Faculty of Arts and
Philosophy
Storification of the Self
Narrative Unreliability in the Metafictional First-Person
Novel
Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Jürgen
Pieters
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of “Master in de
Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde”
by Hanne Carlé
August, 2009
I‟m telling you stories. Trust me.
– Jeanette Winterson
2
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I wish to thank my supervisor Prof. Jürgen Pieters for giving me the
opportunity to write this dissertation, for his help in delineating the subject and for the time
invested in me. Without his guidance and encouragement, this work would not have been
what it is now. In addition, I would like to thank Prof. Vervaeck for his time and for providing
me with a peripeteic insight when it was desperately needed.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my family for allowing and encouraging me to
pursue this study. I would like to thank my father for the genuine interest and the moral
assistance, my mother for the inexhaustible support and for my daily dose of vitamins, my
sister Jole for her enthusiasm and for putting up with me, my aunt Greet for believing in me
and my grandparents who, I‟m sure, have lost quite some sleep worrying over this paper. I
would also like to express my warm-hearted gratitude to my friends for their support and
listening ear. More specifically, I would like to thank Kim for being there and for letting me
miss her birthday party when I needed the time to write; Bob for the positive attitude and for
being himself; Tinne for the liters of coffee and the diversion; Milica for her sharing
generosity; An for the encouraging phone calls; René for the witty messages; and Karen for
her spicy postmodern humour that always lifts my spirits.
3
Table of contents
Introduction
p. 6
I. Theoretical survey
1. Theory and definition of the concept of narrative (un)reliability
1.1 The Founding Father: Wayne C. Booth
1.2 Problematizing the implied author
p. 8
p. 9
p. 10
1.3 The respective roles of authorial agency, textual clues and reader
response in the interpretation process
p. 14
1.4 Towards a working definition?
p. 16
1.5 Typological distinctions
p. 17
1.5.1 Facts and ideology
p. 17
1.5.2 Unreliable Narrators vs. Fallible Characters
p. 18
2. Reading Narrative Unreliability
p. 20
2.1 Textual clues to recognize narrative unreliability
p. 20
2.2 The scope of unreliable narration
p. 22
2.3 Estranging and bonding unreliability: the effects of (un)reliable
narration on the authorial audience
3. Theory and definition of narrative self-consciousness
3.1 Definition of metafiction
p. 12
p. 25
3.2 The birth of literary self-awareness
p. 26
p. 27
3.3 The metafictional paradox
p. 31
3.4 A typology of self-conscious narration
p. 33
4. Reading metafiction: freedom and responsibilities for the reader
4.1 A double ethical implication
5. Unreliable narrators in metafictional novels
p. 34
p. 34
p. 37
5.1 The narrator: subjective, unreliable and self-conscious
p. 37
5.2 Locating self-conscious and unreliable narration
p. 39
5.3 The ethical implications of unreliable narration in metafiction
p. 40
5.3.1 Quadruple distancing
p. 41
5.3.2. “L‟effet-valeur” according to Jouve
p. 43
4
5.3.3. (Dramatic) irony
p. 46
II. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
1. Introduction
p. 49
1.1 The author
p. 49
1.2 The novel
p. 50
1.3 The plot
p. 51
2. Analysis
2.1 Paratext
p. 54
p. 54
2.1.1 Self-conscious parodying of the memoir: title, epigraphs and
preface
p. 54
2.1.2 A helping hand: table of contents and acknowledgements
p. 57
2.2 The memoir
p. 58
2.2.1 The narrator as flawed human being
p. 58
2.2.2 Overt self-consciousness
p. 60
3. Conclusion
p. 65
III. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock. A Confession
1. Introduction
p. 67
1.1 The author
p. 67
1.2 The novel
p. 67
2. Analysis
p. 70
2.1 Paratext
p. 70
2.2 Intratext
p. 72
2.2.1 Narrator(s) in the twilight zone
p. 72
2.2.2 Narrative self-consciousness
p. 73
IV. Conclusion
p.76
Bibliography
5
Introduction
When we read a story, we surrender ourselves to the one who tells it. However, what happens
if this narrator is not telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? What if the
person depicting our fictional world is deforming the image, whether deliberately or not? In
such cases, it is our job as skilled and attentive readers to detect the error on the narrator‟s part,
and recompose the fictional „truth‟ to our best ability. We will be guided down the yellow
brick road by the author, who will often give us plenty of subtle or less covert hints in order to
doubt our companion‟s trustworthiness. The term „narrative unreliability‟ was coined by
Wayne C. Booth in his widely acclaimed work The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), and in spite of
recent criticism, his views continue to serve as the foundation for several studies on the topic
today. Though unreliable narration might strike us as a feature of predominantly
contemporary, (post)modern literature, the phenomenon dates back to the novel‟s infancy.
Once we start doubting the character that guides us through the fictional universe, we become
aware of this world‟s artificiality. The reflecting upon fiction as a construct in explicit or
implicit terms is called „metafiction‟, and like unreliable narration, the phenomenon is older
than we might think at first. Already in the opening lines of the Don Quijote we notice traces
of this „proto-postmodernism‟ when the narrator discloses to us that he encountered
difficulties when writing his book (Currie 1995: 5).
In this dissertation, I will investigate unreliable narration in contemporary metafictional
novels. First, I will outline the basic theoretical foundation of both my central concepts,
providing the reader with a definition, a typology and an overview of the different academic
stances on the subject. Secondly, I will for both techniques investigate the specific
consequences for the reader. I will then continue the theoretical survey by trying to determine
a common ground between the two narratological phenomena: where are they located, i.e. in
what part are they authorial constructions or interpretations by the reader? How can we
recognize an unreliable narrator or metafictional passages? How do both narratological
phenomena manipulate readers and push them towards a certain interpretation? Finally, I
would like to examine whether metafiction and unreliable narration affect each other when
used simultaneously in a text, and more specifically whether the use of both techniques has an
influence on the effect produced in the reader‟s mind. For this purpose, I will put theory into
practice in the second part of this work and analyse two postmodern novels: Dave Eggers‟ A
6
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Philip Roth‟s Operation Shylock. A
Confession.
7
I. Theoretical Survey
1. Theory and definition of the concept of narrative (un)reliability
Once upon a time there was an unreliable narrator, meaning it was not a reliable one. To
determine the nature of the not-so-reliable fabulator, we will start by looking at his positive
counterpart.1 Kathleen Wall is one of the first theorists to reflect upon this opposition. In her
1994 work on Kazuo Ishiguro‟s The Remains of the Day, she defines the reliable narrator as
the „rational, self-present subject of humanism, who occupies a world in which language is a
transparent medium that is capable of reflecting a „real‟ world‟ (1994: 20). Likewise, Ansgar
Nünning argues in “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration” that „[t]he notion of unreliability
presupposes that an objective view of the world, of others, and of oneself can be attained‟
(2005: 41). As has been demonstrated throughout history, humans are keen to believe they are
capable of providing veracious accounts of events. Think for example of eighteenth-century
humanist optimism and nineteenth-century realism. The contemporary reader however,
infused by a postmodern disbelief in this possibility, will immediately remark that no such
entirely objective narrator exists. I would therefore prefer to define the reliable narrator as a
character that reflects a coherent rather than a „real‟ world, and does not trigger any textual
discrepancies within the fictional universe.
In the following part of this dissertation, I will try to provide the reader with a survey of the
different views on narrative unreliability and main problems standing in the way of a
consensus on an unambiguous definition. I will begin with Booth‟s more text-centred theory,
elucidate the notion of the implied author, and briefly mention some of Booth‟s like-minded
colleagues. The vision of these scholars was strongly contested by cognitive theorists, in
particular by Ansgar Nünning, who proposes a more reader-oriented approach. Subsequent to
the cognitive-constructivist perspective, I will discuss the rhetorical approach as forwarded by
James Phelan, who campaigns the recursive relations between author, text and reader as
responsible for narrative unreliability. Finally, I will try to establish a working definition,
which I will use as an instrument for analysis in the second part of this work.
1
As both novels in my analysis feature male unreliable narrators, I have chosen to use strictly male or pural
pronouns for the sake of simplicity.
