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Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita
Abstract
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. (391)
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. (419)
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. (9)
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 well-wrought 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 2007 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 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...
... Yet every single one in this cacophony of focalizers is unreliable-the unreliability even extends to the voice of the heterodiegetic narrator, who keeps together all strands of narration. As a result, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what James Phelan (2007) calls "estranging" ( [9], p. 223) and "bonding" ( [9], p. 223) unreliability. This article aims to show how the unreliable narration of The Plague Dogs defamiliarizes a writing tradition usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, and in doing so calls into question the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world. ...
... Yet every single one in this cacophony of focalizers is unreliable-the unreliability even extends to the voice of the heterodiegetic narrator, who keeps together all strands of narration. As a result, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what James Phelan (2007) calls "estranging" ( [9], p. 223) and "bonding" ( [9], p. 223) unreliability. This article aims to show how the unreliable narration of The Plague Dogs defamiliarizes a writing tradition usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, and in doing so calls into question the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world. ...
... Yet every single one in this cacophony of focalizers is unreliable-the unreliability even extends to the voice of the heterodiegetic narrator, who keeps together all strands of narration. As a result, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what James Phelan (2007) calls "estranging" ( [9], p. 223) and "bonding" ( [9], p. 223) unreliability. This article aims to show how the unreliable narration of The Plague Dogs defamiliarizes a writing tradition usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, and in doing so calls into question the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world. ...
Richard Adams’s talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode of narration, offers a multiplicity of avenues to explore the literary animal as animal. The story draws much of its power from the psychological complexity and related unreliability of both canine narrators, two research lab escapees gone feral. Both the terrier Snitter and the black mongrel Rowf are mentally ill and experience a highly subjective, part-fantastic world. In episodes of zero focalization, a sarcastic voice comments on the plot from the off, aggressively attacking a thoroughly anthropocentric superstructure the protagonists themselves are oblivious of, and presenting all that is normally constructed as “rational” in the implied reader’s world as a carnivalesque farce. Combining these equally unreliable narratives, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what Phelan (2007) calls “estranging” and “bonding” unreliability and brings to light the devastating consequences of anthropocentrism. The Plague Dogs not only defamiliarizes a genre usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, but the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world, showing that once we start to read the animal as animal, this sets into motion an avalanche of other concepts in need of re-reading, among them the very ones making up the fundamental pillars of Western societies’ anthropocentric self-conception.
... The review of literature makes it possible to assert that the research of narrative techniques "narratology" engaged foreign and domestic scientists: Bekhta-Hamanchuk (2017), Booth (1983), Chatman (1978), Phelan (2007), Rymar (2016), Schmid (2003), Shen (2013). ...
... As long as Booth focused on the study of the theory of unreliable narrations, Phelan (2007) improved the distinction between the types of unreliability as defined by Booth, describes the principles of structuralist, cognitive, feminist and rhetorical approaches to the narrative. It is worth noting that Phelan (2004, p. 50) indicates that "narrators play three main roles: report, interpret and evaluate, sometimes they play the roles simultaneously, and sometimes -successively". ...
The article is devoted to the consideration the problem of the phenomenon of an unreliable narration in the British intellectual prose of the second half of the twentieth century (Golding, Murdoch). The meaning of the words “narrator”, “unreliable narration” is investigated. The unreliable narration is reviewed based on the example of the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding (1980). It is noted that the aforementioned work has a vibrant didactic component. It has been found that Golding uses a wide range of narrative techniques. The emphasis is made on the critical analysis by other literary scholars of the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding. The use of narrative strategies in accordance with the scientific classification by Genette (1980) is investigated. The markers of unreliability of the narrators are emphasized. Attention is focused on the fact that a high degree of unreliability is based on the limited knowledge of the heroes, direct participation in the events, a problematic system of values. It is noted that the unreliability of narration in the novel “Rites of Passage” by Golding forces the reader to doubt not only the narrator but oneself. The use of the narrative method in the intellectual prose of the British writer Iris Murdoch is investi-gated. It has been found that the novel “The Black Prince” by Iris Murdock (2006) is one of the best examples of an unreliable narration. The genre specifics of the novel are emphasized, which combines the forms of the diary, of the memoir and of the confession. In addition, Murdoch creates a narrative strategy, which combines signs of various forms of “I am the narrator” within the framework of one narrative. In addition, “The Black Prince” is a unique model of modern artistic and philosophical metatext genre formation.
... Synergi av detta slag kan i bästa fall iakttas i exempelvis narratologiska analyser av otillförlitliga eller på annat sätt felbara berättare som erbjuder en naturlig koppling mellan verkets form och dess värderingar och världsbild. 35 Lovande ansatser återfinns sedan sekelskiftet 2000 även i den rörelse som har kallats "New Aestheticism" men som ännu inte har fått luft under vingarna. 36 Då den litterära formen uttryckligen behandlas sker det därför ofta separat i versläran och i mer specialiserade narratologiska studier. ...
Literary Scholarship in the Future: From Canon-Centred Subaltern to Literary-Minded Social Participant Appreciation of literature and literary scholarship has arguably been on the wane in the twenty-first century. In this article, I argue that literary scholarship, in response to this declining interest, needs to be reformed. Literary scholars should continue to study literature from all historical periods, but they need to deal with the conflict between the democratic values of contemporary readers and pre-1968 sexism and racism in literature. This blight on the reading experience cannot be removed by the one-sided measures of historicism or presentism. Rather than marginalizing popular literature, children’s literature, and non-Western literature, scholars should integrate this body of work into the core of literary studies and accord them roughly half of their interest alongside canonized Western literature for adults. Literary scholars should also be prepared to present their teaching curricula as a development of skills that can be used in the processing and evaluation of any kind of text in any kind of employment in a company or a government agency. Furthermore, rather than produce literary readings mainly in terms of content, scholars should highlight the synergy of content and literary qualities such as form, fictionality and generalizability. This will allow them to valorize the enhanced understanding of real-life phenomena offered by literary works in the form of socially useful “applied literary scholarship.” The fields of operation for literary studies should include schools; the training of professionals, such as doctors and economists; and bibliotherapy designed to alleviate anxiety and malaise before it develops into a mental condition requiring treatment in a healthcare system that is already stretched beyond its capacity.
... As the Swedish legal system builds on the principles of orality and immediacy, being attentive and openminded are important aspects of the professional role. The legal procedure demands legal actors to listen and imagine events 'with reservations' (Phelan, 2007) and through a 'skeptical receptiveness' (Törnqvist, 2017). In the legal context, sympathy is associated with being biased and is shunned by legal actors. ...
By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal interaction order in court.
... As the audience, do we distance ourselves from the narrator, or do we get closer to each other when we recognize the contradictions in his/her narration? James Phelan (2007b) paves the way for an answer to such a question in his theory of estranging and bonding unreliability. Of these two types of unreliability, estranging unreliability means a distance, or estrangement in the communicative exchange between the narrator and the authorial audience whereas bonding unreliability marks, in an unlike way, reduction of this distance between the participants, as stated by Phelan: "In bonding unreliability, the discrepancies between the narrator"s reports, interpretations, or evaluations and the inferences of the authorial audience have the paradoxical result of reducing the interpretive, affective, or ethical distance between the narrator and the authorial audience" (2007b, p. 225). ...
