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Identification and Unreliable Narrators
Mar. 26th, 2014 12:07 pmThere are, I think, three archetypal relations of consumers of literary works to the works in question.
The oldest is literally that of an audience reacting to a performance. That was the context for Homer; it remains (obviously) the context for drama. It can be argued that this was the principal model, even if at one remove, until about 1500: a work circulating in manuscript was a stand-in for a (perhaps notional) performance by the author. The reader is facing the author and reacting to all the elements of the performance.
(There was a secondary model, that of the researcher consulting a work of reference: the type of engagement contemplated is different for Augustine's Confessions[1] and for De Trinitate. Many works were written with that model in mind -- from Herodotus to Isidore of Seville -- even in the days of antiquity. In this context the "literary" character of the work is secondary.)
The second is the "appreciator": originally, literally, a correspondent or friend of the author to whom a lyric or short work of a "private" nature might be forwarded. (Sometimes the work was written expressly for the recipient.) This is the model of the non-sung lyric; occasionally it has been the original model for much larger works (the ones where there is no original intent to publish until friends either urge the publication of the work or actually forward it to a publisher).[2] The way of reading associated with this mode is typically one of technical appreciation; the reader is "looking over the shoulder" of the author.
The third may have earlier roots but did not become a normative form until the emergence of the middle class: it is the reader who is part of a mass audience who sits privately and (silently) reads the work in question. This is the typical form of engagement with the novel.
None of these assumes an identification with the protagonist. In the first and second cases, it is the artist, not the internal character, who is front and centre. (For the Odyssey or the Aeneid or many mediaeval romances, the main character is definitely foregrounded throughout, but the narratorial techniques foreground the artifice of the narrative even above the character.)
The early novel also avoids identification with a central character. To begin with, many have a narratorial voice who is distinct from and critical of the narrator (consider Tom Jones, or anything by Jane Austen). Others (Tristram Shandy, anyone?) have such a quirky first-person narrator that identification is not one of the demands of the text on the reader. This continues through the Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth in the main stream of the novel: consider George Eliot, Henry James, and James Joyce. (The omniscient narratorial voice sinks back into the background as we move into the Twentieth, though, becoming more and more "neutral" and apparently transparent: Conrad is succeeded by Hemingway on one side, and "train of consciousness" techniques (notably in Woolf, more than Joyce) foreground characters but in a context where the reader has to be active to separate reality from impression on the other).
However, the model of private engagement allows identification with the narrator, or the central viewpoint character. One is no longer looking over the author's shoulder, or engaging with the author as performer; the artist vanishes. In Joyce's expression, "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." (Joyce was not contemplating identification of the reader with elements within the work, but rather something more like the deist finding a watch on the beach; but it is nevertheless true that one possible response is to assimilate the experience of the artifact to that of real life.) Note, however, that isn't Joyce himself speaking, but Stephen Daedalus (who is a very unreliable narrator), and Joyce's own practice does not show a consistent aim of making the artist invisible...
Thus there is also a development of novels which work by encouraging an identity between the reader and the main character -- most obviously where the narrative is first person (Jane Eyre and its successors) but also in third-person narratives which follow a central character whose viewpoint is presented as normative. Many genre novels adopt this model -- they centre on the hero, or his slight variant, the detective, in a story about his / her (usually his, except in genre romances) establishing order / eliminating disorder / defeating evil / solving crimes.
The types were pretty distinct, though. You couldn't easily mistake a mainstream novel for a genre one in, say, the mid-thirties: a couple of chapters would orient the reader pretty quickly as regards which conventions were being followed.
However, one thing that has happened in the late Twentieth Century is that there has been a convergence centred around the technique of the (subtly) unreliable narrator. On the mainstream side, the dividends of experimental techniques diminished as those techniques either became domesticated (were not experimental any longer: many stream-of-consciousness techniques have just become part of the standard novelistic toolkit) or became evidently so risky that they worked rather than flopped only in the hands of exceptionally skilled authors (see: House of Leaves, and compare Illuminatus!). By the late Twentieth Century both genre and non-genre novels were making heavy use of a mix of weak train-of-consciousness together with a form of style indirect libre / "tight third person" as a standard narratorial model, and were doing so to present their stories via an unreliable narrator / point of view. There are lots of outliers in both directions -- nostalgic whodunnits and space operas on one side and Pynchon / Stephenson / Danielewski (plus many others) on the other -- but a random selection of well-regarded recent novels of any sort will probably be largely made up of this one type. John M. Ford is the poster child for this in SFF, but even such popular and more accessible writers as Lois Bujold and Charlie Stross are explicit about their use of unreliable narratorial perspectives.