8
The Founding Father: Wayne C. Booth
I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the
work (which is to say the implied author‟s norms), unreliable when he does not. (Booth 1961: 158159)
Booth defines the unreliable narrator in his 1961 work The Rhetoric of Fiction as a narrator
whose values and/or perceptions differ from those of the implied author, and thus
distinguishes itself from its reliable counterpart through a certain distance between himself
and this so-called „implied author‟. By introducing this important narratological construct,
enfant terrible Booth clearly positions himself against the anti-authorial theories of the in
those days dominant New Criticism. He believes the implied author is a „second self‟ the
flesh-and-blood author creates while writing, and which is the source of the norms, beliefs
and final purpose of the text. He asserts that this doppelgänger of the author is an entity that
the reader can know, can reconstruct based on the given text. However, he also warns readers
that the continuity between the flesh-and-blood person and the implied author can not be
interpreted as a total identification: the same „real‟ author can create various implied authors
in as many texts.
According to Booth, the implied author can communicate with readers on two levels: in the
first place through the narrator‟s direct telling of the story, yet at the same time the writer can
add a second layer of communication that takes place between him/her and the readers behind
the narrator‟s back and that is signposted by textual indicators. Consequently, when faced
with a work of fiction attentive readers can at a certain point detect a distance between the
literal meaning of the narrator‟s words or actions and a second, underlying meaning they are
invited to infer. The utterances of the narrator can also be contradictory to what readers
believe to be the norms and values of the text as a whole. In such cases, any claim of the
narrator‟s part will not be taken for granted, yet be scrutinized: once the unreliability is
detected, readers‟ truth-sensitive antennas are extended, as it were. Booth believes it is
possible to draw up an exhaustive list of the textual signals that cause readers to consider a
narrator as unreliable. According to the scholar, the unreliability can either be regarding facts
or values. Moreover, he claims that a narrator either is or isn‟t reliable and remains so
throughout the entire text. However, as Vera Nünning demonstrates in “Unreliable Narration
and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms, The Vicar of Wakefield as a test case of a
Cultural-historical Narratology”, a text and its narrator can be interpreted as reliable in one era
9
and as unreliable in another. It seems thus, that however important Booth‟s coining of the
term and theoretical foundations were, he was indeed wide of the mark in these last
assumptions.
In 1978, Seymour Chatman develops the „communication model‟; following in Booth‟s
footsteps (he will later make several adjustments to this model, due to criticism by cognitive
and rhetorical schools). According to Chatman, a double communication takes place within
every fictional text:
R author  I author  (Narrator)  (Narratee)  I reader  R reader
Chatman defines the implied author as the „patterns of the text‟ or the „codes and conventions
of the text‟. 2 This symmetrical model is also used by Monika Fludernik in her important
narratological work in The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction.
Let us concentrate on the narratological levels of interaction between characters within the fiction,
narrator and narratee, implied author and implied reader and – finally – the „real‟ author and his or
her public. The communication on each of these levels is of a very different kind from the
interaction on the others, and the status of sender and recipient, too, needs to be redefined for each
level. (1993: 442)
In these text-immanent models, narrative unreliability is a result of the interplay between the
discursive levels in a text, and more specifically of the discrepancy between the narrator‟s
point of view and the general meaning or values of the text.
1.2 Problematizing the implied author
A vigorous opponent of the text-oriented approach Booth and Chatman promote, is Ansgar
Nünning. In his work “Reconceptualizing the Theory, History and Generic Scope of
Unreliable Narration”, he claims that both the concept of the unreliable narrator itself, and
more specifically the axiom of the implied author are „terminologically imprecise and
theoretically inadequate‟.
2
Chatman, Story and Discourse, 1978. Quoted from Phelan 2005: 40
Note: Chatman does nuance the concept of the implied author, which he believes should be renamed „inferred
author‟ to incorporate the reader‟s role in the process.
10
The postulation of essentialized and anthropomorphized entities designated “unreliable narrator”
and “implied author” ignores both the complexity of the phenomena involved and the dynamics of
literary communication and the reading process, standing in the way of a systematic exploration of
the cognitive processes which result in the projection of unreliable narrators in the first place.
(2005: 30)
According to Nünning, Booth regards unreliable narration as a text-immanent issue, thus
neglecting the important role of the reader in the reception and interpreting process. As results
from the above citation, the cognitive scholar has specifically strong objections against the
theoretical construct of the implied author, which, he argues, is a repository for all difficulties
narratology encounters concerning the relation between the author and the reader.
[C]ognitive narratologists have argued that instead of postulating an “unreliable narrator”, whose
reliability or unreliability is gauged against the norms of an anthropomorphicized entity designated
“the implied author”, it would be more sensible to conceptualize the relevant phenomena in the
context of frame theory as a projection by the reader who tries to resolve ambiguities and textual
inconsistencies by attributing them to the narrator‟s “unreliability”. (2005: 32)
Likewise, Mieke Bal observes that the implied author is „a remainder category, a kind of
passepartout that serves to clear away all the problematic remainders of a theory‟ (1981: 209).
Nünning claims that even in Booth‟s own definition of the implied author, the phenomenon is
not forwarded as a purely textual feature, but rather as a mental image that the reader
constructs of the author based on the text. Moreover, the scholar draws our attention to the
fact that placing the responsibility for the text in the „hands‟ of an anthropomorphicized
agent/creator reintroduces the intentional fallacy Wimsatt & Beardsley tried to heed us for: i.e.
that the author creates a text with one, ideal interpretation. Susan Lanser believes that the law
of parsimony is to be held high and the concept therefore should be abandoned altogether, as
„[i]t not only adds another narrating subject to the heap but it fails to resolve what it sets out to
bridge: the author-narrator relationship‟.3
Because Booth bases his theory of unreliable narration on this contested notion of the implied
author, it no longer seems sustainable. What does Nünning propose instead? His definition of
unreliable narration is as follows:
Unreliable narrators are those whose perspective is in contradiction to the value and norm system
of the whole text or to that of the reader. The phenomenon of unreliable narration can be seen as
the result of discrepant awareness and dramatic irony. The general effect of what is called
unreliable narration consists of redirecting the reader‟s attention from the level of the story to the
3
Susan Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction, Princeton University Press, 1981: 49f.
Quoted from Nünning 2005: 36
11
speaker and of foregrounding peculiarities of the narrator‟s psychology. (2005: 38-39. My
emphasis)
Nünning believes that the concept of the unreliable narrator is a naturalization strategy of the
part of the reader in order to accord for ambiguities within the text, and proposes a cognitive
reconceptualization of the narrative phenomenon. According to the cognitivist, the reader will
try to make sense of any textual discrepancies, and does this by attributing them to the
narrator‟s flawlike character. In a similar vein of thought, Tamar Yacobi admits that the
technique of unreliability is a cognitive construction of the reader in the meaning-making
process, is „an inference that explains and eliminates tensions, incongruities, contradictions
and other infelicities the work may show by attributing them to a source of
transmission‟(1981: 119). Yacobi calls unreliable narration one of the many „reconciling and
integrating measures‟ readers have at their disposal in order to account for contradictions in
the text (1981: 114). Surely, it is true that the historical variability of the reception of
unreliable narration, as demonstrated by Vera Nünning, endorses her namesake Ansgar‟s view
that unreliability is not a textual feature, but is dependent on reader reception and thus a
reading strategy. In contrast to Booth, Nünning contends that it is not merely the distance
between the world view of the narrator and that of the implied author that causes the reader to
perceive of the narrator as unreliable, but also that between the narrator and the world view
and standards of normalcy of the reader.
A positive side to the cognitivist approach is that the vague and abstract notion of the implied
author is left out. However, Greta Olson argues in her article “Reconsidering Unreliability:
Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators” that even though Booth‟s model of unreliable narration
is text-oriented and Nünning‟s is reader-oriented, the latter is too aggressive in his attack.
Olson argues that the two models are structurally similar, and that Nünning throws out
Booth‟s theoretical baby with the bathwater.
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). (2003: 93)
Simplified, Booth locates the authority to judge a narrator as unreliable with the implied
author, whereas according to Nünning that authority lies with the reader. Nünning follows a
more constructivist stream of thought, allowing for an infinite number of different
interpretations.
