The most frustrating thing about Gossip Girl (The CW, 2007—present) is how Gossip Girl’s narration slips from plausible reportage to unbelievable omniscience—sometimes she’s a blogger, other times she hovers invisible in the private space around one or two people. She is whimsically, nonsensically both character and (a very poor attempt at a pure) omniscient narrator. From the very beginning of How Fiction Works by James Wood, 2008.
Narrating
1
The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. I can tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular, or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed. And that is it. Anything else will probably not much resemble narration; it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry.
2
In reality, we are stuck with third- and first-person narration. The common idea is that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscience) and unreliable narration (the unreliable first person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does). On one side, Tolstoy, say; and on the other, Humbert Humbert or Italo Svevo’s narrator, Zeon Cosini, or Bertie Wooster. Authorial omniscience, people assume, has had its day, much as that “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade” called religion has also had its. W.G. Sebald once said to me, “I think that fiction writing which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself is a form of imposture which I find very, very difficult to take. Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable. I cannot bear to read books of this kind.” Sebald continued: “If you refer to Jane Austen, you refer to a world where there were standards of propriety that which were accepted by everyone. Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history, and that we do have to acknowledge our own sense of ignorance and of insufficiency in these matters and therefore try and write accordingly.”*
3
For Sebald, and for many writers like him, standard third-person omniscient narration is a kind of antique cheat. But both sides of the division have been caricatured.
4
Actually, first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable; and third-person “omniscient” narration is generally more partial than omniscient.
The first-person narrator is often highly reliable; Jane Eyre, a highly reliable first-person narrator, for instance, tells us her story from a position of belated enlightenment (years later, married to Mr. Rochester, she can now see her whole life story, rather as Mr. Rochester’s eyesight is gradually returning at the end of the novel). Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert. We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator’s unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator.
Unreliably unreliable narration is very rare, actually—about as rare as a genuinely mysterious, truly bottomless character. The nameless narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger is highly unreliable, and finally unknowable (it helps that he is insane); Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground is the model for Hamsun. Italo Svevo’s Zeno Cosini may be the best example of truly unreliable narration. He imagines that by telling us his life story he is psychoanalyzing himself (he has promised his analyst to do this). But his self-comprehension, waved confidently before our eyes, is as comically perforated as a bullet-holed flag.
5
On the other side, omniscient narration is rarely as omniscient as it seems. To begin with, authorial style generally has a way of making third-person omniscience seem partial and inflected. Authorial style tends to draw our attention toward the writer, toward the artifice of the writer’s construction, and so toward the writer’s own impress. Thus the almost comic paradox of Flaubert’s celebrated wish that the author be “impersonal,” Godlike, and removed, in contrast with the high personality of his very style, those exquisite sentences and details, which are nothing less than God’s showy signatures on every page: so much for the impersonal author. Tolstoy comes closest to a canonical idea of authorial omniscience, and he uses with great naturalness and authority a mode of writing that Roland Barthes called “the reference code” (or sometimes “the cultural code”), whereby a writer makes confident appeal to a universal or consensual truth, or a body of shared cultural or scientific knowledge.**
6
So-called omniscience is almost impossible. As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking. A novelist’s omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called “free indirect style,” a term novelists have lots of different nicknames for—“close third person,” or “going into character.”
*This interview can be found in Brick magazine, issue 10. Sebald’s German accent had a way of exaggerating the already comic, miserable, Bernhard-like pleasure he took in stressing words such as “very” and “unacceptable.”
**Barthes uses this term in his book S/Z (1970, translated by Richard Miller, 1974). He means the way that nineteenth-century writers refer to commonly accepted cultural or scientific knowledge, for instance shared ideological generalities about “women.” I extend the term to cover any kind of authorial generalization. For instance, an example from Tolstoy: at the start of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three of Ivan Ilyich’s friends are reading his obituary, and Tolstoy writes that each man, “as is usual in such cases, was secretly congratulating himself that it was Ivan who had died and not him.” As is usual in such cases: the author refers with ease and wisdom to a central human truth, serenely gazing into the hearts of thee different men.
This was great.
ReplyDelete