contemporary (Western) cognitive and epistemological discourses”.67 Consequently, if critics argue that Schulz’s fiction should be considered within the context of radical postmodern anti-illusionism, as some have done quite recently68, they should bear in mind that the mediator of Schulz’s strange literary world is not a contemporary one (and not a typically Western one either). In contrast with postmodern fiction, where the distance between the implied author, the (competent) reader and the narrator seems to be blurred, Schulz’s sto–––––––––––––

64 65

66 67 68

Cf. supra. Cf. Zerweck’s second condition for narrative unreliability: “The unintentional selfincrimination of the personalized narrator is a necessary condition for unreliability,” Zerweck (2001: 156). Ibid.: 167. Ibid.: 170. Examples of this reading Schulz as a postmodernist avant la lettre can be found in, for instance, JarzĊbski (1994) and Gáowacka (1999).

224

Dieter De Bruyn

ries still evoke a kind of structural irony resulting from the discrepancy between the narrator’s account, the implied author’s norms and generations of readers’ frames of reference.69 More specifically, whereas the narrator is constantly faced with the impossibility of a reliable reading of the ‘texts’ of his childhood, the implied author forces him to recommence his pointless act over and over again in every subsequent story. As a consequence, the narrator’s activity is transformed into a perpetual and in fact tragicomic series of misreadings. The reader, who seems to have no other choice than to repeat his act of reading over and over as well, may become conscious of the ironic character of the narrative process. In fact, the cyclical structure of Schulz’s complete fiction, which is responsible for much of the text’s structural irony and which clearly signals the author’s sustained pursuit of representation, , is repeated on the level of the story in the comic heroic struggle of Joseph’s father. Indeed, after each subsequent defeat against the element of boredom and its main incarnation, the servant girl Adela, and after each subsequent metamorphosis or humiliation, Jacob unsuspectingly reassumes his tragicomic role. According to Schulz, the entire reality of his stories is characterized by such an “all-pervading aura of irony”: “There is an ever-present atmosphere of the stage, of sets viewed from behind, where the actors make fun of their parts after stripping off their costumes.”70 Thus, instead of injecting literary reality with epistemological doubts at its very centre (as in the classical case of narrative unreliability), Schulz aims at a faithful mimesis of its border (“on the margins of reality”, as Krzysztof Stala has called it)71, where story merges into discourse and fiction into criticism.

––––––––––––– 69

70

71

As I have shown before, this conflict with the readers’ horizon of expectations started immediately after the publication of Schulz’s stories and it probably has never really been resolved. Schulz (1964: 682–683): “Obecna tam jest nieustannie atmosfera kulis, tylnej strony sceny, gdzie aktorzy po zrzuczenie kostiumów zaĞmiewają siĊ z patosu swych ról.” English translation: Ficowski (1988: 113). Stala (1993).


225

Works Cited Bolecki, Wáodzimierz 1996 Poetycki model prozy w dwudziestoleciu miĊdzywojennym (Kraków: Universitas [1982]). Chmielowiec, Michaá 1938 “Zdarzenia bezdomne,” in Kultura 13: 5. Currie, Mark, (ed.) 1995 Metafiction (New York: Longman). De Bruyn, Dieter 2006 Reflexiviteit in het Poolse modernisme. Karol Irzykowski en Bruno Schulz tussen autotematyzm en metafictie (Unpublished dissertation: Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy). Dubowik, Henryk 1971 Nadrealizm w polskiej literaturze wspóáczesnej (PoznaĔ: Bydgoskie Towarzystwo Naukowe). Eile, Stanislaw 1996 Modernist Trends in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies). Ficowski, Jerzy, (ed.) 1988 Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz (New York: Harper & Row). Fik, Ignacy 1961 “Literatura choromaniaków,” in Wybór pism krytycznych (Warszawa: Robotniczy Spóádzielnia Wydawnicza [1935]): 125–134. Gáowacka, Dorota 1999 “Sublime Trash and the Simulacrum: Bruno Schulz in the Postmodern Neighborhood,” in Bruno Schulz: New Documents and Interpretations, edited by Czesáaw Z. Prokopczyk (New York: Peter Lang): 79–134. JarzĊbski, Jerzy 1994 “Schulz: spojrzenie w przyszáoĞü,” in Czytanie Schulza, edited by Jerzy JarzĊbski (Kraków: TIC): 306–320. KáosiĔski, Krzysztof 2000 “Schulzowskie modele komunikacji,” in Eros. Dekonstrukcja. Polityka (Katowice: ĝląsk [1976]): 189–198. Lachmann, Renate 1992 “Dezentrierte Bilder. Die ekstatische Imagination in Bruno Schulz’ Prosa,” in Psychopoetik. Beiträge zur Tagung ‘Psychologie und Literatur’ München 1991 (series: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 31), edited by Aage Hansen-Löve (Wien: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien): 439–461. Markowski, Michaá Paweá 1994 “‘Wiosna’: miĊdzy retoryką a erotyką,” in Czytanie Schulza, edited by Jerzy JarzĊbski (Kraków: TIC): 286–295. Najder, Zdzislaw 1970 “Development of the Polish Novel: Functions and Structure,” in Slavic Review 29.4: 651–662.

226

Dieter De Bruyn

Nünning, Ansgar 1999 “Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig & Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 53–73. Panas, Wáadysáaw 1974 “‘Regiony czystej poezji’. O koncepcji jĊzyka w prozie B. Schulza,” in Roczniki Humanistyczne 22: 151–173. 1976 “‘Zstąpienie w esencjonalnoĞü’. O ksztaátach sáowa w prozie Brunona Schulza,” in Studia o prozie Brunona Schulza, edited by Kazimiera Czaplowa (Katowice: Uniwersytet ĝląski): 75–89. Samojlik, Czesáaw 1965 “Groteska – pisarstwo wszechstronnie banalne… Sprawa prozy Brunona Schulza,” in: Z problemów literatury polskiej XX wieku. II: Literatura miĊdzywojenna, edited by Alina Brodzka & Zbigniew ĩabicki (Warszawa: PaĔstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy): 266–296. Sandauer, Artur 1964 “RzeczywistoĞü zdegradowana (Rzecz o Brunonie Schulzu),” in Bruno Schulz, Proza (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie): 7–43. Schulz, Bruno 1964 Proza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie). 1989 The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz (New York: Walker and Company). Speina, Jerzy 1971 “Bruno Schulz a nadrealizm,” in O prozie polskiej XX wieku (series: Z Dziejów Form Artystycznych W Literaturze Polskiej 24), edited by Artur Hutnikiewicz & Helena Zaworska (Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy im. OssoliĔskich): 183–198. 1974 Bankructwo realnoĞci. Proza Brunona Schulza (Warszawa: PaĔstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe). Sproede, Alfred 2000 “Expérimentations narratives après la fin de l’Avant-garde: notes sur Bruno Schulz, son lecteur et ses ‘Incantations’,” in La littérature polonaise du XXe siècle. Textes, styles et voix, edited by Hanna Konicka & Hélène Wáodarczyk (Paris: Institut d’études slaves): 135–165. Stala, Krzysztof 1993 On the Margins of Reality: the Paradoxes of Representation in Bruno Schulz’s Fiction (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International). Wyka, Kazimierz 2000 Stara szuflada i inne szkice z lat 1932–1939 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie). Wyskiel, Wojciech 1977 “Brunona Schulza porozumienie z czytelnikiem,” in Problemy odbioru i odbiorcy, edited by Tadeusz Bujnicki & Janusz SáawiĔski (Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy im. OssoliĔskich): 257–267. 1980 Inna twarz Hioba. Problematyka alienacyjna w dziele Brunona Schulza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie).


227

Yacobi, Tamar 2001 “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s (Un)Reliability,” in Narrative 9.2: 223–229. Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35.1: 151–178.

LUC HERMAN, BART VERVAECK (University of Antwerp, University of Ghent)

Didn’t Know Any Better: Race and Unreliable Narration in “Low-Lands” (1960) by Thomas Pynchon When Thomas Pynchon recalls his early short stories in the introduction to Slow Learner (1984), he feels the need to mention “an unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk” in “Low-lands,” a slightly surrealist narrative about three drinking buddies.1 There is no need, according to Pynchon, to attribute this “voice” to one of them, the “unwholesome bluejacket”, Pig Bodine. The author is firm: “Sad to say, [the voice] was also my own at the time”.2 One way to look at this self-accusation is to see it as part of a moralhigh-road strategy developed by Pynchon to endear himself with the audience of his remarkable introduction. Such an intentionalist interpretation assumes that the voice of the introduction is unambiguously Pynchon’s own. Seen as the first long non-fiction statement of a reclusive author after almost twenty years, the introduction was and remains a dream come true for those who want to hear from Pynchon so as to better understand his work. If the introduction’s I is embraced as the explicit authority concerning ‘his own’ early stories, it may be used as a yardstick to decide that the “Low-lands” narrator is morally unreliable. Compared, however, to the 1960 author of the story as Pynchon projects him in 1984, the “Lowlands” narrator seems to be completely reliable, because he is in tune with the ideology pervading the story. Indeed, Pynchon’s introduction insists on the ideological coincidence between at least one of the characters (Bodine), the narrator and Pynchon’s projected former self. This ideological coincidence is even extended to the context. In his introduction, Pynchon tries to exonerate the story’s author by contextualiz–––––––––––––

1 2

Pynchon (1984: 11). Ibid.: 10–11.

230

Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

ing the fifties ideology he apparently so deplores from the vantage point of the eighties: “John Kennedy’s role model James Bond was about to make his name by kicking third-world people around, another extension of the boy’s adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading. There had prevailed for a while a set of assumptions and distinctions, unvoiced and unquestioned, best captured years later in the 70’s television character Archie Bunker”.3 If JFK fell for these ideas, then why should we blame the projected author of “Low-lands”? Yet, none of these mitigating considerations should apparently affect the overall negative judgment: “[T]he [third-person] narrative voice in this story here remains that of a smartassed jerk who didn’t know any better, and I apologize for it”.4 A friendly reader might be inclined to call the narrator fallible rather than untrustworthy. As Greta Olson has explained, “readers regard the mistakes of fallible narrators as being situationally motivated. That is, external circumstances appear to cause the narrator’s misperceptions […]. Conversely, untrustworthy narrators strike us as being dispositionally unreliable. The inconsistencies these narrators demonstrate appear to be caused by ingrained behavioral traits”.5 The narrator of “Low-lands” is misguided by the fifties context in which he is telling the story, but he is not dispositionally misleading. In the words of Phelan and Martin6, his evaluation and perception of things may be unreliable, but he is not knowingly distorting facts and events. He may be called misreading and misregarding, which would respectively refer to his shortcomings on the axis of evaluation and perception. This may seem like a clear-cut case. However, our three-step analysis of the introduction to Slow Learner, of the story and of its context will cast some doubt on the (authorial) norms that may be used to ascertain the reliability of narration. First, we will show how unreliable such norms may turn out to be, by showing that the introduction, which supposedly expounds the reliable norm, is itself characterized by unreliable narration. Second, our analysis of the story provides yet another example of the need to historicize the attribution of unreliability.7 The narrator of ‘Low-lands’ may be regarded as reliable in the historical context of the fifties, but as ––––––––––––– 3 4 5 6 7

Ibid.: 11. Ibid.: 12. Olson (2003: 102). Phelan, Martin (1999: 93–99). See Zerweck (2001) and also Nünning (1998).

Race and Unreliable Narration in Pynchon

231

unreliable in the context of the introduction written in the eighties. Third, our analysis of the context will underscore the importance of the reader over so-called imperative textual signals and over debatable constructs such as the implied author. At a time when cognitive and rhetorical approaches to the question of unreliability are seen to merge into an idealized and harmonious meeting between author, text and reader8, we feel it is important to redraw attention to the reader as someone who may have a far greater tolerance for paradoxes, deviations and other signals of socalled unreliability than is often assumed.

1. Unreliability and the introduction to Slow Learner With an I-narrator looking back on his old self, Pynchon’s introduction has all the trappings of autobiographical fiction. Considered as such it is prone to all the hazards of homodiegetic narration, including its manifold possibilities for unreliability mapped by Phelan and Martin. The I-now often presents himself as someone who knows more than the I-then, and who can therefore be trusted to give the correct assessment of what happened in the past. Pynchon makes extensive use of this narrative strategy in his introduction. Time and again he corrects his old self, the author/narrator of the stories. For instance, in “The Small Rain” the narrator was infantile and had no ear for different dialects and accents. In “Lowlands” he was a victim of racist ideology; in “Entropy” he abused the little knowledge he had of a scientific concept and he overused cool and hip words; in “Under the Rose” he overdid intertextual references and misunderstood surrealism; and in “The Secret Integration” he underestimated the importance of autobiographical experiences. Interestingly, the narrators of the stories never appear as I, but hide behind the third-person narration. According to the voice of the introduction, that is just one of the many shortcomings exhibited by those narrators. The I-now says that in the fifties he was afraid of autobiography and authenticity, whereas now, he, just like every normal reader, knows that literature is always autobiography: “Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite”.9 The appeal to the –––––––––––––

8 9

See Nünning (2005). Pynchon (1984: 21).

232


frames and expectations of the average, realistic reader may be construed as extremely ironic by readers who think of Pynchon as an icon of American postmodernism. But the I-now seems unaffected by such doubts. One of the good things about “The Secret Integration,” he says, is that he gave up intertextuality and became a sort of realist: “I was also beginning […] to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality”.10 If the reader finds that slightly suspicious, it will be so only with regard to his or her own expectations and frames. However, there are also some textual signs that undermine the seemingly all-knowing, trustworthy and authoritative viewpoint of the I-now. On the one hand, he pretends that he now knows better than back in the fifties, on the other he often admits that he is still in the dark. At first sight, the ‘Slow Learner’ concept refers only to the narrator of the stories, but if you look more carefully, the I-now is still learning. The last line of the introduction seals the point: “But as we all know, rock ’n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever”.11 This clearly implies that the I-now is not all-knowing. He may pretend to have found out a thing or two, for instance when he uses sentences such as “What I had to learn later on…” or “I didn’t, however defectively, understand this”.12 At one point he even suggests that ignorance is restricted to his younger I (“The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything – or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance”13), but then it is clear his ignorance had not disappeared by 1984. He just seems more willing to admit to it than he was in his earlier life. When discussing the character of the gypsy girl in “Low-lands,” he admits: “I can’t remember for sure…”14 Concerning the concept of entropy he says: “Since I wrote this story I have kept trying to understand entropy, but my grasp becomes less sure the more I read”.15 He may warn us against his old self (“Do not underestimate the shallowness of my understanding [of entropy]”16), but –––––––––––––

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Ibid.: 22. Ibid.: 23. Ibid.: 20, 21. Ibid.: 15. Ibid.: 10. Ibid.: 14. Ibid.: 13.


233

why would that shallowness be alleviated when he concedes that his grasp has even become less sure? About “The Secret Integration,” in which he moved the scene from Long Island to the Berkshires, he admits: “Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to me”.17 If the narrator of the introduction is indeed unclear on so many points, why should readers be inclined to think he is right and reliable on other points – such as the evaluation of the stories, or the so-called racist contents of them? Is it just because some readers prefer to have some form of authority and norm – no matter how dubious – that they can use as a yardstick by which to measure reliability? Why would a reader believe that the narrator of the stories was unable to free himself from the ideology of the fifties whereas the narrator of the introduction would be perfectly capable of distancing himself from the ideology of the eighties? Might it not be that the I-now is prey to the liberal convictions about equal rights and multiculturalism typical of the eighties, while the narrators of the stories were prey to another form of liberalism typical of the fifties and exemplified, as we shall see, by writers such as Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac? What we are suggesting here is that there is no authoritative or sovereign stance to be derived from the author. The context and the reader play the major part in constructing that stance. Even if theorists and readers make up an author as the starting point and the reliable guarantee of a text, it is still their construction, based on their contextual and historical frames. Readers who know Pynchon’s later works may well think that the values implied by the “Low-lands” narrator jar with those implied by a novel such as Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). They would thus be inclined to call this narrator unreliable, whereas someone with no knowledge of Pynchon’s major work might reach a different conclusion. Not that one needs to be very familiar with Gravity’s Rainbow, an acquaintance with the author’s public image might in fact suffice. Pynchon has often been associated with tolerance and anti-establishment attitudes, which may lead the reader of “Low-lands” to the conclusion of unreliable narration as well. Similarly, those who read the introduction to Slow Learner before they read the early stories may find the narrator more unreliable than those who read the introduction afterwards. His unreliability is a construction posthoc, deriving from the contrast between the narrator-then and the introductory I-now. It is misleading to invert this construction and to pretend –––––––––––––

17

Ibid.: 21.

234


that it is the author’s doing and the author’s intention. Therefore, we feel it necessary to qualify the point that “the concept of unreliable narration presupposes the existence of a constructive agent who builds into the text explicit signals and tacit assumptions for the authorial or hypothetical ideal audience in order to draw readers’ attention to an unreliable narrator’s unwitting self-exposure or unintentional betrayal of personal shortcomings”.18 This formulation suggests that there is a sovereign agent at the beginning of a constructive process, which to us seems to underestimate the dialectics between context and reader that forms the basis of such concepts as authorial intention and implied authors. A later audience may assume a constructive agent different from the original one and thus experience unreliability although it may not have been part of the initial implied author or authorial intention. This is not to detract from the importance of the author; it is merely to maintain that in reading and interpreting, the author can never be anything else than a readerly product.19 Along the same lines, the authorial intention is always an inferred intention. Obviously, the question of unreliability is relevant to Pynchon because his reclusiveness draws quite a few readers to his work who are eager to find out what he actually thinks about the world, and who will therefore gladly entertain the widespread and partly relevant fiction of authorial direction in order to connect the books with their author. These readers’ many presuppositions, scattered and misguided though they may be, cohere into the view of an author who tries to communicate ‘through his work only’. Needless to say, this view of Pynchon as The Great Communicator is the result of an understandable but perhaps deplorable need for clarity induced by the author’s near-total absence from the media, and as such it may well prevent even more relevant readings that leave more room for doubt.

2. Unreliability and “Low-lands” So far, we have indicated that the potential unreliability ‘in’ “Low-lands” derives more from Pynchon’s stark rejection of his own early short story than from any obvious discordance between the narrator and the so-called implied author of the story. The question remains of course whether ––––––––––––– 18 19

Nünning (2005: 100). See Nünning (1993).


235

“Low-lands” is actually that ideologically repulsive, or whether Pynchon’s self-indictment is perhaps, more than anything else, a rather cheap argument pro domo in 1984 that should not be abused to reinforce or even evoke a potential feeling of unreliable narration. “Low-lands” tells the story of Dennis Flange, who lives in a cottage on Long Island Sound. His commanding wife Cindy tells him and his buddies Rocco Squarcione, the garbage collector, and Pig Bodine, who was a member of his division during “the Korean conflict”, to take their drinking outside the house. The men do not resist and spend the night at a garbage dump, where Dennis ends up being seduced by a child-like gypsy woman, Nerissa, who lives under the junk pile. As Robert Holton has shown, Dennis Flange provides a strong example of the male hero in Pynchon’s early fiction who is trying to recapture an authentic masculinity “outside [fifties] conformism’s closed room”.20 It should therefore come as no surprise that it is Flange’s wife Cindy who has to bear the brunt of the sexist representation in the story. Cindy only uses the expensive stereo system as a piece of furniture on which “to put hors d’oeuvre dishes or cocktail trays”.21 She dislikes her husband’s friends to the point of describing him as a member of the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) for allowing some of these friends in. She comes “suddenly roaring downstairs like a small blond terrier” to answer the doorbell, “managing to scowl at Flange and Rocco” before she opens the door.22 She is “austere and logical” and does not hesitate to throw her husband out when one more unpleasant friend shows up: “‘Out is what I said and out is where you are going. Of my life, is what I mean.’”23 Flange, who is “afflicted by marriage”, manages to score a few points at the moment of departure when he decides to let Cindy have their Volkswagen, refuses to take the shaving gear and clean shirt she suggests, and adds he will grow a beard, all of which make it even more likely that readers will think the narrator’s sympathies reside with his male protagonist. It is not clear whether Flange will eventually (be able to) return home or not, but the story clearly points to his wife as the source of his discomfort. ––––––––––––– 20 21 22 23

Pynchon (1984: 39). Ibid.: 55. Ibid.: 60. Ibid.: 61.

236


The narrator’s description of Cindy seems to tie in with sexist stereotypes that readers may harbour or resist. Sometimes the acceptance of the stereotype becomes explicit, for instance at the beginning of the story when the narrator says: “Cindy was Mrs. Flange and needless to say she did not dig this muscatel business”.24 The phrase “needless to say” makes it clear that it is only natural that married women do not “dig” things and that, as such, they are no longer hip or cool. The stereotype of the boring housewife is not subverted. The gypsy girl, Nerissa, lives up to another stereotype: the seductive foreign woman, living on the outskirts of society. Compared to the political correctness Pynchon exhibits in his introduction, the description of the girl as an animal-like creature may come as a shock: “Dark hair floated around her face and down her back like a black nebula; eyes enormous, nose retroussé, short upper lip, good teeth, nice chin”.25 However, the housewife stereotype looms even here, since Nerissa wants Flange to marry her. His Caucasian look seems to be quite important here, since an old woman had told Nerissa “a tall Anglo would be my husband and he would have bright hair and strong arms”.26 To which Flange replies: “But us Anglos all look like that.” So yet another stereotype is used and not subverted. It may be read as an ironic comment on the cliché, common among whites, that all blacks or Asians look the same. It is up to the reader to determine if there is any sort of irony between the character’s words and the implied ideology of the narrator. The text itself provides no conclusive clues. If there is some evidence to see the women in “Low-lands” as targets of the ‘sexism’ brought up in the Slow Learner introduction, the story’s ‘racism’ turns out to be a more complicated issue. When Dennis, Rocco and Pig arrive at the garbage dump, they are given access by an AfricanAmerican called Bolingbroke, who is first described as follows: “A minute later a fat Negro with a pork-pie hat appeared in the headlight beams, unlocked the gate and hopped on the running board.”27 This may be construed by the reader as a racist stereotype. When Bolingbroke hears from Rocco why Dennis and Pig need a place to sleep, his expression of sympathy aligns him with Flange but also reinforces the sexist attitude that may ––––––––––––– 24 25 26 27

Ibid.: 55. Ibid.: 74. Ibid.: 76. Ibid.: 63.


237

be considered part of the racist stereotype: “‘Wife is a nuisance sometimes,’ he said. ‘I got three or four scattered around the country and glad to be rid of them all. Somehow you never seem to learn.’”28 The seemingly racist and negative first appearance of this character is, however, confused by the role he gets in the story. Bolingbroke drinks along with his visitors and when it is his turn to regale the audience, he comes up with “a sea story”. Given the importance of Long Island Sound, elaborately described in the opening pages of the story, as a “consolation” for Flange, this type of narrative once more lines up the African-American with the protagonist. It certainly does not enhance the distance implied in the racial stereotype that determines Bolingbroke’s introduction. As a matter of fact, the presence of an Italian-American and an African-American in Flange’s group at the dump might entice the politically correct reader to see this instance of male bonding as ethnically diverse and therefore in accordance with at least some of the values implied in the introduction to Slow Learner. “Joining Hemingway and Kerouac in celebrating the pleasures of male camaraderie as against the irritating entanglements of domesticity”29, Pynchon seems to augment the macho navy behavior of Pig Bodine with that of Bolingbroke, but then this machismo may be felt to become subsumed under the racial diversity undergirding the experience of (male) freedom. So even a reader informed by the postGravity’s Rainbow Pynchon image – one who would not mind the depiction of Cindy all that much, for instance because he or she might think the presence of a bossy wife does not necessarily imply a sexist text – might not see unreliability on the part of the “Low-lands” narrator after all, as long as he or she decides to let the diversity aspect of the story take precedence over the black character’s introduction. And what to think of “Bolingbroke” as a name? As Joseph Slade was the first to submit, “Pynchon borrows this name from Shakespeare […] (Bolingbroke became Henry IV)”30. For Slade, who views “Low-lands” as “almost a parody” of Eliot’s “Waste Land,” Bolingbroke is also the “king of the waste land” that is the garbage dump. Decked out with the pork-pie hat as a mock-crown, he stands for the “mock royalty” of his Shakespearian source in Richard II, and as such he may be seen to undermine the au–––––––––––––

28 29 30

Ibid.: 64. Seed (1988: 27). Slade (1990: 11).

238


thenticity of the homosocial encounter at the dump.31 Readers versed in or at least remotely familiar with the work of the literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, may obviously read the surrogate king as an instance of the carnivalesque, which might then, by contrast, be thought to strengthen the significance of the bonding. Assuming that Pynchon did borrow Bolingbroke from Richard II, it remains to be seen whether the character is indeed such a mock royal as Slade seems to think. While the Shakespearian Bolingbroke may certainly be viewed as a traitor and usurper, his actions may in fact also be considered to have saved England from ruin. If we take the latter view, the black man’s participation in the drinking binge may enhance its value just as strongly as it would in the interpretation of the character as an illustration of the life-affirming carnivalesque. Saving the men, and especially Flange, from death by domestication, Bolingbroke may therefore appear as a very positive character who does not just provide shelter but also outclasses Flange’s shrink – the “insane” Geronimo Diaz – as a modern-day redeemer. Summing up, textual signs in themselves are not conclusive to determine the reliability or unreliability of the narration. If we go by the signs offered by the story, it is not immediately clear just how badly racist the formulation, “fat Negro with a pork-pie hat”, can be thought to be. This means that those who are reading “Low-lands” with a liberal Pynchon in mind can still be shocked into a feeling of unreliability about the narrator. But the narrator is obviously not the be-all and end-all of this story. In our view Pynchon’s introduction simplifies the “racism” he claims as part of his own mental make-up in the fifties. The story is more complex than the so-called authorial view or intention. The story’s racism shows up in a more intricate way than just as “talk” on the part of the narrator. Contrary to the implication of the Slow Learner introduction about the timing of his “sexist, racist and proto-Fascist” period, we also believe that Pynchon’s self-proclaimed ‘racism’, straightforward or not, can be read into some of his publications in the sixties, as we will show shortly. The inconclusiveness of some relevant textual signs and the wider spread of seemingly racist utterances may lead us to do away with the imagined intentional creation by Pynchon of a narrator with the ‘wrong’ values, but then that obviously doesn’t have to prevent readers from enter––––––––––––– 31

Ibid.: 8–11.


239

taining this illusion. More importantly, the relatively limited evidence on behalf of the larger racism argument might be construed as an indication of Pynchon’s struggle with the issue rather than as a full-fledged illustration of certain opinions, so that the experience of unreliability might perhaps be partly saved as (too simple) a reading in which Pynchon is given the benefit of the doubt with regard to the representation of black people. In order to make this clear, we shall now look at the context in which “Low-lands” may be placed.