12
A second positive aspect of Nünning‟s reader-reception-oriented approach to unreliable
narration is that it takes into account the conceptual frameworks readers bring into the text
and on which they base themselves when constructing meaning.
Determining whether a narrator is unreliable is not just an innocent descriptive statement but a
subjectively tinged value-judgment or projection governed by the normative presuppositions and
moral convictions of the critic, which [...] recuperate[s] textual inconsistencies by relating them to
accepted cultural models. (2005: 40)
Besides the intratextual signals Booth points to, Nünning also draws on the reader‟s
extratextual frames of reference, claiming that all readers have knowledge, norms and moral
standards set up in their minds prior to the reading of the text. These frames of reference
range from general world-knowledge and moral, cultural, social or linguistic values, to
specifically literary norms, like e.g. knowledge of genre conventions, pre-existing texts and
generic stereotypes. The readers‟ world view and norms will certainly have an effect on
whether or not they deem a narrator unreliable. Nünning provides an example to illustrate this:
a „normal‟ person will read Nabokov‟s Lolita as going against the opinion of normal moral
standards; a pederast is likely to have a different perspective on the text. In this light, the
interpretation of a narrator as (un)reliable is not caused by a structural feature of the text, but
is governed by pragmatics, and as such, Nünning calls for an interactive model of the reading
progress in which cognitivist theories, alongside pragmatics and frame theory, can function as
an instrument for studying the reception of the unreliable narrator. One of Nünning‟s
supporters is Monika Fludernik, who considers unreliable narration as one of several possible
naturalization theories readers can use to fit a text into their own world view.
However useful and necessary the recognition of the important role the reader has in the
construction of the figure of the narrator, there is a downside to this approach. In the complex
postmodern age we live in today, how can we establish objective norms the unreliable
narrator deviates from? Can we speak of „common sense‟ and „normal moral standards‟ in our
diversified world? The problem is that an objective, generally agreed-upon standard by which
to judge a narrator simply cannot be drawn up, and the danger of overrelativization renders an
objective study of the phenomenon extremely difficult.
13
1.3 The respective roles of authorial agency, textual clues and reader response in the
interpretation process
The cognitivist theories are criticized by the so-called rhetorical approaches for overstating
the role of the reader at the expense of the author‟s agency and to a lesser extent of the textual
signals of unreliability. They rightly point out the fact that, like the reader, the author is also
defined by frames of reference which have an impact on the text. James Phelan argues in his
work Living to tell about it that the writing of a text is a rhetorical act in which authors want
to communicate something to their audience, and do so by creating a narrator who tells
something to a narratee. The interpretation of a text depends on the interaction between author,
text and reader. Phelan asserts that the rhetorical approach
locates meaning in a feedback loop among authorial agency, textual phenomena (including
intertextual relations), and reader response. In other words, for the purposes of interpreting
narratives, the conception assumes that texts are designed by authors in order to affect readers in
particular ways, that those designs are conveyed through the language, techniques, structures,
forms, and dialogic relations of texts as well as the genres and conventions readers use to
understand them, and that reader responses are a function, guide, and test of how designs are
created through textual and intertextual phenomena. (2005: 18)
The difficulty of the authors‟ task is to render the message while restricting theirselves to the
narrator‟s view. To denominate the creative agent behind the text Phelan maintains the
contested notion of the implied author, which he redefines as „a streamlined version of the
real author, an actual or purported subset of the real author‟s capacities, traits, attitudes,
beliefs, values and other properties that play an active role in the construction of a particular
text‟ (2005: 45). In contrast to Booth, he does not consider the implied author a structural
feature of the text, but rather as the agent responsible for bringing the text into existence and
infuses the text with his or her values. Symmetrically, he adds the notion of the implied or
authorial audience, a hypothetical pool of ideal readers for whom the implied author
constructs the text. The most important change Phelan makes with respect to previous theories
is that he moves the implied author outside the text, but keeps the authorial audience inside
the text. As he puts it, the implied author creates textual phenomena for a hypothetical
audience, and it is the individual reader‟s task to become part of that authorial audience by
making the right inferences about the author‟s intention.
This implies that in every text a double communication takes place: two speakers, one explicit
and one implicit, impart a message to their respective audiences, the narratee and the authorial
14
audience. The most important difference between authorial and narrative audience is that the
first positions itself towards the text with the tacit knowledge that the characters and events
are synthetic constructs, while the second operates within the discourse.
Character narration is an art of indirection: an author communicates to her [sic] audience by means
of the character narrator‟s communication to a narratee. The art consists in the author‟s ability to
make the single text function effectively for its two audiences (the narrator‟s and the author‟s, or to
use the technical terms, the narratee and the authorial audience) and its two purposes (author‟s and
character narrator‟s) while also combining in one figure (the “I”) the roles of both narrator and
character. (2005: 1)
The use of an unreliable narrator is one of the rhetorical devices an author can employ in
order to establish a multilayered communication and achieve a desired effect on the reader. At
a certain moment the attentive reader will notice textual inconsistencies, and deduce that the
narrator‟s point of view does not coincide (entirely) with that of the implied author. As Tamar
Yacobi puts it, „the reader recognizes the character‟s interference with the facts or their
significance‟ (1981: 118). It is this moment of anagnorisis that will trigger readers to consider
the narrator unreliable. Where Nünning holds readers alone responsible for the interpretation
of a narrator as unreliable, Phelan sees the author as someone who deliberately designs textual
discrepancies as signals of unreliability which allow the implied author and the authorial
audience to set up a communication behind the narrator‟s back (this „secret‟ communication is
another of Booth‟s notions Phelan preserves). The effect of the unreliable narrator‟s story thus
depends on the implied authors‟ ability to communicate an underlying message to the
authorial audience, while restricting themselves to the vision and voice of the narrator as this
character addresses the narratee. The tension between the respective viewpoints of implied
author and character narrator create the unreliability in the narration, which the reader can
infer from textual signals.
The feeling that may come out of this is that the narrator is the puppet and readers the kids in
the audience trying to warn Little Red Riding Hood that the wolf is right behind her. However,
once a certain age the illusion experienced as a child wears away and the puppeteer becomes
ever more visible. Likewise, the detection of the manipulating hand of the implied author in a
text requires a certain level of interpretative maturity. Phelan stresses that it is important that
readers notice the different communicative levels interacting within discourse.
The narrator tells her story to her narratee for her purposes, while the author communicates to her
audience for her own purposes both that story and the narrator‟s telling of it. (2005: 18)
15
Phelan makes an interesting distinction between these two purposes, which he both calls
telling functions. The telling functions that follow the narrator-narratee track, he labels
narrator functions; those that run along the narrator-authorial audience track, when the
ignorant narrator unintentionally discloses underlying information to the reader, Phelan calls
disclosure functions. The rhetorical scholar claims that the latter will ultimately trump the first,
because the communication between the implied author and authorial audience is the final
goal of the text. Disclosure functions are foregrounded when the author‟s indirect
communication with the reader interferes with the narrator‟s direct communication to the
narratee, as is the case with unreliable narration.
1.4 Towards a working definition?
In my perspective, all three of the approaches mentioned above have a point to make, and I
would argue that a synthesis of them is probably the clue that will lead us closer to discover
the working of the complex phenomenon of unreliable narration. I have opted to retain the
contested notion of the implied author, because as Tamar Yacobi argues, the mechanism of
narrative unreliability implies a manipulative agent that designed and uses the flawlike
character narrator for a specific purpose.
The relations between implied author and reader are by definition functional and hence located
within the framework of an act of communication. Therefore, when the reader infers an unreliable
narrator (or any other fallible observer) who unconsciously reveals his eccentricities and
distortions ... even this informative aspect of narration forms a part of the intentionality underlying
the overall act of communication. To construct an hypothesis as to the unreliability of the narrator
is then necessarily to assume the existence of an implied (and by definition reliable) author who
manipulates his creature for his own purposes. (Yacobi 1981: 123)
Moreover, it will result from my analysis that the concept of an “authoritative figure” will
turn out to be a useful instrument for detecting the values the text as a whole tries to convey.