... It is important to note that the discussion that follows by no means strives to be a complete analysis of viewpoint and narration in Lolita, let alone a just treatment of the ethical implications and problematic reception of the novel. For more in-depth treatments we refer to Zeman (2016), Phelan (2007), Zunshine (2006), and Boyd (1991). ...
This paper discusses several conventional perspective operators at the lexical, grammatical, and narrative levels. When combined with each other and with particular contexts, these operators can amount to unexpected viewpoints arrangements. Traditional conceptualisations in terms of viewpoint embedding and the regular shifting from one viewpoint to the other are argued to be insufficient for describing these arrangements in all their nuances and details.
We present an analysis of three cases in which viewpoints of speaker, addressee, and third parties are mutually coordinated: (i) global and local perspective structure in Nabokov’s novel Lolita , (ii) postposed reporting constructions in Dutch, and (iii) the Russian apprehensive construction, which has a seemingly redundant negation marker in the subordinate clause. For each of these three cases, we discuss how traditional conceptualisations fall short. We discuss an alternative model of viewpoint construction which allows for the conceptual juxtaposition and mixing of different and simultaneously activated viewpoints.
... To some extent, I agree with Nünning (1997: 87) that "the implied author's norms are [for all practical intents and purposes] impossible to establish and that the concept of the implied author is eminently dispensable". He also points out the weak points of several other critics in this regard, including Chatman, Prince, Rimmon-Kenan, Riggan, Wall and Yacobi -and I would add Currie (1995), Phelan (2007) and Lothe (2000) to this list -all of whom rely implicitly or explicitly on the implied author 3 . However, a problem arises in that no wholly satisfactory account has been provided in terms of where the implied author comes from. ...
There is a sustained debate in the academy about the role of narratology in film studies. This article forms part of this larger debate in exploring the application of the concept of unreliable narration to films, specifically to Jee-woon Kim's little-known but exceptional film A Tale of Two Sisters (2003). A dispute surrounding this narratological device has centred on how readers or viewers determine that the narration deviates from diegetic truth. Two major strands of narratology have given divergent answers to this question: the rhetorical approach has been in favour of aligning diegetic truth with an "implied author", while the cognitive approach has called the implied author into question, instead focusing on the viewer's construction of the diegetic truth. This paper investigates the possibility of integrating the two approaches in terms of the viewer's construction of ethical judgements and cued inferences, which would open up a new avenue for considering this narrative device.
... The hesitation to sympathize with the narrator is perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment of Lolita. The diverse responses within the cline of discordance to complicity with Lolita's unreliable principal narrator and the lingering doubt about the textual author's moral inclination were issues that greatly upset the ethical standards of Wayne Booth in his The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth 1961), 10 The rhetorical strategies underlying the construction of Humbert Humbert's voice(s), to which heterolingualism and strenuous convolutions of English are integral, have elicited heated debates among narratologists ever since (Phelan 2007). The pulverization of authority in Lolita's narration is compounded by the craft of embedded narrative, with the dramatization of editorial intervention ("John Ray, Jr., PhD.," signing the preface) and by the "impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov" (Nabokov 1991: 311) in its afterword of 1956. ...
This article is a first-person account of the translation of Lolita into Portuguese dealing primarily with the question of how to treat English as a source language that should be replaced by the translating language. The novel foregrounds the narrator’s stridency as a non-“native illusionist” (Nabokov 1955/1991: 317), along with a heterolingual bend, presenting remarkable challenges for translation: how to represent the geopolitics of linguistic hybridity in the TT and how to maintain the ambiguity of alignments between (implied) reader(s), author(s) and competing instances of narratorial authority, including the “fictional translator” (Klinger 2015: 16).
Selective non-translation is suggested as an option for addressing linguistic hybridity through which, in this context, the “differential voice(s)” (Hermans 2007; Suchet: 2013) might foreground linguistic (and hence cultural/ideological) difference and deviation. The adherence to a strategy of “overt translation” (House 2001) is not intended to break the “translator’s pact” (Alvstad: 2014); it refuses, however, the convention of transparency as one of its tenets. It also shifts the focus from phonocentric authority to a polyphonous palimpsest and an archaeology of language(s) – not an entrenched foreignization, but an availability for “other-languagedness” (Bakhtin: 1981).
... Epäluotettavaa kerrontaa tutkineet teoreetikot ovat viime vuosikymmeninä kiinnittäneet huomiota paitsi epäluotettavuuden tyyppien laajaan kirjoon myös tunnevaikutuksiin, joita mahdollisesti epäluotettavan kertojan havaitseminen lukijassa synnyttää. Epäluotettavuuden tunnistaminen voi herättää lukijassa vastenmielisyyttä ja vieraantumista tai vaihtoehtoisesti myötätuntoa tai sääliä (Phelan 2007b;myös Nünning 2015, 21). Lisäksi kerronnan epäluotettavuus voi lisätä henkilöhahmon kiinnostavuutta esteettisessä mielessä. ...
Artikkelini tarkastelee eksistentiaalisten tunteiden kerrontaa ja minäkerronnan epäluotettavuutta Kerttu-Kaarina Suosalmen novellissa ”Synti eli punapartainen ikoni” (1957). Novelli kuuluu modernistiseen kertomustraditioon, jossa eksistentiaalinen kokemuksellisuus hahmottuu keskeiseksi osaksi inhimillisen tietoisuuden kuvausta. Artikkelin keskiössä ovat epäsuoran retorisen kommunikaation keinot, joiden avulla tekijä pyrkii herättämään lukijassa ristiriitaisia tunnereaktioita. Artikkeli keskittyy ennen kaikkea epäluotettavaan kerrontaan, jota Suosalmi hyödyntää säädelläkseen kerronnallista etäisyyttä ensimmäisen persoonan kertojan ja lukijan välillä. Millaisia tietoon ja tunteisiin liittyviä vaikutuksia epäluotettava kerronta herättää lukijassa ja kuinka erilaiset tulkinnat ja tunnereaktiot elävät lukuprosessin aikana? Artikkeli osoittaa, että Suosalmi hyödyntää sekä lähentävän että etäännyttävän epäluotettavan kerronnan (Phelan 2007) keinoja ohjatakseen lukijan tunnereaktioita. Suosalmen novellissa kerronnan epäluotettavuus kumpuaa usein kertojan eksistentiaalisesta kärsimyksestä, mikä vähentää tunnetason etäisyyttä kertojan ja tekijän yleisön välillä. Tämä ensimmäistä tyyppiä edustava epäluotettavuus herättää lukijassa sympatiaa ja sääliä pikemminkin kuin epäluottamusta. Jälkimmäistä tyyppiä edustava kerronnan epäluotettavuus puolestaan viittaa eettisiin vääristymiin, joka lisäävät tunnetason etäisyyttä kertojan ja tekijän yleisön välillä. Toisaalta Suosalmen novellin eksistentiaalisten tunteiden kerronta johtaa kyseenalaistamaan epäluotettavan kerronnan teorian dikotomioita, erityisesti sen ennakko-oletuksia kertojien ”normaaliudesta” tai ”hulluudesta”. Novellin epäsuora retorinen kommunikaatio ohjaa lukijaa uudelleenarvioimaan minäkertojan ongelmallista maailmankuvaa ja identiteettiä suhteessa sisäistettyyn sosiaaliseen vallankäyttöön ja mahdollisesti jopa väkivaltaan.