3. Unreliability and the Context When describing his story, “The Small Rain” (1959), in the Slow Learner introduction, Pynchon remembers the conflict he experienced between, on the one hand, “the undeniable power of tradition” and, on the other, an “exciting” literary reform linked to two contemporary authors who subsequently made their way into the literary canon: “We were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro’ [1957], the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road [1957], by Jack Kerouac”.32 Pynchon readers who feel the need to reconstruct some authorial background to his early stories, may see Pynchon’s Long Island and Cornell background as evidence of a largely segregated youth. Readers who believe that a certain type of social background entails a certain ideology may conclude from this that the 1984 summary of Pynchon’s own values in terms of Archie Bunker will not be very far off the mark. They may then go as far as arguing that the two texts by Mailer and Kerouac presented themselves at a crucial moment in the author’s development, since he returned to Cornell in 1957 after a two-year stint in the Navy and switched from Engineering to a major in English. As a result, these texts may have shaped or at least informed his image of black people for quite a long time. To put this hypothesis in terms of the JFK reference from Pynchon’s introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon may not have been dragged into Civil Rights “kicking and screaming” (as the popular formulation about the Kennedys’ recalcitrant behaviour on this issue in the period between 1960 and 1963 goes), but he still took a long time to drop a roman–––––––––––––

32

Pynchon (1984: 7).

240


ticized view of black people as special and perhaps even ‘deeper’ creatures than whites. Whether Pynchon’s racial views have been decisively influenced by Mailer and Kerouac and whether these views have influenced his early stories is impossible to decide. Still, the view on African-Americans exhibited in these stories is remarkably close to the one expounded by both Kerouac and Mailer. Speaking mainly of Kerouac’s Subterraneans (1958), but making the point about his work as a whole, Joe Panish has shown that Kerouac’s “attitude toward racial minorities is […] similar to the stance of the ‘romantic racialists’ of the 1840s and 1850s described by George M. Fredrickson [1987], who, in African Americans, ‘discovered redeeming virtues and even evidences of superiority’”.33 Oppressed minorities in Kerouac, Panish goes on, feature “existential joy, wisdom, and nobility that comes from suffering and victimization”. In “The White Negro,” Mailer betrays a similar romantic primitivism with respect to the African-American community. Having divorced himself from society, Mailer’s white ‘hipster’ hero models himself on the Negro because the latter “has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries”.34 Having “stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could”, the Negro has given voice in jazz to “his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm”35, which turns African-Americans into the champions of a subversion Mailer is trying very hard to promote in an effort to rejuvenate and intensify the American experience. In this subversion, the Negro is said to get the company of “the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent”36, a threesome that develops its own hip language. The introduction to Slow Learner seems to echo these words as the I-narrator dismisses his stories as “juvenile and delinquent” and admits that his attempts at creating a hip language failed, “my mistake being to try to show off my ear before I had one”.37 Mailer’s “wise primitive”38 may very well be reflected in Pynchon’s philosophical outcasts. More––––––––––––– 33 34 35 36 37 38

Panish (1994: 107). Mailer (1968: 272). Ibid.: 273. Ibid. Pynchon (1984: 4–5). Mailer (1968: 275).


241

over, Mailer compares hipsters to “children […] fighting for sweets”39, which may be compared to the Slow Learner introduction, where Pynchon complains that the stories place “too much emphasis on youth” and subsequently exhibit “adolescent values”.40 As Holton has indicated, Bolingbroke is “Flange’s opposite, and like many of the African-American figures in Kerouac and Mailer he embodies a masculine toughness, a depth of experience, and a disregard for propriety that Flange appears to envy”.41 “Low-lands” is perhaps only the first example of what might be understood as Pynchon’s own romantic primitivism. In his first novel, V. (1963), the single important black character is, of all people, a saxophone player. Defined largely by his music, McClintic Sphere conveys what has been construed42 as a message of hope in the midst of the 1956 New York nihilism in which he figures: “Keep cool but care”.43 The positive message expressed by Sphere may be read as ironic when biographical evidence is taken into account. In a letter about the novel of 23 February 1962, Pynchon’s editor, Corlies Smith, asked him to drop the black character altogether, “because he strikes something of a false note in that he somehow leads the reader to believe that the Negro problem is going to become at least a side issue.” Smith maintained it was not Pynchon’s intention to write a “Protest Novel,” and so, to avoid that kind of reading, Sphere had to go. In his reply of March 13, Pynchon first agreed that “Protest” was not his intention, but then he defended the presence of Sphere because of plot considerations. So the character stayed in, but when looking at the typescript of V.44, it becomes clear that Pynchon did notably reduce the race angle and especially what he called the “doctrinaire liberal” friendship between Sphere and a white New York character. The passages Pynchon removed provide additional information about Sphere and complicate the positive image of him based largely on his famous sentence. Indeed, Sphere appears so streetwise in the typescript that his line might even be construed as ironic on his part rather than as the straightforward ethical suggestion it has most often been taken for. Read––––––––––––– 39 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid.: 281. Pynchon (1984: 9). Holton (2003: 44). See e.g.Slade (1990: 89–92) and Seed (1988: 81–82). Pynchon (1963: 366). See Herman and Krafft (2007).

242


ers who know about the removed passages, may suggest that these show a shift in Pynchon’s “doctrinaire liberal” attitude towards racial integration: the author may have been moving away from simple romantic primitivism, and opted for a more ambiguous portrayal. The presence of an equivocal black character might indicate that Pynchon was beginning to grasp and perhaps even criticize the reductive white image of black people as it was prominent in Kerouac and Mailer. But then that might be giving Pynchon too much credit. Since Sphere’s character does not go far beyond the highly stereotypical and Beat-inspired figure of a jazz musician45, the final version of the black saxophone player certainly does not seem to leave much of that ambiguity intact. In the Slow Learner introduction, Pynchon compares his story “The Secret Integration” (1964) with “Low-lands” because of their clear connection with “the landscape and the experiences [he] grew up with”46, but not because they both feature important black characters. Does this mean that “The Secret Integration” does not suffer from any ‘racist talk’ in the eyes of the introductory I-figure? The story is ostensibly about “the race issue”47 in that it deals with the harassment of blacks by whites in a predominantly white environment. A “colored kid”48, Carl Barrington, enriches a group of white children’s lives after a benevolent black person, Carl McAfee, has been duped by some of the whites in town: “Carl [Barrington] brought a kind of illumination, a brightening, a compensation for whatever it was about the light that was missing”.49 In the beginning the narrator presents Barrington as the fourth kid, but in the end he makes it clear that the boy is just an invention of the three white children. Does that make his narration unreliable in the beginning and reliable at the end? And more generally, does that mean whites are unable to live with ‘real’ blacks and can only cope with their imagined and imaginary identities? Is the African-American reality just a dream for the non-African American? Or does the story suggest that there is hope since the younger generation is at least capable of imagining an integrated environment? The text does not give any of the answers to these questions away. –––––––––––––

45 46 47 48 49

See also Witzling (2003: 44–118). Pynchon (1984: 20). Ibid.: 152. Ibid.: 145. Ibid.: 162.


243

A similar undecidability seems to be suggested by Pynchon’s essay, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” (1966). The text revisits the scene of the August 1965 race riots in Los Angeles and tries to understand the difference between “the two cultures”50, black and white. Pynchon clearly separates the two cultures: the whites live in a dream-world whereas the blacks face stern reality. The Watts neighbourhood is “a pocket of bitter reality” in the “well-behaved unreality” of the “white culture outside”.51 Pynchon also describes Watts as lying “impacted in the heart of [the] white fantasy”, by which he means the reality made up by the mass-media dominating L.A. The analysis settles on the idea that it is “in white L.A.’s interest to cool Watts any way it can – to put the area under a siege of persuasion; to coax the Negro poor into taking on certain white values”. This indicates that the whites can only tolerate a white form of Negro, but at the same time the essay upholds the romantic image of the black community. Near the end of the essay, Pynchon insists on the remembrance (by certain unspecified members of the black community) of the riots “in terms of music; through much of the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights”.52 One may well ask how Pynchon can gain access to this supposedly authentically black memory, when he states that whites can only get to the imaginary black experience. Is this just another case of unreliable narration, with a narrator seeming to be blind to the consequences of his own ideas? And does this narrator not fall prey again to romantic racial stereotyping in the tradition of Mailer and Kerouac?

4. Conclusion Where does all this leave the reader with a liberal Pynchon image who is so struck by the narrator’s stereotyped and ‘racist’ description of Bolingbroke in “Low-lands” that he feels the need to solve the ‘problem’ by imagining unreliability? The answer to this question requires a stance on the nature of the reader and the function of criticism. If one believes that readers ‘naturally’ look for unequivocal and coherent interpretations, one would probably accept the verdict of unreliability as a way out of the co––––––––––––– 50 51 52

Pynchon (1966: 4). Ibid.: 5, 10. Ibid.: 10.

244


nundrum offered by the text. The ambiguous Bolingbroke characterization combined with the liberal, non-racist view widely held of Pynchon would lead the reader to regard the narrator as unreliable. This solution would uphold a traditional view of criticism as a problem-solving enterprise. Since a longing for clarity and closure may well be substantial, especially in readers well acquainted with the notorious complexity of Gravity’s Rainbow, it is probably unwise to disregard this approach. Such a neglect may betray an attitude of condescension that is not so different from the ‘white’ position under scrutiny. If, however, a reader sees the ambiguity of the Bolingbroke characterization as an ironic counterweight to the ‘white’ romantic primitivism, he or she constructs a postmodernist Pynchon who is playing around with the misregarding and misreading by his narrator. This is not the unambiguous Pynchon we hear about in the introduction to Slow Learner, but it is a complicated Pynchon construct that may be derived from the imaginary quality of the black boy in “The Secret Integration”; from the doubts surrounding the Watts essay (how can it claim to show the authentic black experience while saying that whites can only imagine that experience?); and perhaps also from the sax player in V., at least if we interpret the latter’s presence as an ironic comment on primitivism rather than as its simple illustration. If ambiguity in these texts appears convincing, this casts further doubt on Pynchon’s clear-cut rejection in the Slow Learner introduction of his “Low-lands” narrator. The option of a Great Communicator who is not speaking clearly and unequivocally may be disconcerting, but it appears as a logical possibility when unreliable narration is seen for what it must be thought to be – the projection, on the narrator, of a tendency that does not fit a preconceived opinion of what he is going to say.

Works Cited Fredrickson, George M. 1987 The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP). Herman, Luc and John Krafft 2007 “Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon's V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.1: 1–20.


245

Holton, Robert 2003 “‘Closed Circuit’: The White Male Predicament in Pynchon’s Early Stories,” in Niran Abbas (Ed.), Thomas Pynchon: Reading From the Margins (Madison/Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press): 37–50. Mailer, Norman 1968 “The White Negro. Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Advertisements for Myself (London: Panther): 269–289. Nünning, Ansgar 1993 “Renaissance eines anthropomorphisierten Passepartouts oder Nachruf auf ein literaturkritisches Phantom ? Überlegungen zum Konzept des ‘implied author,’” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 67.1: 1–25. 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,” in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory (London: Blackwell Publishing): 89–107. Nünning, Vera 1998 “Unreliable narration und die historische Variabilität von Werten und Normen: The Vicar of Wakefield als Testfall für eine kulturgeschichtliche Erzählforschung,” in Ansgar Nünning et al. (eds.), Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglauwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag): 257–285. Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” Narrative 11.1: 93–109. Panish, Joe 1994 “Kerouac’s The Subterraneans: A Study of ‘Romantic Privitism.’” MELUS 19.3: 107–123. Phelan, James and Mary Martin 1999 “‘The Lessons of Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics and The Remains of the Day,” in David Herman (ed.), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press): 88–109. Pynchon, Thomas 1983 A Journey Into the Mind of Watts (London: Mouldwarp). 1962 Letter to Corlies M. Smith. 13 March 1962. 1984 Slow Learner: Early Stories (Boston: Little/Brown). Seed, David 1988 The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press). Slade, Joseph 1990 Thomas Pynchon (New York: Peter Lang). Smith, Corlies M. 1962 Letter to Thomas Pynchon. 23 Feb. 1962. Witzling, David Peter. 2003 Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race and the Cultures of Postmodernism. Diss. UCLA.

246


Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35.1: 151–178.

BART VAN DEN BOSSCHE (Catholic University of Leuven)

Unreliability in Italian Modernist Fiction: The Cases of Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello 1. Unreliable Modernists Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello are generally considered the most important Italian voices in the international chorus of modernist prose writers.1 Their status as icons of modernist fiction is reflected in their large presence in scholarly work dedicated to literary modernism2, and seems all too justified when we consider the massive and impressive presence of modernist features in their novels.3 Typically modernist issues prominently ––––––––––––– 1 2 3

See Bradshaw (2003), Childs (2000), Levenson (1999), Nicholls (1995). See for instance Fokkema & Ibsch (1987), Bradbury (1989: 203–228). A short terminological excursus regarding the association of the term “modernism” with Pirandello’s and Svevo’s fiction may be necessary here. In Italy, the term modernismo has only in recent years come to be be used as a literary-historical category. For most of the twentieth century, the term was associated first and foremost with the theological movement of the modernismo, condemned by pope Pius X in 1907. Italian literary criticism, however, has made extensive use of a range of concepts to identify characteristics of literary texts roughly comparable to those generally classified as modernist. Some examples of these concepts are età della crisi, antinaturalismo, decadentismo, crisi della borghesia, modernità, and Novecento (see e.g. the collection edited by Asor Rosa (1995) which brings together the most important Italian literary works of the first decades of the twentieth century under the label l’età della crisi). Most important for the sake of my argument is the fact that in these critical formations, Svevo and Pirandello invariably occupy central positions. Barilli (1972: 5–15), for instance, advances stylistic, epistemological, ethical and psychological arguments to claim Svevo and Pirandello as the leading representatives of a linea letteraria, as they explore both the crisis of their age and the dawning of a new type of humanity. Debenedetti (1972: 303–414 and 516–616) sees the adventures of Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal as an exploration of the existential condition following the crisi della borghesia and highlights the position of Zeno’s Conscience within the development of the twentieth-century romanzo analitico, whose main representatives are Proust and Joyce. Mazzacurati (1987)

248

Bart Van den Bossche

present in both authors include radical epistemological doubt, fragmented and unstable subjectivity, a worldview imbued with irrationalism and vitalism, sharp criticism of social conventions, and the impossibility of stable and coherent identities. These features are associated with and elaborated through a series of typically modernist narrative devices: the novels of Svevo and Pirandello are told by first-person narrators, in whose accounts the telling of a series of – often tragicomical – vicissitudes is intertwined with countless reflections on how and why they try to make sense of what they have witnessed and to organize events in a meaningful account. Most, and sometimes all, of these characteristics can be found in Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, and in Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal, Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator and in One, No One and Hundred Thousand.4 As might be inferred from this very sketchy identikit of Svevo’s and Pirandello’s fiction, unreliability plays a prominent, diverse and at times even devious role in the four novels just mentioned. In fact, leafing through these four texts one easily comes across a range of important issues related to unreliability. Even a superficial comparison of the texts raises a number of questions about the criteria for distinguishing between different types of unreliability. These issues of classification and typology lead in turn to less frivolous questions concerning the basic criteria and minimal requirements for determining unreliability as such. A reader of Pirandello’s novels may very well be wondering whether and how the reliability of a narrator can be affected by certain forms of psychological, cultural and social stereotyping, in particular different types of social exclusion and self-exclusion. To give some examples: Can a person like Vitangelo Moscarda, the narrator of One, No one and Hundred Thousand, who is considered by others and by himself as a completely fragmented –––––––––––––

4

situates Pirandello’s novels (in particular The Late Mattia Pascal, The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, and One, No One and Hundred Thousand) within a genealogy of the decomposition of characters in the twentieth-century European novel (his main references are to Proust and Musil). La coscienza di Zeno was first published in 1923; Il fu Mattia Pascal was first published in 1904, a second edition, with a preface by Pirandello, was published in 1921; Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore was first published in 1915 under the title Si gira!; the second, revised edition appeared in 1925; Uno, nessuno e centomila, first published 1925. See Svevo (1985) and Pirandello (1985) for critical editions of the novels. For recent translations in English see Svevo (2001), Pirandello (1990), Pirandello (2005a) and Pirandello (2005b).

Unreliability in Italian Modernist fiction

249

personality, incapable of ‘normal’ social behaviour, offer a reliable account of the gradual shattering of his personality? And what about Mattia Pascal? Frustrated with his actual life, he takes advantage of the erroneous identification of a dead body to disappear and forge a new identity. Later on, confronted with and frustrated by the social and emotional impossibility to fully realize this new identity, he decides to return to his old life, only to discover that his place has been taken – literally, for his wife has remarried with his best friend and has given birth to a daughter. Mattia Pascal accepts to be just “the late Mattia Pascal”, visiting from time to time his own tombstone at the local graveyard, and writing down life and times of his former alter egos. Can someone like Pascal be a reliable narrator? Even if the accounts of both Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda may at first seem not all that incoherent, their personality and narrative position clearly work against them: both narrators are outsiders, who speak almost literally from a posthumous and eccentric point of view and are guided by profound feelings of distrust, scorn or pity for the society they have left. Their narrative position challenges right from the start the standards for measuring the reliability of the narrative voice, particularly with regard to the relationship between (un)reliability and social exclusion. The account of Zeno Cosini in Zeno’s Conscience, although organized in a considerably different way, may lead to similar conclusions. In the context of a psychoanalytic therapy, Zeno is asked to write down his memories of several episodes of his life. At first, his account seems a clear-cut case of unintentional self-incrimination, for the gaps and lapses in his story – concerning the facts but even more his emotional and psychological reactions to these facts – result from distraction, forgetfulness or plain lack of psychological perspicacity. Zeno seems to be an authentic “fallible” narrator5, quite incapable of perceiving and understanding the deeper motivations of his inner world, and therefore unable to give a more accurate psychological account of his own past. Zeno is constantly and structurally underreporting, underreading, and underregarding6, and it is the task of dottor S., Zeno’s psychoanalyst – and alongside him, of the ––––––––––––– 5 6

Olson (2003: 101–102). Phelan (2004: 34; 52). Due to the constant overlapping of these types of unreliability in Zeno’s Conscience, the reader (and probably also Zeno himself) may eventually find himself without sound basis for distinguishing between intentionally deceptive accounts and gaps or inconsistencies the narrator is unaware of.

250


reader – to read between the lines and fill all the gaps in Zeno’s story. In the course of the novel, though, the reader grows more and more suspicious of Zeno. In particular the outspokenly flexible, not to say devious, ways in which Zeno makes use of moral categories such as ‘sincerity’ or ‘innocence’ may lead the reader to the conclusion that Zeno is not so much a fallible narrator as an untrustworthy one.7 Although he sometimes straightforwardly confesses his own weaknesses and mocks his own behaviour, his account is strongly pervaded by a manifest desire to justify himself. Especially in the last two chapters of his therapeutic writing, “Wife and Mistress” (“La moglie e l’amante”) and “The Story of a Business Partnership” (“Storia di un’associazione commerciale”), Zeno the narrator refrains from invalidating the overtly deceitful, tortuous and at times preposterous moral justifications of Zeno the character. And when Zeno eventually decides to break off his therapy, the reader’s perplexity may culminate in a radical dilemma. Zeno, contrary to what dottor S. had promised, knows less and feels worse after six months of therapy than before, and therefore refuses to continue to write down his memories. In the last chapter of the book, with the very appropriate title “Psychoanalysis” (“Psico-analisi”), Zeno suggests that dottor S. is no less than a fraud, since he promised his patient health and clarity using a method that in reality produces a quicksand of shifting meanings and emotions. The meaning of every single episode of life is apparently subject to constant change. Hence, Zeno, who claims to have recovered his health during the first months of World War I, some time after having interrupted the therapy, asks dottor S. to ignore all the comments he made in the previous chapters. At this point, the reader of the novel faces a dilemma: if Zeno’s declarations after the interruption of the therapy are considered as a final move of self-interest, meant to cover up all the inconsistencies and lies of his past self, his account is a case of radical misreporting which eventually results in the disruption and denial of the narrative itself. But the reader might also join Zeno in his conclusions, and see the notion of ‘inner truth’ as the result of a rhetorical apparatus imposing some kind of artificial closure on a floating experience. In this last scenario, it is clear that Zeno’s account challenges the very possibility of determining unreliability, but in the first scenario, too, the doubts cast on Zeno’s version are so radical and so widespread that the reader may find himself deprived of criteria fit to –––––––––––––

7

Olson (2003: 101–102).


251

replace Zeno’s misreporting with a more truthful version. In the dreamlike apocalyptic collapse of human society at the end of Zeno’s Conscience, one may already catch a glimpse of the collapse of unreliability in postmodern fiction.8

2. Unreliability and Literary Repertoire However interesting it might be to further elaborate on these and other instances of unreliability in Svevo’s and Pirandello’s novels, I would like to address a somewhat different dimension of unreliability in both authors, namely the way in which the above-mentioned manifestations of unreliability in Svevo and Pirandello can be connected to specific literary repertoires as well as to the broader cultural-historical transformations associated with them. If Svevo and Pirandello are rightly considered as the most important initiators of the Italian modernist novel or, to adopt the terminology more widely used in Italian literary historiography, of the romanzo del Novecento, the main features of their modernist fiction can be looked upon in terms of transformation of the nineteenth-century realist novel, or its Italian variant, the verismo. For both authors, this transformation has to a large extent taken place within their own work, since both Pirandello and Svevo made their debut in the last decade of the nineteenth century with novels containing the typical ingredients of a fully-fledged realist novel, even though, with the benefit of hindsight, one can already discern many an irrationalist and vitalist element announcing their later modernist work.9 As the late nineteenth-century realist repertoire is manipulated and turned upside down in Svevo’s and Pirandello’s subsequent modernist novels, it can hardly come as a surprise that unreliable narrators play a key role in this transformation process of realist repertoire. The most manifest sign of this transformation is the straightforward revolt of Pirandello’s narrators against their social and psychological situation, a situation that bears all the features of the basic plot of a realist novel. Pirandello’s protagonists are not just gifted with an acute awareness of their condition, they also try to take their destiny in their own ––––––––––––– 8 9

See Zerweck (2001: 162–164). Svevo’s A Life (Una vita) and As a Man Grows Older (Senilità), Pirandello’s The Excluded Woman (L’esclusa).

252


hands, and some of them literally step out of their previous identity. Sometimes they aspire to an alternative and, in their own perception, a more ‘normal’ identity (Mattia Pascal to some extent presents the symptoms of Zeno’s obsessive yearning for the ‘healthy’ condition of bourgeois marriage); sometimes they actively engage in a process of decomposition of their identity (Vitangelo Moscarda and Serafino Gubbio). Yet in the wake of these processes all of them eventually come to a strong sense of distance and detachment from society, as well as to a deeper understanding of the omnipresence and omnipotence of fictions and illusions in social interaction and in personal life. All of them eventually end up in some kind of “beyond” (oltre), be it that of a tragicomic afterlife (Mattia Pascal), a mystical union with nature (Vitangelo Moscarda), or a complete impassiveness (Serafino Gubbio). And it is in this oltre that Pirandello’s characters turn into narrators and writers, in an attempt to reflect on and account for the hilarious and traumatising events they have gone through: Vitangelo Moscarda recounts the slow and deliberate decomposition of his identity in what Pirandello himself has called a “romanzo testamentario”, Mattia Pascal writes down what has happened to him after he has become the late Mattia Pascal, and Serafino Gubbio starts to write his ten notebooks (quaderni) after he has gained proof that he has succeeded in observing life with the very same impassiveness of the camera he operates. Zeno’s position is somewhat more complex, since he seems to reach some kind of oltre precisely because of the traps of his introspective therapeutic writing: after having interrupted his therapy, he takes up the pen to nullify and strongly deny what he told in all the previous chapters. All of these narrators write down their experience in an attempt to account for the hilarious events they have gone through, but through this process they also acquire an attitude of sceptical detachment from society, and in their writings they observe and comment society as if it were one big and not particularly happy tragicomédie humaine. Not only can the vicissitudes of their life be interpreted as a thorough reworking of realist plot repertoires, but at the same time their writing practices too echo, transform and undermine the narrative strategies of realist fiction, as is eloquently and convincingly illustrated by the peculiar use of – at times sharply parodic – prefaces. Both The Late Mattia Pascal and Zeno’s Conscience have not one but two prefaces, imbued, especially in the case of Zeno’s Conscience, with concealed tensions, twisted ideas and whimsical statements, attracting right from the start the reader’s attention and cautioning him against unreliability hazards.


253

In this perspective, the shift from third-person narrators to character narrators in Svevo’s and Pirandello’s novels cannot be reduced entirely to a sketchy opposition between nineteenth-century realism and twentiethcentury modernism. Especially in Pirandello’s novels, we come accross a subtle reworking of the verist repertoire.10 Serafino Gubbio’s ideal of impassiveness, for instance, although associated primarily with the camera and the new medium of film, is an ideal which directly and explicitly recalls and thematizes the verist poetics of impassibilità. Through the association with the camera, the ideal of impassiveness becomes far more radical, leading to a completely dehumanized alienation, but eventually this impassibilità is achieved by objectivizing subjective feelings. This was also the case in the works of Giovanni Verga, the main representative of Sicilian verismo, where an emotional and spiritual taking part in the tragic destiny of the victims of history (la fiumana della storia) was filtered through an apparatus of narrative and rhetorical procedures Alberto Asor Rosa has called the ottica verghiana.11 Svevo’s and Pirandello’s modernist narrators explore, exploit, manipulate and radicalize components and “codes of accreditation”12 already present in programmatic realism of the nineteenth century, emphasizing how in modernist fiction a critical repulsion of nineteenth-century realism and a creative and radical reworking of its representational codes and epistemological paradigms may go hand in hand. Despite many a straightforward attack against the Mr. Bennetts of realism, modernist fiction’s representational strategies result often in an extended and radicalized version of realism’s reality.13

3. Unreliability and Literary Conventions The above-described interaction of modernist and realist repertoires and its relation to the use of unreliable narration make Italian modernist fiction an interesting test case for the way in which narrative unreliability may engage certain groups of readers in a process of matching up extra-literary ––––––––––––– 10

11 12 13

On the relationship between Pirandello and Verga, in particular on Pirandello’s critical reassessment of Verga’s alleged poetics of impersonality and objectivity, see Lepschy (2000). See Asor Rosa (1975, 1995). Furst (1988). On the relation between nineteenth-century programmatic realism and the representation of subjectivist reality in modernism, see Herman (1996).

254


presuppositions, based on psychological, social, ethical and epistemological standards with literary frames of reference. What makes a case like this particularly thought-provoking is the fact that conceptual models of unreliability hardly go into the specific ways extra-literary and literary frameworks are put together. Ansgar Nünning14, for example, presents both types of frames as two sets of schemata the reader can refer to in order to ‘naturalize’ inconsistencies in fictional texts, but it is not entirely clear how and why both sets of schemata, who are of a very different nature, relate to each other. One may get the impression that literary conventions are some kind of back-up solution to be called in whenever extra-literary schemata fail to provide adequate solutions for textual inconsistencies, or whenever reference to literary conventions may be, for one reason or another, suitable, convenient or simply unavoidable. In the case of the modernist novels I have mentioned, however, extra-literary and literary schemata are closely intertwined. They are not just alternative sets of interpretive tools readers can freely dispose of. A reader’s decision as to how, why and to what extent the narrators of these novels may be considered unreliable is highly dependent on the ability to take into account the connection between the narrator’s behaviour and the interaction of the novel with a specific literary repertoire. Put differently, if literary repertoires offer viable clues for interpreting unreliability, readers may resort to these clues as short-cuts for interpreting unreliability, though this analysis depends of course on their knowledge of and attitude towards the literary repertoires at stake. Interactions such as these do not necessarily occur with every novel and are certainly not always as manifest or relevant as in the case of Pirandello and Svevo. Still, it is important to acknowledge the fundamental difference between references to extra-literary schemata and references to more specifically literary frames of reference. Rather than offering a spare solution, literary conventions function more as a double interface between extra-literary frames of reference and the act of reading. On the one hand, literary intertexts, genres, conventions and so forth may guide readers in determining if and to whatextent extraliterary schemata can be deemed useful and relevant for interpreting the (un)reliability of the narrator: specific references to certain intertexts, for ––––––––––––– 14

Nünning (1999: 67); in Nünning’s recent plea for a synthesis of rhetorical and cognitive approaches the issue is not really addressed, as the relationship between referential frames and literary frames in resolving cases of unreliability remains vague, Nünning (2005: 98).