Vincent Jouve claims in La Poétique des Valeurs that the implied author is the figure that
allows us to evaluate the character of the narrator on a higher ontological level: it is „une
instance textuelle qui se distingue du [narrateur] puisqu‟elle permet d‟évaluer [le narrateur]‟
(2001: 91). Where I agree with Ansgar Nünning‟s rejection of Booth‟s definition of the
implied author as a purely structural feature of the text, Phelan‟s – or Yacobi‟s for that matter
– reconceptualization of the notion does appear to be useful. In the rest of this dissertation, I
will interpret the concept of the implied author as a creative agent that is responsible for the
text, and addresses a hypothetical ideal audience.
16
The unreliable narrator then, is a character that grants us access to the fictional world, and that
is created by the implied author out of language for a specific communicative purpose. The
structure of this narrative strategy is, like Booth proposed, tripartite: the reader judges the
narrator‟s (un)reliability based on textual signals, intercepts a non-literal, underlying meaning
of the text which express the text‟s general intention or values and norms. The respective
degree of importance attributed to each of these components can vary from text to text.
Determining narrative unreliability is not just a gratuitous value-judgement of the reader, but
a decision based on a broad range of textual signals. The reader will import conceptual
frameworks and knowledge of standards of normalcy into the text, and likewise take those of
the (implied) author into account. After this judgement, the reader can predict whether the
narrator is likely to be unreliable again and assume a reading strategy.
1.5 Typological distinctions
1.5.1 Facts and ideology
Several theorists have attempted to make distinctions between various sorts of unreliable
narration. The most important division seems to be based on whether we are dealing with a
factual of an ethical type of unreliability: Booth claims a narrator can be unreliable about
either facts or values, Nünning feels a narrator can be either misrepresenting or
misinterpreting, and Dorrit Cohn distinguishes between a factual kind of unreliability and
ideological kind that is attributed to a narrator who is biased or confused, which she labels
“discordant narration”. Fludernik takes this typology to the next level, as she adds a third axis.
She discovers three modes of narrative unreliability: factual inaccuracy, lack of objectivity
and ideological unreliability.
In a more elaborate typology, Phelan believes a narrator can be unreliable along three axes: 1.
the axis of facts and events: in this case the narrator is „guilty‟ of unreliable reporting; 2. the
axis of understanding and perception: this would be unreliable reading on the narrator‟s part;
and 3. the axis of ethics and values: here he speaks of unreliable regarding. The rhetoricist
makes a further subdivision between six types of unreliable narration which can occur along
one or several of the axes: misreporting, misreading, misregarding; underreporting,
underreading and underregarding. Misreporting occurs when narrators give us an erroneous
account of things, often because of a lack of knowledge or „mistaken values‟ on their part.
17
Misreading is due to the narrators‟ lack of knowledge and understanding. Misregarding
involves unreliability along the axis of ethics: the narrator makes a bad judgement call.
Narrators that are underreporting do not tell us everything they know. We speak of
underreading when a narrator makes another bad judgement call due to a lack of knowledge.
Finally, underregarding occurs when narrators cannot grasp the scope of the event and judge it
insufficiently. An important remark Phelan adds to this typology is that narrators do not have
to be (and often cannot be) fitted neatly into one of these categories. A narrator can be
unreliable „in different ways at different points in his or her narrative‟ (2005: 52). According
to Phelan, a further distinction between unreliable narrators must be made based on the effect
the narration has on the authorial audience, and I will elaborate on this topic when discussing
the reception of narrative unreliability.
1.5.2 Unreliable Narrators vs. Fallible Characters
Greta Olson provides us with an important observation concerning narrative unreliability in
her article “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators”. She claims it
is necessary to make a differentiation between downright untrustworthy narrators and
characters that are fallible, i.e. who are not in the position to provide readers with a veracious
or authoritative account of events, because they are mistaken in their judgements or biased.
“Unreliable” and “untrustworthy” suggest that the narrator deviates from the general normative
standards implicit in the text. For this reason the narrator cannot be trusted on a personal level. By
contrast, “inconscience” and “fallible” imply that the narrator makes mistakes about how she
perceives herself or her fictional world. The first terms concern the narrator‟s qualities as a person
and the second her ability to perceive and report accurately.4 (2003: 96. My emphasis)
Olson claims that a narrator‟s fallibility is situationally motivated – or that external
circumstances cause the narrator‟s mistaken judgement – and that this kind of unreliability is
excusable. However, untrustworthy narrators are dispositionally unreliable; any utterance of
this type of character will be scrutinized by the reader. Like Phelan, Olson argues that
different types of unreliability require a different reading attitude and that a decision on
whether a narrator is fallible or untrustworthy „allows the reader to predict whether the
narrator is likely to always misreport or is prevented by circumstances from telling the tale
straight‟.
4
Note: Olson adopts the term inconscience from Booth‟s work, which he defines as the mistaken belief of the
narrator in his/her own qualities.
18
A final notion I would like to elaborate on is „sincerity‟. A fallible character can
simultaneously be sincere and unreliable as it does not provide the reader with the required
information. Lionel Trilling has defined sincerity in his essay Sincerity and Authenticity as the
„congruence between avowal and actual feeling‟.5 Liesbeth Korthals Altes asserts:
[s]incerity has been defined as the adequation of speech or writing to one‟s intention and character,
to one‟s inner self and one‟s deeds. Although it is a necessary element of truth-telling, it does not
guarantee a truth claim – as reliability would – but rather the speaker‟s commitment to his/her
„saying‟ and „said‟ and to the values and meanings implied. (2008: 109)
Altes maintains that in speech act and communication theory, sincerity is considered as one of
the basic conditions for meaningful human communication, as „it entails the projection of the
image of a trustworthy speaker, suggesting a basis for reciprocity‟ (2008: 114). In spite of her
belief in the necessity of moral genuineness, Altes remarks that in contemporary postdeconstructionism culture, irony and unreliable narration may appear the more sincere mode
of expression, as they highlight the risks of communication and the hermeneutic work that are
in fact the norm.
5
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1972: 2. Quoted from Korthals Altes
2008: 109
19
2. Reading Narrative Unreliability
After having briefly described the main theoretical currents underlying the notion of narrative
unreliability, I will now scrutinize the causes and effects of the literary phenomenon. First, I
will look at the textual signals that can guide a reader to conclude on such unreliability;
several of the authors mentioned above have attempted to draw up a (complete) list of these
indicators. Secondly, I will investigate which effect this conclusion has on the reading
experience and the meaning the reader infers from the text.
2.1 Textual clues to recognize narrative unreliability
Why do readers consider a character narrator untrustworthy? There are several intratextual
signals that trigger such an interpretation. Ansgar Nünning claims that
[u]nreliable narrators tend to be marked by a number of textual inconsistencies. These may range
from internal contradictions within their discourse over discrepancies between their utterances and
actions, [...] to those inconsistencies that result from multiperspectivval accounts of the same event.
(2005: 44)
Kathleen Wall talks about verbal tics or verbal habits of the narrator. As I mentioned above,
Booth claims in his The Rhetoric of Fiction that narrative unreliability is a textual
phenomenon, which can consequently be subjected to a systematic investigation. In his more
recent work A Rhetoric of Irony, the author puts theory into practise and provides us with a
list of textual indications of a narrator‟s untrustworthiness. These include: paratextual
elements; direct warnings that the narrator should not be confused with the author; obvious
grammatical, stylistic, or historical mistakes on the part of the narrator; conflicts between
fictional facts; discrepancies between the values asserted in the work and those of the author
in other contexts (1975: 47-86).
