(urth) Introduction and Breath

DAVID STOCKHOFF dstockhoff at verizon.net
Mon Apr 18 10:52:30 PDT 2011


Although as an afterthought I suppose there is still some distance between a narrative with a clearly delineated and limited viewpoint---and a narrative that pretends to even more severe limitations.

Taking as a model of reliability the Philip Marlowe (IIRC, I'm no Chandler expert) style of narration: 

"A gorgeous redhead walked into my office..."

"I knew the name she hissed at me. He was a big shot around town ..."

Basically, the narrator may tell us 

(a) everything  he sees, hears, knows, and thinks (as above)
(b) only what he sees and hears but not what he thinks
(c) only some of what he sees and hears (i.e., he withholds)
(d) some dramatic combination, e.g., where he tells us everything but the identity of the killer, which he knew from page 1. 

Mixing b and c by selective editing combined with relaying to us his internal dialog would be one obvious way for the narrator to make himself look good---too good. He might also lie outright or be unable to put obvious clues together, like Mr McGoo (think The Pink Panther as told by Inspector Clouseau). I'd consider these to be further limitations farther along the spectrum, but clearly more artificial than simply withholding for narrative effect. There are so many ways to play this, there seems little point in making any more precise distinctions. 

As examples, consider these parallel treatments of the same event:

"I greatly feared that I was going to die."

"My heart pounded so hard I nearly fell over."

"I felt no fear, but heard a distant hammering like the ringing of giant gongs."

"I thought only of my dear Monica as I squeezed the trigger of my 9 mm Beretta three times, firing blindly in the dark. Thus, I brought justice to her killer."

"Only later did it occur to me that I had nearly met death at that moment."

To us, these are routine dodges/edits/misdirections, but if you take the Victorian novel as the benchmark for all modern fiction, some are indeed less honest than others, by omission at least. 

Wolfe plays these tricks all the time, and indeed seems to love subverting the straight detective story, but he's only "unreliable" to readers who still follow the Victorian standard, which survives in genres like boys' adventure fiction. His storytelling is probably more "consistently" and "playfully" unreliable than it is dramatically or substantively unreliable. 

Unreliability doesn't require lying, and Severian's tale is mostly just incredibly complex and fundamentally unbelievable. But compare Severian's failure to confess his incest to Humbert Humbert's not-well-hidden rape of Lolita.

(The Flashman series plays with this modern-vs-Victorian contrast by putting a cowardly narrator in charge of a story defined by a Victorian template. Compared to us, Victorians told everything straight but the sex, although they had certain rhetorical devices of debatable honesty at their disposal as well.)

--- On Mon, 4/18/11, António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Introduction and Breath
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Monday, April 18, 2011, 10:39 AM
> DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote (18-04-2011
> 15:35):
> 
> > You just can't RELY on it. It's all in contrast to the
> omniscient narrator.
> 
> +1
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