255

instance, may cast a completely different light on extra-literary standards of unreliability and on the possibility or necessity of applying them to literary texts. On the other hand, literary frames of reference often contribute to the ways readers elaborate their interpretations of particular works of fiction within more general patterns of meaning that are used to make sense of experience, history, reality, and so forth. To make things more concrete: if it is possible to consider interpretations of a novel as an allegory or as an “epistemological metaphor”15 of ways of perceiving, organizing and making sense of not just literature but reality in general, the various ways readers deal with unreliability may also be allegories of a broader understanding of the world.16 And it is in this organization of reading experience as an allegory of understanding that literary schemata may intervene in crucial ways. In the case of modernist fiction, for instance, the knowledge of literary schemata, and in particular the awareness of radical transformations of a realist repertoire, will contribute to the organization of interpretations of unreliability within a broader narrative of ‘loss of confidence in truth’, ‘growing opacity of reality’, ‘fragmentation of identity’ and so forth. References to the transformation of realist repertoires in the Italian modernist novels as discussed above may give way to interpretations of the novels within a broader cultural-historical narrative of the Novecento as an era marked by the growing awareness that issues of truth, social criticism, and (self-)exclusion are not just closely connected to but also crystallize into a series of radical dilemmas, foreshadowed to some extent in the apparently self-confident épistémè of nineteenth-century verismo. In the context of a scholarly debate on unreliability, a reading of unreliability in Italian modernist fiction inevitably takes the form of a specific kind of allegory. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from unreliability in Italian modernism (or from other literary currents with a high degree of ––––––––––––– 15 16

Eco (1989: 159–163). On interpretation as allegory, see Luperini (1990). Luperini, drawing on Benjamin’s remarks on allegory, conceives interpretation as an allegory because of the fact that it articulates its own production of meaning through a differential dynamics between the conventional historical meaning of a text (the so-called ‘real content’), and the actual meaning it eventually transmits (the so-called ‘truth content’). In Luperini’s materialistic hermeneutics, ‘real content’ and ‘truth content’ are linked in a hermeneutic circle, the ‘real content’ being both an objective and legitimising basis for the ‘truth content’ and a consequence or outcome of it.

256


interpretive regulation and cultural-historical institutionalization), it is that the use of unreliability as a ‘natural’ category to explain the behaviour of personalized narrators and the contextualized and cultural-historically situated interpretation of this use are not just two parallel tracks, but constitute rather strongly intertwined and overlapping dimensions of the reading process. Decisions about unreliability as a category of ‘common’ experience (involving psychological, cultural, social frames of reference) may depend on the status and the relative weight attributed to literary schemata associated with these novels. And these literary schemata will also offer an important resource in the incorporation of a particular reading experience in a broader cultural narrative. This is not to say that references to literary repertoire will always necessarily affect interpretations of unreliability. Still, focusing on the possible roles of literary conventions in the interpretation of unreliability may at least be useful to remind us that dealing with literature is sometimes like wrestling with Protheus, an adversary elusive even for the most pragmatic of approaches.

Works Cited Asor Rosa, Alberto, ed. 1995 Letteratura italiana. Le opere. IV. Il Novecento. 1. l’età della crisi (Torino: Einaudi). Asor Rosa, Alberto 1975 “Il punto di vista dell’ottica verghiana,” in Letteratura e critica. Studi in onore di Natalino Sapegno, ed. Walter Binni et al., vol. II (Roma: Bulzoni): 721–776. Asor Rosa, Alberto 1995 “I Malavoglia di Giovanni Verga,” in Asor Rosa, Alberto ed., Letteratura italiana. Le opere. 3. Dall’Ottocento al Novecento (Torino: Einaudi): 733–877. Barilli, Renato 1972 La linea Svevo-Pirandello (Milano: Mursia). Barilli, Renato 1986 Pirandello. Una rivoluzione culturale (Milano: Mursia). Bradbury, Malcolm 1989 The Modern World. Ten Great Writers (London: Penguin). Bradshaw, David, ed. 2003 A Concise Companion to Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell). Childs, Peter 2000 Modernism (London/New York: Routledge). Debenedetti, Giacomo 1972 Il romanzo del Novecento. Quaderni inediti, ed. Eugenio Montale (Milano: Garzanti).


257

Eco, Umberto 1989 Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milano: Bompiani). Fokkema, Douwe & Ibsch, Elrud 1987 Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature, 1910–1940 (London: Hurst). Furst, Lilian 1998 “Realism and its ‘Code of Accreditation’,” in Comparative Literature Studies 25: 101–126. Herman, Luc 1996 Concepts of Realism (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House). Lepschy, Giulio 2000 “Pirandello’s Verga,” in Prue Shaw and John Took, ed., Reflexivity: Critical Themes in the Italian Cultural Tradition (Ravenna: Longo): 83–94. Levenson, Michael 1999 The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Luperini, Romano 1990 L’allegoria del moderno: saggi sull’allegorismo come forma artistica del moderno e come metodo di conoscenza (Roma: Editori Riuniti). Mazzacurati, Giancarlo 1987 Pirandello nel romanzo europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino). Nichols, Peter 1995 Modernisms: a Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Nünning, Ansgar 1999 “Unreliable, Compared to What: Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, ed., Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context (Tübingen: Narr): 53–73. 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliability: Synthesizing Cognitive and Retorical approaches,” in James Phelan and Paul Rabinowitz, ed., A Companion to Narrative Theory (Oxford: Blackwell): 89–107. Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” in Narrative 11: 93–109. Phelan, James 2004 Living to Tell about it: a Rhetorics and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Pirandello, Luigi 1990 One, No One and Hundred Thousand, tr. William Weaver (Boston: Eridanos Press). 1994 Tutti i romanzi, ed. Giovanni Macchia (Milano: Mondadori (“Meridiani”)), 2 vols. 2005a The Late Mattia Pascal, tr. William Weaver (New York: New York Review Books).

258


2005b Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Svevo, Italo 1985 Romanzi, ed. Pietro Sarzana (Milano: Mondadori (“Meridiani”)). 2001 Zeno’s Conscience, tr. William Weaver (New York: Knopf). Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35: 151–179.

YASMINE BADIR (University of Liège)

“He” Who Knows Better Than “I”: Reactivating Unreliable Narration in Philip Roth’s Human Stain and Jean Echenoz’ Nous trois 1. Introduction Nous trois and The Human Stain, first published respectively in 1992 in France and in 2000 in the United States, have one striking characteristic in common: they activate recognizable frames of first-person narration and internal focalisation alongside each other. In Nous trois, an impersonal narrator focalising on one character doubles the first-person narrator. In The Human Stain, a narrative told in the third-person interrupts the firstperson narrator. The unconventional co-occurrence of these two frames throws into doubt the mimetic premises on which the two novels seem at first to be based. The realist project does not go altogether bankrupt, however, and the novels do not turn into a metafictional game although the experiment forces the reader to scrutinize the assumptions that warrant the mimetic illusion. I will propose that reading the two novels in terms of unreliability does not recuperate or solve the tensions weakening the realist norm, but gives them a new relevance.

2. Deconstructing Experience Jean Echenoz owes the critical acclaim he enjoys and his inclusion into the new generation of writers published by the Editions de Minuit and dubbed the Minimalists, to a sophisticated detachment that questions in a comic way the possibility of subjectivity, identity and narrative. As opposed to the Nouveau Roman, the experimental style of the minimalist writers shakes expectations without jeopardizing legibility. Most readers of Echenoz’ novels recognize references to popular story patterns and cultural myths, though they admit by the same token that the plot seems arbi-

260

Yasmine Badir

trary and irrelevant to the characters who are mostly anxious, bored and disoriented, mere jaded worker bees taking part in a game that holds little significance for them.1 Nous trois also offers great density at the level of the story, but despite various possible plot triggers, the novel floats on the surface of the narrative, focusing instead on the discomfort of two characters, captured in the banality of their everyday life. One might sum up Nous trois, despite its numerous digressions, as the story of two men pursuing the same woman. Louis Meyer meets and rescues a woman in extraordinary circumstances from great danger without however succeeding in garnering any such minimal information as her name. In parallel, a first-person narrator hopes to win the favour of a woman called Lucie Blanche. Meyer then joins the crew of a space mission that includes both the first-person narrator and Lucie who turns out to be the mystery woman Meyer saved. Whereas Lucie’s point of view remains opaque to the reader, a necessary condition of the novel’s intrigue, the perspectives of the two male protagonists crisscross and sometimes even overlap. As the novel thus moves DeMilo and Meyer around from the position of reluctant observer to the part of actively seeking Lucie’s attention, our sympathies are evenly balanced between them. In fact, the variability of the novel’s focus endlessly postpones dramatic climax and creates in the reader a sense of unease, which sends her to seek meaning elsewhere. After helping a stranger twice, first by saving her from the impending explosion of her car, then by helping her get away from the rubble caused by a major earthquake in Marseilles, Meyer finds himself in a car alone with the mysterious woman. Long descriptions of what can be found within Meyer’s field of vision are free from the stylistic, expressive or deictic markers that would decisively identify them as Meyer’s own observations. Since Meyer’s embarrassment and irritation are not foregrounded, it seems easier to attribute these remarks to the heterodiegetic narrator who describes objects and movements with scientific detachment. The aesthetic pleasure derived from the description of the damage caused by the earthquake, one of the rare passages that lie outside the conscious––––––––––––– 1

Monique Galloway observes that Echenoz’ novels, “parodies of the adventure, spy and detective genres, contained a plethora of fast-moving, essentially pointless, plots” (Galloway 2005: 1). A reviewer also mentions references to “American pulp fiction, B movies and pop music” (James 2004) and another emphasizes the “casual attitude to plot” which gives the novels a feeling of “irresolution” (Jenkins 2000: 24).

Reactivating Unreliable Narration

261

ness of either male protagonist, seems only compatible with a narrator whose reality is not contiguous with that of the story: It is not that easy for the clown, with the projection that inflates his jaw close to bursting and sculpts his ears into a point, to explain that despite the Marseille tragedy 2 that affects us all the show must go on.

With the same ironic objectivity that would acknowledge the fictionality of the story and as a result deals with casual insolence with human emotions, suffering and death, the narrator describes Meyer’s fainting fit: Dizziness: bent in two, the heart no longer answering, his hands crocheting the slippery edge of the sink, Meyer falls heavily on his knees – his eyebrow violently hitting 3 the ceramic on its way.

The description does not however conflict with the kind of information that Meyer’s blurred consciousness would be able to pick up in such moment. Similarly, Meyer’s instinctive recourse to the television to break the silence of his room bespeaks an apathy that is not altogether foreign to the narrator’s dispassionate stance. In fact, the narrator’s distance from the scene is reminiscent of Meyer’s helplessness and psychological isolation. One could therefore speak here of a kind of co-incidence between the narrator’s external standpoint and Meyer’s point of view. Thus, although these passages evoke the eerie universe of literary impersonality, surprisingly enough it is not incompatible with Meyer’s experience. In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology Fludernik proposes a linguistically-informed cognitive model according to which the reader constructs a text as a reallife instance of narration along two typical frames. The action/telling schema hypostatises on the discourse level the anthropomorphic presence of a telling instance, whereas the viewing/experiencing schema projects on the story level an embodied consciousness. In the example above, although the telling instance is foregrounded, the experiencing instance remains available as well. ––––––––––––– 2

3

“Sous le défilement qui gonfle sa mâchoire en outre et lui taille les oreilles en pointe, ce n’est pas si facile pour le pitre d’exposer que, malgré le drame de Marseille qui nous touche tous, le spectacle doit continuer” (Echenoz 1992: 99, my translation). Since I have no knowlegde of an English translation of this book, all translations from the novel are my own. “Vertige: plié en deux, le cœur aux abonnés absents, ses mains crochetant le rebord glissant du lavabo, Meyer tombe pesammant sur les genoux – son arcade sourcilière heurtant avec violence, au passage, la faïence” (Ibid.: 95–96).

262

Yasmine Badir

Occasionally, the novel features what Fludernik calls the character’s voice, a mimetic recuperation of text material as the narrated perception or thoughts – whether non-reflective, verbalized or uttered – of a consciousness that finds embodiment within the spatial and temporal coordinates of the story. Expressive markers create a deictic centre that can be defined linguistically and onto which the reader can project a subject within a realist reading frame.4 An instance of voice can be found in the following extract where Meyer racks his brains to make an interesting reply to his mysterious protégé who commented on passing a horse on the road: And when it finally occurs to him to tell about his fall from a horse when he was fifteen sixteen years old, the only time he climbed upon one, it is much too late, the black horse is too far behind and anyway it is a pointless story; not to say that it’s a 5 bad memory.

The syntactic signal that triggers a reading of the last portion of the quotation as the character’s voice is the sentence-modifier “anyway” (tout compte fait) while the argumentative adverbial “not to say” (sans compter que) confirms the possibility of the reading.6 In other cases, signs of subjectivity that cannot be reconciled with the narrator’s neutrality are less easily recuperated as Meyer’s voice: With that kind of subject, of course, associations abound, possible comments are not lacking. You have first the beauty of the horse, the nobility and the loyalty of the horse, you have everything that concerns the horse in cinema, in painting, sculpture and agriculture […] really the horse is the ideal starting point for a conversation, the perfect incipit. Caught off guard, the time to understand this easy enough sentence, the time to look for the animal in the landscape, confused, Meyer is disappointing. Maybe panic-

––––––––––––– 4 5

6

Fludernik (1996: 344). “Et quand l’idée lui vient enfin de raconter sa chute d’un cheval vers quinze seize ans, la seule fois qu’il est monté dessus, c’est beaucoup trop tard, le cheval noir est trop loin derrière et tout compte fait c’est une histoire sans intérêt ; sans compter que c’est un mauvais souvenir” (Echenoz 1992: 92–93). It would have been possible to read voice earlier in the sentence because of the colloquial “quinze seize ans” and “monté dessus” and the sentence-modifier “beaucoup”, but these signs are not sufficient in themselves because the narrator is also informal at times.


263

stricken by the very number of possible comments, quickly he looks for one, quickly 7 he looks for one.

The humour exhibited in the first part of the quotation is connected to the frustration of the character who insinuates that the occasion given him is not much of an invitation to start a conversation. Although the annoyance is Meyer’s, the text does not invite the reader to interpret the passage as if it faithfully retraced Meyer’s train of thoughts. Indeed, the representation of Meyer’s reaction to his companion’s comment in the second part of the quotation leaves no place in his blank mind for such reflective irony and belies our first reading. Nevertheless, the irony expressed in the first paragraph is so close perceptually and emotionally to what one imagines Meyer to experience that the reader is encouraged to project him as a narrator figure who evokes retrospectively the exasperation he felt back then. Similarly, the second paragraph, although apparently an external summary of Meyer’s state of mind, questions the distinction between character and narrator. It is difficult to interpret such evaluations as “easy enough” or “confused” as the scornful judgments of a narrator who has never before commented on the protagonist in such a way. In fact, these accusations smack of Meyer’s irritation with himself and with his female companion. It also seems more productive to recuperate the hesitation recorded in “maybe” as Meyer’s attempt to attenuate what he considers as his incompetence rather than to attribute this to the antics of an omniscient narrator affecting to ignore what goes on in Meyer’s mind. To cope with texts that blur the distinction between story and discourse, Fludernik proposes the term of reflectorization, which creates the illusion that a character momentarily takes on the narrator’s attributes.8 However, Fludernik’s examples are for the most part the narrator’s ironic way to denounce a character on ethical grounds and exacerbate the reader’s sense of the character’s alterity. But the irony registered in Nous trois is the character’s. Moreover, –––––––––––––

7

8

“A partir d’un sujet pareil, à l’évidence, les associations foisonnent, les commentaires possibles ne manquent pas. Vous avez déjà la beauté du cheval, la noblesse et la fidélité du cheval, vous avez tout ce qui concerne le cheval au cinéma, dans la peinture, dans la sculpture et l’agriculture […] vraiment le cheval est le point de départ idéal pour une conversation, l’incipit en béton. Mais pris au dépourvu, le temps de comprendre cette phrase pourtant simple, le temps de chercher cet animal dans le paysage, Meyer troublé se montre consternant. Peut-être affolé par cette quantité même de commentaires, à toute vitesse il en cherche un, à toute vitesse il en cherche un” (Echenoz 1992: 92). Fludernik (1996: 184).

264

Yasmine Badir

no sense of alterity differentiates the character’s idiom from the narrator’s, and the latter does not present a personal view of Meyer’s difficulties. Fludernik herself has noted similar deviant cases of reflectorization in George Garrett’s Death of the Fox, and concludes that “this may be the point at which the usefulness of the narratological concept of voice is exhausted”.9 I would like to argue, however, that returning to the way Gérard Genette had once defined the concept of focalisation might resolve the issue. Following the example of Mieke Bal, when Fludernik writes of “internal focalisation”, she means that the narrative is focalised “through” the character or that the reader is presented with “the reader’s focalisation”.10 As Genette makes clear in Nouveau discours du récit, this use of the concept goes against his original definition. For him, the narrator focalises the narrative on a character.11 In Fludernik’s use of the term, reading focalisation amounts to creating the illusion that one sees through the character’s eyes. In that sense, Fludernik is correct to observe that internal focalisation cannot be distinguished from the concept of voice and will only be called upon in the PERCEIVING schema.12 In Genette’s use of the word, however, focalisation allows for such liminal mimetic recuperation that does not entail embodiment. In the first paragraph of our quotation, the narrator cannot be said to evoke Meyer’s voice, nor can Meyer be projected as the narrating instance since such technique as reflectorization typically flaunts the character’s alterity of which the novel is utterly devoid. It remains however useful to observe that the subjective centre which the telling instance draws from is Meyer, because what the paragraph foregrounds is Meyer’s frustration: his knowledge, his perception and his experience. Meyer’s experience thus finds expression on the levels of both the discourse and the story. Since the only element that distinguishes the narrator from Meyer is the analytical distance from which the story is mediated, one is tempted to regard that distance as part of Meyer’s perspective. This interpretation is only possible because we do not have a personalized narrator. The narrative instance cannot be reconstructed around a –––––––––––––

9

10 11

12

Fludernik (2001: 636). Ibid.: 624, 635. Genette (1983: 48–49). Although I find Genette’s original definition of focalisation more useful, I do not use the three types of focalisation he proposes (zero, internal, external), which Bal and Fludernik are right to criticize. Fludernik (1996: 345).


265

deictic centre, and does not express views that differ from Meyer’s. The narrator rarely organizes the story temporally, or with a dramatic resolution in view, a feature that would highlight his role of storyteller. He rarely gives out information that exceeds Meyer’s knowledge and, when he does so, as in the description of the earthquake, this appears as an enhancement of the character’s consciousness. In fact, the narrative situation we have here is very close to first-person narration, since Meyer’s subjectivity manifests itself both through the narrating and the experiencing instances. What remains of the teller-figure is the aesthetic pleasure of literary creation. The reader’s unease thus results at once from Meyer’s alienation from his own experience and from the discrepancy between the narrator’s pleasure in formal acrobatics and the poignancy of the story: the tragic earthquake, Meyer’s solitude, his overwrought state or Lucy’s supreme indifference. Here is our first hint of unreliability.13 The focalisation through Meyer makes up only half of the novel, however. The other male protagonist pursuing Lucie expresses himself in the first person. The narrative that relates Meyer’s trip to Marseilles and back is interrupted by three short chapters which detail DeMilo’s monotonous occupations while he waits to be sent on his next spatial mission. The past and present tenses alternate in DeMilo’s narration, foregrounding in the former case his narrating self and in the latter his experiencing self. It is generally accepted today that first-person narratives typically combine the retrospective stance of an older self and the immediate perception of a younger self.14 But, beside the fact that present-tense portions far exceed past-tense narration, because the point in time from which the I-narrator recounts his experience remains unknown and his retrospective stance shows no trace of evolution in relation to his younger self, the narrating role of the I-persona remains peripheral and a mere grammatical question, similar in fact to the relation between the heterodiegetic narrator and –––––––––––––

13

14

Again I test my reading against that of other readers. Ruth Amar notes that, “les scènes sensées être sérieuses tournent immédiatement au dérisoire. Les moments les plus intimes deviennent les plus drôles” (Amar 2005: 115). She makes of this inversion the principle of Echenoz’ fiction “créant un malaise et une sensation de perte de contrôle” (ibid.: 117). One reviewer notices that Echenoz’s novels seem “blithe” although they are also an “exploration of love and betrayal” (James 2004). To another, Echenoz’ novels emphasize “the mundanity of life” though in infrared, while they also ask “questions about religion, free will and morality” (Dallas 2003: 6). Stanzel (1987: 48).

266

Yasmine Badir

Meyer. This impression is further confirmed when Meyer and DeMilo share the same fictional space. In the first part of the novel, Meyer and DeMilo evolve in parallel stories without entering into contact. Since DeMilo shows no sign of being aware of Meyer, the reader is inclined to consider these sections as distinct, each deploying their own narrative situation. However, when DeMilo and Meyer meet, the reader is brought face to face with an anomaly in the narrative, which so far had only been apparent in one short paragraph in the first chapter: “After I left, around 10 pm, Blondel had stopped in Poecile’s office to give a phone call”.15 Blondel, the boss of DeMilo and Meyer, telephones a man named Séguret and asks to talk to Meyer. Séguret is then said to turn towards Meyer who chooses not to take the call. Not only does the I-narrator tell what happens in a location where he is not present, but he tells what happens in a second location occupied by characters whom he does not know. Should we assume that DeMilo reconstructs the story after having taken down the testimony of both Blondel and Meyer? The narrative does not suggest any such solution, and it is an extravagant explanation for such a trivial scene. Should we then decide that the novel infringes on all mimetic constraints so that the I-narrator is granted the omniscience of a heterodiegetic narrator? That hypothesis must later be rejected too in view of DeMilo’s unawareness of certain facts regarding Meyer and Lucie’s relationship. The second part of the novel suggests another option: that of posing an external narrator, focalising either on Meyer or on DeMilo, but choosing to refer to the latter in the first person.16 Indeed, the meeting of Meyer and DeMilo surprisingly occasions few ambiguities and syntactic paradoxes. As the spatial crew become acquainted with each other and tour the spaceship, the standpoint of the two men is generally comparable so that despite the use of the first-person pronoun here and there, the narrative seems to focalise on both DeMilo and Meyer simultaneously. Note for example the similarity of their reaction towards Blondel’s drooling dog: “At his feet, at this prospect, the foul animal yapped out of joy. Disgusted, Meyer saw Begonhes’ moustache

––––––––––––– 15 16

“Après mon départ, vers vingt-deux heures, Blondel était passé téléphoner dans le bureau de Poecile” (Echenoz 1992: 11). DeMilo is indeed referred by his name only in the quoted speech of other characters.


267

quiver. As to me, I didn’t smile as wide.”17 Meyer and DeMilo, in their common existential isolation and general passivity, have acquired so little personality of their own that their stances blend in smoothly despite their antagonistic positions in relation to the plot. At long last, the two men need to exhibit opposed points of view when Meyer is introduced for the first time to Lucie as his new colleague. The next couple of chapters recount how Meyer forces Lucie into acknowledging acquaintance with him and into accounting for her aloofness. Once in space, Meyer gradually becomes intimate with Lucie until she finally yields to his advances: We know it, nothing is more like space than water. The sensation of weightlessness is similar. And yet one very often imagines that it wouldn’t be bad to mate in water. […] [But like in water, in zero gravity] one lacks grip, support, resistance, but still one succeeds by concentrating hard. The major strategic hooks Meyer had spotted right away. One after the other, he undertook to undo them, just under the lens of one of the small 18 on-board cameras that I had inadvertently left on.

This passage is difficult to attribute to anyone, and this anti-perspectivism provides a counterweight to the scene’s potential for resolution. Lucie finally chooses between the two men, which one expects to ease the sexual tension between the three of them. But because no one’s perspective in particular, neither Meyer’s, nor DeMilo’s or the heterodiegetic narrator’s rules the passage, and because as a result the distance adopted to narrate the moment is variable, the event loses its intensity and meaning on the plot level. The first introductory sentences seem to refer to the same heterodiegetic narrator who so casually dealt with the earthquake in Marseilles or with Meyer’s fainting fit. They dissect Meyer’s movements almost scientifically and so divert the reader’s attention away from the impact of the exchanged caresses. Meyer’s sexual desire, so contextualized within a ––––––––––––– 17 18

“A ses pieds, à cette perspective, la bête immonde glapit de plaisir. Meyer écœuré vit frémir la moustache de Bégonhès. Moi-même je souris moins” (Echenoz 1992: 159). “On le sait, rien ne ressemble autant à l’espace que l’eau. L’effet d’apesanteur y est à peu près semblable. Or l’on s’imagine, très communément, qu’il ne serait pas mal de s’accoupler dans l’eau. […] [Mais comme dans l’eau, en gravité zéro] on y manque de prises, d’appuis, de résistances, mais quand même on y arrive en se concentrant bien. Les agrafes stratégiques majeures, tout de suite Meyer les avait repérées. L’une après l’autre il entreprit de les défaire, juste sous l’objectif d’une des petites caméras de bord que j’avais laissée, par inadvertance, branchée” (ibid.: 209).

268

Yasmine Badir

broad cultural fashioning of sexual fantasy, is robbed of its singularity and mocks our urge for a resolution of the story. As in the previous example we analysed above, reconstructing the comments as Meyer’s voice in the logic of realist psychological vraisemblance would require a clearer indication of his agitation. Yet, as above, one can postulate that Meyer is looking back with amusement and tenderness on his own efforts. This reading has the disadvantage of imputing to a character the retrospective perspective characteristic of a telling figure, but allows the reader to recuperate the passage perceptually as Meyer’s and so tie these sentences with what follows. After all, who better than Meyer now knows what it is like to have weightless sex? The third and fourth sentences timidly introduce Meyer’s experiencing stance. The style becomes more colloquial, modifiers are more frequent (“still”, “right away”) and some elements are preposed (“the major strategic hooks" “one after another”). What is foregrounded now is Meyer’s impatience. Although still comic and not incompatible with the narrator’s detachment, the tone is more empathetic with Meyer’s endeavour. Grammatically, the last sentence introduces another point of view, one that should logically overrule our first assumptions since it is in the first person. The reader however is reluctant to retract his first conclusions because the subjectivity of that first person, whom we expect to be mortified by this discovery, remains undetectable. In view of his indifference, although the logic of the first-person reference implies that DeMilo witnesses Meyer’s performance, that event hardly exists on the story level so that the former’s presence in this paragraph is not different to that of the external narrator. Irony reaches a climax here and forecloses any possibility of dramatic resolution considering the lack of clear distinctions between the heterodiegetic narrator, Meyer and the first-person narrator. The novel’s ending, flouting all expectations of closure, confirms the interchangeability of Meyer and DeMilo and the blurring between their experiencing and telling selves. A few paragraphs casually sketch how Lucy moves into Meyer’s apartment when they return from their space trip. In that same chapter, the narrative suddenly slows down: on an apparently insignificant night, presumably a few months after she moved in, Lucy, left by herself by Meyer who went out, calls DeMilo to invite him to meet alone with her the next day. The last chapter stages DeMilo on the following day hours before he and Lucy have planned to meet. The narrative though stops before the time of their meeting.