... Explica los orígenes del problema como resultado del maltrato y del humo del azogue, enfatizando así la importancia del contexto, haciendo menos significante el contenido del testimonio. Así produce lo que Phelan llama ''bonding unreliability'' (Phelan 2007): una narración infidente que por serlo logra acercar el lector al narrador infidente. En vez de establecer la autoridad del poder basándose en una subversión de la credibilidad del forzado (con lo cual se debería producir un distanciamiento entre lector y el forzado/narrador), se produce una identificación entre lector y forzado/narrador justamente porque la situación en la cual se presenta la narración infidente se presenta así como más verdadera, como si nos dijera el narrador ''Mira ese pobre, que balbucea y miente porque ha perdido el seso por causa de los humos del azogue''. ...
The following article discusses the representation of marginality in two early modern Spanish texts. Firstly, the episode of the galley slaves in the first part of Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes, and, secondly, the informe secreto (1593) by Mateo Alemán, a report on the conditions of forced laborers in the quicksilver mines of Almadén. The comparison allows us to discuss specific instances of the narration of the marginal experience in texts both inside and outside the realm of fiction. The article starts out with a discussion of the many suggestive parallels between the episode in Don Quixote and the informe secreto. Subsequently, it proposes an interpretation of the episode of the galley slaves as a discussion of the contemporary practice of interviewing marginals for government reports such as the informe secreto. The problems put forth in the episode of the galley slaves, such as the unreliable narration of the criminal, the power disparity between the interviewer and the interviewed and the narrative and topical nature of the responses by the interviewed, can also be observed in the informe secreto. In the second part of the article, we use these findings to discuss the practice of microhistory and its program of reconstructing the marginal experience using such documents as the informe secreto. In doing so, we extend the critical representation of the act of interviewing marginals in Don Quixote to a critical evaluation of the microhistorical approach to the representation of the marginal experience in present-day historiography.
... Grushin 2006, 31); the other three, intertwined, make up not only his relation to the reader but also his personality: he first becomes a liar in regard to the authorities, and then to himself; gradually, his self-delusion and solipsism make him a naïf in his own family (he is the only one not to notice developments apparent to his wife and children); finally, he turns into a madman. Literally ever more unreliable in regard to the present, he arguably becomes ever more reliable metaphorically, so that his unreliability can cease to estrange, becoming a bonding feature instead (Phelan 2007) if the reader shares in his growing regret and insanity. ...
The present article analyzes visual and literary surrealism as a theme and method in Olga Grushin’s debut novel
This chapter addresses the nuance of dystopian ethics, applying theoretical insights from psychology, narratology and cognitive linguistics to the reading of twenty-first-century feminist dystopia. In exploring the relationship between the worlds of the text and the world of the reader, it examines how a reader’s processes of world-building may provoke an ethical and didactic response.
In this chapter, I investigate the relationship between narrative (un)reliability and dystopian refraction. Drawing upon both narratological and stylistic approaches, I analyse the ways in which dystopian narratives project the uncertainty, anxieties and fears of their text-world enactors—and, by extension, of base-reality—through unreliability, addressing both unreliable world-building and unreliable narration. To exemplify such practice, I draw attention to the unreliability of ecodystopian worlds, specifically, discussing such topics as the dystopian lie, the language of propaganda and the particular texture of plague or outbreak narratives.
Game scholars have discussed both the ways in which video games structurally differ from literary fiction and the ways in which they remediate motifs and narrative strategies from it. In this article, I reverse the direction of that exchange, arguing that video games are disclosing new perspectives on both literary writing and literary interpretation. My focus is on how literature can integrate ludic strategies on a formal level, rather than by merely thematizing games (as genre fiction does extensively). I thus discuss three formal devices—multimodality, present-tense narration, and loop-like repetitions—that evince considerable literary interest in gaming culture. Through these formal experimentations, literature participates in a media environment that is significantly shaped by games. I argue that this intermedial transfer also offers an opportunity for a literary scholarship to enrich its conceptual and interpretive toolbox through dialogue with both game studies and gaming culture.
There emerges in the nineteenth century with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground the stylized estranged male character narrative who will subvert the more holistic direction of the Bildungsroman toward the exploration of narcissism, solipsism, sadism, masochism, and helplessness of the masculine subject in the modern environment, and his waning empathy and connectedness with others and refueled misogyny and self-loathing. This narrational trend continues in Kafka, and develops more strongly in French existential narratives such as Camus’s L’étranger and Sartre’s La nausée, and deepens with Beckett’s postwar narratives, both short stories and his novels. The idea of the reader and writer taking part in what Nykanen terms an “aesthetical game of losing the self in the fictional Other, of transgressing and escaping the boundaries of the self” also involves a self-evaluation of one’s ethical flaws and egotism. As these are all narratives intensely focused on a (white) male subject in the process of self-investigation, socialized Eurocentric attributes often associated with manhood come to the fore: strength, authority, stoicism, intellectual superiority over women and ethic others.
This article focuses on the evocation of children’s experiences in fiction that engages with postapocalyptic scenarios. It examines three contemporary novels from profoundly different geographic contexts—Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna, and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness—that evoke a child’s experience of societal collapse in the wake of a catastrophic event. Diverse meanings come to the fore as these novels outline, through child focalization, the relevance of bodily experience, materiality, and reenchantment vis-à-vis the climate crisis and its uncertainties. This discussion shows how formal choices in climate fiction are instrumental in creating an affective trajectory that complicates adult readers’ perception of our collective future. These close readings stage an encounter between the fields of ecocriticism and childhood studies that speaks to the significance of the figure of the child in the environmental humanities: even in literature by and for adults, the integration of children’s perspectives on the end of the world performs important cultural work by questioning and decentering an understanding of the ecological crisis shaped exclusively by the adult (and adultist) anxieties of parenthood.
Unreliable narration research raises the problem of truthful information presented in fiction, which is for the most part made up. However, the truth in the fictional world is what the reader believes to be true. Therefore, deliberate deluding or confusing the reader by an untrustworthy character creates an additional fictional layer consisting of false facts. This represents the contradiction between the imaginary and the fake, the latter being untrue in terms of fiction. The paper examines how the author of the best-selling novel Gone Girl realizes her intention of deceiving or misleading the readers on the syntactic level of speech of the two main characters who are unreliable narrators. The analysis of sentence structure variety, average sentence length and syntactic stylistic peculiarities of I-utterances aims at ascertaining whether these devices and their frequency indicate that the author gives the readers a hint at the unreliability of the narration. Sentence complexity and types of clauses in composite sentences are also taken into consideration as possible signs of unreliability. As one main character is male and the other is female, the quantitative analysis of syntactic features is carried out separately to detect gender differences.