Nünning provides us with a more exhaustive list. He discovers the following textual
indications of narrative unreliability: the narrator‟s explicit contradictions and other
discrepancies in the narrative discourse; discrepancies between the narrator‟s utterances and
actions; divergences between the narrator‟s description of himself and other character‟s
descriptions of him; contradictions between the narrator‟s explicit comments on other
characters and his implicit characterization of himself or the narrator‟s involuntary exposure
of himself; contradictions between the narrator‟s account of events and his explanations and
20
interpretations of the same, as well as contradictions between the story and discourse; other
characters‟ corrective verbal remarks or body signals; multiperspectival arrangements of
events and contrasts between various versions of the same events; an accumulation of remarks
relating to the self as well as linguistic signals denoting expressiveness and subjectivity,
which indicate a high degree of emotional involvement; an accumulation of direct addresses
to the reader and conscious attempts to direct the reader‟s sympathy; syntactic signals
denoting the narrator‟s high level of emotional involvement, including exclamations, ellipses,
unmotivated repetitions etc; idiosyncratic verbal habits like stylistic peculiarities/ violation of
linguistic norms; explicit, self-referential, metanarrative discussions of the narrator‟s
believability; an admitted lack of reliability, memory gaps, and comments on cognitive
limitations; a confessed or situation-related prejudice; paratextual signals such as titles,
subtitles, and prefaces. 6 I want to stress that Nünning feels that explicit self-referential
metanarrative discussions can be an indication of unreliable narration, a technique that both
the authors I study in my analysis have clearly grasped and make extensive use of in their
novels.
Phelan elaborates on the interesting notion of redundant telling, which he defines as „a
narrator‟s apparently unmotivated report of information to a narratee that the narratee already
possesses‟ (2005: 11). He attributes this redundancy to the author‟s need to communicate
information to the audience, for example when the audience knows less than the narratee, and
claims that redundant telling can equal necessary disclosure. Vincent Jouve argues in his work
Poétique des Valeurs that the technique of redundant telling is an important instrument of
which narrators dispose to indirectly communicate values to the reader. Jouve claims narrators
fulfil three functions through which they can steer readers‟ perception of the text: 1. la
fonction idéologique, i.e. when the narrator explicitly formulates a judgement towards
characters or events; 2. la fonction de régie: the narrator organises the text according to
preference. This function includes the use of redundant telling or the juxtaposition of
conflicting viewpoints in order to emphasize and/or express a stance towards an event or
character; and 3. la fonction modalisante (the narrator assumes the role of “porte-parole” of
the text).
6
Nünning, „Unreliable Narration zue Einführung: Grunzüge einer kognitiv-narratologischen Theorie und
Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens,‟ in Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis
unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, edited by Ansgar Nünning, Trier, WVT,
1998. Freely adapted from Olson, 97-98. My italics.
21
Certains personnages « ont toujours raison » – leurs commentaires (prévisions, analyses, jugements)
sont toujours confirmés par les évènements. Un tel personnage fonctionne comme interprète
véridique, voire comme porte-parole des valeurs de l‟œuvre. Une fois qu‟un tel personnage est
constitué, tous ses commentaires tendront à fonctionner comme des commentaires « autorisés ».7
The employment of an unreliable narrator thus points to a high degree of ideological
manipulation by the implied author.
2.2 The scope of unreliable narration
Both novels I will analyse in the second part of my dissertation feature homodiegetic firstperson narrators. The distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration was
introduced by the French theorist Gérard Genette, who asserts that a homodiegetic narrator is
a character that encounters itself at the same ontological level as other characters, that can talk
to them and partakes in the events of the story. A heterodiegetic narrator on the other hand, is
a narrator that is situated on a higher ontological level than other characters, and cannot
interfere with the story world (think of the objective omniscient narrator in realist novels).
Some theorists, like Bruno Zerweck, argue that there exists a package deal between narrative
unreliability and homodiegetic narration, because there can be no interpretation of
unreliability unless there is an anthropomorphic character that the unreliability can be
ascribed to. Zerweck argues that „[t]he concept of narrative unreliability is inapplicable if a
narrative is transmitted in an impersonal mode or if a text is extremely metafictional‟. 8
Moreover, heterodiegetic narration seems to have an authoritative aura caused by its nonparticipation in the related events, as „existence outside the fictive world [...] naturally links
up with reliability (i.e. “objectivity” resulting from distance and lack of involvement) as well
as with omniscience (the range of knowledge which exceeds that inherent in the human
condition)‟ (Yacobi 1981: 120). However, more recently Manfred Jahn, Dorrit Cohn and
Tamar Yacobi have among others explored the extensive possibilities of heterodiegetic
narration. Greta Olson argues in “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy
Narrators” that she
7
Susan Suleiman, Le roman à thèse, op. cit. p. 201-202. Quoted from Jouve, Poétque des Valeurs, 2001: 106
Bruno Zerweck, „Historicising Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction‟,
in Style 35, 1, 2001: 155-156. Quoted from Gunther Martens, „Revising and Extending the Scope of the
Rhetorical Approach to Unreliable Narration‟, in Narrative Unreliability in the twentieth-century first-person
novel. De Gruyter, 2008: 77
8
22
would agree with Cohn and Yacobi that the same inferences about character, trustworthiness, and
personality can be applied to narrators who do not take part in their stories. The degree to which
these disembodied voices appear to be part of full-fleshed characters determines the reader‟s
perception of whether they can be thought of as fallible and trustworthy. The less personalized the
narrative voice is, I would argue, the more inappropriate it is to infer unreliability. (2003: 106)
It does seem to be the case that homodiegetic narrators are more likely to be fallible or
untrustworthy, as they do not have the bird‟s-eye view heterodiegetic narrators have over the
narrative world and are thus more liable to erroneous judgements and interpretations.
However, character narrators who tell stories they do not take part in can still deliberately
deceive or give readers incomplete accounts of events.
2.3 Estranging and bonding unreliability: the effects of (un)reliable narration on the authorial
audience
Action triggers reaction: once readers have made up their minds whether or not to trust the
narrator, this mindset will have consequences for the further reading strategy. The effect of
the detection of unreliable narration is twofold: on the one hand the phenomenon „refocuses
the reader‟s attention on the narrator‟s mental processes‟9. Ansgar Nünning claims that
[t]he general effect of what is called unreliable narration consists of redirecting the reader‟s
attention from the level of the story to the speaker and of foregrounding peculiarities of the
narrator‟s psychology. (2005: 38-39)
On the other hand, the change in the readers‟ perception of the narrator‟s character will cause
a change in their emotional response to both the narrating figure and the text as a whole. As
the cognitive-constructionist approach to unreliable narration has postulated, a certain narrator
can be considered either reliable or unreliable according to the readers‟ respective frames of
reference. The variation in interpretation of the narrator can cause a potentially enormous
variation in the experience of the narrative world. Ansgar Nünning claims that „[d]ecisions
which readers make about a narrator‟s unreliability tend to determine many aspects of the
represented world that readers (re-)construct‟ (2005: 67). Once readers consider a narrator to
be untrustworthy, they will naturally be suspicious of this character‟s other utterances.
In this respect, Phelan makes an interesting distinction between types of unreliable narrators
based on their respective effect on the authorial audience.
9
Wall 1994: 23. Quoted from Nünning 2005: 39
23
More specifically, I want to distinguish between estranging unreliability, by which I mean
unreliable narration that underlines or increases the distance between the narrator and the authorial
audience, and bonding unreliability, by which I mean unreliable narration that reduces the distance
between the narrator and the authorial audience. (2008: 9)
When confronted with the first type of unreliable narration, the authorial audience
understands that the narrator‟s perspective and the implied author‟s do not coincide. Readers
will consequently be on their guard for the rest of the reading process and every utterance by
the narrator will be scrutinized, to the extent that identification with the narrator is made
entirely impossible. Reading the second type of unreliability, the authorial audience
paradoxically recognizes that the viewpoints of the implied author and the authorial audience
may not coincide, yet at the same time understands that in this case the implied author
endorses some of the unreliable communication. The reader is aware that the unreliable
narrator is the instrument that the implied author uses for a specific purpose, and will
consequently play along with the character narrator. Bonding unreliability thus turns the
reader in to the accomplice of the implied author.
24
3. Theory and definition of narrative self-consciousness
Desocupado lector: sin juramento me podrás creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del
entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse;
pero no he podido yo contravenir al orden de naturaleza, que en ella cada cosa engendra su
semejante.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote De La Mancha, prologue
In the two following parts of this dissertation I will take a closer look at my second central
concept: that of contemporary metafiction. In the sixties the postmodern novel was born:
writers eschewed the possibility of meaning-making in their work and started analysing both
the construction methods of the novel and the arbitrariness of language. Authors of the period
turn to playfulness, parody, pastiche and puns as a way of maintaining identity within the
postmodern chaos. Interestingly, the use of these self-reflective devices makes metafictional
writers at once creators and critics of their own work. Scorned by some critics as the last
convulsion of an extinguishing novel form, jubilantly received by others as a fresh wind in a
vibrant -if fossilized- story tradition, self-conscious fiction or metafiction has the effect of an
earthquake in the literary field.