269

I have tried to show that the novel assails mimetic conventions on several levels. First, the uncomfortable co-occurrence of a first-person narrator and a heterodiegetic narrator and the strange similitude between them place in relief the authority invested in them as the subjective centre and moral basis they allegedly represent. Eventually the reader suspects both narrators to be mere empty shells, of which only the surface structure remains. Second, one may observe a disjunction between discourse and experience: the external narrator finds aesthetic pleasure or scientific interest in reporting experiences that hold great personal import to these involved. What is more, characters, whether referred to in the first or third person, both jump unexpectedly from coldly analyzing their experiences to investing themselves emotionally in the story. Finally, the novel so rigidly and desultorily sticks to familiar story lines on the one hand, and potential crises are so playfully defused or cursorily mentioned on the other, as to have the effect of parody. The disruption of the mimetic standard points the reader towards a meaning beyond the authority of the narrators and beyond the plot. The reader may recuperate that meaning by projecting the frame of unreliability. The reader might have expected DeMilo to be a jealous and bitter unreliable narrator. The title even predicts as much: Meyer, Lucy and me; but it also gestures towards another trio, that mishmash of superficial differences composed of DeMilo, Meyer and the anonymous narrator. It is not neutrality that is at stake in Nous trois, neither is it subjectivity per se, but the possibility of having an identity. And on that score, the three of them are unreliable: the discourse cannot account for the experience19, the experience is so formatted that it is no longer personal and the plot cannot hold up authentic human emotions. In thus projecting unreliability, in the interstices between parody, meta-fictional in-jokes and aesthetic enjoyment of literary forms, the reader reconstructs another story: that of loneliness, ennui, self-alienation, lack of moral anchorage or the intrusion of the media in the character’s most private thoughts. Ansgar Nünning and James Phelan, although not concurring on the narrative agents that the frame of unreliability involves, both agree that to infer unreliability on the plane of narration amounts to supplying the text with a general meaning that escapes the narrator at least in part. Neither ––––––––––––– 19

For a discussion of the unreliability of telling instances without ontological embodiment, see the contribution of Gunther Martens.

270

Yasmine Badir

DeMilo, nor the external narrator (nor Meyer if we consider his contribution to the narration) address me as a reader since I reconstruct a different meaning (in Nüninng’s version), or share another meaning with the implied author (in Phelan’s version), in spite of those three. In its mode of argumentation, my analysis is closer to Nünning’s and Fludernik’s cognitive model. I have indeed tried to naturalize what I identified as mimetic disruptions and textual aporia “by giving them a function in some larger pattern supplied by accepted cultural models”.20 My reading of unreliability makes assumptions about psychological models of romantic attachment, intimacy and jealousy. It has tested the plot against the popular pattern of the love triangle as it is found in fiction and mainstream films. It also depends on realist notions of subjectivity and identity, although I have primarily viewed the novel as a development of the Nouveau Roman, which questions the very possibility of objectivity and dislocates both plots and characterization. Still, Phelan’s rhetoric model as it is presented in Living To Tell about it has also influenced my reading in so far as I have been on the lookout for an ethically more rewarding interpretation than a mimetic or meta-fictional reading alone could provide. Following Nünning’s model, Bruno Zerweck has argued in favour of a historical conceptualisation of unreliable narration. Zerweck describes three major moments in that history. He identifies the first one with the nineteenth-century realist novel which does not foreground epistemological questions, the second with the first part of the twentieth century, the heyday of unreliable narration, and finally describes postmodern variations of the novel which create a climate of ontological doubt making unreliable narration virtually obsolete. This is not to say that realist fiction is not subversive or sophisticated, for each moment comes up with “a special heuristic device for coming to terms with the real”.21 This realization leads Zerweck to call for a dissolution of “another seemingly fundamental opposition, namely, that between the illusionist realist novel and the antiillusionist modernist and postmodernist novel”.22 While Nous trois uses many of the anti-illusionist devices of postmodern fiction described by Zerweck, I propose to take the full measure of Zerweck’s proposition and situate Echenoz’ novel at the crossroads of the realist and postmodern –––––––––––––

20 21 22

Nünning (1999: 67). Zerweck (2001: 170). Ibid.: 169.


271

practice. Nous trois does not simply discard the mimetic project as inappropriate to deal with contemporary preoccupations. The unreliability frame that I proposed here requires the reader to project the existential presence of Meyer, DeMilo and the external narrator, to empathize with their interests and fate as if they were real human beings and to regard their story as an authentic one. Yet the novel enhances these mimetic impressions by questioning subjectivity, identity and the power of narrative to reflect these concepts in a society overrun by mediatised cultural macro-narratives.

3. Narrative as Enhanced Reality In contrast with Echenoz’s connection with the Nouveau Roman, Philip Roth continues an American tradition of social critique and rethinks great national myths. The Human Stain allies itself most clearly with that cornerstone of American literature, The Great Gastby. Like Nick Carraway, Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator of The Human Stain and several other novels by Roth, undertakes to address prejudice through storytelling. Zuckerman trades Carraway’s scepticism and fatalism for rage and sometimes brutality, but the sheer depth of their ambitions stems from a deepseated trust in narrative. Nathan Zuckerman’s fascination for the Jewish professor Coleman Silk fires up when the accomplished and influential dean is ostracised by his university on account first of a spurious racist charge, then of his liaison with Faunia Farley, forty years younger than him, underprivileged and illiterate. When Coleman dies, presumably killed by Faunia’s jealous ex-husband who is unhinged by his experience in the Vietnam War, Zuckerman learns from Coleman’s sister that he is the son of African-American middle-class parents. The well-kept secret reverberates both on his imperious, ruthless persona and his rebellion in old age. Zuckerman vows to write Coleman’s autobiography to correct his children’s and colleague’s representation of him. According to him, that portrait misrepresents Coleman in two respects: it erases his affair with Faunia as the folly of a man driven to despair by the false accusations levelled against him, and it leaves out the story of his passing. Carraway presents himself as a privileged and valuable witness. However, as Kent Cartwright convincingly demonstrates, his defeatism and impressionability both in relation to the Bucchanans’ impunity and self-

272

Yasmine Badir

indulgent life and to Gatsby’s wild romanticism make him a relatively poor judge of character,23 which is to say that Carraway falls short, to use James Phelan’s new typology, on the axis of ethics and is guilty of “unreliable regarding”. What predominates in The Great Gastby, therefore, is not that Carraway attempts to deceive the narratee (“unreliable reporting”), nor that his intellectual and perceptive power falls short of the complexity of the events he undertakes to relate.24 Carraway remains our privileged interlocutor though the reader may doubt whether he evaluates to its full extent the generosity and endurance of Gastby’s idealism and the general immorality of the capitalist system that the Bucchanans incarnate. The reader enters into discussion with Carraway over the complex matter of innocence and guilt. Three quarters of a century later, Roth engages the reader in a comparable ethical discussion, although the parameters of the narrator’s (un-)reliability have changed considerably. The narrator of The Human Stain does not claim to faithfully report or objectively interpret what he witnessed. Instead, he openly enhances his material with his imaginative power as writer. Nevertheless, like Carraway, he poses himself as the privileged and ultimate interpreter of the protagonist’s life. Yet, although realist norms of objectivity and neutrality have been cast aside as ineffective in fully revealing a man’s personality, the structure of the novel is such as to invite us to suspect Zuckerman of unreliable regarding.25 At the start of the novel, Zuckerman emphasizes his role of confidant and observer and retraces chronologically the different phases of his friendship with Coleman. However, when the latter reads to him an old letter from his ex-girlfriend Steena, Zuckerman steps out of his observing stance, and shows his friend in the position of a heterodiegetic narrator in the new light in which he now appears to him. Allegedly building on information he collected during his conversations with Coleman, Zuckerman reconstructs a key moment of self-consciousness for the old man: –––––––––––––

23 24 25

Cartwright (1984: 230). Phelan (2005: 49–53). Phelan’s new typology of unreliable narration is helpful in many regards. Most importantly, distinguishing between reporting, reading and regarding allows us to describe different effects achieved by unreliable narration. The effect in both The Great Gastby and The Human Stain is to encourage the reader to enter into discussion with the narrator rather than to promote the reader’s sense of superiority.


273

As [Faunia] was about to leave, he at last found himself craving for her as though nothing else mattered – and none of it did, not his daughter, not his sons, not Faunia’s ex-husband or Delphine Roux. […] [It was the time] to undo himself from the conscientiousness with which he had raised the four lively children, persisted in the combative marriage, influenced the recalcitrant colleagues, and guided Athena’s mediocre students, as best he could, through a literature some twenty-five hundred years old. It 26 was the time to yield, to let this simple craving be his guide.

The narrator does not report what he has learned here, but evokes through scene-making as if with the authority of a heterodiegetic narrator the mental activity of a character, whose consciousness he has full access to. The many evaluative adjectives clearly result from a focalisation through Coleman who is in the process of realizing his own motives. Zuckerman has Coleman interpret his sexual involvement with Faunia as a rejection of the many social roles he so successfully performed allegedly at the expense of his own impulses. An abrupt change in the narrative situation occurs at the start of the second chapter and persists until the end of the third chapter. The firstperson narrator disappears entirely, and an impersonal, heterodiegetic narrator tells Coleman’s biography from his late teens to his marriage. The narrator shows little evidence of any kind of distancing towards Coleman whether epistemologically or ethically. Oftentimes, the narrative features Coleman’s voice and follows him in the meanderings of his mental arguments, sometimes even switching from a third-person to a first-person reference. Next to the change in narrative situation, the reader witnesses a redirection of the plot. In the first chapter, Coleman’s anger at the specious accusations made against him is a moment of self-discovery that exposes the policed and civilized self as a lie and allows him to cut loose a more violent aspect of his personality, a kind of primal self. Without the least transition or indication from the narrator, what the second chapter tries to establish is the continuity that defines Coleman’s charismatic, selfabsorbed identity and that peer pressure had only temporarily jeopardized. After taking the jump of casting aside his African-American heritage and family, Coleman becomes the insider par excellence. Husband, father, classics professor, dreaded College Dean: he embraces a variety of social expectations and conventions, some of which as absurd and arbitrary as the racist charge levelled against him. Coleman’s relation to Faunia, –––––––––––––

26

Roth (2000: 64).

274

Yasmine Badir

Zuckerman now evaluates, is a return to his bold independence from social pressure and family ties. As in American Pastoral, Zuckerman seeks to define American identity along two opposed tendencies. Whereas Seymour Swede Levov embodies the ideal of relativist, tolerant, diverse America, Silk Coleman personifies the myth of powerful, self-seeking, individualistic America. The Swede, as his angry, self-centred brother Jerry sums him up, is always ready “to test even further the limits of his enlightened tolerance” and is “pathetically and naively nonviolent”27: What you are is you’re always trying to smooth everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never telling the truth if you think it’s go28 ing to hurt somebody’s feelings. What you are is always compromising.

In contrast, Coleman does not make the same mistake as Bill Clinton who, as the new generation of Athena College academics put it, lost control because he was too considerate of Monica Lewinsky’s feelings and too afraid to dominate her. Like Clinton, Coleman is confronted with “the sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption” of his student, a Lewinsky figure who flaunts herself as victim or of Delphine Roux whose sexual frustration implies that she might have had to tame her dominatrix persona to fit the liberal tendencies of her time.29 Thus despising possible explanations for the idleness of the two black students he called “spooks”, and mesmerized by the gruelling efforts of his daughter Lisa to help “the kid who can’t read”, Coleman rejects self-denying ideals of equal opportunity and gives full rein to his egomaniacal ambition by erasing the social circumstances that limit him.30 Coleman’s biography as imagined by Zuckerman emphasizes the role of the narrator as interpreter. To compare, although The Great Gatsby remains logically and unambiguously framed by the first-person narrator, Carraway at times relates incidents that he has no first-hand knowledge of in the manner of an external narrator. Such “authorialization of the peripheral first-person narrator” remains here merely functional.31 In con––––––––––––– 27 28 29 30 31

Roth (1997: 252). Ibid.: 274. Roth (2000: 147). Ibid.: (161). Stanzel (1987: 208). Yacobi (1987: 336) explains that the reader is bound to resolve textual ambiguities along five different principles. One of those is the perspectival principle, which consists for example in attributing the ambiguity to the narrator or


275

trast, Zuckerman varies the narrative situation as a way to illustrate his competence and the imaginative power of his tale. For example, the trigger that gives the reader a first hint of Coleman’s secret and that starts the narrative of his passing is forged in the sense that this is not how Zuckerman first learned about Coleman’s true origins. As Zuckerman later acknowledges, he guesses about Coleman’s antecedents when he recognizes a family resemblance in the more characteristically Negroid face of Coleman’s sister at his funeral. But, in the second chapter, Zuckerman “shows” how Coleman jeopardizes his secret by lashing out at his lawyer Primus and calling him “lily-white”. Of course, the word might have been reported to Zuckerman later by Primus since the latter is also seen wondering with his wife why Coleman settled for such an epithet. Nevertheless, it becomes evident to the reader when she reads about the meeting between Ernestine and Zuckerman that the latter abandoned the chronological report of his own experience as a witness in favour of the mode of heterodiegetic narration. Paradoxically, at that early point of our reading, the scene between Primus and Coleman at the end of the first chapter authenticates the flashback that follows as Coleman’s own recollection and narrative. The biography is then not yet identified as the product of Zuckerman’s imagination: “First ‘spooks’ and now ‘lily-white’ – who knows what repelling deficiency will be revealed with the next faintly antiquated locution […] that comes flying from his mouth?”32 Because this sentence can be recuperated as Coleman’s voice, the novel suggests that the narrative that follows results from the fact that Coleman’s blunder and fear to be found out send him back to the time of his decision to pass as white. Other elements too point us in that direction. Although the reader quickly guesses it, no explicit mention is made of the fact that Coleman’s parents are coloured. The reader is ignorant of the fact in the first chapter, but in the second and third chapters the reader is an uninvited peeping Tom. Similarly, the existence of Coleman’s sister – Coleman had professed to be an “adored” “only child”33 – or the profession of his father whom we thought to be a –––––––––––––

32 33

character’s unreliability. The functional principle serves the novel’s rhetorical structure. Phelan (2005: 12) explains this phenomenon by suggesting that the narrator’s disclosure functions, his duty to the authorial audience, here supersedes the narrator’s telling functions, his duty to the narratee. Roth (2000: 84). Ibid.: 22.

276

Yasmine Badir

saloon keeper are not explicitly stated, but casually thrown in along with other information. Finally, known anecdotes of Coleman’s life such as his being thrown out of the white brothel or his last meeting with Steena accrue new meaning, but receive no special mention. While the construction of the novel stresses the role of the homodiegetic narrator as literary creator, the internal focalisation in the middle chapters suggests that Coleman is the only subjective source present on the scene. There are however other voices in the novel than Coleman’s. On the one hand, these voices substantiate Zuckerman’s interpretation of Coleman’s life. Faunia is clearly portrayed as Coleman’s closest ally: reluctant to be considered as a victim, with a secret of her own and great sexual appetite. Les and Delphine are shown to be torn by the contradicting ethical standards of America: he must kill Vietnamese abroad, then make friends with Americans of Asian descent at home whereas she must conceal her ambition and sexual drive underneath her liberal pose. On the other hand, their voices seem to erupt spontaneously and sometimes contradict the main narrative. Indeed, Les is not, as the narrator himself will later admit, a man who “muscled on undisturbed, uncharged with any crime, manufacturing that crude reality all his own, a brute of a being colliding with whomever he liked however he liked”.34 At this point, the discrepancy between Zuckerman as Coleman’s friend and Zuckerman as writer of The Human Stain becomes apparent. Indeed, when he picks up again his persona as witness in the fourth chapter to tell about the last time he met Coleman and Faunia, his narrating self stages an experiencing self still unaware of Coleman’s secret who discovers for the first time that “it’s something not there that beguiles, and it’s what’s been drawing me all along, the enigmatic it that he holds apart as his and no one else’s”.35 This, rather than the reading of Steena’s letter, is when Zuckerman conceived of Coleman’s liaison with Faunia as an assertion of his independence from repressive social codes. His experiencing self also notices then that Faunia keeps an eye on the crows flying above them, a detail that he makes much of when imagining Faunia’s intimate thoughts. And finally, at Coleman’s funeral, his experiencing self still knows little

–––––––––––––

34 35

Ibid.: 315. Ibid.: 213.


277

of Les’ plight or of his intelligence.36 The voices of Faunia, Les and Delphine operate a link between Zuckerman’s experiencing self who gradually and haphazardly becomes acquainted with Coleman’s story and Zuckerman’s narrating self who offers a coherent and committed version of Coleman’s life. That point where the novel in becoming and the novel as it is meet and contradict each other is the reader’s point of entry, when the latter starts suspecting Zuckerman of unreliability and enters into the discussion. And there is no lack of material for discussion. We could wonder at Zuckerman’s choice to unconditionally celebrate Coleman’s egotistic and primal urge for independence, and treat the accidents that warp his course as signs that America is diseased. Can we not also find reasons in Coleman’s personality and behaviour for the resentment of his colleagues or for his children’s misgivings? Mark’s anger against his father, his wife’s death and his irrational fury at the injustice he suffered are so many clues that find no satisfactory meaning within Zuckerman’s interpretation of Coleman. It seems difficult to evaluate Coleman’s passing exclusively as a positive act of self-assertion. Several readers have found Les and Delphine to be caricatures, probably because Zuckerman treats them with less than kindness. Where does that brutality come from? Finally, in the American Pastoral, the second part of the trilogy and a novel in which Zuckerman also undertakes to reconstruct with little factual evidence how a man arrived at point X, Swede Levov, like Coleman, also a product of the booming post-war era and an emblematic figure of the American middle-class, is accused at the height of his professional achievement and personal happiness of a crime he did not commit. The way they react against the injustice is different, and Zuckerman clearly chooses Coleman’s side. Is his preference justified? To Zuckerman, Coleman and Levov are victims of individuals who abuse the liberal system to alleviate their own personal frustrations, individuals such as Delphine Roux, Coleman’s black’s students, the Swede’s terrorist daughter or Monika Lewinsky. In his evaluation, Zuckerman idealizes the purity of the self-made man unsullied by the projection of others’ desires on him and dismisses suffering and frustration as sterile. –––––––––––––

36

There is a subtle hint that Zuckerman might have interrogated Les’ therapist to gather information on him, an indication of a more traditional kind that Zuckerman researched his material thoroughly.

278

Yasmine Badir

There can be no question of unreliability for Mark Maslan, however, for whom “Roth's admiration for Coleman is unqualified”37. Thus, for instance, Les' feeling of debt towards his comrade-in-arms, killed by his side, leads him to the murder of Coleman who feels no compunction towards his less lucky fellow African-American citizens.38 Nevertheless, Zuckerman’s inability to give narrative significance to Les’ moral distress and the intelligence with which he describes his plight calls for suspicion. Neither does Patrice Rankine problematise the relation of Roth to his narrator although his analysis reveals thematic tensions within the novel. Indeed, Coleman’s decision to pass is at once a “murderous secret”, “hubris” or “an act of heroism” and his death a moment of “self-discovery” or society’s negation of the self-made man.39 Although Roth himself calls Zuckerman his “alter brain”, the structure of the novel invites the reader to enter into a dialogue with the narrator.40 The switch from homodiegetic to heterodiegetic narration and back again lays bare Zuckerman’s rhetorical techniques: the first-hand knowledge and research work of the empathetic and pain-staking biographer on the one hand and Coleman’s voice as if emerging of its own will on the other. The contrast between the personal voice that opens the novel and the impersonal narrator of the middle chapters emphasizes the gaps and variations between Zuckerman’s experience as Coleman’s friend and his narrative as writer. Finally, Les’, Delphine’s and Faunia’s voices, alternatively discordant or congruent with the main narrative, open up a space for debate. Unsurprisingly, one reviewer describes the novel as “manic, clashing arias” since Roth “embellishes and intensifies” criticism only to establish the authority of his narrative all the more convincingly.41 This description of the novel is consonant with Zuckerman’s view of narrative in American Pastoral “it’s getting [people] wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong again and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again”42 and in The Human Stain “what we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything. The things you ––––––––––––– 37 38 39 40 41 42

Maslan (2005: 381). Ibid.: 373. Rankine (2005: 104–108). Bernstein (2000: 22). Ibid.: 22. To Lorrie Moore (2000), Roth’s narratives also “proceed by argument, often in the form of dialogue”. Roth (1997: 35).


279

know you don’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don’t know is astonishing”.43 Zuckerman makes unreliability his norm and narrative a form of discussion. Although he has abandoned all claims to objectivity and truth, his belief in narrative as a heuristic device remains intact so that the frame of unreliability still triggers disturbance and questioning on the axis of ethics.

4. Conclusion To project unreliability in The Human Stain and in Nous trois, presupposes recording breaches in the mimetic illusion, testing the characterization and the plot against realist models of vraisemblance and measuring the narration against the ideal of accounting for all singularities. That realist frame of reference proves inappropriate at particularly salient points so that what counts as unreliable narration slides from its old stronghold. Yet, such liminal mimetic recuperations as I have tried to extract complement the metafictional responsiveness of the two novels. In these texts born of the continuum that links the realist and postmodern novel, unreliability allows mimetic and anti-illusionist structures to cohabit with and reverberate on each other.

Works Cited Amar, Ruth 2005 “Du minimalisme de Jean Echenoz,” in Les Lettres Romanes 59: 113–121. Bernstein, Michael André 2000 “Getting the American People Right,” in Times Literary Supplement, 26 May: 22. Cartwright, Kent 1984 “Nick Carraway as an Unreliable Narrator,” in Papers on Language and Literature 20.2: 218–232. Dallas, Lucy 2003 “In Search of Rose,” in Times Literary Supplement, 21 March: 6. Echenoz, Jean 1992 Nous trois (Paris: Editions de Minuit). Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1992 The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin)

––––––––––––– 43

Roth (2000: 209).

280

Yasmine Badir

Fludernik, Monika 1996 Towards a “Natural” Narratology. (London: Routledge). 2001 “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New Writing,” in New Literary History 32: 619–638. Galloway, Monique 2005 “Planes, Trains, Automobiles … and Space Shuttles: Travel in the Fiction of Jean Echenoz,” in eSharp 4: 1–15. Genette, Gérard 1983 Nouveau discours du récit. (Paris: Seuil). James, Caryn 2004 “Guy Noir,” in New York Times 19 May. Jenkins, Alan 2000 “Bad heart trouble,” in Times Literary Supplement, 19 May: 24. Maslan, Mark 2005 “The Faking of the Americans: Passing, Trauma, and National Identity in Philip Roth’s Human Stain,” in Modern Language Quarterly 63.3: 365–389. Moore, Lorrie 2000 “The Wrath of Athena,” in New York Times, 7 May. Nünning, Ansgar 1999 “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 53–73. Phelan, James 2005 Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell UP). Rankine, Patrice 2005 “Passing as Tragedy: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the Oedipus Myth, and the Self-Made Man,” in Critique 47.1: 101–112. Roth, Philip 2005 American Pastoral [1997] (London: Vintage). 2005 The Human Stain [2000] (London: Vintage). Stanzel, F.K 1987 A Theory of Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). Yacobi, Tamar 1887 “Narrative Structure and Fictional Mediation,” in Poetics Today 8.2: 335–372. Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35.1: 151–178.

ALICE JEDLIýKOVÁ (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)

An Unreliable Narrator in an Unreliable World. Negotiating between Rhetorical Narratology, Cognitive Studies and Possible Worlds Theory 1. Introduction Unreliable narration is generally considered as one of the typical devices of modern and postmodern literature, connected as it is with the transformation of traditional social schemes and the re-evaluation of the concept of the individual in the twentieth century. But is unreliable narration indeed restricted to modern literature? Or is it possible to discern it in premodern narratives without falling into the error of ahistorical misreading? To this temporal query, we might also add a spatial one: to what extent are unreliable narratives distributed across different nations and cultures? And how do we avoid mistaking cultural diversities for aspects of unreliable narration? Finally, does unreliability belong to the properties of a given narrative or is it a mere strategy for naturalizing a text? These questions have preoccupied many narratologists since Booth and have lead to a reconceptualisation of unreliability e.g. in the context of cognitive narratology. Most theories, however, share the view that unreliable narration is a phenomenon connected with character narration (i.e. first-person narrator) and they rarely question the ‘authority’ of the omniscient third-person narrator. Wayne C. Booth famously located the phenomenon of unreliability within the structure of the narrative text and described it as a set of inconsistencies and contradictions resulting from the confrontation of the actions and speech of a personal narrator with the norms of the work, personified in the implied author. The idea of the implied author – which Booth in a later essay called an “authorial better self”1 –includes the role ––––––––––––– 1

Booth (2005).

282

Alice Jedliþková

of an ethical authority. The concept results from a rhetorical understanding of narrative, geared towards describing the effects narratorial strategies have on the audience. But since this rhetorical reading does not involve an actual inquiry into the processes of perception, it seems to reduce the activity of the reader to mere discerning the internal contradictions ‘prescribed’ or programmed in the text. The reconceptualization of unreliable narration in the context of cognitive narratology is part of a larger shift of focus in narrative analysis from textual qualities to processes of perception and evaluation. The point of departure here is the idea that a parallel may be drawn between understanding the fictional storyworlds and real life situations. In both contexts, processing information and creating coherence is controlled byemploying frames of reference and ‘ready-made’ scripts, scenarios and cultural models. This approach also requires a critical reexamination of Culler’s concept of naturalization2 for the purposes of contextual narratology. Unreliable narration is no longer considered a textual quality, but rather a strategy of naturalizing a text, of negotiating textual inconsistencies and contradictions. In this essay, I intend to question this conception of unreliability. For if unreliable narration is located ‘outside’ the text, resulting primarily from the confrontation of the norms of the first-person narrator with the reader’s frames of reference, one may wonder why a similar difference with the norms of the omniscient narrator does not result in an interpretation of unreliability. In other words, why is the interpretational ‘resistance’ of an omnisciently narrated text not negotiated by the same strategy? Considering the fact that hardly any narrator can provide a report free of uncertainties and that almost every narrative includes ‘odd’ representations of reality, perhaps no narrator can be called fully reliable. On the other hand, in the cognitive reconceptualisation of unreliability, unreliable narration seems to have become a ‘universal device of making a first-person narrative perfectly legible’: it appears possible to make every text culturally and socially legible and to explain away what is unacceptable and controversial. This tendency to stress the current cultural and social norms of normality as reference frame opens up a gap between the scholars who inquire into the ideological and ethical aspects of reading (which may be observed both in adherents of symptomatic reading, cognitive approach and recent rhetorical narratology) and those who claim that –––––––––––––

2

Culler (1975).

