Introduction and Breath

Gerry Quinn · 18 Apr 2011, 10:38 · from 2011-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:38:48 +0100
Subject: (urth) Introduction and Breath
References: <BANLkTik_4w2RyPg-_cSBwYYPO68HEkA55w at mail.gmail.com><2287.2.6.15.19.1302728897.squirrel at websecu.irit.fr><6C450A90F88D4BA997DF9DCF98FAAF33@jill><4DA6EFD6.5010307 at gmail.com><526475.52363.qm at web37607.mail.mud.yahoo.com><BANLkTimqnEO1A3qTuLGdCBKAyDPTKnUaow at mail.gmail.com><4DA881E1.1080906 at gmail.com><BANLkTi=RCPVs0JO=DW3LJ2+vqZQX8NYHhg at mail.gmail.com><4DAB52AB.1060203 at verizon.net><72EC5D2EB0E842E1B97DEA81E746139A@jill><4DAB7A15.1000006 at verizon.net>
	<371453.25343.qm at web114712.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <080D021A2D8C440B99508F9D60251285@jill>

From: "Jerry Friedman" <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
> Antonio Marques wrote:
>> On 4/17/2011 6:31 PM,  Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>> > For me, the term 'unreliable narator' implies that the author is 
>> > telling us
>>another, different story disguised > >behind the overt story the  narrator 
>>is
>>telling is; either the narrator is lying or he doesn't understand  what's 
>> >
>>>going on.  I really don't think that either is the case with  Severian.

>>I think you're doing overanalysis. 'Unreliable narrator'  simply means 
>>that the
>>narrative isn't the absolute >complete truth of  what happened. Which, 
>>actually,
>>applies to any narrative. What Gene Wolfe does - as >other did and do - is 
>>to
>>craft that part of his work, instead of leaving it to be a subproduct.
>
> The original meaning of "unreliable narrator", as used by Wayne C. Booth 
> in /The
> Rhetoric of Fiction/, is that the narrator's /norms/ differ from the 
> implied
> author's.  He gives examples such as Barry Lyndon, morally as far from the
> author as possible (Booth says--I haven't read it), and Huck Finn, who 
> calls
> himself bad when we can tell the author thinks he's good.  Or the narrator 
> "is
> mistaken, or believes himself to have qualities which the author denies 
> him"--I
> suppose Kinbote would be a good example of that last, or Pooter in /The 
> Diary of
> a Nobody/.  Booth says irony on the narrator's part is not an example, but 
> lying
> is, though an uncommon one.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=VfUgMbRYSW4C&pg=PA159
>
> No doubt the meaning has changed.  I'm with Gerry Quinn.  There's no point 
> in
> making a big deal out unreliability unless it's "strong" 
> unreliability--the
> story is or could be substantially different from what you get by 
> believing the
> narrator.

I like Booth's attitude.

>> But the Nebraskan is a great example of unreliability, because he 
>> doesn't lie.
>>Yet, we cannot trust his
>> narration---that's all that "unreliable"  means.
>
> I wouldn't call a person unreliable who didn't notice something in the 
> dark, and
> I wouldn't say I couldn't trust what he told me.
>
> (I suppose it's just as well if nobody has put forward an interpretation 
> of that
> story where the actual narrator is unreliable, or Thoe is.)

Booth writes: "We should remind ourselves that any sustained inside view, of 
whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a 
narrator."

This is my perspective also.  'The Nebraskan and the Nereid' is told in 
close third person; there is no explicit narrator other than the author. 
But when I wrote about earlier, I thought of the Nebraskan as the narrator.

In many ways, the third person 'pseudo-narrator' is more free to deceive 
than the most unreliable of direct narrators, though we can more easily 
believe that his deception is unintentional.  When the author, writing from 
inside Cooper's head, refers in passing to "the dumpy little 
maid-of-all-work", we must accept this as what Cooper saw, even though later 
he encounters the same person in different circumstances, and does not 
recognise her.  Had Cooper been the actual narrator, we would wonder ifl he 
was in some way lying when he describes her thus - this is close to the kind 
of 'lying' that Severian is being accused of.  Severian (or the 
hypothethical narrating Cooper) would reply that he is merely describing as 
clearly as possible what was in his head at the time.  To interrupt the 
story to describe exactly who she was would (apart from interfering with the 
flow of the narrative) do a disservice to the subjective history, in the 
purported interest of an objective history which will in any case be fully 
explicated by the end.  "I am telling you the truth", Severian would say, 
"but I cannot do it unless you let me tell it in my own way!"  Cooper does 
not have to answer this question; he can hide behind the coat-tails of the 
omniscient author.  And yet the narrative methodology, apart from this 
really rather inessential difference, is almost the same in both.

Should we not speak of unreliable narratives, rather than unreliable 
narrators?

Antonio says above that every author does unreliability - Gene Wolfe crafts 
it, and other novelists achieve it as a "sub-product".  I don't really agree 
with this distinction.  All decent authors are aware of the issue, I think - 
they just go different ways to achieve the effect.  It's present in most 
novels.

I guess this ties into my view that Wolfe is a much *clearer* author than 
his reputation would suggest.  You just need to read him.  Some people seem 
to use his reputation as an excuse to put their hands over their ears and 
say "Lah, lah, unreliable, I'm not listening..."

- Gerry Quinn

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net