Linda Hutcheon argues in her work Narcissistic Narrative that art has always been “illusion”,
and that it has often, if not always, been aware of that status. She claims self-consciousness is
a broad cultural phenomenon, not limited by art form or even by period (1980: 17). Indeed,
the erosion of literary foundations is discernible in fiction from the very beginning: early
examples of novelistic self-awareness include Cervantes‟ Don Quijote – which is not only the
first „realistic‟ novel, but also the first self-reflective one in that it is aware of and parodies
both its own status as a written text (cfr. supra) and the literary conventions of its time –; the
phenomenon of the mise en abyme; Shakespeare‟s plays within plays; frame narratives like
Boccaccio‟s Decamerone; and perhaps above all Sterne‟s parodic novel The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Likewise, we can think of early self-referentiality
in painting, like the painter in Velasquez‟ “Las Meniñas” and Jan Van Eyck‟s literal selfmirroring in the portrait of the Arnolfini-couple.
In the following section of this chapter, I will more or less maintain the same structure as in
the above discussion of unreliability, starting with the definition of and conceptual problems
25
surrounding the notion of metafiction. I will then present a brief survey of the evolution of
literary self-awareness throughout history, followed by a summary of the attempts towards a
metafictional typology. Secondly, I will focus on the effect of metafictional passages on the
reading experience, and address the double ethical implications of narrative selfconsciousness.
3.1 Definition of metafiction
The term „metafiction‟ was first used in 1970 by William Gass – a writer of self-conscious
novels himself – in his work Fiction and the Figures of Life, to refer to recent fictions that
were somehow about fiction itself. In a comparable line of thought, Linda Hutcheon claims
that
[m]etafiction is, in some dominant and constitutive way, self-referring or autorepresentational: it
provides, within itself, a commentary on its own status as fiction and as language, and also on its
own processes of production and reception. (1980: xii)
With her definition, Hutcheon pinpoints the fact that metafictional writing is both aware of
and at the same time provides an overt commentary on its ontological status as a written
artefact and a universe created out of language. In his introduction to the collection of essays
on the subject of narrative self-awareness, Mark Currie has similarly labelled metafiction „a
borderline discourse, a kind of writing between fiction and criticism‟ (1995: 2). The basic
elements to the understanding of narrative self-consciousness are fiction (a universe located
on a different ontological level than reality), story (as told by a narrator), language (arbitrary
and meaning-imposing) and critique (varying from overt commentary to parody to covert
linguistic puns). In sum, self-reflective fiction thus contains its own frame of reference, which
it then critically formalizes or thematizes. However, it is important that readers remember that
metafiction always remains to a certain extent fiction: contemporary literature has not yet
reached the point where deviation from the norm has triggered the establishment of a
completely new set of norms, and self-conscious narration still operates from within
established forms of cultural representation. Patricia Waugh argues more strongly that a
certain degree of familiarity is even necessary in order for readers to be able to make sense of
a text.
I want to stress that the type of metafiction I will study in this dissertation is of the
postmodern kind, and that I will leave earlier forms of narrative self-consciousness for what
26
they are. I do not pretend the contemporary form is in any way superior to its precedents. I
make this selection solely for the purpose of narrowing down the scope of my investigation.
The difference between both forms of textual self-awareness is that early narrative metafiction
is mainly self-conscious of its status as a written product, emphasizing the writing process and
the role of the author in constructing the fictional universe. The postmodern kind adds to these
insights a second, parallel concretization process: the constructive role of the reader is
recognized to be of equal importance to that of the author. In postmodern metafiction an
explicit commentary is enunciated, which forces readers into an active role of recognition and
assimilation of this critique, and will lead them to construct a new or surplus meaning.
3.2 The birth of literary self-awareness
Literary self-consciousness had to come a long way before it obtained its contemporary
postmodernist degree of sophistication. In what follows, I will briefly outline the evolution of
literary self-awareness on both the epistemological and ontological level, as I believe it to be
crucial for an accurate understanding of the concept. In her work Metafiction. The Theory and
Practice of Self-conscious Fiction Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as „a term given to
fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an
artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality‟ (1984: 2).
This relationship has proved to be a very complex one that has kept philosophers and
narratologists alike occupied for centuries, and is crucial for the recognition of literature as a
linguistic construct in the twentieth century.
The problem was first thought about by the ancestors of philosophy, the Greeks. Long before
the traditional novel saw the light of day, Plato distinguished between two different types of
artistic representation in his significant work The Republic, namely mimesis (from the Greek
μίμησις: to imitate) and diegesis (from διήγησις: to tell). Mimetic art or discourse aims to
imitate nature, to show (a part of) reality, whereas diegetic art or language designates the
subjection of nature to the ordering principle of language: the telling of a story by a narrator.
Plato prophesized that purely mimetic art can never attain the truth, that representation of
reality can never equal reality, and must therefore be considered useless. However, Aristotle
pointed out in response to his mentor‟s statements that humans are naturally mimetic beings,
that they are inclined to represent reality in art and that only by doing so the catharsis (the
cleansing effect of art on the public) is attainable. Retrospectively, we can establish that
27
metafiction comments on the second type of representation: it lays bare the conventions of
telling. The distinction mimetic-diegetic remains until today an important theoretical axiom in
narratology. More recently, the Russian Formalists distinguished between the fabula, the
events as they occurred in reality, and the suzjet, or how the events are reshaped and told as a
story. Monika Fludernik distinguishes between „mimetic unmediated representation‟, which
she links to direct discourse, and „mediated summary by the narrator‟ (1993: 26), linked to
indirect speech.
However, the conscious differentiation between showing and telling does not necessarily lead
to the postmodern critique we can detect in contemporary metafiction. How did narrative selfawareness evolve after the Greeks laid the foundations for the apprehension of the concept?
During the Christian-ruled Middle Ages people believed in a divine order that established a
causal relationship between sign and referent, and literature was consequently considered a
reliable source of knowledge about the empirical reality. Nonetheless, Roland Barthes argues
in “Littérature et méta-language” that the belief in a translating instance and the
epistemological value of literature starts staggering with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the
secularization of society. 10 This process has also been described in Michel Foucault‟s Les
mots et les choses, in which the author discerns a growing schism between language and
reality in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century G.W.F. Hegel overtly calls the
epistemological status of literature into question: according to the idealist philosopher, a work
of literature produces an image of „reality‟, and this image can never procure objective
knowledge about the empirical reality outside the work (we can detect clear echoes of Plato in
this theory).
In reaction to these epistemological doubts, we encounter legitimation strategies in the work
of 19th century romantics like Schlegel, who value literature above everyday life and
consequently regard it as a superior source of knowledge and experience to which only the
artist has access. The romantic exaltation of literature and the figure of the artist as a
connection between the human and superhuman world triggers a counterreaction with the
realists and more specifically the naturalists at the end of the century: for them literature can
depict historical events truthfully and is equal to any scientific method to analyse reality.