An Unreliable Narrator in an Unreliable World

283

our reading of narration, fiction and literature in general is an aesthetic, not an ethical act (a point of view typical of the representatives of structuralist thinking). Furthermore, this norm-based approach seems to neglect the fact that only the first two of the five naturalization strategies suggested by Culler are connected with social and cultural reality, whereas the other ones are derived from the literary discourse (sets of literary norms such as generic rules, principles of creating a fictional character etc.; metatextual thematization of these rules and the ways of breaking them; intertextual relations, parodic ones in particular).3 The same applies to the readerly strategies as suggested by Yacobi4. She recognises two “extra-textual” spheres of reference in her scheme: the “genetic” principle and the “existential” principle. The remaining three principles are controlled by literary conventions: the “generic” principle, the “functional” principle (referring to aesthetic effects) and the “perspectival” one, which inquires into the reliability of narration. Yet Culler’s and Yacobi’s principles are in fact all to a certain extent functional: subordinated to the complex semantics of a work of fiction. On the basis of this I would argue that unreliable narration may be observed as a particular subtype of narrative mediation employed to fulfil a particular function: to call our attention to unstable, variable values of human life for instance. Employing “functional perspective” in our observations suggests that textual inconsistencies in first-person narratives may be revealed as symptoms of the narrator’s inconsequent or uncertain report on fictional facts, but also as aspects of the semantic structure of the whole, that is of its aesthetic function at the same time. Accepting the idea of a comprehensive aesthetic function implies conceding the virtual existence of a textual agent superior to the narrator – or rather ‘agency’, since it may or may not be personified. Nünning, who has criticised the classical concept of the implied author as a redundant anthropomorphization, argues for a merely textual interpretation of this concept.5 But the genetic logic of the narrative is a textual result of a complex creative human activity (performed by one or more physical authors). This genetic logic seems to entitle us to designate this agency as the textual –––––––––––––

3 4 5

Ibid. Yacobi (1981). Nünning (1998).

284

Alice Jedliþková

version of the author’s role, which is not equal to the author’s personality/ies, but to his or her/their specific performance of the creator of the particular work as reflected in the entire structure of the text. In Czech literary theory, the idea of this textual agency is usually referred to as ‘the subject of the work’. Miroslav ýervenka, a member of the second generation of the Prague School, coined the term ‘subject of the work’ as early as in the 1960s, without any knowledge of Booth’s work.6 In search for a “keystone of the semantics of the work”, he arrives at the conviction that it may be the “virtual personality” constructed by the text.7 The ‘subject of the work’ may be reconstructed from the text as a dynamic complex of experience, knowledge, and creative competencies; as a consciousness to which solely the work can be attributed as a result of a complex of creative activities. Clearly, this concept of the ‘subject of the work’ shares some elements with Booth’s concept of ‘implied author’: The implied author is a streamlined version of the real author, an actual or purported subset of the real author’s capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other proper8 ties that play an active role in the construction of the particular text.

What is different or maybe just more strictly defined in ýervenka, is the relation to the real author. While the expression “streamlined version of the real author” seems to suggest a strong link with the biographical author, ýervenka prevents the subject of the work from being confounded with the real author by emphasizing that the “personality” contained in the notion of ‘subject of the work’ is “not expressed, but constituted by the work”.9 The communicational aspect of ýervenka’s theory is comprehended in the relation between the ‘subject of the work’ (i. e. Booth’s implied author) and the “addressed audiences” (Booth’s implied reader): If the subject of the work is considered a correlate of an ensemble of acts of creative choice, the addressed audiences may be considered a number of expected competencies of understanding: the ability to use the same codes and to develop them in a way

––––––––––––– 6

7 8 9

ýervenka’s text “Významová výstavba literárního díla” (= Semantic structure of the literary text) was written in the early 1960s but only allowed to be published in 1968, due to the political proscription of structuralism as ideologically subversive. It was subsequently published in pieces in journals and magazines. A German translation was published by Fink München in 1978; the official Czech edition as late as in 1992. ýervenka (1992: 135). Phelan (2005: 45). ýervenka (1992: 136).


285

analogical to that of the subject of the work, the ability to respond to the semantic po10 tential of the work in order to transform it into an aesthetic object.

Obviously, ýervenka’s concept is akin to the communicative approach of e.g. Chatman’s Story and discourse (1978). It does not refer to the moral imperative of the implied author as an abstract better self as it is contained in Booth’s works.11 Booth concedes that one of the important incentives for his concept was the proliferation of reader response as the ultimate interpretive institution. The implied author was meant as a kind of defence of the authorial intention: it may also be applied as a tool for defending the identity of the work of literature, while allowing for the semantically productive structure to be pluralized in the processes of interpretation. If we wish to save the work from becoming the subject of a never-ending semiosis – with the narcissistic interpreter as its interpretive focus – the notion of the implied author may provide a framework for determining the identity of the text. Though Czech narrative studies did not produce an independent concept of unreliable narration, its tradition of narrative analysis provides a stable background for negotiations between textual and contextual narratology. Similarly, recent rhetorical studies that suggest questioning the reliability of the narrator along the axis of facts, values and perception12, provide a framework for textual analysis. I consider these negotiations a possible point of departure for revisiting the concept of unreliable narration, since such an approach would allow us to preserve a thorough textual analysis while reflecting upon possible reference frames and thus allowing to model the process of identifying the symptoms and understanding the effects of narrative unreliability. I agree with Ansgar Nünning who draws our attention to the fact that the classical scheme of unreliable narrator failed “to provide a satisfactory answer to the question how the readers actually recognize an unreliable narrator”.13 By taking into account and activating a whole range of reference frames we may indeed arrive at a “satisfactory answer”, i. e. a modelling of the process of reading the unreliable narration. But does this really provide the answer to how readers recognize the unreliable narrator? –––––––––––––

10 11 12 13

Ibid.: 138. Cf. Booth (1961 and 2005). Cf. Phelan/Martin (1999); Phelan (2005). Nünning (2005: 94).

286

Alice Jedliþková

2. Readers and “Readers” or About Reference Frames Unfortunately, we are not ‘mere readers’; we are professional readers. What we perform by ‘reading’ is what Umberto Eco calls a critical interpretation, a metalinguistic operation aimed at describing and explaining which particular qualities of the text create its particular effects.14 Conversely, ‘ordinary reading’ is, according to Eco, a semantic interpretation: It is the result of the encounter of the reader with a linear representation of the text and the process of attributing meanings to that representation. This is not to say that a ‘mere reader’ is not able to reflect upon the structural causes of the aesthetic effects of a literary text and to locate it within the context of the literary tradition and its conventions, whereas a critic is no more able to “experience” what he or she reads, of course. But even if we accept the idea of having all the reference frames in mind while interpreting narrative, we will not be able to estimate the rate of actualization of these frames and their mutual relation in the process of perception performed by that obscure entity I have called ‘mere reader’, which is preferably referred to as flesh-and-blood reader in recent criticism. One may at least try to enact the role of the flesh-and-blood reader and ‘stage’ the process of reading as a semantic interpretation. This alternative means that the main reference frame is the reader’s sum of individual experience, though inevitably formed by a particular culture (including literature) in a particular historical period. This point of view is akin to the opinion of Jonathan Culler who – aiming at the sources and strategies of naturalizing a text – claims that “most literary effects, particularly in narrative prose, depend on the fact that readers will try to relate what the text tells them to a level of ordinary human concerns”.15 Reading thus means comparing “aesthetically represented experience” with our own experience. But I maintain that the compatibility of the represented experience with the real experience does not necessarily depend on the characteristics of the art as ‘realistic’, ‘modernist’ or ‘traditional’ or on the mimetic qualities of the fictional world, but rather on the kind of the mediated ‘experientiality’. I would argue therefore in favour of formalist defamiliarization, since reading Culler’s statement literally may result in eliminating “the literary ef–––––––––––––

14 15

Eco (1997: 637–638). Culler (1975: 144).


287

fects” that ensue from the particular verbal (i. e. literary) representation of what is beyond ordinary human concerns. The following case study is aimed at putting the concept of unreliable narration to the test: It aims to find out which conditions suggest employing ‘unreliable narration’ as a tool of naturalization (such as discrepancies between the fictional characters’ observations of the fictional reality similar to that of ours, uncertainties and inconsistencies in narrator’s reference to the fictional facts and their evaluation). In presenting an analysis of Cortázar’s short story “Silvia”, I attempt to ‘stage’ the process of reading performed by a reader who has not yet encountered Cortázar’s writing, since this may differ significantly from that of the scholar reflecting who is familiar with the position of Cortázar’s oeuvre in the modern HispanoAmerican fiction. For this purpose, I try to may imagine a reader who has simply taken the advice of a librarian to read “that collection of enjoyable stories” and who avoids introductions...

3. Reading the Short Story “Silvia”16 The story is told by the protagonist Fernando, who – as soon as the other characters have left him – tries to find out what actually happened – if, as he points out, anything happened at all, and if, what happened, may be regarded as a story. As we find out later on, the problem is not the narrator himself or his narrative competence, as he provides enough clues to let us infer that he is a writer, and thus a professional who is familiar with the parameters and constitutional elements of what is supposed to be a story. Rather, the problem lies with the particular nature of the events or situations involved. The setting of the storyworld is the valley of the river Luberon in Provence, a popular summer resort, in particular with Argentinean families living in France. The narrator feels protected from the rush caused by the holiday makers and neighbours by his “well-earned reputation” of a lout. In general, he implicitly presents a self-portrait by describing the way other people approach him and by quoting their remarks. From this we may infer that he is an Argentinian writer and intellectual, ––––––––––––– 16

Julio Cortázar: “Silvia”, Último round (1969). All quotations from the short story are my own translations based on the Czech version of the text; I beg the reader to consider them mere references to the original, if not modest paraphrases, thus I do not refer to particular pages of the Czech translation.

288

Alice Jedliþková

one who prefers serenity to society. (A reader acquainted with Cortázar’s biography might even know that Cortázar used to spend his summer holidays in the valley of Luberon since the 1950s.) The I-protagonist then describes two garden parties involving two families of his friends and the family of a French professor. During the first party the adult members of the company are occupied with preparing meals, serving drinks and discussing art. These discussions are motivated especially by the presence of the French professor who obviously wishes to learn as much about Hispano-American literature as possible as well as to merge with the small society representing a ‘sample’ of the culture he is interested in. The children are occupied with their wild games, fighting, destroying flower-beds and hurting their knees. Apparently, the adults do not wish to be disturbed by the children’s antics, while the children are not very enthusiastic about their parents getting involved in their games. Both groups create virtual domains of their own, which the narrator classifies as “playful”. When dusk is falling, the Sioux Indians are forced to leave and take a shower, and “the battle changes its character” – it is taken up by the adults and transformed into a verbal one. Both groups find the activities of the others silly, and the only person equally accepted by both of them is the narrator. He seems to be the only adult who is willing to pay attention to the children (which the others attribute to the fact he is the only childless person among them). As a result, his little friend Graciela lets him in on the mysteries of the children’s friendships and fights. She explains to him the roles of the other members of the group and expresses her contempt for the youngest one, a toddler still condemned to wear diapers and to annoy the others. Graciela also explains that they are lucky to have Silvia who changes his dirty clothes if necessary and saves him from his mother’s anger. The protagonist returns to his part in the conversation on literature but is again attracted to the group of playing children. A charming young girl turns up among them and looks after them in a quiet gentle way. He is surprised by her anonymity – she was not introduced to him and he does not remember she would have accompanied any of the guest families – but he is ready to understand it as a result of her specific position in the small society. She seems to “partake in the games of the adults” and “too old” to join the children’s games, and thus logically prefers to act as a serious baby-sitter. What the narrator finds fascinating about her is her style, her behaviour, her motion, as well as the way she appears: it is as if she is steps out of the dark and fire and disappears in the darkness again. He is


289

anxious to learn something about her, but the girl disappears as fast as she appeared. The ongoing conversation and the social rules prevent the narrator from asking directly about her, so he prefers to retain the question as long as his little friend Graciela requires his attention. Her explanation that Silvia is a friend of hers as well as of the other children is interrupted by a slightly annoyed statement of her parents that the children simply made Silvia up. The only reason that the parents are able to find for this is that the children probably did so just in order to annoy them, which they do anyway... While listening to his friends’ arguments and assurances that Silvia is merely a children’s collective fiction, the confused narrator goes on watching her, marvelling at her beauty. To sum up the situation: the existence of Silvia, who is sighted and described by the narrator, is affirmed by one group and denied by another. The question is now what the narrative judgments of the reader will be and on what basis they will be made.

4. Narrative Judgments and Textual Clues The first major clue obviously is the nature of the fictional world. Nünning claims that the orthodox concept of unreliable narration is based on a realist epistemology and a mimetic view of literature; this results in analyses that insist on the idea of ‘normality’ but tend to omit the fact that what is considered normal is a complex of historically limited norms and do not set out these norms explicitly.17 When conditioning the first reference frame he does not recede from the orthodox concept significantly, stating that “a first referential frame should be based on the reader’s empirical experience and criteria of verisimilitude”18, i.e. on the premise that the narrative refers to what we may call a ‘real world’ or is at least a representation of a world compatible with that of ours that allows us to determine reliability according to the narrator’s behaviour in relation to the norms of that world. In doing so, i. e. in meeting the requirements of contextual analysis and specifying the historically limited cultural aspects of the fictional world, we may observe two major cultural schemes in “Silvia”: the opinions and attitudes of mainly Hispano-American intellectuals, especially men or women of letters, in the context of French or franco––––––––––––– 17 18

Nünning (2005: 96). Ibid.: 98.

290

Alice Jedliþková

phone culture of the 1960s. These families are distinguished by noisy emotional solutions to everyday conflicts and readiness to forget them before long for the sake of atonement. The fictional world does not comprise any norms and forms of social activities and behaviour that may be considered entirely unacceptable. The small company of educated people and their children that gather during the garden party seems quite ‘normal’ in the ‘historically limited’ common sense of the word. Whereas the Hispano-American traits of the characters and of the atmosphere are mentioned explicitly, the other cultural context may be inferred from the topics of conversation. As we have noted already, the narrator provides clues that he is supposed to be a representative of what he calls “the literature of our countries” and a renowned Argentinean writer. There are numerous cultural innuendos and references to real HispanoAmerican and French culture in the text. The intellectuals involved in the story talk about the novel The Green House (by another acknowledged Argentinean author Mario Vargas Llosa) and about “Macondo” (the fictional setting of a number of Gabriel García Márquez’s fictions). They discuss the activities of the 1960’s group of literary critics associated with the magazine Tel Quel, etc. All these innuendos are related to a whole cultural encyclopaedia. But our flesh-and-blood reader who is not supposed to be an expert either in literary criticism nor in visual arts, is not handicapped by not decoding all the names and titles involved. So far, their particular qualities do not seem to play any role in the story; the only general effect of all those topics is that they create a virtual sphere of art which has very little to do with the actual atmosphere of the moment. Their pragmatic purpose is to gain the attention of the protagonist – which distracts him from observing Silvia... But the obvious normality of the fictional world definitely provides a background for evaluating the I-protagonist’s behaviour and his reactions. If we invoke ‘common sense’ on the level of the story, it will advise us that parents are supposed to be more sensible than their very young children. But it is the narrator who does not allow this short-sighted judgment. This echoes one of the questions put forward by Ansgar Nünning: how does the reader negotiate the textual inconsistencies and ambiguities? Here we might say that the narrator does a substantial part of the job for the reader as what he is doing may be called ‘negotiating’ between two points of view and two alternatives of the situation: the rational one and the inexplicable one. In the beginning, he even negotiates with himself: enchanted by Silvia’s beauty the narrator wishes to meet her to be able to


291

define her: either to find out that it was the magical atmosphere of the evening that made him mistake a good-looking teenager for a woman of exotic radiance. He also claims that, if he finds out that she is as beautiful as she appears to him, he is ready to admit that she represents a kind of untouchable beauty and therefore he is going to accept the role of a mere spectator. The narrator realizes that Silvia is at the border between childhood and adulthood, and her particular position saves her from being watched as an erotic object. Thus the narrator presents himself as a reasonable person who controls his feelings and desires. Obviously, he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to report on what he was able to observe, instead of reporting what he felt. So he presents her appearance in a very specific, dramatic way. In the dark scenery of a summer night lit by fire she not only seems to step out of fire, and to disappear in the darkness again, but also to be “made of bronze and brass”. While trying to reconstruct (or construct?) Silvia’s image, the narrator involuntarily borrows comparisons from the ongoing discussion on contemporary art, and compares the clean-cut curves of her legs to the expressive style of Francis Ponge. The comparison hardly tells anything about the appearance of the girl but rather about the intensity of the impression. Sometimes the narrator seems to be aware of the possibility of aestheticizing his observations under the influence of the atmosphere and conversation: “I caught sight of her delicate and sensual nose, the lips of an ancient sculpture (but wasn’t it Borel who was just asking me a question about a statuette from the Cyclades?)”. So the insecurity of how the narrator is reporting (i.e. if he is reporting equally to the situation, on the axes of ‘facts’) results not only from unintentional connections of the narrative discourse with the discourse of the other characters, but also from the narrator’s own reflections on the way of reporting, including possible interferences. So far, we are not able to decide whether Silvia was or was not present (and thus eliminate or endorse the alternative of narrator’s misreporting). We might say that he – even though he is trying to retain a rational control over his narration – seems to be ‘overreading’ a banal situation and implanting into it aesthetic qualities and erotic potential that it lacks, and thus transforming it into a fatal encounter. In view of the fact that Silvia remains silent throughout and does not comment on what she or the others do, let us compare the narrator’s image of Silvia with that of the children to test his report. There is one substantial difference in their presentation: the children do not mention Silvia’s looks at all, they even do not evaluate her behaviour except for liberty of

292

Alice Jedliþková

action – to come and to leave – because this is actually the quality that makes her a respected member of the children’s company: “She does as she likes, just as we do”. For the children, Silvia is neither beautiful nor mysterious; neither nice nor friendly: she simply is. She exists and that makes them feel safe: they know she may not be present all the time but if she is, they may rely on her. When speaking of her, they only mention her actions, which have helped them avoid problems and quarrels with their parents. She is a quiet onlooker of their games who does not hesitate to intervene in case of danger, removes the unpleasant consequences of minor accidents without reproaches, and heals small wounds. She does exactly what the children need and expect, in a simple way that they can appreciate. And she does so without patronizing comments, actually without any comments at all. Yet this difference in representation does not prove the (un)reliability of the narrator, since the two portraits are not so much distinguished by different qualities as by different emphases: each speaker seems to highlight what he or she is interested in. The children report on what Silvia does, the narrator on what she looks like when doing it: these differences do not seem to comprise any contradiction and thus do not entitle us to judge whether the narrator or the children are misreporting. There is even one point of convergence in the descriptions: Silvia’s silence and quietness. Both the children and the narrator are aware of the feeling of harmony emanating from her presence. Yet while it makes the children feel safe, it disturbs the narrator and constitutes for him the most puzzling feature of her undisclosed personality. The major inconsistency of the narration is the fact that the narrator insists on seeing something else than the other adult characters do. But why should he do that? To please the children and to annoy the parents who are fascinated by modern art but do not care about beauty not mediated in an elaborated artistic way? Neither does he have to stage himself as a person prone to fantasies as it is exactly what his friends think about him and why they warn him not to comply with the silly ideas of their children. Though the narrator insists on having seen Silvia in his report, he tries to negotiate within the storyworld: He is ready to find a simple explanation for Silvia’s presence that is compatible with the normal world, just like he was ready to interpret her anonymity in terms of shyness. The different points of view of both groups might be explained by the fact that the children simply refer to what they see and experience, whereas his friends, who have noticed his admiration for the charming girl, pretend


293

not to see her and have fun observing his perplexity. Such an explanation sounds a bit too trivial, if not tasteless to him. While observing the social interactions of the characters, we may infer it could be also a way of reminding the protagonist of what kind of social role he is expected to play in the society: he is supposed to be here to give his opinions on literature and arts, he is here to inspire the others, to “partake in their games and rituals” as he calls it, not to get inspired by the atmosphere to which the others do not seem to pay any attention. The narrator succeeds in setting up a rationalist construction for the situation, but fails in ‘naturalizing’ and accepting it.

5. Silvia’s Territory or the ‘Unreliable’ World The second party described in the story takes place in the protagonist’s garden. In the beginning, Silvia is missing and the narrator plucks up his courage to approach the children and to inquire into her absence: the children explain that she has not come yet. Her presence does not depend on their wish but on her own will. Shortly after that little Graciela requests to be guided to the bathroom; the protagonist is told he does not have to wait for her, because Silvia has come and will pick her up. Silvia does appear, though not as a careful baby-sitter in the lobby, but as a seductive sleeping beauty in the protagonist’s bedroom. When hearing Graciela call for her, she wakes up and, without paying any attention to the frozen protagonist, leaves the room to accompany the little girl. She does not seem to ignore him on purpose, she seems not to record his presence at all: it is as if he did not exist. When recalling the situation, the protagonist is trying to reconstruct Silvia’s appearance. Once again he acts as a highly self-conscious narrator. At first, it seems to him that he watched her naked body, but then he realizes that she wore her usual clothes, a mini-skirt, a blouse and black sandals. He admits he must have just imagined her naked under her clothes. He does not report on meeting Silvia or on the further course of the evening any more. His narration switches off rather abruptly to the ultimate scene of the story. The friends have to say good-bye and the last summer guest, little Graciela, tells him that Silvia is not going to come any more just for her sake. On hearing this, Graciela’s mother expresses her relief in getting rid of those silly stories eventually – and thus confirms the fact that for the parents, Silvia has not ever existed. What we have observed here is a highly self-conscious narrator who is aware of a number of inconsistencies in the story and offers alternatives of

294

Alice Jedliþková

their explanation – though he is not able to deliver any safe evidence of his reliability. ‘Reading’ the narrator as an unreliable one – or rather ‘testing his reliability’ by following his own control of narration – allows an insight into the narrator’s system of preferences and values. This reading provides the reader with numerous clues to pass judgments on his behaviour and report, but does not provide an insight into the meaning of his intense experience. The only rational solution of the story that allows all the characters to share a ‘normal’ world – a practical joke of the friends – is eliminated eventually. Moreover, accepting the adult characters as warrantors of the authentic version does not make sense, since it ‘erases’ the meaning of telling the story. As a result, the meaning seems to be located not only on the level of discourse, but also, and even more probably so, in the inner logic of the story. What operation must the reader perform to inquire into that logic – so that he may be able to understand the final statement of the narrator: “Silvia was the four of them, Silvia was, when all of them were here, and I knew they would never meet again like that”? Literally, this sentence declares that the children were capable of ‘generating’ an energy that allowed (or made?) Silvia to come, or even to ‘materialize’. Owing to this, the storyworld apparently loses its status of a ‘normal’ world. To be able to naturalize the story, the reader (who is not supposed to be acquainted with Cortázar’s poetics) and who has been trying to do so by testing the narrator’s reliability (or whom I made do so...) has to perform intuitively a very sophisticated operation. In order to reconsider the limits of ‘normality’ of the storyworld, he or she has to transfer his or her attention from the narrative discourse to the inner structure of the story. That is, our reader gets a chance of naturalizing the text by inquiring into the design of the fictional world. I have already pointed out that connecting all the names mentioned in the intellectuals’ conversations with particular arts and styles requires a whole cultural encyclopaedia. Yet this knowledge hardly helps us to make any interpretive progress in understanding the story. According to Lubomír Doležel in Heterocosmica (1998), the reader has to accept the fact that the fictional text constructs a particular possible world and also constitutes a fictional encyclopaedia of its own, which may “to a greater or lesser degree digress from the actual-world encyclopaedia”19: –––––––––––––

19

Doležel (1998: 177).


295

The immensely varied fictional encyclopaedias guide the recovery of implicit meaning in fictional texts. In order to reconstruct and interpret a fictional world, the reader has to reorient his cognitive stance to agree with the world’s encyclopaedia. The actualworld encyclopaedia might be useful, but it is by no means universally sufficient; for many fictional worlds it is misleading, it provides no comprehension but misreading. The readers have to be ready to modify, supplement, or even discard the actual-world encyclopaedia. [...] they must background the knowledge of their actual domicile and become cognitive residents of the fictional world they visit through the act of read20 ing.

Let us reconsider the structure of the storyworld of “Silvia”. We have noticed its division into two relatively independent, autonomous spheres (possible worlds theory indicates them as “domains”): the sphere of the adults occupied with intellectual games, and the sphere of children and their games. As the narrator is able to get along easily with both groups, his private world may be apprehended as a “transit space”, as an intersection of two social domains, each controlled by a set of common and special rules. He is willing to adopt some of them and to concede for example that the Sioux warriors may not be expected to save flowerbeds from plundering. This adaptability makes him a possible inhabitant of both worlds, that of the adults as well as that of the children. Silvia inhabits only the children’s domains and restricts her activities to a distant limited space that the narrator designates as “Silvia’s territory”. The logic of the storyworld as a possible world implies that the narrator may share with the children also Silvia’s presence. (We must not forget that he does not opt for Silvia and thus for the “childish party of fantasies” after having learned about them – he takes notice of her prior to the ‘ontological’ debate about her between the children and their parents.) What he is allowed to share is Silvia’s territory and herself as a personification of the children’s wishes – in a way, she seems to be a compensation for what they miss in their everyday lives. Obviously they would not mind being looked after: but all of them long for a quiet nanny who understands their games and does not loose her temper. The narrator appreciates her silence and quietness as well, and expresses his own yearning by adding charm and unusual beauty to Silvia’s appearance. Yet there is a significant difference in the way the children and the narrator are allowed to contact Silvia: the children take her by the hand, she cleans the toddler’s face and bandages the oldest boy’s wound – she is not ––––––––––––– 20

Ibid.: 181.