In addition, the whole approach of identifying with the viewpoint character has been at odds with critical reading pretty well forever. (Bradleian criticism at the beginning of the Twentieth Century would be the exception here -- the approach parodied as "How many children had Lady Macbeth?".) For an extended period in the Twentieth Century, the critical reader was encouraged to approach a work of literature as an artifact, independent of the author: characters in a novel, principal or otherwise, were evaluated at a remove as elements in the structure of the novel. Modern post-Structuralist approaches (notably New Historicism and Deconstruction) have jettisoned the idea that the work should be read on its own -- frequently one is reading _through_ the artifact to engage broader issues -- but it is, if anything, even more the case that characters within the work are not treated as autonomous beings with whom one might identify or treat as other humans with whom one might engage.
Genre readers, however, are in different stages of catching up. When I look over book reviews, I frequently see it mentioned as a problem that the reviewer could not identify with the central character, or found the central character's views or perceptions objectionable (where those views or perceptions are demonstrably not being presented as objectively true by the author). Or, more insidiously, I see readers who take the narrator's viewpoint at face value because they are reading with identification rather than critical distance.
[1]OK, the Confessions is technically an overheard extended prayer, and the reader is in the technical role of an allowed eavesdropper. This does have its successors -- Gower's Confessio Amantis comes to mind -- but the effect is different when the speaker is fictional rather than the subject/object of an autobiography. In some ways, the Confessions is one of the earliest works presupposing a private consumer who is not an "appreciator".
[2] The Hobbit is an interesting recent example of both prior types: it was originally a "performed" work, written for reading to the author's children. It was circulated to a few friends, one of whom brought it to the attention of George Allen and Unwin.
The oldest is literally that of an audience reacting to a performance. That was the context for Homer; it remains (obviously) the context for drama. It can be argued that this was the principal model, even if at one remove, until about 1500: a work circulating in manuscript was a stand-in for a (perhaps notional) performance by the author. The reader is facing the author and reacting to all the elements of the performance.
(There was a secondary model, that of the researcher consulting a work of reference: the type of engagement contemplated is different for Augustine's Confessions[1] and for De Trinitate. Many works were written with that model in mind -- from Herodotus to Isidore of Seville -- even in the days of antiquity. In this context the "literary" character of the work is secondary.)
The second is the "appreciator": originally, literally, a correspondent or friend of the author to whom a lyric or short work of a "private" nature might be forwarded. (Sometimes the work was written expressly for the recipient.) This is the model of the non-sung lyric; occasionally it has been the original model for much larger works (the ones where there is no original intent to publish until friends either urge the publication of the work or actually forward it to a publisher).[2] The way of reading associated with this mode is typically one of technical appreciation; the reader is "looking over the shoulder" of the author.
The third may have earlier roots but did not become a normative form until the emergence of the middle class: it is the reader who is part of a mass audience who sits privately and (silently) reads the work in question. This is the typical form of engagement with the novel.
None of these assumes an identification with the protagonist. In the first and second cases, it is the artist, not the internal character, who is front and centre. (For the Odyssey or the Aeneid or many mediaeval romances, the main character is definitely foregrounded throughout, but the narratorial techniques foreground the artifice of the narrative even above the character.)
The early novel also avoids identification with a central character. To begin with, many have a narratorial voice who is distinct from and critical of the narrator (consider Tom Jones, or anything by Jane Austen). Others (Tristram Shandy, anyone?) have such a quirky first-person narrator that identification is not one of the demands of the text on the reader. This continues through the Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth in the main stream of the novel: consider George Eliot, Henry James, and James Joyce. (The omniscient narratorial voice sinks back into the background as we move into the Twentieth, though, becoming more and more "neutral" and apparently transparent: Conrad is succeeded by Hemingway on one side, and "train of consciousness" techniques (notably in Woolf, more than Joyce) foreground characters but in a context where the reader has to be active to separate reality from impression on the other).