Die Kategorie des abstrakten Autors ist auf Lyrik übertragbar, da Gedichte eine grundsätzlich analoge Perspektivstruktur zu Ich-Erzählungen aufweisen, für die der Begriff ursprünglich (als implied author) eingeführt wurde. Denn ähnlich der Erzählerrede in der ersten Person besteht die prototypische Sprechsituation in der Lyrik aus der monologischen Rede eines Sprechers. In beiden Gattungen wird somit vom Verfasser mit dem Erzähler bzw. dem Sprecher eine Vermittlungsinstanz eingesetzt, die als alleinige Quelle die Geschehnisse in einer Erzählung bzw. die Wahrnehmungen, Reflexionen, Gefühle in einem Gedicht verantwortet. Die Gesamtkomposition des Werks macht dabei jedoch die standpunktbedingte Begrenztheit der Vermittlungsinstanz für den Leser beobachtbar. Dies gilt prinzipiell auch für die Lyrik, tritt hier allerdings seltener als in der Erzählliteratur in Erscheinung, bedingt durch die genrespezifische Konvention, die jeweilige Sehweise im Gedicht nachdrücklich zu beglaubigen, eine Tendenz, die James Phelan bonding strategy nennt. Als eklatante Beispiele für die Diskrepanz zwischen dem Standpunkt des Sprechers und der Sicht des abstrakten Autors werden zunächst Robert Gernhardts Sonett über Sonette und die dramatic monologues von Robert Browning vorgestellt. Um die generelle Fruchtbarkeit der Kategorie des abstrakten Autors in der Lyrikanalyse nachzuweisen, wird sodann deren Anwendung in einer historischen Bandbreite von Beispielen vorgeführt, einerseits an älteren Gedichten von William Wordsworth (“The world is too much with us”) und William Butler Yeats (“Sailing to Byzantium”), andererseits an zwei Beispielen aus der englischen Gegenwartslyrik, an „Hitcher” von Simon Armitage und „Comprehensive” von Carol Ann Duffy.
We aim to analyze how state rhetoric influences conceptualizations of COVID-19 presentation in the media.
This paper reads the autodiegetic narrator Sammy Mountjoy's retrospective and self-reflexive writing in William Golding's Free Fall (1959) as an absurd quest. Therefore, it centres itself on the concepts of free will and darkness, associating Sammy Mountjoy's darkness with the absurdity and darkness of the 20 th century, in which the implied author wrote his work. What make this deduction possible are three components of the narrative: its binaristic nature, self-reflexivity and the repeating narratives. When construed through the concept the absurd, these elements allow demonstrating the implied author William Golding's design to represent the absurd world through Sammy Mountjoy's quest. Therefore, this paper firstly focuses on examining the narrative's binaristic nature, narrative self-reflexivity, and repeating narratives in order to study the narrator's desire for a pattern and his self-questioning as a reflection of the implied author's design to convey the absurd man's situation in the twentieth century world. After this discussion, it pays attention to the clash between two specific binaries of spiritualism-rationalism and innocence-experience, in terms of the concept of darkness, and attempts to observe how they lead to a bonding unreliability, which paves way to a bonding communication between the implied author and his authorial audience. Considering the fact that Sammy Mountjoy follows a subjective pattern of events and accounts in his absurdist quest, this paper aims to conduct its rhetorical narratological analysis in the light of the narrator's casual-temporal order in order to build a bridge between the narrator's choices and the implied author William Golding's design.
This first novel of Mexican film director, scriptwriter, poet, multi-award-winning playwright, journalist, and political activist, Sabina Berman, appeared in English translation in 2012. Berman’s autistic narrator, Karen Nieto, uses notebooks and diaries to produce a memoir-style narrative that undercuts Cartesian understandings of rational human(ist) subjectivity; Nieto is embodied, and embedded in the world, then she attributes meaning. This paper argues that Berman repositions readers in relation to standard human subjectivity and values by consistently calling attention to differences between (an assumed) neurotypical reader and the representation of a neurodivergent narrator. Taking a Disability Rights perspective, Berman refuses to subsume the narrator’s neurodivergence to a neurotypical plot by representing her as an autistic savant or allowing her life story to be reduced to pain and suffering through social or medicalized deficits. An enactive reading of this autistic narrative highlights differences between neurotypical and neurodivergent positions without favoring the former as a point of origin or destination thereby facilitating a revaluation of what it means to be human. It highlights embodiment and embeddedness in environment. The paper also examines stylistic features of the text’s materiality that engage with echolalia and alexithymia to analyze how they enable defamiliarization to reposition readers.
As proposed by Olson and Copland (2016), “the politics of form” should help us examine both the ways in which politics condition narrative form and the ways in which narrative forms, in turn, participate in their political contexts. Contextualist approaches in narratology have gained attention since the beginning of the 21st century, but theorists still struggle to determine how political discourses are relevant to narrative form. This article proposes that the modulations of narrative reliability known as “estranging narration” (Phelan 2007) and “discordant narration” (Cohn 2002) are especially dependent on the political discourses that make them possible. Both categories describe forms of narrative reliability based on biased judgment rather than misreported facts, but the use of political ideology in these approaches has not been sufficiently examined. This is evident in Albert Camus’ L’étranger (1942) [ The Stranger ], which actively uses the École d’Alger colonial discourse of the Méditerranée from contemporaneous French Algeria, to produce an ambivalent version of estranging and discordant narration. The politics of form, therefore, provides an opportunity to delve into and revise the concepts of estranging and discordant narration, which constitute a good starting point for narratologists’ efforts to elucidate both the uses of historical discourse in narrative poetics and the uses of narrative poetics for shaping political ideology.
How does racial ideology contribute to the exploration of narrative voice? How does narrative reliability help in the production and critique of racial ideologies? Through a refreshing comparative analysis of well-established novels by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, Albert Camus and Alejo Carpentier, this book explores the racial politics of literary form. "Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel" contributes to the emergent attention in literary studies to the interrelation of form and politics, which has been underexplored in narrative theory and comparative racial studies. Bridging cultural, postcolonial, racial studies and narratology, this book brings context specificity and awareness to the production of ideological, ambivalent narrative texts that, through technical innovation in narrative reliability, deeply engage with extremely violent episodes of colonial origin in the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, and the French and Spanish Caribbean. In this manner, the book reformulates and expands the problem of narrative reliability, and highlights the key uses and production of racial discourses so as to reveal the participation of experimental novels in early and mid-20th century racial conflicts, which function as a test case to display a broad, new area of study in cultural and political narrative theory.
https://www.routledge.com/Narrative-Reliability-Racial-Conflicts-and-Ideology-in-the-Modern-Novel/Puxan-Oliva/p/book/9780367140878
Building on Susan Mizruchi’s article, “Lolita in History,” Wood uses Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the affective dimensions of fascism to show how the characters in Lolita are driven by fascistic desires. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Nabokov portrays liberating desire as a delusory trap. Instead, toward the end of Lolita Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert exhibit signs of altruism born of suffering (ABS), a psychological phenomenon supported by some recent cognitive studies. Though this change is ambiguous and incomplete, Nabokov uses religious allusions to suggest its transcendent power. Mentalizing with the characters’ responses to suffering, Wood argues, pushes readers toward what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “reparativereading” and what Nabokov terms the “kindness” and “tenderness” inseparable from “aesthetic bliss.”