296

Alice Jedliþková

only present, the children experience her as a physical being. On the contrary, what the narrator encounters, is a dreamlike being that seems to move within an energetic field that protects her from intruders: the narrator is allowed only to observe Silvia’s territory. If we accept the structure of the fictional world as a whole, as a compound of autonomous domains that are accessible according to the ability of the characters to adopt their particular rules, we may infer two reasons why the narrator was not allowed to meet Silvia face to face. Firstly, he was ready to allow for a ‘normal’ rational explanation of the situation and thus expressed his readiness to negate the existence of Silvia as an inhabitant of the world of collective fantasies. Secondly, the rules of this domain were set by very young children and their yearnings and needs, and thus did not include erotic desire and sexual behaviour: the narrator would be forced to accept the role of a ‘mere’ admirer of Silvia’s beauty anyway, without obliging himself to do so. By leaving the bedroom without noticing the protagonist, Silvia is leaving the sphere of the narrator’s yearnings and fantasies: it is a symbol of the fact that the beauty he is longing for is not only an exotic, but also, and in particular, an inaccessible one. The inner logic of the fictional world does not allow us to decide whether Silvia existed or not – it only tells us we may share some aspects of our wishes and dreams, but their diversity will never allow us to materialize and ‘possess’ them and thus destroy their magic. Obviously, the clues for narrative judgments were subject to a reconsideration in the process of reading: our reading shifted from creating a mental image or at least a structure of the storyworld compatible with the ‘normal’ world – and evaluating the reliability of the narrator on the axis of facts – to qualifying the relation of the storyworld as a whole to the particular temporary social domains as well as the private worlds of the characters. As a result, we do not have to judge whether the narrator gives a reliable report on their nature, but rather whether their autonomous existence may be vindicated within the storyworld. The gauge of the reliability of the narrator obviously is not located along the axis of facts. If we now actualize the frame of reference which has been omitted so far, i. e. the context of Cortázar’s oeuvre, the process of narrative judgments is likely to be different. Cortázar’s short stories and novels are considered a significant part of Hispano-American literature generally referred to as magic realism or fantastic fiction. The notion “magic realism” was first introduced by Ángel Flores in the 1950s and involves two opinions in the context of Hispano-American literature. Some argue that magic


297

is rooted in the everyday reality and tradition of Hispano-American culture. Others argue that the magic results from an attitude towards reality that allows for the “alternative substance” of everyday phenomena. If we insist on taking our rationalist western tradition as a reference frame, we will obviously end up charging the narrator with unreliability along the axis of facts; if we accept the “hybridity” (Doležel’s term) of the storyworld of magic realism, it seems to be utterly useless to check the reliability of the narrator. He is either automatically – from the epistemic point of view – unreliable, or, hard as he may try to be honest with his readers, he will always mediate an ‘unreliable world”. But this is naturally a shortsighted view of the whole problem: overestimating the reference frames – i.e. in particular if reduced to labelling or pigeon-holing – might lead to misreading particular texts. If we compare Cortázar with Márquez, we can see the latter as a typical representative of magic realism who apprehends magic as a quality inherent in the world. This attitude is endorsed by the mode of narrative discourse: his storyworld is mostly mediated by a narrator with the ‘highest rate’ of authentification power, an omniscient thirdperson narrator. Cortázar on the contrary tends to test various forms of narration (including second-person narration) that allow more room for doubt. As we have observed in “Silvia”, Cortázar’s storyworld is not a world pervaded by self-understood magic phenomena. If we insist on classifying it on the scale of fantastic literature, we may employ the system introduced by Tzvetan Todorov who has argued that the quality of the “fantastic” hinges on the readers’ doubt about the events depicted in the storyworld. The events pictured in “Silvia” seem to balance on the interface of the Todorov’s category of the “strange” (l’étrange – which is the result of a delusion or hoax) and the “marvellous” (merveilleux – which depends on principles of the storyworld unknown to us).21 I have presented a reading of the short story “Silvia” that derives the acceptability of the fantastic from the structure of the storyworld and its logic that allows to assemble and concentrate wishes and dreams of various people in a single person and to experience the felicity of her presence in common. At the level of story, Cortázar seems to offer a clear polemic with the rationalist concept of the world which is typical of the western cultures: An inquiry into the structure of the storyworld allows us to understand the –––––––––––––

21

Todorov (1970).

298

Alice Jedliþková

meaning of the “fantastic”. At the level of discourse, Cortázar invites the reader to follow a highly self-conscious narrator and to check whether the narrator’s control of narration is aimed at understanding or concealing his motivations. Fernando’s reliability is put to the test by his continuous oscillation between the role of a ‘mere spectator’ and the role of a man confessing his erotic desire. Both the story logic (Silvia’s territory is “designed and controlled” by children) and the aesthetic control of discourse prevent him from enforcing the erotic aspect of his experience. In a way, we may read this short story as a positive pendant of Nabokov’s Lolita, where the protagonist narrator Humbert Humbert attributes the fact that he is attracted to the young girl, to the “perilous magic of nymphets” and loses his aesthetic control of narration when trying to aestheticize his sexual experience or to enact himself as a highly sensitive person.22 The protagonist narrator of “Silvia”, on the other hand, does not provide any excuses for his desire. Instead he tries to cope with it, both within the storyworld and within the discourse. If Silvia does exist, he is ready to admit that she is just a good-looking teenager whom his fantasy disguised as a beauty. The narrator realizes that it is he himself who attributes to Silvia the charm of an exotic beauty while “assembling” her features from the “beauty standards” of ancient cultures and the image of an average teenager.

6. Testing Narrative Reliability. Restricting Unreliable Narration There is no evidence entitling us to claim that the process of readerly perception as suggested here – i.e. based on limited literary knowledge and resulting in a shift in the strategy of naturalizing the text – equals a possible empirical reading. But, as I hope to have demonstrated, regarding unreliable narration as a comprehensive naturalization strategy applicable whenever the reader wishes to negotiate the inconsistencies of the text may result either in overestimating the general cultural reference frames, or in underreading of other semantic aspects of the fiction. In the case of “Silvia”, adopting the story logic or disclosing the design of the fictional world makes it possible to recover some of them and, above all, to make the sense of the storytelling. Understanding the nature of the storyworld may be enhanced by (but does not necessarily depend on) supplementing ––––––––––––– 22

Cf. Phelan (2005).


299

the process of reading with author-related and generic reference frames, i.e. locating the narrator in a fictional world, which appears as a type of storyworld ‘unreliable’ in itself. On the other hand, this experience allows us to conclude that the ‘fantastic’ characteristics of the storyworld do not eliminate the possibility of questioning the narrator’s reliability. This unreliability is of course determined not along the axis of facts, but definitely along the axis of evaluation, in the process of ‘competition’ of aesthetic and ethical aspects of the narrative mediation. As a result, questioning the reliability of the narrator appears as an alternative component of a holistic interpretation. This approach suggests reconsidering the notion we are focusing on: it seems to be more useful to speak about testing the reliability of narration within the process of understanding a text, a test which may or may not result in classifying the particular narrator as an unreliable one, rather than to speak about ‘unreliable narration’ as a naturalization strategy. This idea even seems to be more akin to the cognitive concept – stressing the role of the reader – than the attempts at a typology of unreliable narrators, generally accepted within the cognitive discourse, such as Riggan’s typology delivered in Picaros, Madman, Naïfs, and Clowns.23 Such a typology suggests that some character narrators are inevitably unreliable due to their specific nature encoded in the text. Nünning claims that “These typological distinctions can best be understood as a way of relating texts to accepted cultural models or to literary conventions. Riggan (and critics like him) integrate previously held world-knowledge with textual data or even impose pre-existing conceptual models on the text”24. However, this statement allows for two alternatives: if the typology results from an inquiry into a significant number of texts from various periods sharing a particular quality (an ‘odd’ character narrator), the unreliability represents a literary (i.e. ‘textual’) convention in itself, which can be ‘automatically’ discerned in reading as such. If the classification of such narrators as unreliable results from a recursive confrontation of their representation of the world with current and culturally prevalent frames, the typology appears superfluous: each narrator has to pass his or her own reliability check. In order to substantiate this opinion, I suggest a transformation test for our short story which passes the role of narrator onto little Graciela. An ––––––––––––– 23 24

Riggan (1981). Nünning (2005: 95).

300

Alice Jedliþková

author like Cortázar would definitely be capable of finding devices to mediate Fernando’s desire by means of Graciela’s underreading the whole situation. Would it then prove helpful to read her narration as unreliable? In general, due to their limited (insufficient) knowledge and experience, infant narrators are assorted with conventional naive narrators and thus classified as unreliable in systems like Riggan’s. As a rule, underreading performed by narrators such as very young children, fools or animals and the like, actually provides an extremely illuminating insight into the nature and substance of the most complex phenomena of our lives. The effect is based on the cognitive limits or deficits of the narrator and, of course, endorsed by the superior knowledge and experience of the reader. But I do not see any reason in classifying this phenomenon as unreliable narration: it might be easily referred to as a particular narrative perspective, resulting from a particular cognitive horizon of the narrating character. The related reading strategy may be referred to, as suggested by Yacobi, as “focusing on narrative perspective”. We may also take into consideration the hypothetic situation that a narrative intended for adult readers and representing the cognitive perspective of an eight-year-old girl is read by an eight-year old girl, i.e. the cognitive horizons are supposed to meet – what would the strategy of naturalization possibly be? While the cognitive-oriented approach tends to extend the range of the phenomena of unreliable narration by stressing the value judgments of the reader controlled by prevalent cultural frames, the results of the present analysis argue for restricting it to specific cases displaying an obvious strain between the ethics of actions within the storyworld and the aesthetics of the narrative mediation in first-person narration. Such a point of view entails the danger of ending up asking questions about the ethics of art in general (rejected by many scholars), but the effects of ‘genuine’ unreliable narration seem to be basically ethical narrative judgments. Even though James Phelan doubts the aesthetic-ethical effectiveness of unreliable narration in Lolita (i.e. the capability of the narrative technique to vindicate the representation of a controversial story)25, I believe he has delivered substantial evidence that Humbert Humbert is a narrator who is aware of the ethical norms concerned and tries to stay in accordance with them by converting his behaviour or aestheticizing it in order to make his audiences underestimate its harmfulness and excuse him. He fails in par––––––––––––– 25

Cf. Phelan (2005: 129).


301

ticular due to exaggerating his rhetorical devices – as a result, he again violates the norm he wished to comply with. The effect of unreliable narration does not result from a simple difference between the norms of the character narrator and the reader, but, above all, from the narrator’s attempt at negotiating the differences by narrative mediation. Fernando’s report on Silvia remains contradictory in its reference to the storyworld; but the readers are allowed to negotiate this inconsistency by inquiring into the inner logic of the storyworld. His narration, again, reveals a strain between the aesthetic aspect of the representation and the ethics of his motivations and delivers a set of cues that suggest checking his narrative reliability, which does not provide a tool to naturalize the story; it even tends to enhance the ambiguity of the story, which is its main aesthetic function. The case of “Silvia” obviously demonstrates, first, that a set of conditions implying narrative unreliability do not necessarily imply that reading the narrator as unreliable will result in naturalizing the story; second, that employing contextual relations (such as generic reference frames) does not necessarily eliminate all aspects of reliability of narration; and third, that an inquiry into the story logic makes it possible to reveal the hidden miraculous nature of the fictional world, even without involving the conventional reference frame of fantastic fiction. The case study displays both the limits and potentials of the employed concepts, suggesting to restrict the notion of unreliable narration and to employ ‘testing’ the narrative reliability as a heuristic device of a holistic interpretation.

Works Cited Booth, Wayne C. 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). 2005 “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother”, in: A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden – Oxford – Carlton: Blackwell Publishing): 75–88. Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Cortázar, Julio 1967 “Silvia,” in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, Trans. Thomas Christenson (San Francisco: North Point, 1986): 186–195. Culler, Jonathan 1975 Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge).

302

Alice Jedliþková

Doležel, Lubomír 1998 Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP). Nünning, Ansgar 1999 “Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by Walter Grünzweig und Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr): 53–73. 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches,“ in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden – Oxford – Carlton: Blackwell Publishing): 89– 107. Phelan, James 2005 Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Phelan, James/Martin, Mary Patricia 1999 “‘The Lessons of Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics and The Remains of the Day,” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press): 88–109. Riggan, William 1981 Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). Todorov, Tzvetan 1970 Introduction a la littérature fantastistique (Paris: Édition du Seuil). 1992 Einführung in die fantastische Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag). Yacobi, Tamar 1981 “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” in Poetics Today 2: 113– 126.

ELS JONGENEEL (University of Groningen)

The Deconstruction of the First-Person Narrator in the French New Novel “If in order to be absolutely honest I have to say that we are responsible, well then I do say it, and the beginning of my exposé isn’t true, I admit that with joy. Not joy. Submission. And I repudiate everything I have said up to now, I mean the paragraphs which don’t ring true”. (Robert Pinget, Quelqu’un).

1. Introduction: The Rise of the “New Novel” At the beginning of the 1950s, a new avant-garde of prose writers, labelled the “New Novelists”, came onto the literary stage in France. Most of them made their debut shortly after World War II: Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Ollier, and Jean Ricardou. Only Nathalie Sarraute had been publishing since the 1930s; and Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett, who sympathized with the group, dropped out soon afterwards. Although their novels diverge significantly from each other, the New Novelists share a main objective: the rehabilitation of the literary form. In their opinion literary form has been neglected by previous ideological and politically committed literary movements such as existentialism. Under the influence of nascent structuralism, they call attention to aesthetic autonomy. They interrogate conventional narration and attack the traditional representation of characters, time and space. In this way they reopen the never-ending discussion on literary mimesis, or the link between lived experience and writing, which has been one of the main topics in twentieth-century French prose since Proust. The importance thus accorded to the relationship between the literary text and experience can be related to the impact of rhetoric on French culture, which came under scrutiny at the beginning of the twentieth century

304

Els Jongeneel

due to the widening gap between art and society. Authors such as Gide reflect in their works on the relationship between text and modern life, seeking to adapt the literary form to a contemporary society obsessed by technology and money. Given its preoccupation with reality, the New Novel is not an ‘art for art’s sake’ movement, quite the contrary. Some authors (Simon, and, to a lesser degree, Butor) quite purposefully embed their narratives in a historical context, at a time when the traditional, coherent world view of the pre-war generations has collapsed. Nevertheless, history in these novels is considered an opaque, hostile force. The central theme of the New Novel is indeed the estrangement of the individual from himself, from society and from history. However, for the New Novelists the inaccessibility of the outside world is not an invincible a priori but a negotiable obstacle. They have a moderately optimistic view on the possibility of investigating the unknowable by means of the text. In their novels the text is often used therapeutically, as a compass or thread of Ariadne in the labyrinth of reality. Even though the subversive character of the New Novel makes it an avant-gardist movement, the New Novel remains firmly wedded to the representation of reality. After 1965, however, a postmodern ‘ontological doubt’ about the status and the representation of extra-textual reality pervades the textual experiments of the New Novelists. In what is called the ‘New New Novel’, deconstructionism takes over, and the adventure of the text (‘the play with the signifiers’) supersedes the text of the adventure (of life).

2. Metafiction and Unreliability In the wake of Gide and Proust, the New Novelists continue to investigate literary form, rejecting the traditional, linear story and probing new ways of narration. They experiment with alternating temporal levels, with several narrative variants of the same story, with alternative ways of representation (intertextual, pictorial, cinematic, photographic). Likewise, they make use of embedded stories, collage and montage, multiple narrators, and the inversion of the traditional relationship between telling and showing. In short, the story is turned inside out. The characters in the New Novel are generally evanescent shadows without a past. Unlike their modernist precursors, the New Novelists do not portray the characters’ inner

The French New Novel

305

life as a means of investigating reality, although the degree of psychological consistency varies in different novels.1 The New Novel is a meta-text par excellence, as it concentrates on the self-reflexive adventure of the text. The text as structure, as camera on the outside world or as text in progress is in the spotlight, and the narrative illusion is constantly interrupted. The textual experiments confront the reader with the possibilities and constraints of textual representation. Whether a commenting narrator is present or not, the reader has to find his or her way through a fragmentary text which insistently asks for construction and concretion. The role of the reader is a favourite theme in the New Novel and in theoretical essays by some New Novelists. According to Butor, reading is completing and continuing the text by filling in its gaps. Among the rhetorical constructs tested for their narrative efficiency in the New Novel, the narrator occupies an important place.2 Both writing and speaking narrators occur. In Pinget’s novels, the tone of the speaking voice is more important than the pen, whereas in Butor and Simon the struggles with narrative structure and rhetoric dominate: in their novels we often encounter diarists working on the text we are reading. In the early novels by Robbe-Grillet, Ollier and Ricardou, on the other hand, the camera-eye has replaced the personal narrator; like a registering consciousness, it canalizes the events of the story (hence the name “école du regard” for the New Novel). In the first New Novels the narration is a remedy against the hostile environment, a therapeutic means to gain insight into an enigmatic situation. Subsequently, in the New New Novels of the 1960s scepticism takes over and the story degenerates into a search for representation. It is significant, however, that the homodiegetic I-narrator is not the New Novelist’s favourite narrative agent. In fact, Butor is the only author who uses a homodiegetic narrator in most of his novels.3 Other texts view ––––––––––––– 1 2

3

In the autobiographical novels by Claude Simon, for example, the characters are more precisely delineated than in those by Butor or by Robbe-Grillet. I apologize for this and other anthropomorphizing denominations for what is only a rhetorical construct. Given the human connotations of telling and ‘voice’, post-classical narratology cannot help but copy the personifying vocabulary of its patriarchs (Booth, Stanzel, Genette), although wrestling with its misleading implications. I count Butor’s most famous novel, La Modification, as an I-narrative as well. In this novel the protagonist-narrator addresses himself as “you” (“vous”). This apostrophic structure creates distance, all the more since the narrator uses the polite form of

306

Els Jongeneel

the narrator from a heterodiegetic perspective (see for example RobbeGrillet, Les Gommes and Dans le labyrinthe) or alternate a homodiegetic with a heterodiegetic narrator, as in Simon’s novels. Pinget, for his part, uses a first-person narrator in his early novels but switches to a heterodiegetic perspective in his later works. Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute rarely use the first-person narrator. An explanation for the minority position of the homodiegetic I-narrator in the New Novel could be the important place accorded by the New Novelists to the autonomous text. Rather than focusing on a maker and his or her text in progress, they give the floor to the textual system creating its own organization. Given the impact of metafictional reflection in the New Novel, the use of the narratological concept of ‘unreliability’ in this context is problematic. Like most narratological concepts, the notion of narrative unreliability is based on the criteria of realist and modernist novels, criteria that are hardly applicable to metafiction. Obviously, metafictionality a priori implies advertised construction, hence unreliability. In “Historicizing unreliable narration”, Bruno Zerweck discusses the problem of metafiction with regard to the literary competence of the reader.4 Referring to Tamar Yacobi’s model of naturalization of textual inconsistencies5, Zerweck remarks that when aesthetic, thematic, or persuasive goals of the work in question are foregrounded, incongruities of the text can be solved with regard to the conventions of the genre in question (“the generic or the functional principle”). Naturalization then concerns a resolution of the textual ambiguities at the level of the text as a whole, and not at the level of the mediation of the fictional story. Zerweck’s remarks notwithstanding, I will argue that the concept of unreliability can be applied to first-person narratives in the meta-fictional New Novel. To this end, I will adopt Greta Olson’s distinction between “fallibility” and “untrustworthiness” as two different modes of narrative unreliability.6 In this context it is important to distinguish between different forms of metafiction in the New Novel. During the first polemical period, the authors experimented rather trustfully with the textual structure. Benevolent narrators and observers confide their struggles with language ––––––––––––– 4 5 6

address, and meanwhile generalizes the personal adventure. The reader feels addressed by the narrator and implicated in the story. Zerweck (2001: 163). Yacobi (1981: 113–126). Olson (2003: 93–110).


307

and with reality to the reader. These narrators are in accord with the values of their narratives and report with factual accuracy. They are trustworthy, though fallible, because they are “subject to the epistemological uncertainty of lived experience”.7 However, as the scepticism regarding the possibility of representation increases, irony and deconstructivism enter the novels. One narrator succeeds the other at high speed (see for example Pinget, L’apocryphe, 1980); the homodiegetic narrator becomes an unclear medium which almost coincides with the text, and the story disintegrates into alternative versions. To put it briefly, the late New Novel preaches its own untrustworthiness. Unreliable (untrustworthy) narration has become the authentic, ‘reliable’ hallmark of deconstructive thinking. By way of illustration, I will briefly discuss two new novels with a fallible and an untrustworthy first-person narrator: Degrés (1960) by Michel Butor and Quelqu’un (1965) by Robert Pinget. Both novels belong to the transitional phase between the New Novel and the New New Novel.

2. Degrés or the Death of the First-Person Narrator Degrés tells the story of a narrator who does not succeed in registering one hour of lived experience. Pierre Vernier, a young teacher of geography and history in a high school in Paris at the beginning of the 1950s, decides to lend colour to his monotonous life by putting it down on paper. Moreover, he wants to clarify daily existence for his pupils. He chooses to register a one-hour history lesson that he has given to class 2A. His nephew Pierre Eller is in this class and Vernier contacts him in order to gain more information about the other pupils. He plans an exhaustive description of the events, the words he has spoken, the material he has used, and the reactions he has received from the pupils. Quickly, however, Vernier realizes that the job proves more difficult than expected. Far from being a simple stylistic exercise, writing down one hour of lived experience appears to be a complex task. The lesson in question is connected with an infinity of other experiences which can no longer be recuperated. In order to describe the pupils’ reactions correctly, Vernier has to reconstruct their school timetable, he has to know what they have read not only the day before but weeks before the history lesson, and he has to learn about their other activities and those of their teachers. Vernier tries to ––––––––––––– 7

Ibid.: 101.

308

Els Jongeneel

structure his text by studying the family bonds and friendships between the pupils and teachers of the class. He goes two years back in time and he proceeds with registering the events of the year after that of the crucial lesson, as the writing takes increasingly more time and energy and new circumstances affect the writing process,. After some time he decides to pass the role of the I-narrator to Eller. When this narrative trick appears equally unsuccessful, he changes narrator yet another time and gives the floor to Eller’s uncle Jouret, the teacher of French and classical languages. Finally Vernier succumbs to his authorial task and Jouret completes the text as best he can. To use Greta Olson’s terminology, Degrés confronts us with “homodiegetic narrators [who] are subject to the epistemological uncertainty of lived experience […]. Such narrators reliably report on whatever informational puzzles they are currently piecing together”.8 On the metafictional level, we can observe a demonstration of rhetorical untrustworthiness. In other words, the generic principle can be invoked in order to resolve the discordant elements of the novel.9 In thus exposing the failure of literary mimesis in traditional narrative forms, Butor settles scores with Proust. He wants to demonstrate that the settled forms of narration have had their day and that other narrative forms are more congenial to modern life. Thus, in Degrés, lived experience degenerates into imagined experience and fantasy. The linear story falls into iterative fragments and quotations, whereas lists and other textual structures assume the role of the organizing narrator. In this way, Degrés allegorises the crisis of the traditional story with a centralized narrator. Like the other New Novelists, Butor is obsessed with the epistemology of the literary text. In his critical essays too, he reflects on the vital importance of literature and art in a rudderless world.10 Allegory also pervades Butor’s second novel, L’Emploi du Temps (1956), in which the first-person narrator-diarist and apprentice Jacques Revel concludes a pact with the hostile and asphyxiating town of Bleston, symbol of modern society. According to the clauses of the pact, the writer commits himself to delivering a meticulous description of the town, and the town ‘guarantees’ the scribe a safe outcome. –––––––––––––

8 9

10

Ibid. Yacobi (2001). See his Répertoire volumes.


309

An allegorical reading of Degrés would similarly read the relationship between Vernier and his nephew Eller as a symbol of the relationship between writer and reader. The pact concluded by Vernier and Eller takes place on October 12, the day of the discovery of America by Columbus, and the day of the 15th anniversary of Eller. The last words of the novel, “Who speaks?”, murmured by the agonizing Vernier, also point to allegory. This symbolic underlining of the story contrasts rather surprisingly with the concreteness and precision of the text.11 Yet, allegory and metafiction notwithstanding, Butor succeeds superbly in depicting a convincing portrait of a Parisian high school in the post-war period. His artistic skills protect him against what Northrop Frye calls “naïve allegory” or “a disguised form of discursive writing”.12 Vernier’s death, which is predicted in the course of the story, nonetheless strikes the reader because of its pathetic pointlessness. The event convincingly concludes the allegorical setting. It refers to the failure of the writing project and the uselessness of the narrator, whether homodiegetic or heterodiegetic. However, it constitutes an incongruous element in the intrigue. Ironically enough, Vernier’s death prefigures the dethronement of the author in postmodern theory and literary texts some ten years later. Barthes’ “La mort de l’auteur” appears in 1967, followed in 1969 by Foucault’s “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” The author, according to Foucault, is nothing but a function in the text which confines the plurality of language. Shortly afterwards Derrida echoes these revolutionary statements: the centre of the text is vacant, the text is omnipotent – in the beginning was the text. The narrator is replaced by the anonymous ‘écriture’ or writable text, the story substituted by the play of the signifiers and the consistent plot by the chameleonic textual form.13 This rejection of the author and his or her narrative tools, and the ensuing denial of mimesis, will finally bring postmodernism to to an impasse from which there is no return. Butor himself drew the conclusion of the Degrés-‘project’: Degrés was his last novel, to be succeeded by new textual experiments. Mobile. Etude pour une représentation des Etats-Unis (1962), his subsequent work, is a poetic experiment devoid of any narrative intrigue. The text, presented as

––––––––––––– 11 12 13

For an extensive analysis of Butor’s narrative technique, see Jongeneel (1988). Frye (1990: 90). De Man (1971) calls allegory the “trope of tropes of postmodernism”. See Derrida (1970).

310

Els Jongeneel

a personal voyage of discovery throughout the different states of America, only offers narrative onsets, no regular story.

3. Quelqu’un: Unreliability and Beyond In Robert Pinget’s Quelqu’un we meet again with a first-person diarist who is wrestling with a text about the troubles of life. Each of Pinget’s first-person stories presents a similar point of departure: an old and solitary man somewhere in the country is writing his memoirs or diary, or soliloquises about past events.14 Writing or memorizing proceeds painfully as the narrators do not succeed in transmitting their life to paper: their memory is deficient, they wrestle with various stories about the same event and at times even hand the text over to other writers or readers. The identity of the characters is vague, the story falters, and the narrators retell their story again and again. Pinget’s novels focus on the voice: not only the narrator’s singular voice, but also the choral voice of the community. For Pinget, ears are more important than eyes for gaining insight into the chaos of life. “Concentrate on the abysses fate opens up”, says the diarist in Quelqu’un, “not abysses, things we didn’t know about but which suddenly start moving under our eyes or rather under our ears but our ears begin to see”.15 In his novels, Pinget is constantly in search of the tone of the voice, as he noted in a paper delivered in 1972 at the Cerisy conference about the New Novel, one of the few extensive statements he has made about his work.16 It is this tone that unravels life and makes sense. In the midst of a scene in progress, the diarist of Quelqu’un remarks: “The tone is there. The tone. The most difficult thing to capture”, only to ironically translate it immediately afterwards into daily conversation stuff: Your whole life can be messed up by a wrong tone. It’s terrifying when you come to think of it. More than terrifying. Mortal. And we sometimes wonder what people die of. We can’t explain it, we don’t understand, we say it’s a mystery. It’s their tone that 17 has killed them. They didn’t pick the right one at the start. The tone. It’s vital.

––––––––––––– 14 15 16 17

See also Mahu ou le matériau, Graal Flibuste, Baga, Le renard et la boussole, and Cette voix, even though not all first-person narrators in these texts are writers. Pinget (1984: 106). Pinget (1972: 311). Pinget (1984: 39).


311

The quest for the tone in Pinget’s novels proceeds mostly by means of pen and paper. In spite of the triteness of discourse and the horrific trivialities of life that pass in review, the text leads to “the clear patches of these aggravations”.18 Pinget’s narrators remind us of Beckett’s agonizing storytellers who cannot stop speaking (and writing, see Malone with his logorrhoea and his pencil stump in Malone dies) because as long as there is voice, there is hope. The anonymous narrator-diarist in Quelqu’un is running a pension in the French countryside, together with a school friend, Gaston. They met again in a health resort ten years before and decided to start the business, “me between two drinking bouts, him between two bouts of diarrhea”.19 Meanwhile the ideals have vanished and money-making has become Gaston’s unique obsession. In the pension the guests hardly live; they vegetate. They lack the most elementary comfort, mediocrity reigns, monotony kills every initiative, and the yearly visits to nieces and nephews in the country are the only contacts with the world outside. The anonymous narrator one day starts to put down on paper daily life in the pension. The reason for this event is a missing bit of paper on which he had scrawled some notes regarding his favourite pastime, botany. The report on the hopeless search for his lost piece of paper makes him write down his daily routine in the pension, the dirt, and the complaining and querulous guests. It induces him to give vent to his irritation about the horrific dullness of life.20 The narration flags continuously because the narrator fails to remember certain facts, stumbles into fantasy and dreams, or cannot find the right tone. Up to nine times he retells the story da capo. When he has finally succeeded in writing down a full day at the pension, notwithstanding frequent desperate interruptions, restarts and flashbacks, he puts down his pen: “This time it’s finished. The little future has gone west”.21 In other words, nothing new remains to be said because next day will bring the same predictable events lived by the same protagonists.