Important in the light of my investigation is that in order to achieve so-called „objectiveness‟,
10
Roland Barthes, “Littérature et méta-language”, in Essais critiques, Seuil, Paris. 1964: 106. Quoted from
Hutcheon 1984: 10
28
realists most often employ an invisible narrator (an illusionary device that will later trigger
strong reactions in both modernist and postmodern literature). In spite of the fact that the
realist paradigm has dominated western literature since it appeared and the form is used in
popular literature until today, many critics have spoken out against the strident novelistic
mode. Marcel Proust claims that „la littérature qui se contente « de décrire les choses » ... est
celle qui, tout en s‟appelant réaliste, est la plus éloignée de la réalité.‟ 11 More recently,
Michael Davis formulated his objections to mimetic art beautifully:
At first glance, mimesis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary features of our
world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the
object it imitates being something like the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always
involves selecting something from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what
really has no beginning or end. Mimêsis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is
contained within the frame is not simply real. Thus the more "real" the imitation the more
fraudulent it becomes.12
In the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism – and more specifically the Dadaist
movement – turns against the idolization of the writer as the almighty creator and starts
celebrating the role of chance, play and collage in art, taking a giant leap towards
postmodernism. It is clear that this self-conscious, deconstructive vision stands in stark
contrast to the positivist current that forms the theoretical basis of realism. As Linda Hutcheon
has pointed out, metafiction
implies the decentralizing of the traditional realistic interest of fiction, away from the story told to
the story telling, to the functioning of language and of larger diegetic structures. (1980: 35)
Concluding, self-reflective fiction has its roots in the theories that study the problematic
relationship between literature and reality and is a reaction against the realistic tendency to
obscure the diegetic or fictional mode. However, as we have seen in the definition,
metafiction is also aware of its status as language and of the arbitrariness of the language
system. This awareness dates from the early twentieth century: strongly influenced by the
theories of Ferdinand de Saussure about the difference between signifier and signified and by
psychoanalysis, the literature of that time interiorizes and starts investigating the possibilities
of the material the author uses. This linguistic turn in what we would today label „modernist‟
literature rejects the simplistic idea that language passively reflects reality. Language is seen
as an independent semiotic system that actively generates meaning and relates to empirical
11
12
Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,Gallimard, Paris, 1954: 243. Quoted from Hutcheon 1980: 46
Michael Davis, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics, St Augustine's, South Bend, Indiana, 1999: 3
29
reality in a complex way. The modernist author deconstructs the language system into its most
basic components and, by rearranging them into unusual combinations, the reader is at all
times made aware of the medium (think for example of the modernist novel par excellence,
Joyce‟s Ulysses).
Even though the modernist linguistic turn causes authors like Joyce and Woolf to experiment
with language in the first half of the twentieth century, one could claim that the explicit
postmodernist form of metafiction only sees daylight in the sixties. Patricia Waugh argues
that this literary self-realisation can be explained by an augmenting cultural awareness of how
human beings construct meaning (1984: 2): in the turbulent sixties the feeling of fictionality
in daily life increases strongly. As Hayden White explains in his 1973 work Metahistory,
reality and history are felt to be both artificial and provisional constructs which are
determined by language (and more specifically by metaphors), and this feeling then translates
itself into a hyper-awareness of the fictional construct, visible in both thematic content and
form of postmodern art.
Le postmodernisme, contrairement au modernisme, ne tente pas de répondre au chaos, mais
l‟accueille. Alors que le modernisme cherchait à compenser par des moyens esthétiques le
désordre du monde, le postmodernisme propose une forme esthétique elle-même marquée par
l‟incertitude et l‟éparpillement. (2001: 162)
The phenomenon does not manifest itself in literature alone: think of the French Nouvelle
Vague movies of the sixties and films of for example François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard
that tend to deconstruct the cinematographic medium through experimental postmodern
techniques like the presence of the filmmaker on the scene, the aside to the public and jump
cuts. After the epistemological questions of the modernists concerning the relation between a
story and reality and the mediating role of language, postmodern authors start thinking about
the ontological status of literature, and they investigate and explicitly criticize fictional
construction methods in their works.
A third factor that has had a direct influence on the development of contemporary literary
self-consciousness is the communicative model as forwarded by Roman Jakobson in 1950.
According to Jakobson, any utterance or act of communication is composed of six factors:
context, addresser, addressee, contact, code and message. Each factor is the dominant to one
of the six correspondent functions of language: the referential, the emotive, the conative, the
phatic, the metalingual and the poetic function. The model Jakobson proposes is as follows:
30
CONTEXT
Referential
MESSAGE
Poetic
ADDRESSER ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ADDRESSEE
Emotive
Conative
CONTACT
Phatic
CODE
Metalingual
An utterance simultaneously fulfils these six functions to a greater or lesser extent. The most
important function in the light of this discussion is the fifth or metalingual function of
language: an utterance can comment on its being language, like for example the question
„what does commuting mean?‟ Not only does the Russian critic point to the context-dependent
nature of utterances, he also reintroduces two components of communication that are vital to
the phenomenon of postmodern metafiction: those of the enunciator or addresser and the
receiver or addressee. As we have seen in the discussion of unreliable narration – and more
specifically when studying the rhetorical model proposed by James Phelan – the narrative
phenomenon is considered the result of the interrelation between the addresser or (implied)
author, the addressee or (implied) reader and the text. Jakobson‟s theory proved to be vital for
the understanding of the narrative mechanisms I investigate in this dissertation.
3.3 The metafictional paradox
The attentive reader might have remarked that the kind of fiction that reveals and provides a
comment on the conventions of literary tradition inherently contains a paradox. In her work
Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox Linda Hutcheon asserts that in selfconscious novels a fictional illusion is created, yet at the same time the construction of this
illusion is laid bare.
Its central paradox for readers is that, while being made aware of the linguistic and fictive nature of
what is being read, and thereby distanced from any unself-conscious identification on the level of
character or plot, readers of metafiction are at the same time made mindful of their active role in
31
reading, in participating in making the text mean. They are distanced, yet involved, co-producers of
the novel. (1980: xii)
Readers of self-reflective fiction are forced to recognize the artificiality of the story world
they enter, yet at the same time they are still expected to react emotionally to the text, and the
cognitive address to the reader is more strident than when dealing with a conventional novel.
The effect of this twofold demand on the reader is profound, and I will address it in the
section entitled „reading metafiction‟.
A second paradoxical question that critical readers need to consider is whether it is possible to
criticize forms of cultural representation from within these forms. As it happens, the
metafictional discourse is based on exactly those literary conventions it seeks to deconstruct.
Can it therefore be an objective kind of criticism? This question gave rise to a twofold
reaction: early critics react paranoically to the estranging effect of metafiction and considered
the phenomenon the beginning of the end for the novel. José Ortega y Gasset called
metafiction a “dehumanization of art”.13 „Critics argue that, like Narcissus, the novel began to
lose those attractive features – of action, of personality – which had made it so beloved. ... to
become absorbed in a deeper self-reflective state which – and herein lay the fear – threatened
to deny the novel‟s existence as a realistic narrative of something outside itself,‟ Linda
Hutcheon explains (1980: 13). However, seeing that self-aware elements have been present in
the novel since the very beginning, critics have recently come to realize that metafiction is not
a sign of decline, yet quite the contrary: it is a natural development of fiction that has been
wrongfully banned from literature since realism.
[W]hile the novel form developed further, its theories froze in time somewhere in the last century.
What was a temporary stage in literature became a fixed definition in criticism. From this point on,
any form which revealed a moving beyond that stage could only be dealt with in negative terms (as
not really a novel, or at best as a new novel, or perhaps as metafiction), rather than being treated in
terms of a natural, dialectical development of the genre, as the backgrounded traditions parodied in
such forms themselves proposed. (1980: 38)
Rather than metafiction being a whimsical offshoot of the novel form that announces its end,
it is realism‟s desperate clinging to fictional illusion and rejection of new novelistic methods
that will cause the novel‟s decay. As Darwin proved to modern man, evolution and adaptation
to the natural environment are necessary for a species to survive. Likewise, contemporary
13
Preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Infamy. Dutton, New York, 1972. p. 11.
Quoted from Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative. 1980. p. 20
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literature felt the realistic mode was no longer effective for depicting the postmodern feeling
of chaos and fictionality in the world, and turned to other representative modes.
3.4 A typology of self-conscious narration
Several critics have attempted to provide a taxonomy of the phenomenon of self-reflective
narration. For example, Patricia Waugh enumerates some alternative definitions of
metafiction, like „the introverted novel‟, „surfiction‟, „the self-begetting novel‟ and
„fabulation‟. The most adequate in the light of my analysis seems to me the typology
forwarded by Linda Hutcheon herself. The author makes a double distinction in her
classification of the different types of metafiction. She claims that self-consciousness in a
novel can be either diegetic, meaning that the text is aware of its own narrative processes, or
linguistic, pointing to the novel‟s awareness of language as the medium of expression and the
arbitrariness of this system. Both these modes of self-reflectiveness can in their turn be overt
and covert, the first designating forms of metafiction which are explicit, and often even
thematized in the novel. When we are dealing with the latter form, this process would be
„structuralized, internalized, actualized‟.