Perturbatory narration is a new transmedial narratological concept conceived in order to analyze how innovative experimental fictional texts irritate the reader or spectator by transgressing or annulating the rules of the common narrative system. We distinguish three ludic narrative techniques which are sometimes even mutually exclusive, but nevertheless frequently combined in literary and filmic fiction. Perturbatory narration serves to model and systematize a narrative principle which combines devices of these three strategies, in particular of unreliable narration, paradoxical narration and puzzling narration. The dynamic interplay of these devices is illustrated with two short stories by Julio Cortázar, “Continuidad de los parques”/“The continuity of parks” (1964) and “Graffiti” (1980) and the filmic adaptation
Martha Nussbaum has famously argued that narrative fiction can expand readers' capacity to make appropriate ethical judgments because it requires readers' discernment of nuanced ethical situations, and because the emotional dynamics of engaging with the particulars of a fiction aids that discernment. In this essay, I argue that Nabokov's Lolita pushes Martha Nussbaum's philosophy of emotions and ethics to its limits by creating the audience position of “lyrical addressee,” which, in contrast with two other central audience positions, encourages affective participation and thus temporarily sidesteps concerns over ethical judgments against Humbert. Accounting for the critical tendency to ignore the power of emotions, I first describe how Lolita invokes the lyrical addressee only after Humbert establishes two other narratee positions, both of which devalue emotional experience and make it easy to ignore the lyrical addressee position. I argue that in the audience position of “lyrical addressee,” a reader can notice two important features that emphasize affective experience and feeling with Humbert: (1) the breakdown of the communicative situation, indicating the power of Humbert's emotions; and (2) the establishment of a “fuzzy” mood that transcends character and setting boundaries to involve even a reader who wishes to sympathize with Dolores's pain. Ultimately, in passages aimed at the lyrical addressee, there is a significant loss of the specificity that Nussbaum claims aids ethical decisions. In these moments, the move to generality, which appears in the form of a breakdown of communication and the permeable boundaries between characters and settings, renders ethical decisions temporarily irrelevant.
Zur Systematik des Kapitels: Die klassische Narratologie kennt lediglich die Dichotomie Diskurs (discours) und Geschichte (histoire). Der Erzähler und seine Merkmale werden dabei der Diskurs-Seite zugeschrieben (s. Kap. I.6). Im Rahmen dieser Einführung haben wir uns dagegen für eine Trias entschieden, in der die Dimension des Erzählers als eigenständiger Phänomenbereich neben denen von Diskurs und Geschichte steht. Diese drei Dimensionen des Erzähltextes dienen in der Untersuchung von Erzählungen entsprechend als analytische Kategorien:
Der Erzähler ist die Vermittlungsinstanz, der wir die Erzählung zuschreiben (wer erzählt?).
Der Diskurs bezeichnet die kompositorische und sprachliche Realisierung einer Erzählung (wie wird erzählt?).
Die Geshichte besteht aus den Elementen ›erzählte Welt‹, ›Figuren‹ und ›Handlung‹, die zusammen den Gegenstand der Erzählung ausmachen (was wird erzählt?).
This paper explores the reasons for the first-person narrator’s unreliability in Sarah Salar’s novella I’m Probably Lost according to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s terminology. Based on his theory, a narrator’s limited knowledge, his/her self-involvement in the narrative as well as his/her paradoxical value-scheme are some of the textual evidences that can be taken as the reasons for his/her unreliability in a particular narrative. The present study, thus, firstly attempts to show that the narrator’s narration in I’m Probably Lost is so incongruent with the narrative events and situations within the fictional world that one can hardly believe her words as standing for the fictional facts. Further, because of her personal fears and weak memory (psychological states) the narrator has got limited knowledge to report the fictional events accurately. The paper also argues that the narrator fails to report the fictional facts impartially because of her self-involvement along with her paradoxical value-schemes. Therefore, by restricting the narration to her own perspective or by inverting many of the fictional facts, the narrator reports the fictional events as she wishes not as they actually might have happened. Furthermore, the paper in its opening provides a short theoretical background to the discussion concerned with the (un)reliability of a narrator in narratology.
Zur Systematik des Kapitels: Die klassische Narratologie kennt lediglich die Dichotomie Diskurs (discours) und Geschichte (histoire). Der Erzähler und seine Merkmale werden dabei der Diskurs-Seite zugeschrieben (s. Kap. 1.6). Im Rahmen dieser Einführung haben wir uns dagegen für eine Trias entschieden, in der die Dimension des Erzählers als eigenständiger Phänomenbereich neben denen von Diskurs und Geschichte steht. Diese drei Dimensionen des Erzähltextes dienen in der Untersuchung von Erzählungen entsprechend als analytische Kategorien:
Der Erzähler ist die Vermittlungsinstanz, der wir die Erzählung zuschreiben (wer erzählt?).
Der Diskurs bezeichnet die kompositorische und sprachliche Realisierung einer Erzählung (wie wird erzählt?).
Die Geschichte besteht aus den Elementen ›erzählte Welt ‹, ›Figuren ‹ und ›Handlung ‹, die zusammen den Gegenstand der Erzählung ausmachen (was wird erzählt?).
Unsere Trias trägt der Tatsache Rechnung, dass im Erzählkunstwerk eine Geschichte nie unabhängig vom Diskurs existiert: Es gibt die Geschichte nicht ›an sich‹ und vor der Erzählung, sondern wir konstruieren sie aus der Rede des Erzählers. Auch wenn es uns so scheint, als ginge es dabei um eine Re-Konstruktion, als würden wir hinter dem Erzählerbericht irgendwie das ›wirkliche Geschehen‹ ausfindig machen können: Tatsächlich kommen wir am Erzähler nicht vorbei, denn: Fiktionale Erzählungen sind — Dichtung.
The aim of my paper is to examine the close interlocking of narrative construction, reader's apperception and moral evaluation. I have chosen Barnes' Love, Etc. for this as this novel pushes the borders of the conventions of its genre by adopting a distinctive and innovative narrative form consisting of monologues where characters take turns to narrate an event or a version of an event, all addressed directly to the reader. There are thus various intradiegetic first-person narrators, and an absence of an extradiegetic narrator. Such a technique offers a potential which Barnes exploits for introducing unreliability in narration. This paper suggests that this narrative technique plays a crucial role in the ethical positioning of the reader which leads to a moral evaluation. This is hardly straightforward as I will argue that reliability is not a binary and, consequently, moral positioning is not an "either-or" matter, so that the reader is provoked to think more deeply about the moral point of the novel. Barnes' narrative technique along with his stylistic manipulations open up an ambivalence about morality, not just within the novel but also, because the reader is directly and actively invited to interact with the text, the moral norms and standards that are taken for granted in the reader's real world.