–––––––––––––

18 19 20

21

Ibid.: 111. Ibid.: 28. The description of the dining room (le foutoir) and of the commode with bad-smelling napkins reminds us of one of the most famous pensions in French literature, la Pension Vauquer in Balzac”s Le père Goriot. Pinget (1984: 155).

312

Els Jongeneel

4. Metafiction and Deconstruction Similar to Degrés, Quelqu’un relates the story of a writer-narrator wrestling with a text in progress. The diarist also tries to gain insight into his mediocre life, knowing that he is “a failure”.22 Like most I-narratorwriters in the New Novel, he is especially concerned with the chaos and disease of contemporary society. The vileness of life is echoed through the populist idioms of Pinget’s narrators as well as their emotional swipes of existential nausea, grotesque images and cynic sarcasms, reminiscent of Céline. Daily life in the pension breathes the nausea of existence. The dirt in the rooms and the mud in the garden, the hard-packed dustbins, the bad smell emanating from the kitchen and from the shithouses, the disgusting food, the stupid conversations by the grotesque inhabitants: everything points to the hopelessness of the situation, as do vain efforts at amelioration: repainting the rooms, changing furniture and flowerbeds, and increasing the budget for food and wine. Besides the daily routine, textual representation is also metaphorized. More abundantly than Butor, Pinget uses metafiction, though overflowing with irony, to shed light on the writing process and its problematic relationship to reality. As in other novels by Pinget with a homodiegetic I-narrator-writer, the monotonous listing of events and the endless repetition of scenes refers to the stumbling mechanism of the writing process. Moreover, some standard events, such as the search for the piece of paper, botanising and packing and unpacking one‘s bag become metaphors of writing. The narrator also insistently expresses his need for someone, for a fellow-sufferer, to share his solitude, to partake in the process of writing and to spur it on through questions. At times, the writer can get quite sarcastic about the actual source of inspiration: To hear these Borromeans [a former holiday destination of one of the pensioners] spoken of as if they were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and to hear those three old fogeys clucking over such marvels, mulled and re-mulled, ruminated and re-ruminated, digested and all the rest of it, all the while picking their stumps full of our loathsome 23 grub – this inspires me.

In spite of these sarcastic sneers, the writing process provokes a continuous tension inspired by the fear to deform the truth. Hence the exhorta––––––––––––– 22 23

Ibid.: 103. Ibid.: 81.


313

tions which the diarist frequently inserts into his report (“Courage”, “Keep calm”, “Precision and discipline”, “Tell Gaston method”, “Repeat, I’m looking for my paper”), and the exasperated outbursts which bear witness to the impossibility of avoiding the confrontation with reality.24 Unlike Butor, however, Pinget uses metafiction in order to deconstruct writing from the very beginning. Pinget´s narrators are untrustworthy story-tellers who underline their own tricks. “I don’t mind if I contradict myself”, says the diarist in Quelqu’un, “What’s said is never said because you can say it differently.”25 Statements are systematically undermined, and revelations rejected as sentimental bluffing and diversionary tactics. Conventional narrative topics and strategies are ridiculed and unmasked as manipulations and lies. Witness the ironic references to (auto-) biographical conventions (“I’d intended not to mention any names […] But something tells me that that might have been boring”, “I don’t want to talk about my life”)26; to narrative structures such as the inventory (“But I don’t want to go in for any more inventories … Objects are no good at all when you’re aiming at the soul”)27 and to idiomatic precision (“Finding the right word, finding the exact word – it’s divine. I must say in passing that it’s often the word caca that is the most precise”)28. Even the obsession to sincerely investigate reality, the motor of Pinget’s novels (and of the New Novel in general), is subjected to sarcasm: Don’t let anyone come and tell me that I answer questions. Because that has been said. That has been said in the past. Apropos of my other lives, when I was trying to get rid of them. He answers questions, as you see. That must be the police. […] I don’t want

––––––––––––– 24

25

26 27 28

See for example the scene of Marie and the gas-chamber, the invective against Gaston, and the comparison of Madame Apostolos and the shitting owl (Pinget 1984: 115, 103, 145). Ibid.: 25. An ironic variant of Sartre’s freedom of choice? Elsewhere too, the diarist makes a covert allusion to existentialism, calling himself “a decent fellow, rather smallscale”, which can be linked to the epitaph of Sartre’s La Nausée – „C’est un garçon sans importance collective, c’est tout juste un individu”, in turn a quotation from a comedy by Céline, L’Eglise (1936). Ibid.: 7, 15. Ibid.: 22–23. Ibid.: 15.

314

Els Jongeneel

to give the impression that I answer questions. Not give the impression, even though I 29 do answer.

Conscious of the damaging effects of the text, the diarist strives for an impossible ‘degree zero’ of writing, which uses no method (“Method, that’s another thing I’ve had my fill of. It falsifies everything, it upsets everything”), and gives free reign to chance (“Chance, that’s easy to say, we’re all the time tempting it without meaning to […] We ought rather to call it a miracle which crowns our efforts in an unexpected fashion”).30 It is to this context of a pseudo-neutral registration of reality that the “someone” so often invoked by the narrator belongs. In spite of cynics and deconstruction, the diarist in Quelqu’un persists in unravelling the truth. Writing is of vital importance for him: “I can’t do anything else. I didn’t let myself in for anything, it imposed itself”.31 Although writing is seen as a narcotic, it is also the only means by which to know and withstand the horrible mediocrity of life. Writing might perhaps even clean up the mess, just like the hooting owl cleans out the garden: “I have a kind of feeling that things become transformed when it hoots […] there’s movement everywhere so long as the owl is hooting, the moment it stops everything will return to immobility”.32 This explains the continuous tension and anxiousness about the outcome of the writing process. Like the other texts by Pinget, Quelqu’un tells the story of a Célinian journey to the end of the night, the ultimate confrontation with the base horror of life as it is exemplified by one day at a family-pension in the French countryside.

5. Conclusion In the 1950s and 1960s, the French New Novelists wanted to come to terms with an incomprehensible and hostile world. Under the influence of the French rhetorical tradition and of structuralism, and anticipating postmodernism, they promoted the malleability of the real by means of the lit––––––––––––– 29

30 31 32

Ibid.: 7–8. Pinget obviously parodies his own texts where the inventory and the interrogatory play an important role; see for example Clope au dossier (1961), L’inquisitoire (1962) and Autour de Mortin (1965). Ibid.: 6, 18. Ibid.: 30. Ibid.: 101.


315

erary text. Therefore, like most literary avant-gardes, they highlighted the literary form within their texts, by substituting the traditional text of adventure for the adventure of the text. One of their main targets, in this respect, was the narrator as the fictional organizer of the story. Among the New Novelists, Butor and Pinget have investigated and reduced that favourite device of modernist authors: the I-narrator. Both authors still believe in the mimetic potency of the text, which they highlight by means of allegory and metafiction. Their novels focus on the urge to investigate reality through writing. In Degrés, Butor rings the death-knell of the fallible narrator and consequently of the traditional novel. Instead of the subjective point of view of the I-narrator, he opts for a multi-voiced discourse as a means of expressing modern society. In Quelqu’un, Pinget makes fun of the unreliable I-narrator. Traditional narrative tricks are turned inside out and the narration flags frequently. However, Pinget’s deconstructionist pessimism also turns the other way round. The unmasking of narrative unreliability gives way to a degree zero of writing or narrative minimalism that touches on the authentic experience, which is identified as the nausea of existence, with which we willy-nilly have to cope. Any further than this Pinget does not want to go: All life is there within reach, all our poor infectious worm’s life which gives us so many headaches is exposed there, we can hold it in the hollow of our hand, it was just a little bird, nothing at all, how could we have made such a song and dance about it? Difficult to talk about that, very difficult. But I notice that it’s always words that reveal this sort of thing to me […] That’s why I say that certain things […] may perhaps 33 be nothing but a question of words.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland 1977 Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana). Beckett, Samuel 1955 Malone dies (London: Olympia Press). Butor, Michel 1956 L’Emploi du Temps (Paris: Minuit). 1957 La Modification (Paris: Minuit). 1960 Degrés (Paris: Gallimard). 2006 Oeuvres complètes 2–3. Répertoire (Paris: La Différence).

––––––––––––– 33

Pinget (1984: 106–107).

316

Els Jongeneel

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 1932 Voyage au bout de la nuit (Paris: Denoël et Steele). 1933 L’Eglise (Paris: Denoël et Steele). Derrida, Jacques 1970 “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Science of Man, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Foucault, Michel 1979 “What Is an Author?” translated from the French by the editor, Josué V. Harari, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Frye, Northrop 1990 Anatomy of Criticism (1957) (New Jersey: Princeton UP). Jongeneel, Els 1988 Michel Butor et le pacte romanesque: écriture et lecture dans L’Emploi du Temps, Degrés, Description de San Marco et Intervalle (Paris: éd. José Corti). de Man, Paul 1971 “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen). Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators,” in Narrative 11: 93–110. Pinget, Robert 1965 Quelqu’un (Paris: Minuit). 1984 Someone (New York: Red Dust). 1952 Mahu ou le matériau (Paris: Minuit). 1953 Le renard et la boussole (Paris: Gallimard). 1956 Graal Flibuste (Paris: Minuit). 1958 Baga (Paris: Minuit). 1975 Cette voix (Paris: Minuit). 1982 “Pseudo-principes d”esthétique,” in Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd”hui, II: Pratiques (Paris: 10/18): 311–350. Sartre, Jean-Paul 1938 La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard). Yacobi, Tamar 1981 “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” in Poetics Today 2: 113– 126. 2001 “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s (Un)Reliability,” in Narrative 9,2: 223–231. Zerweck, Bruno 2001 “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction,” in Style 35,1: 151–180.

PER KROGH HANSEN (University of Southern Denmark)

First Person, Present Tense. Authorial Presence and Unreliable Narration in Simultaneous Narration 1. First Person, Present Tense (FPPT) If one of the major characteristics of nineteenth-century prose fiction was that it replaced the previous century’s use of first-person narrators (e.g. in the epistolary novel) with omniscient narration, one cannot but notice that the tendency goes in the opposite direction in the twentieth century. Firstperson narration is again widely used, but unlike in the nineteenth century, the narration is more often in the present than in the past tense, especially in the last decades. In Towards a ‘natural’ narratology (1996), Monika Fludernik outlined this development, noting that “[e]ven among fullblown novels the number of present tense texts has risen dramatically in the last two decades.”1 She referred in this respect to such different works as Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957), Beckett’s Company (1980), Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1982). Now, ten years later, first person present tense has become a preferred narrative mode in mainstream fiction. Present tense passages can of course be observed in earlier literature as well (Fludernik notes that one finds whole chapters in the oeuvre of Dickens), but novels being told throughout in the present tense are a relatively new phenomenon. As Fludernik points out, the use of the present tense has an interesting consequence for the reader’s “(re-)conceptualization of the natural storytelling frame, where a story has to have happened in the past in order to become tellable”.2 Simultaneous narration, as Dorrit Cohn has labelled the –––––––––––––

1 2

Fludernik (1996: 223). Ibid.

318

Per Krogh Hansen

phenomenon3, cannot be ascribed to our standard notion of a narrative since it does not establish the spatial and temporal distance to the incidents narrated which we normally consider essential for a ‘natural’ narrative situation. Cohn quotes Rimmon-Kenan who claims that “[c]ommon sense tells us that events may be narrated only after they happen”.4 Yet, this understanding has problems when it is transferred to cinematographic narratives and other genres such as sports commentary, where the incidents are told at the same time as they take place. Something similar holds true for first person, present tense narration in written fiction (hereafter abbreviated FPPT). One could claim that the widespread use of FPPT is to be understood with reference to audio-visual media narration insofar that it also establishes a registering ‘here-and-now’ mode. As is well-known, the exploration of the possibilities of adapting cinematographic narrative forms to written fiction was common throughout the twentieth century.5 But as Fludernik and Cohn note, one cannot generalize this understanding to all uses of present tense in relation to first-person narrators, since also feelings and thoughts might very well be part of the telling. Another way to conceptualise FPPT would be to consider it as a variant of what has been labelled ‘historical present’. But as Cohn notes, the historical present designates an ‘as if’ form, through which the narrating subject tries to recreate a situation from the past by describing it from the incidents’ perspective. In that sense, the historical present serves as a sort of covered preterite which is disclosed through the knowledge of future incidents, as can be seen in this example from the Danish author Jakob Ejersbo’s novel Nordkraft. Here, the narrator Maria tells us about her boyfriend Asger’s attempt to become a tattoo-artist, practising on bananas and a pork-roast: Shortly afterwards Asger destroys the five bananas I have just bought. “But you can eat them afterwards,” he says, “I doubt if the ink will go through the skin.” He writes I love Maria on one of them, but I don’t want to eat it. I don’t think he loves me. He tries to persuade me to roast the pork in the oven, so that it doesn’t go to waste, but I am not having any dead pig in my oven. So instead he cuts it into strips and throws it out to Twister and Tripper [Asger’s dogs] in the yard, despite my warnings. Naturally enough, they have the shits for two days afterwards because they are not used to raw meat and a pork joint from a bloody supermarket is absolutely crammed full with bac-

––––––––––––– 3 4 5

Cohn (1999: 96–108). Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 89), quoted in Cohn (1999: 96). See e.g. Robbe-Grillet’s considerations in Robbe-Grillet (1966).

Unreliable Narration in Simultaneous Narration

319

teria. For the next two weeks the tattooing machine lies untouched and I begin to re6 joice that this project at least has died in the water, but I rejoice too soon, all too soon.

The temporal crescendo in the passage, through an increase in narrative speed from neutral to accelerated, culminates in Maria transcending the temporal frame she is placed in and telling about the future with an omniscient narrator’s authority. Still, it does not make sense to consider Maria as an omniscient narrator. Instead her narrative mode takes the form of a covered past tense, which is told with the knowledge gained by temporal distance, and is therefore a classical example of a historical present.7 In contrast to the historical present, FPPT does not just simulate, but actually is a narration from within the incidents. Dorrit Cohn characterizes it as a “fictional present”8 with reference to Käte Hamburgers “fictional past”. In Hamburger’s epic preterite, the deictic temporal adverbials are connected to the preterite and thereby establish fictive I-origo’s from which the deixis is departing. In addition, Cohn makes clear that this preterite is to be distinguished not only from the historical present, but also from the interior monologue, understood as “texts that presents themselves as mental quotations from start to finish, as unmediated mimesis of consciousness”.9 Even though the latter notion can cover parts of the narration in a simultaneously narrated text, it does not fit all of its aspects. As Cohn points out the inner happenings can very well be “mediated by a knowingly analytical voice”10, and extended stretches of time can time and again be compressed in summary sentences whereby the sense of an unrolling mental quotation is being undermined. Cohn draws attention to three central and interdependent characteristics of simultaneous narration. Firstly, the narrative situation is incongru––––––––––––– 6 7

8 9 10

Ejersbo (2004: 31). Nordkraft is among the best selling novels in recent years in Danish literature and was adapted to film in 2005 by the Danish director Ole Christian Madsen. One way to disclose the historical present is to do a commutation test on the text by substituting present tense with preterite. The final paragraphs will in that case say: “Naturally enough, they had the shits for two days afterwards because they were not used to raw meat and a pork joint from a bloody supermarket is absolutely crammed full with bacteria. For the next two weeks the tattooing machine was laying untouched and I began to rejoice that this project at least had died in the water, but I rejoiced too son, all too soon.” That there are several indications in the book that the narrational mode is at the same time a covered heterodiegesis is another story – not to be told here. Cohn (1999: 106). Ibid.: 103. Ibid.

320

Per Krogh Hansen

ous insofar as it cannot be naturalized by the reader’s attempt to postulate a verisimilar narrative situation (tape-recording, oral diary, etc.). Secondly, the semantic implications of the narrative tense, e.g. the fact that the narrator’s imaginations and observations are being juxtaposed and presented in the same temporal grammar, facilitate a high degree of uncertainty regarding what is true and false, real and fantasy within the fictional world. And thirdly, “the absolute focalization of its narrated experience” rests on the analogy between action, thought and narration. To Cohn’s list we can add a fourth characteristic, namely that FPPT promotes a complete elimination of any visible signs of an authorial or narrational agent ‘beyond’ the first person narrator. Dennis Cooper’s My Loose Thread (2002) can serve as a very good example here. The novel is told by the emotionally inhibited, apathetic and existentially disturbed teenager Larry who is having a sexual relationship with his younger brother Jim, but in general has a hard time keeping fantasy and reality apart. Larry feels (and partly is) guilty of his friend Rand’s death and a schoolmate has paid him to kill another (younger) student. The following excerpt is from the beginning of chapter two and takes place in the morning after Larry has been in Jim’s room at night: I’m at breakfast. It’s always something easy to make like a cold cereal. Dad watches taped golf from the weekend, and my mom reads the paper. Something in her is going off about me. I can see it’s not the world. Jim’s food is already a ruin, which is the only thing wrong. ‘Jim rode his bike,’ she says. Not hello, or anything. That’s news, since I always drive him to school. ‘Yeah?’ She turns a page fast, and it rips. But I’m tired enough from one or maybe two hours’ sleep, that her shit doesn’t reach me. ‘Say it, mom.’ ‘Your dad had a cramp, and I was up, and I saw you,’ she says. ‘Meaning what?’ I’m pretty sure I was naked, and holding my clothes and my shoes in a wad. ‘I called Dr. Thorne,’ she says. ‘What did Jim say?’ ‘He protected you,’ she says. 11 ‘From what?’ I throw my cereal bowl at the wall.

––––––––––––– 11

Cooper (2002): 23. I have taken the following examples from chapter 2, which can also be found on the internet at http://www.denniscooper.net/myloosethread.htm.


321

As can be noted, focalisation is absolute in this passage. Nothing points to a focaliser or narrator other than Larry. One can claim that even the inquit formulas belongs to Larry’s domain insofar that his registration of the incidents around him does not in the first place take the form of an ‘unmediated’ here-and-now experience, but on the contrary is very explicitly marked as narrated. The reader is not just placed in medias res at the breakfast table. The narrator explicitly points out to the reader where the narrator is (“I’m at breakfast”), even elaborating on Larry’s morning habits (“It’s always something”). In that sense it is obvious that ‘interior monologue’ fails to completely describe the nature of the narration. We are not given any impression of what Larry feels except for the remark on being tired because of too little sleep. His reaction, at the end of the quote, where he throws his breakfast at the wall, stands in a paradoxical contrast to the neutrally recording, nearly apathetic tone of the narration. One could claim that the descriptive distance is evidence of another narrative position than that of Larry, but this is to underestimate the thematic implications of the narration. First of all, it is a significant trait of Larry’s character that he often does not feel anything or does not reflect on his own situation due to his apathetic condition. Secondly, the paradoxical distance between the burst of anger and its objective description at one and the same time gives the outburst an explosive power (as it surprises not only the reader and the mother, but also Larry himself) and signals (due to the unsurprised descriptive modus) that it is not the first time this happens, but is rather a part of the daily life in the family. Thirdly, the existential crisis Larry is in does indicate that he ‘is not himself’. Frequently he does not understand and control his own doings, but is placed in the divided position of being an observer of or to himself. Nonetheless, the most outstanding quality of the narration is that it is very difficult to naturalize. The explicitly marked mode of narrating belies the verisimilar characteristics of interior monologue (with stream of consciousness, etc). In addition, the close relation between the course of the events and the narrator’s lack of signs of ulterior knowledge, as determined by the narrated situation, defeats the historical present-solution. Instead we have to take conceptual refuge elsewhere, namely to ‘fiktionales Erzählen’ in Hamburger’s understanding and Cohn’s adjustment. It shall be noted that the text also contains passages which are not anchored in the events, but have a more reflective or recollective quality. Immediately after the passage quoted above, we are given a passage where Larry is re-

322

Per Krogh Hansen

flecting on Rand’s death, relating it to the murder of the younger student and his relationship to Jim: I think Rand is still on the floor of my bedroom. I mean in some way. I know he didn’t die there. He got up after a couple of minutes, and left. But I think he’d come there if he could go anywhere. That’s the Franks’ big idea, or their excuse. The dead don’t want to be dead, and they only give a shit about life. When I got back to my bedroom last night, I thought a lot about Rand, then decided. I killed the boy because I can’t kill myself. That’s why I hit him so hard. I realize he isn’t Jim. When I get that upset, it 12 doesn’t take much to remind me.

Even though the first sentence gives the impression that Larry’s narrating continues from the breakfast situation, it is made clear that his idea of Rand still being in his bedroom should be understood figuratively. The plotlines of the novel are merged together in the reflection, and Larry comes closer to some sort of clarity about his situation. This is also the case in one of the following passages, here with explicit reference to the past: “After Rand died, I was drunk for a month, even at school. People I didn’t already know thought it was tragic, and left me alone.”13 Similarly, the passage where Larry has just attacked Jim, apparently unknowingly, (an event which is described in the past tense) and is now in a situation of rest (described in the present tense) which leaves room for recollection: I guess I dragged Jim off the bed, and strangled him on the floor, but I’ve stopped. He’s on one side, coughing and holding his mouth to be quiet. I’m on my knees beside him. I don’t think he yelled, or I’d know. Whenever I realize how much I used to worry about him, I always lose it. I used to drive to a rifle range somewhere and shoot 14 off my guns. When my dad confiscated them, I’d get drunk.

As should be clear by now, the narrative set-up in this text is rather complicated. The narration is on the one hand an objective registration of the ongoing events with an exterior view on the narrator himself, and on the other hand records the reflections and memories of the first-person narrator. Cooper himself has given the perhaps most precise description of the narrative situation: I feel like it’s a documentary. I wanted it to be like there’s this kid’s head, and here is the stuff coming out of this kid’s head. There’s no bullshit, there’s no art, and there’s no tricks. It’s mysterious and confused as he is. It’s like this electric wire and this outpouring. […]

––––––––––––– 12 13 14

Cooper (2002: 23f.). Ibid.: 25. Ibid.: 45.


323

The narrative was determined by what the kid could deal with. If the kid becomes confused, it becomes confusing. If he can’t think about something, the book can’t think about it either. […] It’s totally in the service of him. He has no sense of humor. Those 15 are blackouts and it’s like he is blacking out and is in denial. He’s a weird kid.

2. The Implicit or the Omitted Author As mentioned earlier, a distinctive feature of FPPT is that all visible indications of an authorial or narratorial agent ‘above’ the homodiegetic narrator are eliminated. The (implied) author16 is reduced to a paratextual function sanctioning the work’s status as fiction, and leaving the whole act of narration to the character-narrator’s here-and-now. One way of testing this assertion is by comparing it with the historical present. Ejersbo’s Nordkraft can again serve as our example, with a passage taken from the very beginning of the novel. The section is entitled “Junkie dogs” and the chapter is called “Bitch”: The dog snarls. Its canine teeth gleam with saliva and the snapping of its jaws sends a wave of air towards my nether parts. I am standing with 300 grams of hash taped to my stomach, from just beneath my breasts down to my pubic hair. The smell drives the Alsatian wild and its open jaws are only a hand’s width from my crotch. The animal stands up on its rear legs, the lead held taut by the policeman; its collar bites into its coat. Hot breath from the dogs mouth billows out into the frosty evening air. My back rubs against the wall and my boots crunch as they stumble over the filthy snow on the pavement a few metres from the main entrance to Christiania, Copenhagen, [squatted area in Copenhagen known for its hash-market] where twenty policemen dressed in riot gear and accompanied by dogs have jumped out of nowhere. I try to edge my way along the wall on the back of Loppen [rock-venue at Christiania]; the

––––––––––––– 15 16

Laurence (2002). I will not here enter the seemingly never-ending discussion regarding the concept of implied author. I have taken reservations elsewhere regarding the general status of this concept, see Hansen (2005) and Hansen (2007). My conception of the author is very close to Phelan’s recent suggestion. Phelan (2005) calls attention to the aspect of continuity (but not identity) between the implied author and the real author and thereby (re)establishes a link between these two instances that is closer than most text-centred literary theories have acknowledged. In doing so, Phelan reopens the discussion of the communicative and ethical perspectives of literature started by Booth, and develops an approach in which literature is primarily understood as a construction created by an author as a way of communicating meanings and beliefs. On the other hand, I am not willing to give the concept the same general importance as Phelan does. The author is only worth paying attention to in narratological studies insofar as he plays a notable (that is detectable) role in the text.

324

Per Krogh Hansen

posters advertising gigs at the club scrape against my back and make a rasping noise. Can’t move in any direction; on my left there are two pot heads staring apathetically at 17 the dog which holds the three of us in check.

The opening in medias res produces an experience of presence and action, mainly because the narrative style is impressionistic and gives priority to the immediate perception of the dog. At the same time, though, the narration is characterized by what might be called a naturalist strategy because of the high degree of precision in the description of the quantity of the hash, the number of police officers and the location of the event. This intermingling of two very different strategies (where the one aims at creating a sense of immediacy and the other at making situation and character visible and intelligible for the reader by establishing a concrete and detailed universe) does not have any immediate negative effect on the reader’s reception. Yet one will not give it too much thought before the mimetic status of the narrating person breaks down, insofar as the character establishing markers to a large extent fail to match the character of the narrator. The narrator is a young ‘pusherfrau’ called Maria, a social misfit. Words like ‘skød’ (‘nether parts’) and ‘pubic hair’ seem rather archaic in this context, and one could instead have expected a more vulgar denomination. Furthermore, the specification of how the hash has been placed (“from just beneath my breasts down to my pubic hair”) seems circumstantial, especially taking into consideration the situation from which Maria is telling. And the same holds true for the description of the location in the last part of the quotation: “on the pavement a few metres from the main entrance to Christiania, Copenhagen, where twenty policemen dressed in riot gear and accompanied by dogs have jumped out of nowhere”. An obvious explanation for this divergence is to consider this odd and inappropriate information as part of the author’s attempt to compensate for the obvious problem connected to the use of first person narration in general, namely that the author cannot himself step in to give the reader the necessary information about time, place and person, since there is no room left for an extradiegetic narrative position. Instead the author is dependant on the character-narrator to communicate the necessary information to make the text intelligible to the reader. This problem can be solved by letting the narrator tell in past tense and thereby establish a clear dis––––––––––––– 17

Ejersbo (2004: 1).