However, the model of private engagement allows identification with the narrator, or the central viewpoint character. One is no longer looking over the author's shoulder, or engaging with the author as performer; the artist vanishes. In Joyce's expression, "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." (Joyce was not contemplating identification of the reader with elements within the work, but rather something more like the deist finding a watch on the beach; but it is nevertheless true that one possible response is to assimilate the experience of the artifact to that of real life.) Note, however, that isn't Joyce himself speaking, but Stephen Daedalus (who is a very unreliable narrator), and Joyce's own practice does not show a consistent aim of making the artist invisible...
Thus there is also a development of novels which work by encouraging an identity between the reader and the main character -- most obviously where the narrative is first person (Jane Eyre and its successors) but also in third-person narratives which follow a central character whose viewpoint is presented as normative. Many genre novels adopt this model -- they centre on the hero, or his slight variant, the detective, in a story about his / her (usually his, except in genre romances) establishing order / eliminating disorder / defeating evil / solving crimes.
The types were pretty distinct, though. You couldn't easily mistake a mainstream novel for a genre one in, say, the mid-thirties: a couple of chapters would orient the reader pretty quickly as regards which conventions were being followed.
However, one thing that has happened in the late Twentieth Century is that there has been a convergence centred around the technique of the (subtly) unreliable narrator. On the mainstream side, the dividends of experimental techniques diminished as those techniques either became domesticated (were not experimental any longer: many stream-of-consciousness techniques have just become part of the standard novelistic toolkit) or became evidently so risky that they worked rather than flopped only in the hands of exceptionally skilled authors (see: House of Leaves, and compare Illuminatus!). By the late Twentieth Century both genre and non-genre novels were making heavy use of a mix of weak train-of-consciousness together with a form of style indirect libre / "tight third person" as a standard narratorial model, and were doing so to present their stories via an unreliable narrator / point of view. There are lots of outliers in both directions -- nostalgic whodunnits and space operas on one side and Pynchon / Stephenson / Danielewski (plus many others) on the other -- but a random selection of well-regarded recent novels of any sort will probably be largely made up of this one type. John M. Ford is the poster child for this in SFF, but even such popular and more accessible writers as Lois Bujold and Charlie Stross are explicit about their use of unreliable narratorial perspectives.
In addition, the whole approach of identifying with the viewpoint character has been at odds with critical reading pretty well forever. (Bradleian criticism at the beginning of the Twentieth Century would be the exception here -- the approach parodied as "How many children had Lady Macbeth?".) For an extended period in the Twentieth Century, the critical reader was encouraged to approach a work of literature as an artifact, independent of the author: characters in a novel, principal or otherwise, were evaluated at a remove as elements in the structure of the novel. Modern post-Structuralist approaches (notably New Historicism and Deconstruction) have jettisoned the idea that the work should be read on its own -- frequently one is reading _through_ the artifact to engage broader issues -- but it is, if anything, even more the case that characters within the work are not treated as autonomous beings with whom one might identify or treat as other humans with whom one might engage.
Genre readers, however, are in different stages of catching up. When I look over book reviews, I frequently see it mentioned as a problem that the reviewer could not identify with the central character, or found the central character's views or perceptions objectionable (where those views or perceptions are demonstrably not being presented as objectively true by the author). Or, more insidiously, I see readers who take the narrator's viewpoint at face value because they are reading with identification rather than critical distance.
[1]OK, the Confessions is technically an overheard extended prayer, and the reader is in the technical role of an allowed eavesdropper. This does have its successors -- Gower's Confessio Amantis comes to mind -- but the effect is different when the speaker is fictional rather than the subject/object of an autobiography. In some ways, the Confessions is one of the earliest works presupposing a private consumer who is not an "appreciator".
[2] The Hobbit is an interesting recent example of both prior types: it was originally a "performed" work, written for reading to the author's children. It was circulated to a few friends, one of whom brought it to the attention of George Allen and Unwin.