This thesis examines the competing frameworks in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—the fictional Foreword written by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and the manuscript written by Humbert Humbert—in order to understand to what extent the construction manipulates the rhetorical appeal. While previous scholarship isolates the two narrators or focuses on their unreliability, my examination concentrates on the interplay of the frameworks and how their conflicting objectives can be problematic for readers. By drawing upon various theories by Michel Foucault from Power/Knowledge and Louis Althusser’s “On Ideology,” I look into how John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and Humbert Humbert use authoritative voices to directly address readers with a specific duty, as “parents, social workers, educators” and “ladies of the gentleman,” and I question to what extent this can force readers to unwillingly forfeit their authority in order to adopt an alternative disciplinary gaze in pursuit of a premeditated idea of truth and justice. Using the concept of truth and justice, I explore how psychological discourse and the court are made up of ideologies that operate like the Panopticon, and I question where readers fit despite the strong influence exerted on to them by this structure.
Using the framework of a rhetorical theory of narrative, I advance two main arguments. (1) The concept of the implied author is as useful for the understanding of nonfictional narrative as it is for fictional narrative. In developing this case, 1 identify and counter the underlying reasons why the concept encounters resistance from many theorists (Occam's razor and the anti-intentionalist orthodoxy of contemporary theory). (2) The concept of the implied author and the distinction between fiction and nonfiction help capture the different rhetorical dynamics of unreliable and deficient narration. The first is intentionally off-kilter and the second is unintentionally so. 1 then explore the consequences of key passages of deficient narration in Didion's and Bauby's memoirs.
You say that [Lucy Snowe] may be thought morbid and weak unless the history of her life be more fully given. . . . I might explain away a few other points but it would be too much like drawing a picture and then writing underneath the name of the object intended to be represented.
In the first of 44 direct addresses to the reader (the narratee), Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, says, “I betook myself home, having been absent six months. It will be conjectured that I was of course glad to return to the bosom of my kindred. Well! The amiable conjecture does no harm, and may therefore be safely left uncontradicted. Far from saying nay, indeed, I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years, as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass. . . . A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something in that fashion; why not I with the rest?” (35). In this passage the narrator returns to a home about which the reader knows nothing, yet refuses to directly narrate her home experience. Instead of narrating any direct information about the eight years in which she comes of age, she suggests a conjecture that “will” be made by the implied reader and then “permits” the implied reader to picture her in a peaceful existence that conforms to how women and girls are “supposed to pass their lives.” She then immediately undermines this picture with the following:
Picture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently soft. However, it cannot be concealed that, in that case, I must somehow have fallen over-board, or that there must have been a wreck at last. I too well remember a time—a long time, of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs. I even know there was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished.
In this passage, an acceptable, comforting image of an idle, happy woman is presented and immediately undermined, not with directly narrated contradictory events, but by substituted metaphors of danger and hardship. How should narrative theorists classify this active resistance to presenting important narrative information and the further manipulation of replacing direct narration with metaphor, substituted, or diversionary narrative in the place of explicitly refused narration? These instances clearly fall into the broader classification of the unnarratable as defined by Gerald Prince and clarified by Robyn Warhol, but do not fit into the classifications of disnarration or unnarration. I propose a new classification, circumnarration, which is a narrative act that functions alongside disnarration and unnarration as part of the unnarratable. While disnarration explicitly states what did/does not happen and unnarration refuses to tell what did happen/is happening, circumnarration either evades the report of what actually happened/is happening through various means—substituted narratives, metalepses, misdirections, etc.—or only obliquely or indirectly reports it. In effect, circumnarration talks around a subject or event rather than directly narrating it.
This narrative act is particularly important to analyze in narratives where evasion is necessary because of non-normative behaviors or outcomes. To illustrate the usefulness of analyzing circumnarration, I will look closely at two texts, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to reveal how both novels rely on circumnarration to convey important information that also challenges social norms. Warhol argues that the unnarratable can lead to genre change, thereby “participating in what [she calls] ‘neonarrative,’ or narratorial strategies for making narrative genres new” (“Neonarrative” 221). In this analysis of Villette, I will...
This paper analyzes the imaginative journey taken when creating an unreliable narrator for my novella, “Will Martin” (2011). It charts the interplay between the theoretical and historical research and the writing of several drafts. “Will Martin” is based on the eighteenth-century sailing trip taken by explorers Matthew Flinders, George Bass, and Bass’s servant, William Martin, along the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, in the Tom Thumb. Colonial boat-builder Daniel Paine writes in his journal that “the Boat not being above twelve feet long [was] a small Boat to Coast in” (39). Shortly after setting off, the explorers discover their water is contaminated. They have great difficulty landing their boat and struggle to find fresh drinking water. On the fourth day, thirsty and suffering from sunburn, they trade goods with two Koori men. Later, these two Kooris guide them to a stream (Flinders names it Canoe Rivulet) near Lake Illawarra. There they meet with local Kooris, but after filling their water barrel, the Europeans become frightened and retreat, although not without firing off a shot.
Flinders himself wrote two accounts of the journey. The longer journal version, Narrative of Tom Thumb’s Cruise to Canoe Rivulet (hereafter Canoe Rivulet) was passed down through the family and eventually donated to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The South Eastern Historical Association published this version—edited and introduced by Keith Bowden—in 1985. Historian W. G. McDonald argues that the journal “must have been written up after the discovery of coal in 1797 … possibly from earlier notes” (15). The second account appears in the introduction to A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814)—the narrative Flinders wrote after his Investigator explorations. After reading the two Flinders accounts, I felt there was value in re-imagining the explorers’ encounters with the Kooris. I decided to write a fictional narrative from the perspective of an imagined Will Martin, whose unreliable narration would provide an opportunity for different interpretations of those encounters. This would be a fictional narrative with a different purpose than those guiding Flinders’s nonfiction accounts. I begin by providing some necessary historical context for both narratives before turning to a fuller discussion of the case study.
On Thursday, March 24, 1796, Matthew Flinders, Second Lieutenant on the Reliance; George Bass, surgeon on the same ship; and William Martin, George Bass’s personal servant and loblolly boy, set off on their sailing expedition. Their task was to find the mouth of the river that Henry Hacking, a pilot, had sighted on hunting trips (Flinders, Canoe Rivulet 2). Captain Cook had only sketchily mapped this part of the coast and Flinders, Bass, and Martin were, according to historian Michael Organ, “the first Europeans to officially set foot in Illawarra” (7). Flinders was twenty-one at the time, Bass twenty-four, and Martin just fifteen years old.
Sydney Cove, called by the Eora people “Warrane” (Smith, Bennelong 3), had been colonized and renamed by Europeans in 1788. Seven years later the European population had swelled to “3,211, with an additional 887 (in 1796) on Norfolk Island” (Estensen, The Life of George Bass 42) while the local Aboriginal population, whose people had occupied coastal Sydney for “10,000 years” (Smith, Bennelong 10) and whose ancestors had been on the continent for “possibly 40,000 years prior to the white invasion in 1788” (Organ xxviii), had greatly diminished. That the Europeans had survived the early days of “near-starvation” and had managed to develop a farming base with limited tools “and a desperate lack of almost every kind of practical equipment” was remarkable (Estensen, The Life of George Bass 42). But it was at great cost to the Aboriginal population. They not only had their land occupied, their hunting grounds and water supply interfered with, their fishing and hunting implements stolen as curiosities, but had been affected by foreign diseases, most especially the “highly contagious virus” smallpox (Smith, Bennelong 34).