325

tinction between the experiencing and the narrating I whereby the latter may give more explicit information to the reader by way of introduction to his narration. In FPPT this of course is not a possibility. In Living to Tell about It, Phelan distinguishes between “disclosure functions” and “narrator functions” of character-narration. Disclosure functions denote communication from the author to the authorial audience and the narrator functions cover the communication from narrator to narratee.18 One of the aspects Phelan is paying attention to as a disclosure function is “redundancy”, by which he means descriptions and statements which are redundant to the narratee and the narrator-character and which can therefore be considered to be indirectly addressed to the reader. The passages describing place and situation in the foregoing extract from Ejersbo are examples of such redundancy since they are counteracting (if not subverting) the verisimilar illusion of hectic immediacy and chaos. The same thing holds true for the long descriptions of types of hash and smoking techniques in the rest of the book. When Maria mentions that someone wants to smoke a bong, the remark is followed by a long description of how this smoking attribute works: “‘Err…couldn’t we…umm smoke a bong?’ Loser whispers to me so as not to distract Asger. ‘No,’ I say. We have a bong, but smoking a bong head makes me incredible dizzy, almost nauseous. Well, a bong is basically ahookaah, except that there are no holes for the water to pass through. Instead the hole to the bong head functions as a water channel. You suck until the pipe-fill is burnt and then you pull the bong head out of the bong and inhale a lungful in one go. Asger’s bong is made of leather and it is unusu19 ally disgusting, exceptionally even.”

Considering the situation from which Maria narrates (and the smoking history she has), these descriptions seem redundant, since they are passing information the narrator would not bring forward in this situation were it not that they are necessary for the authorial audience of the novel. Indeed, no diegetic or explicitly addressed extradiegetic narratee is present in the novel. Moreover, even though the interjection ‘well’ (‘altså’) seems to hint at a communicative situation, the extended use of present tense seems to counteract any naturalizing strategy including a narratee. Therefore, it is better to claim that another narratorial instance, another voice, is inter––––––––––––– 18 19

Phelan (2005: 12ff., 214f.). Ejersbo (2004: 30

326

Per Krogh Hansen

mingling in the first person-narrator’s discourse to compensate for the absence of an extradiegetic narrator. Skov Nielsen has treated the same issue, albeit in a different way. He focuses on what he calls the “impersonal voice” in first person fiction.20 Among the examples Skov Nielsen is commenting on, we find this passage from Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama (1998): ‘Disarm’ by the Smashing Pumpkins starts playing on the soundtrack and the music overlaps a shot of the club I was going to open in TriBeCa and I walk into that frame, 21 not noticing the black limousine parked across the street.

With regard to the black limousine that goes by unnoticed, Skov Nielsen refutes the conjecture that “Victor is lying or having a split consciousness. What happens […] is that the impersonal voice of the narrative tells us what Victor does not notice.” And a little later he concludes: “Thus, through long intervals Victor is obviously not telling anything to anybody and does not know everything that is told. It is impossible for the reader to naturalize the narrative and describe it in terms of communication from a character to a narratee.”22 This is a plausible explanation in so far as it concerns the description of the narrative situation and the problem of naturalization of FPPT-narration. Yet it could also be argued that an example such as this actually gives the reader the opportunity to naturalize the text by referring to the authorial framework of the text. The ‘not known but reported’ and the ‘overreported’ (as found in Ejersbo’s text) could then be subsumed under the heading of the author and understood as conventions of fiction in the form of what Phelan describes as disclosure functions. Hence, instead of describing these aspects as an ‘impersonal voice of fiction’, we might as well consider them as an indirect communication from the author. The above discussed distance between the character of the narrator in Nordkraft and her choice of words can also be explained through reference to these disclosure functions. Even though Nordkraft is a novel about misfits, its authorial audience is a much wider group which is likely to be unfamiliar with the character gallery of pushers, drug addicts, punk rockers and political refugees. One might claim that part of the project of Nordkraft is to make this subculture’s self-destructive lifestyle compre–––––––––––––

20 21 22

Nielsen (2004). Quoted in ibid.: 140 Ibid.


327

hensible to the parental generation, which has typically no understanding thereof. And to promote this identification, the author makes the narrator narrate in a vocabulary which is closer to that of the older generation than to that of the character-narrator. A vulgarisation of her language would have invigorated the mimetic effect, but at the risk of dissociating the reader from the narrator-character, which would affect the reader’s understanding of the act that saves Maria from the gridlock she is in at the opening of the novel: to distract the Alsatian Maria rips open her jeans and “pull[s] out the blood-soaked sanitary pad and hurl[s] it at the dog which starts chewing it”.23 Because of her language (which can better be understood as the author’s voice finding expression in the narrator’s) Maria seems more innocent and decent than she actually is, and her diversionary manoeuvre regarding the Alsatian becomes an expression of firmness, survival capacity and efficiency rather than the opposite. By taking resource to such strategies, Nordkraft remains accessible to a broader audience than Cooper’s novel with its minimal redundancy and its unmarked movements between fantasy and reality. And even though Cooper’s text is so obviously marked as ‘narrated’ (as when the passage quoted earlier opens with determination of where Larry is located) one cannot consider this as a sign of a narratorial or authorial instance beyond the character-narrator, even though the latter occupies a non-naturalizable narrational situation. The narration belongs solely to the character, and is therefore characterized by narrator functions (on the axis between narrator and narratee) and not by disclosure functions (on the axis between author and authorial audience). It is, as Cooper himself pointed out, as if there is no one else present than the narrator: “no bullshit, […] no art, and […] no tricks”. In that sense, a strong mimetic impulse forms the basis of this non-mimetic narrative situation. And in such cases it might perhaps be better to talk about an omitted rather than an implied author. And that might be the greatest trick of all.

3. Unreliability in FPPT Both the statement made by Cooper and the examples from My Loose Thread point in the direction of the main topic of this book: unreliable narration. In general, FPPT most certainly promotes unreliability, espe––––––––––––– 23

Ejersbo (2004: 2).

328

Per Krogh Hansen

cially because of what Cohn described above as the semantic implications of the narrative tense where the narrator’s imaginations and observations are being juxtaposed and presented in the same temporal grammar. If we bring in Booth’s distinction between stable and unstable irony24 as a way of classifying unreliable narration (as suggested by Olson25), we can propose that one of the characteristics of ‘classical’ unreliable narration is that the unreliable narrator’s account of the events works contradiegetically, that is in conflict with the facts of the fictional world (the diegesis). The unreliable narrator’s account is at one and the same time included in and our source to the diegesis, while also being overruled and rejected by it. The conflict is manifested in different kinds of distortion in the narration, prompting the reader to read with reservations and take different (re)constructive and error-correcting strategies to infer a relatively consistent diegesis up against which the homodiegetic narrator’s (or as it would be the case in heterodiegetic narration: the character-bound focaliser’s) unreliability is measured. In stable unreliability this reader-based reconstructive strategy isn’t complicated since the deviations in the homodiegetic narration are clearly marked, for instance through the account of other narrators (as in Fowles’ The Collector (1963) where Miranda’s (the ‘collected’) diary serves as a correction to Frederick’s (the collector) story) or through quite obvious misinterpretations of recorded events and facts (as in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), where Humbert Humbert ignores Dolores Haze’s (Lolita’s) clearly expressed loneliness and disgust for his approaches26). One could even claim that only in the latter case there is any need for a reconstructive manoeuvre, since in the former the ‘real story’ is stated explicitly. This stable type of unreliable narration can be contrasted with an instable type which features prominently in modernist and postmodernist fiction. This unstable type often diminishes (or even eliminates) the possibility for the reader to follow reconstructive strategies by giving no corrective standpoint in the text (there is no privileged diegetic normativity), leaving only a disturbed narration. This is one of the main features of the unreliability in FPPT texts because of the absolute focalisation and the ––––––––––––– 24 25 26

Booth (1974). Olson (2003). I discuss the possibility of reading Lolita as a reliably narrated text in Hansen (2007), but will leave that complication out for now.


329

non-hierarchical intermingling inclusion of imagination and registration of events. In this case, figuring out on what ground a narrator’s unreliability stands is more a matter of interpretation in the Nietzschean creative sense than in the hermeneutic unveiling sense. Put differently, it is obvious that Larry’s narration in My Loose Thread is full of contradictions and misunderstandings, but the questions of why he is as he is does not find a satisfactory answer, but leaves the reader speculating and pending between an infinite number of cultural and psychological frames. Bret Easton Ellis’ Less than Zero (1985) can serve as an interesting example of how this mechanism works, because by the end it points out one direction for the act of naturalization. Less than Zero is told by Clay – a young college student coming home to Los Angeles for Christmas-break – and illustrates the moral and mental depravation of a group (or generation) of teenagers who have everything except “anything to loose”27 as one of the characters says at the end of the book. Even though Clay takes part in the depravity, he is primarily given the role of observer, and his narration is characterized by a disinterested, ‘flat’ and non-reflective tone. The narration follows the chronological order of the events, but is interrupted by flashbacks (marked by italics) where Clay recalls situations from the past. There are similarities with Raymond Carver’s minimalist realism, but where Carver most often uses third person past tense, and thereby gives the reader an obvious narrative frame to naturalize the nonreflectiveness of the narrators and/or focalisers (by inflating the marked temporal an spatial distance into an extradiegetic narrative position), the use of first person and present tense produces a disturbing apathetic sense. Clay records what is happening around him, and, occasionally, the immediate emotional effect the events have on him. But he does not reflect on these events and they only leave minor traces of emotional disturbance in the discourse, witness the following scene where one of the subordinate characters, Muriel, is fixing herself in the presence of others: Muriel holds the syringe and Kim whispers, ‘Don’t do it,’ but her lips are trembling and she looks excited and I can make out the beginnings of a smile and I get the feeling that she doesn’t mean it and as the needle sticks into Muriel’s arm, Blair gets up and says, ‘I’m leaving,’ and walks out of the room. Muriel closes her eyes and the syringe slowly fills with blood. Spit says, ‘Oh, man, this is wild.’ The photographer takes a picture.

––––––––––––– 27

Ellis (1986: 190).

330

Per Krogh Hansen

My hands shake as I light a cigarette. Muriel begins to cry and Kim strokes her head, but Muriel keeps crying and drooling all over, looking like she’s laughing really and her lipstick’s smeared all over her lips 28 and nose and her mascara’s running down the cheeks.”

Even though the situation leaves a trace of intensity in Clay’s description by means of the repeated use of conjunction and the uncommon contraction in “lipstick’s” and “mascara’s”, it is still the objective recording of the events that dominates. Clay records his own condition by external observation (the shaking hand), and not by inner emotions. However, the FPPT is not maintained all through the novel. As we approach the end the past tense is increasingly used, which places the narrator in a position of temporal and spatial distance. The distance is anticipated by the use of prolepsis as a marker of time in a present tense chapter (“The week before I leave, one of my sister’s cats disappears.”29), followed closely by a chapter using the same prolepsis in present tense, but shifting to past tense immediately afterwards (“The week before I leave, I listen to a song by an L.A. composer about the city. I would listen to the song over and over […]”30). Past tense is maintained in the following two chapters, and by way of conjunction we return to present tense for a series of chapters (“And I see Finn at the Hughes Market […]”31) until we are finally sent back to a past tense by yet another conjunction, expressing a direct connection to the preceding chapter in the present tense (“And before I left, I read an article […]”32). The conjunctions, however, only serve as a formal connection between the chapters and the tense shifts do not really make sense. Instead the reader is left with an impression of the narrator struggling to transgress the present tense in favour of the past tense. This is accomplished gradually through the beginnings of the final three chapters, ranging from the quote just discussed, “And before I left, […]” over “When I left […]”33 to a clearly marked distance in “There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group.”34 –––––––––––––

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ibid.: 86. Ibid.: 192. Ibid.: 193. Ibid.: 196. Ibid.: 206. Ibid.: 207. Ibid.: 208.


331

We could suspect this shift to be a mere matter of offering the reader a narrative frame from where the FPPT could be considered a traditional historical present and thus be resolved. But the function is nearly the opposite, since we cannot help but speculate about the relation between the disinterested, non-involved but still precise narration (as if) from a ‘hereand-now’ and the implementation of a retrospect narrational position. Especially when we consider what the narrator is telling us in the final chapter: There was a song I heard when I was In Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called “Los Angeles ” and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time. After I left.

The allegorical parallel between what Clay is witnessing in Los Angeles and the images that keep on haunting him is obvious, and the final chapter serves as a mise-en-abyme for Clay’s relation to his past. Even though he has physically left Los Angeles, it remains his only point of reference – that is all that is present to him. To naturalize the differentiation in the narrational structure, one could see the FPPT section as an act of Freudian repetition, and thereby ascribe Clay a traumatic trait. The information about Clay finding out that the images are personal and not shared by any of his acquaintances supports this interpretation and opens up for a reading of the FTTP section as potentially unreliable (can we be certain of Clay’s observations or have we been misguided by his objective mode of telling?), just as the final section’s past tense functions as a marker of Clay taking the first (mental) step out of his Los Angeles trauma. To leave the past behind, one has to be able to talk about it as past, not present. While Clay is stepping out of his trauma, we might as well take a step backwards and take a look at our own interpretational activity above. To describe the variety in textual strategies that can promote narrative unreliability, I have elsewhere suggested taxonomy of four categories35 – intranarrational, internarrational, intertextual and extratextual unreliability – which I shall briefly rehearse here. Intranarrational unreliability refers to ––––––––––––– 35

See Hansen (2003, 2005, 2007).

332

Per Krogh Hansen

unreliability established and supported by the large stock of what Wall has labelled “verbal tics”36 and other textual indicators of uncertainty in and on what is being narrated: explicit claims of reliability, subjective efforts at partiality, absurdities or violations of the logic and the premises of the story world, changes in the use of pronouns, a marked attention towards one’s reactions, etc.37 Internarrational unreliability refers to the situation where a narrator’s version of the incidents is contrasted by the version of one or more other narrators. This ‘other’ narrator can be identical with the first, for instance if a span of time or gained knowledge is in between the two positions. This type of unreliability may likewise occur with different forms of embedded narration. In opposition to the intranarrational type, the internarrational unreliability is not necessarily marked discursively in the unreliable narrator’s discourse, but comes into being by the framing of other voices and non-correspondence with what is taking form as the factual story on their behalf – either because they are of greater authority, or because they serve as independent but agreeing witnesses.38 The intra- and the internarrational unreliability are alike in that they both rest on textually observable issues, which are manifested as conflict. When it comes to the two remaining categories, they differ from the intratextual variants since they depend on extra- or contextual issues. Intertextual unreliability is based on manifest character types, which direct the reader’s attention towards their potential unreliability, either through their conventional configuration or through paratextual elements, such as the well-known epigram in Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), the title of Thomas Mann’s picaresque novel Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954) or the title of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991).39 In most –––––––––––––

36 37

38

39

Wall (1994). For a systematic and detailed account, see Allrath (1998). These indicators functions as cues for the reader for reflection over the trustability of the narrator, which, however, will have to end out in a general rejection of the narrator’s version of the story in favor of a (re)construction of ‘how it really was’ to label the narrator unreliable. Ellis has explored this strategy in another novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), where a group of narrators belonging to the same environment is telling about shared situations and experiences – but where especially the human relations they seem to identify (attraction, rejection, sym- and antipathy) only vaguely seem to unite in a shared protocol. None of the narrators have a privileged knowledge or a privileged position which authorizes their version. In this case, all narrators are unreliable and the text is established as conflicting multiperspectivism. See Riggan (1981), who points out and follows some of the essential types.


333

cases, these types will of course be further made manifest through intranarrational unreliability markers. From a stringent formalistic point of view, one could claim that the interpretation of unreliability is dependent on these markers and not on the preconceptions concerning the characternarrator so that this category could be removed from the taxonomy. Such a critique, however, would overlook some of the major insights conveyed by genre theory and genre studies, namely that genre to a very high degree establishes a horizon of expectations for the reader which predetermines a large part of the meaning of the text. And this holds true as well for reader’s identification of typological aspects of characters and narrators. The mere identification of a character-narrator as a specific, recognizable type which normally would act unreliably will let the reader pursue this aspect in the reading. That the expectation is not necessarily honoured is obvious and the irony will in these cases be ambiguous and left open for the reader to decide. Here we arrive at my final category, the extratextual variant, which designating unreliability that depends on the reader’s direct implementation of his or her own values or knowledge in the story world. In a series of articles, Ansgar Nünning has tried to generalize this feature by considering the concept of the unreliable narrator as a means of naturalization. He has claimed that the concept can be defined “neither as a structural nor as a semantic aspect of the textbase alone, but only by taking into account the conceptual frameworks that readers bring for the text”.40 When the reader finds inconsistencies in the narration, s/he brings ––––––––––––– 40

Nünning (1999: 60). See also Nünning (1997, 1998b, 1998a). Phelan has criticized Nünning for exaggerating the reader’s role and neglecting the author’s agency, and claims that the interpretive move to read textual inconsistencies as a signal of unreliability doesn’t make any hermeneutic sense if it isn’t based on the assumption that ‘someone’ designed the inconsistency as a signal of unreliability (Phelan 2005: 48). Nünning himself has accepted this criticism and claims that his former exclusive focus on the readers’ response as the motivating factor in detecting a narrator’s unreliability needs to be “supplemented by the insight that the narrators unintentional selfincrimination in turn presupposes an intentional act by some sort of higher-level authorial agency, though it may be open to debate whether we should attribute the constructive and intentional acts to ‘the implied author’ or ‘the real author’” Nünning (2005: 100). I have discussed and criticized this claim and Nünning’s former position in some detail in Hansen (2007) and will have to leave out all reservations here in favour of what should be praised: Nünning can be credited with uncovering that the determination of a narrator’s unreliability in many cases does rely on the reader’s constructive involvement.

334

Per Krogh Hansen

them at rest by relating them to frameworks of different kind, both on a general level (that is for the whole text) and in local incidents. One of Nünning’s main arguments here concerns the fact that the history of interpretation has shown that texts which at one time were considered to be straightforwardly reliable, are read as unreliable in a new historical situation (due to changes in ideology and culture).41 He explains this by arguing that the normative system of the story world, which was formerly in accordance with the consensual understanding of reality, is now being discredited. Since the reader ‘enters’ the story world by means of an intradiegetic narrator, the latter will in that case be held responsible for the unacceptable normativity of the work. But the extratextual unreliability can also function on a more stable and local basis. The text may postulate a clear resemblance with the real world and thereby borrow a behavioural pattern, a situation or an object from it, leaving it to the reader to complete its existence and consequences in the reading. This function can take different forms – from the simple interpretation of a character’s behavioural pattern by the strategies we follow when we interpret non-fictionalized human beings, to the narrator’s misinterpretation of commonly known historical facts. The four basic forms of narrational unreliability I have sketched here will of course often function together in a text so that the unreliability is simultaneously marked in the narrator’s discourse, by other narrators relating, by virtue of the character type the narrator is modelled on, and in relation to the knowledge the reader brings to the text. It is thus possible to determine four different strategies for the same effect – but they should, precisely because of their divergence, be treated as distinct features. If we return to Less than Zero, we see that the narration, since it is in an objective and recording mode, does not carry any immediate intranarrational unreliability signs (verbal tics, self-contradictions, uncertainties, emotional outbursts, metanarrative comments, etc.). Instead, it is the internarrational relation established between two narrative positions – the one (the present tense position) embedded in the other (the past tense position) – within the same narrative subject which cues our suspicion towards the reliability of the first of these. Further, this suspicion is being reinforced when we consider the narrator to be suffering from a trauma: We detect a character-type and make an intertextual connection to other ––––––––––––– 41

See also e.g. Cohn (2000) and Nünning, V. (1998).


335

specimens of this type, and bring in the stock of assorted characteristic traits as an extratextual frame of reference to explain the mode of narration. From here, the interpretation could be developed even further by taking for granted Clay’s final words about the images being personal and solely his own and thereby consider the whole FPPT-section as unreliable.42 From being a sophisticated mode of objective narration, the FPPT has by now turned into a matter of subjective traumatic repetition and repression.

4. Conclusion One might claim that the final moves in this interpretation are going too far. Yet, we should not forget that these interpretational moves have been and still are very common43 and that they cannot be rejected as they are established on the basis of instabilities in the text which call for naturalization. Even though the final inclusion of past tense narration in Less than Zero directs the reader’s naturalization of the disturbed narration, one should not overlook the fact that the constant attempt to find reasons and systems is a part of the general game one enters when reading a FPPTnarrated text. In most cases the reader’s attempt to interpret is left unresolved, if not downrightly rejected, by the text itself. We could go as far as claiming that this feature is a logical consequence of the FPPT insofar as the basic configuration of the mode manifests an encapsulated resistance towards narrative in general. As remarked in the beginning, one of the founding characteristics of narrative is the temporal distance between the incidents that are being narrated and the narrative situation. This is certainly lacking in FPPT-narration – and it is not a dispensable detail. One might go as far as saying that at least a minimal temporal distance is ––––––––––––– 42 43

One might add that that there is no direct evidence in the discourse of this unreliability (there are no intranarrational inconsistencies) besides the laconic tone of his narration. One might mention older psychoanalytical fiction studies like e.g. Guerard’s study of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness under the title “The Journey Within”. Guerard wants us to “recognize that the story is not primarily about Kurtz or about the brutality of Belgian officials but about Marlow its narrator”, and that the story is quite unbelievable if read literally. Instead it should be read as we would read a dream, for “the personal narrative is unmistakably authentic, which means that it explores something truer, more fundamental, and distinctly less material: the night journey into the unconscious, and confrontation of an entity within the self” (Guerard 1958: 37, 39).

336

Per Krogh Hansen

necessary for structuring incidents in a narrative pattern. To propose a causal-temporal relation between events, the events have to be diachronically related (and not synchronically) and the relating instance (the narrator) has to be in a position from which the account becomes narratable – that is from a distance. In Nordkraft this distance was hidden behind the character-narrator’s present tense which covered an implicit authorial voice giving the reader an identificatory understanding of an otherwise distant character type, building up suspension by giving hints of future events and establishing room and location in detailed description. In Less than Zero the distance was exposed in the end by the past tense narration, and the apathetic as well as chronological telling was given a frame by which it could be accounted for. Yet My Loose Thread does not include a temporal distance. For this reason, the narrative falls apart or – more precisely – is never established: the chronology breaks down, we are given no elaborate introduction to characters and localities, it is unclear what is fantasy and what reality, and the character-narrator gradually disintegrates in contrast to Maria’s development and Clay’s at least minor development. Whereas Nordkraft gives the implicit authorial voice control over the ‘narrativization’ of the incidents and Less then Zero gives it to the narrator by letting him tell from a distance and, hence, from an explicitly authorial position, My Loose Thread – which realises FPPT in its most consequent form – leaves it to the reader to suggest explanatory stories for Larry’s situation. One feels tempted to conclude, with an allusion to Barthes’ famous dictum in The Death of the Author44, that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the omission of the author. This is less drastic than Barthes perhaps, but nonetheless a similar idea.

––––––––––––– 44

Barthes (1988).


337

Works Cited Allrath, Greta 1998 “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ Textuelle Signale für die Ermittlung von unreliable narration,” in Unreliable Narration: Studien sur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzähllitteratur, edited by A. Nünning, C. Surkamp and B. Zerweck (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier): 59–80. Barthes, Roland 1988 “The death of the author,” in Modern Criticism and Theory. A reader, edited by D. Lodge (London & N.Y.: Longman): 167–172. Booth, Wayne C. 1974 A rhetoric of irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Cohn, Dorrit 1999 The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press). 2000 “Discordant Narration,” in Style 34.2: 307–316. Cooper, Dennis 2002 My loose thread (Edinburgh: Canongate). Ejersbo, Jakob 2003 Nordkraft. roman (København: Gyldendal). 2004 Nordkraft (Toronto: McArthur & Co.). Ellis, Bret Easton 1986 Less than Zero (London: Picador). Fludernik, Monika 1996 Towards a ‘natural’ narratology (London & N.Y.: Routledge). Guerard, Albert J. 1958 Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Hansen, Per Krogh 2003 “Hvem sagde upålidelig? Om sanktioneringen af upålideligheden i den upålidelige narration,” in Berättaren: En gäckande röst i texten, edited by L.-Å. Skalin (Örebro: Örebro Universitet): 149–176. 2005 “When Facts Become Fiction: On Extra-Textual Unreliable Narration,” in Fact and Fiction in Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by L.-Å. Skalin (Örebro: Örebro University): 283–307. 2007 “Reconsidering the Unreliable Narrator,” Semiotica 165.1: 227–246. Laurence, Alexander 2002 “Dennis Cooper Interview.” http://www.denniscooper.net/myloosethread.htm. Nielsen, Henrik Skov 2004 “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Fiction,” in Narrative 12.2: 133–150. Nünning, Ansgar 1997 “‘But why will you say that I am mad?” On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction,” in AAA. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22.1: 83–105. 1998a “Unreliable Narration zur Einführung. Grundzüge einer kognitiv-narratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens,” in Unreliable Narra-

338

Per Krogh Hansen

tion: Studien sur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, edited by A. Nünning, C. Surkamp and B. Zerweck (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier). 1998b “Unreliable Narrator,” in Encyclopaedia of the Novel, edited by P. E. Schellinger (Chicago & London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers): 1386–1388. 1999 “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of ‘Unreliable Narration’: Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologien im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, edited by W. Grünzweig and A. Solbach (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag): 53–73. 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration”, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (Malden, Ma & Oxford: Blackwell Pub.): 89–107. Nünning, Vera 1998 “Unreliable narration und die historische Variabilität von Werten und Normen: The Vicar of Wakefield als Testfall für eine kulturgeschichtliche Erzählforschung,” in Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, edited by A. Nünning (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier): 257–285. Olson, Greta 2003 “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators”, in Narrative 11.1: 93–109. Phelan, James 2005 Living to tell about it. A rhetoric and ethics of character narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Riggan, William 1981 Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 1983 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London & N.Y.: Routledge). Robbe-Grillet, Alain 1966 For a new novel: essays on fiction (N.Y.: Grove Press). Wall, Kathleen 1994 “The Remains of the Day And Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” in The Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1: 18–42.

Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory Beitrage zur Erzahltheorie)

Eventfulness in British Fiction (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory)

Narratologie des Raumes (Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory)

Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory)

A Companion to Narrative Theory

Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research (Narratologia)

Postmodern narrative theory

Beyond Narrative Coherence (Studies in Narrative)

Narrative Form

Narrative Ethics

Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Frontiers of Narrative)

Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse (Studies in Narrative)

Narrative Sentences

Narrative Therapy

Reading Narrative

Narrative Intelligence

Reading narrative

On Narrative

Das narrative Urteil: Erzählerische Problemverhandlungen von Hiob bis Kant (Narratologia)

The Frontiersman - A Narrative

The Narrative Reader

The Slave's Narrative

The Slave's Narrative

The Sociolinguistics of Narrative

Ancient Narrative: Supplementum 1 Space in the Ancient Novel

Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914

Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative Edition 2

Narrative Strategies in Television Series

Poetry and Narrative in Performance

Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory Beitrage zur Erzahltheorie)

Eventfulness in British Fiction (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory)

Narratologie des Raumes (Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory)

Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader (Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative Theory)

A Companion to Narrative Theory

Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research (Narratologia)

Postmodern narrative theory

Beyond Narrative Coherence (Studies in Narrative)

Narrative Form

Narrative Ethics

Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Frontiers of Narrative)

Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse (Studies in Narrative)

Narrative Sentences

Narrative Therapy

Reading Narrative

Narrative Intelligence

Reading narrative

On Narrative

Das narrative Urteil: Erzählerische Problemverhandlungen von Hiob bis Kant (Narratologia)

The Frontiersman - A Narrative

The Narrative Reader

The Slave's Narrative

The Slave's Narrative

The Sociolinguistics of Narrative

Ancient Narrative: Supplementum 1 Space in the Ancient Novel

Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914

Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative Edition 2

Narrative Strategies in Television Series

Poetry and Narrative in Performance

Recommend Documents