The English established Australia as a penal colony as a way to relieve overcrowded prisons as well as to increase their presence in uncharted waters. For many convicts, transportation to such a remote location meant leaving their family...
During the last fifteen years or so, unreliable narration has not only developed into a phenomenon of scholarly interest and narratological inquiry; it also captures the imagination of the public, who avidly read stories or watch films which feature unreliable narrators. From the point of view of literary studies, the topic is particularly interesting because it is not only situated at the interface of different narratological approaches, but also at the crossroads where narratology, theories of fictionality, ethics, and interpretation meet. Giving an overview and discussion of recent research developments with regard to unreliability, this essay attempts to show that an exploration of this key concept can provide valuable insights into the advantages and the possible limitations and blind spots of those approaches. Looking at unreliable narration as a test-case for the various postclassical approaches, the article discusses the advances made in the reconceptualization of unreliable narration in e.g. cognitive narratology, feminist narratology, and transgeneric and intermedial studies of unreliable narration, while also offering a brief overview of new research questions and horizons that have opened up as well as some desiderata and suggestions for future research on unreliable narration.
This paper looks at the evolution of the narratological concept of unreliability since Booth coined it in 1961. The interest of this paper resides solely in the rhetorical essentialist approach and leaves out the cognitive constructivist stance taken by a number of narratologists. The rhetorical approach to narrative unreliability is based on the anthropomorphic agent called the implied author, responsible for intentionally marking the text as such. If the implied author endorses the narrator's account and the evaluation he attaches to it, then the narration is reliable; if not, it is unreliable.
The persuasive power of narratives, which has been demonstrated in a host of psychological experiments, offers a rewarding field of research for literary studies in general and ethical criticism in particular. If fictional as well as factual narratives can change the beliefs of readers, then they are ethically meaningful to disseminate values, emotional dispositions, and cognitive practices. Building on recent research in psychology and literary studies, this article explores in three steps the ethical value of fictional narratives. First, the persuasive power of narratives is discussed from a cognitive perspective, which includes consideration of the ethical consequences of taking the perspectives of others. Second, these insights are connected to a delineation of narrative conventions, which can foster the kind of deeper understanding associated with altruistic behavior. In the third part, pertinent narrative strategies are discussed from an ethical perspective. A brief conclusion summarizes the most important results and sketches some fields that merit exploration in future studies of ethical criticism.
This article takes its cue from Caryl Phillips’s critique of Eurocentric “tribalism” in The European Tribe and compares it to the ghostly and highly dystopian “traumascape” of Dead Europe by the Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas. It argues that, in contrast to the predominantly black British frames of reference of Phillips’s counter-travelogue, Tsiolkas’s depiction of Europe is characterized by a transcultural shift. Scrutinizing this shift, the analysis of Tsiolkas’s novel demonstrates how transgressing generic boundaries and employing narrative unreliability and magical realism not only brings transculturality to the fore, but also creates reader complicity. The article goes on to examine the novel’s use of photography, since it plays a crucial role in depicting Europe as “traumascape” and, together with the novel’s unclear stance on anti-Semitism, invites readers to experience the struggle and tensions accompanying diasporic encounters and the emergence of transnational identities in contemporary fictions of Europe.
This paper sketches out some methodological coordinates for investigating the formal category of narrative voice in a broader discursive context. It seeks to reformulate the classic model of narrative communication in order to redress the imbalance of current narratological scholarship, which focuses on theorizing the role of real readers without due attention to real authors. I have developed this approach to investigate and explain a specific problem: how to account for the increased prominence of omniscient narration in literary fiction over the last two decades. Does contemporary omniscience differ from the classic omniscience of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, and if so, what does that difference say about the cultural status of the novel in current public discourse?1
I’ll begin by illustrating this problem through a brief discussion of narrative voice in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848Vanity Fair and Martin Amis’ 1995The Information. At one point in Thackeray’s novel, the narrator pauses to address readers as follows:
If, a few pages back, the present writer claimed the privilege of peeping into Miss Amelia Sedley’s bedroom, and understanding with the omniscience of the novelist all the gentle pains and passions which were tossing upon that innocent pillow, why should he not declare himself to be Rebecca’s confidant too, master of her secrets, and seal-keeper of that young woman’s conscience?
By contrast, Amis’ narrator laments, “And I made the signs—the M, the A—with my strange and twisted fingers, thinking: how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don’t know anything?” (63). Both passages exemplify intrusive omniscient narration in that the narrators reflect on their own authority as storytellers, presenting themselves not just as narrators, but as novelists and authors of the books that we are reading. Each of these examples makes specific reference to the function of literary omniscience as a form of knowledge, about which there is an ongoing debate sparked by Jonathan Culler’s 2004 article in Narrative, entitled “Omniscience.” In my own contribution to that debate, I discussed how its parameters have been largely epistemological and theological: limited to asking how and how much an omniscient narrator “knows” about the fictional world, and what sort of narratorial figure or entity can be considered omniscient (Dawson 143–61). In a sense, Thackeray’s and Amis’ narrators are grappling self-reflexively with these same questions. What interests me in this essay, though, is not the questions themselves, but why the narrators foreground them.
If we conduct a classic taxonomic study of these two novels, we will see that both narrators display all the knowledge of their respective fictional worlds characteristic of omniscient narration, including variable (or zero) focalization, access to consciousness, and spatio-temporal freedom. In terms of Gérard Genette’s category of mood, or the various means by which information about the story world is regulated, the novels differ little, although The Information is less panoramically ambitious, focalizing mainly through the protagonist Richard. In terms of Genette’s category of voice, or the narrating instance, the novels also differ little: the person, time, and level of the narrating are all the same. So if we tick off the list of their formal properties, we can classify synchronically these novels as omniscient. Yet surely there is a palpable difference between the performative stances that these two narrators adopt. In the Thackeray passage, the novelist confidently and playfully asserts the privilege of omniscient knowledge, whereas in the Amis passage, the narrator manifests anxiety about that omniscient authority. In fact, Amis’ narrator grapples not with a failure of diegetic knowledge, but with a failure of novelistic insight resulting from his own limitations as a person. He reflects scenically on his own experience in order to ask whether he can satisfy his role as an observer of human nature.
If there is a formal difference between these two examples of omniscient narration, it rests in Genette’s last and least developed element of voice: the function of the narrator.2 Both of these novels enact what for me is the key feature of literary omniscience: the performance of narrative authority through intrusive narratorial commentary, which “personalizes...
In narrative terms, the transition from Victorian tale to modern short story in Anglophone literature has often been characterized as a movement from ‘telling’ to ‘showing.’ Anthony Alpers refers to this development as “getting rid of the narrator” (The Life 238), while Clare Hanson describes it as moving “from ‘teller’ to indirect free narration, and from ‘tale’ to ‘text,’” as part of a larger shift from “‘discourse’ to ‘image’ in the art and literature of the period” (1). In the nineteenth-century tale, indeed, a first-person narrator—often a polished version of the author (Shaw 114–15)—guides the reader through the story, guaranteeing its authenticity and providing a certain moral framework. The hallmark of most nineteenth-century tales, this narrative mode is reminiscent of the tale’s origins in communal, oral storytelling traditions. A desire to question narrative authority and remove the teller gradually from the tale characterizes the so-called modern short story, the origins of which—at least in Britain—are usually traced to the 1880s. Early experiments with this other narrative mode, in which focalization alternates with narration,1 can be found in the proto-impressionist psychological sketches of George Egerton, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ella D’Arcy, and Ernest Dowson (Korte 103–107; Malcolm and Malcolm 12–13). Yet only with the figural narration of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and—especially—Katherine Mansfield does the modern short story really come into its own. In such a story, the narrator virtually disappears behind the characters’ voice and inner consciousness, mostly rendered through free indirect discourse. In the absence of a narrator to guide, instruct, or communicate with the reader, the emphasis invariably shifts from plot and (moral) message to suggestion, symbolism, and mood. This modernist development in the shaping of the short story, in which Mansfield played a crucial role (Dunn 202, Van Gunsteren 108–115), became especially influential, to the extent that focalization, interior monologue, symbolism, epiphany, and slice-of-life are still among the defining features of the short story today.
Nevertheless, this general development should not make us forget that proto-modernist and modernist writers also adopted other narrative modes to turn the moralizing and plot-bound Victorian tale into a literary form suited to the modern age and its aesthetics. Indeed, several writers experimented with first-person narration, the reigning mode of the nineteenth-century tale: Rudyard Kipling introduced uncertainty and ellipsis in his otherwise traditional and plot-bound first-person narratives; Joseph Conrad undermined narrative authority by multiplying his narrators and narrative frames; and Virginia Woolf staged excessively hesitant and self-reflexive narrators in stories such as “An Unfinished Novel,” “The Mark on the Wall,” or “The Lady in the Looking-Glass.” Mansfield’s short fiction contains a surprising number of first-person narratives as well—surprising, because her short stories are, like those of Joyce, often cited as textbook examples of free indirect discourse and focalization. Moreover, in the span of her short career, Mansfield’s first-person narratives undergo a considerable alteration: from satirical and autobiographical first-person narration to a subtle and highly flexible narrative form that perfectly realizes her poetics of impassioned objectivity and cultivation of an intensely felt impersonal style (Head 110; Coelsch-Foisner 98–99). Mansfield’s short fiction thus shows that the short story’s movement from telling to showing need not involve the extinction of the narrative ‘I.’
The “Vignettes” and other prose poems that Mansfield wrote and, to some extent published, in 1907 are the first texts in which an ‘I’ appears. Yet because of their poetical quality (they are collected in Vincent O’Sullivan’s edition of Mansfield’s poetry) and relative absence of narrative development, their ‘I’ resembles more the ‘I’ of lyrical poetry than that of an actual first-person narrator. As in lyrical poetry, moreover, the speaker seems quite close to the actual author. Several small details suggest this connection: “Vignette III” alludes to Mansfield’s cello, and “Vere” in “Westminster Cathedral” and “Carlotta” in “Summer in Winter” refer to actual persons (86). In general, the “Vignettes” revolve around small anecdotes set recognizably either in London (the Mews and Westminster Cathedral) or in Wellington (the Botanical Gardens and the...
Narrative 11.1 (2003) 93-109
Why do we fail to trust some narrators, and why do the tales other narrators tell strike us as incomplete? How do the phenomena of untrustworthy and fallible narration function within fictional texts, and how do readers respond to these kinds of narration? In this essay I will address these questions by reviewing Wayne Booth's introduction of the term unreliable narrator and his explication of unreliable narration as a function of irony, since this formulation remains the leading model for unreliable narration. I will then describe how Booth's text-immanent model of narrator unreliability has been criticized by Ansgar Nünning for disregarding the reader's role in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently defined concept of the implied author. Nünning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theory of unreliability that rests on the reader's values and her sense that a discrepancy exists between the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text. Nünning, I argue, overstates his case and ignores the structural similarities between his and Booth's models. Both models 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). Finally, I offer an update of Booth's model by making his implicit differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators explicit. Drawing on new research on unreliability, I suggest that these two types of narrators elicit different responses in readers and are best described using scales for fallibility and trustworthiness.
Booth first gave readers a handle on how to think about narrators like Dostoevsky's Underground Man. Insisting that he suffers from liver disease while admitting that he cannot locate or identify his pain, the Underground Man contradicts himself so much that the reader cannot take his words at face value: "I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what hurts" (3).
Booth defines as unreliable those narrators who articulate values and perceptions that differ from those of the implied author. The latter term was developed by Booth to circumvent problems of naively biographical readings of texts in which, for instance, J. Alfred Prufrock's lack of agency was attributed to the same qualities in the writer who gave him form, T. S. Eliot. As Booth comments, we cannot call Voltaire when we want to question him about the right interpretation of Candide (Irony 11).
Booth understands narrator unreliability to be a function of irony. Irony provides the formal means by which distance is created between the views, actions, and voice of the unreliable narrator and those of the implied author. As the following passage shows, Booth's descriptions of irony may be read as further explications of the concept of unreliable narration:
Booth applies a communicative model to reading fiction here. This model allows for secret communion between the "postulated reader" and the implied author (177). By emphasizing the "unspoken," Booth anticipates work on conversational implicature (by, for...
Coping refers to behavior that protects people from being psychologically harmed by problematic social experience, a behavior that importantly mediates the impact that societies have on their members. The protective function of coping behavior can be exercised in 3 ways: by eliminating or modifying conditions giving rise to problems; by perceptually controlling the meaning of experience in a manner that neutralizes its problematic character; and by keeping the emotional consequences of problems within manageable bounds. The efficacy of a number of concrete coping behaviors representing these 3 functions was evaluated. Results indicate that individuals' coping interventions are most effective when dealing with problems within the close interpersonal role areas of marriage and child-rearing and least effective when dealing with the more impersonal problems found in occupation. The effective coping modes are unequally distributed in society, with men, the educated, and the affluent making greater use of the efficacious mechanisms.
This article proceeds from the premise that the narratological process of ascribing (un)reliability to specific narrators is dependent on the values and norms of the critic. Since the attributes individual scholars accept as "normal" or "natural" vary from culture to culture and from epoch to epoch, every analysis of unreliability has to take the (historically variable) values and norms that govern the attribution of (un)reliability into account. In order to demonstrate the importance of the cultural context I will concentrate on the history of the reception of Oliver Goldsmith's novel The Vicar of Wakefield, since this illustrates strikingly how readers and critics in different times have come to diametrically opposed conclusions regarding the reliability of the narrator. The article ends with a discussion of the general importance of a cultural-historical approach that can also be used to explicate other aspects of literary works, such as irony and humor.