There are texts which are, as has been mentioned, diegetically self-aware, that is, conscious of their
own narrative processes. Others are linguistically self-reflective, demonstrating their awareness of
both the limits and the powers of their own language. In the first case, the text presents itself as
diegesis, as narrative; in the second, it is unobfuscated text, language. A further distinction must be
made, however, within these two modes, for each can be present in at least two forms, what one
might term an overt and a covert one. Overt forms of narcissism are present in texts in which the
self-consciousness and self-reflection are clearly evident, usually explicitly thematized or even
allegorized within the “fiction”. In its covert form, however, this process would be structuralized,
internalized, actualized. Such a text would, in fact, be self-reflective, but not necessarily selfconscious. (1980: 22-23)
Diegetic metafiction lays bare narrative mechanisms like the creation of a story world filled
with characters and events. Linguistic narcissism on the other hand can vary from being
overtly aware of its status as a written artefact, can be explicitly parodic of a certain style of
writing or can be more subtle in the form of word-play or puns.
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4. Reading metafiction: freedom and responsibilities for the reader
A metafictional text is not your average reading experience. When dealing with a
conventional realistic novel, readers create in their mind a self-contained and coherent
fictional universe. However, since both the epistemological and ontological status of literature
have been called into question during the last century, the reading experience has moved away
from being a comfortable, passive act. More recent literature focuses on the internal processes
of characters, creating consciousness rather than a streamlined empirical product. This type of
fiction demands a higher degree of involvement from readers, who can no longer sit back and
enjoy the semi-touristic read through the story world, yet are required to actively engage with
the created consciousness, to make sense out of the postmodern chaos or to reflect on the
metafictional critique provided in these novels. Indeed, as Bart Bervaeck puts it: „the
metafictional layer in a novel could be considered a manual that directly or indirectly informs
you how to read the text. [...] [T]he good reading is a fiction: the reader has to investigate the
fictionality (the product) and the fictionalization (the process) and can do so by looking at the
imagery. However, “have to” is a relative term in this context. For the reader can always
choose to ignore the manual” (1999: 147. My translation).
4.1 A double ethical implication
Like Aristotle said, human beings are naturally mimetic creatures; consequently the least
strenuous (and thus least engaging) mode of literature is realism. Because of the
„objectiveness‟ of a realist work and the absence of an intruding or commenting narrator,
readers‟ access to the narrative world is similar to gazing through a clean window: when
concentrating on what lies behind it, the window disappears and readers are under the illusion
that they encounter themselves within the fictional universe. A metafictional work, however,
steps out of the mark, rejects
the theological and artistic implications of the novelistic illusion: first, that the novelist is a god
who – like God – creates what and how he pleases, since art imitates life and its myriad
possibilities; and secondly, that the reader is reading a verisimilar “slice of life” to which,
paradoxically, he need not seriously respond, since it is “only a novel”, only entertainment, only
fictive. (1980: 59)
There are various ways in which the reader‟s expectations can be troubled. In self-conscious
novels like the ones I will analyze in the second part of this dissertation, it is often possible to
34
detect a controlling and manipulative narrating figure that demands the imposition of a single
perspective; yet at the same time postmodernist art rejects such closure. The reader is puzzled
by the friction between the controlling voice of the narrator and the content, theme or
underlying message of the novel, which causes the fictional bubble to burst. As Roland
Barthes has discussed in his work Le Plaisir du Texte, some texts satisfy the reader and some
disturb him. When dealing with a text of the second type, readers have to revise their
understanding of the text, and this will lead to a new understanding of the world. Jouve
explains that „[s]i les structures du récit classique sont intrinsèquement conservatrices, c‟est
que la lisibilité […] repose sur la reconnaissance. Il appartient donc au texte ou bien de
favoriser la lisibilité en se référant à une série de schémas préexistants, connus donc
rassurants, ou bien de remettre en cause cette lisibilité dans le but d‟éveiller la conscience
critique du lecteur‟ (2001: 144).
An interesting consequence of any literary disturbance is that because the fictional bubble is
burst, readers are obliged to recognize their own active enabling role in creating the work‟s
universe. Hutcheon comments that parallel to the writing process, the attention in postmodern
works is drawn to a second imaginative-creative process: that of reading.
As the novelist actualizes the world of his imagination through words, so the reader – from those
same words – manufactures in reverse a literary universe that is as much his creation as the
novelist‟s. This near equation of the acts of reading and writing is one of the concerns that sets
modern metafiction apart from previous novelistic self-consciousness. (1980: 27)
The reader is forced to engage in a higher degree of participation, and assumes both the role
of active co-producer and critic of the fictional universe. The result of narrative selfconsciousness is thus that every reader to a certain extent shapes his or her own story.
However, the downside to this existentialist freedom is that it entails at the same time a large
responsibility: a good reader is one who succeeds in making sense of the novel, in picking up
on both explicit and implicit critiques, a reader who engages morally with the text. Like
Western society, literature has been liberalized, and we have learned that the combination of
duty and liberty can possibly be stressful to deal with. The question arises whether we really
want the red pill, or do we want to return to the ignorant bliss of fictional illusion?
The truth is that it is too late to do such a thing. As well-trained postmodern beings,
contemporary readers will subconsciously pay attention to the devices operating within the
novel – even if invisible – simply because they know of their existence. As Wayne C. Booth
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put it in the 1950s already, modern readers are much more on their guard and „tend to see
deliberate artistry where earlier readers saw only whimsy‟ (1952: 163). As readers progress
through any novel, they will take notice of the author‟s guiding rhetoric through the mediating
voice of the narrator(s). Moreover, because of their familiarity with generally-accepted views
on the context-dependence of language, postmodern-raised readers will be aware of the fact
that the same story might take on very different shapes in the mind of other readers of the text.
They relate events within the fictional universe to their own empirical frames of experience,
which engenders differences in the respective universes that are created in reader‟s minds.
Summarizing, on the one hand readers are immersed in the story world, yet they will always
remain at a certain distance of it through the awareness of the different ontological levels of
the fictional and empirical world and the apprehension that one story creates as many fictional
universes as there are readers.
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5. Unreliable narrators in metafictional novels
How do both narrative self-consciousness and unreliable narration affect the reader‟s
perception of the narrative world? Do they operate on the reader in the same way? And most
importantly, do metafictional passages make the reader more perceptive of unreliable
narration and vice versa? Interestingly, several parallels can be drawn up between the
concepts of narrative unreliability and metafiction. Both of them are features of narrative that
are typically linked to the postmodern paradigm, yet are in fact natural developments in the
novel form that have been apparent from the beginning. Both of them are the result of the
recurrent relations between the author‟s intention, the text and the reader‟s interpretation of
this text. Both of them have a certain effect on the reader‟s experience of the narrative world
and are tools the author can employ to manipulate the reader. In the following and last section
of the theoretical overture to my analysis of the novels of Dave Eggers and Philip Roth I will
investigate the intersection of the two narratological concepts clarified above. I want to
remark that the theoretical assumptions I make are only valid for one specific type of fiction,
i.e. metafictional novels containing an unreliable narrator.
5.1 The narrator: subjective, unreliable and self-conscious
At the beginning of this dissertation, I stated that when reading a novel, readers place
themselves in the hands of the one who is telling the story. As we have learned from the
realist eschewal of overt narration for the sake of „objectivity‟, the explicit presence of a
mediating figure prevents the reader from a total absorption in the fictional universe. Linda
Hutcheon asserts that
[t]he presence of an « authorial » narrating figure as mediator between reader and novel world
demands recognition of a subsequent narrative distance. This results in an added emphasis on
diegesis, on the act of storytelling. In such fiction, the reader is temporally and spatially oriented in
the fictional world by the act of narration itself; the narrating figure is the centre of internal
reference. (1980: 51)
The use of a fictional device like a narrating figure – whether reliable or unreliable –
heightens the degree of fictionality of the work, stressing the diegetic aspect of storytelling
rather than the mimetic. On the other hand, Christoph Reinfandt claims in the third of his
lectures on narrative texts that the withdrawal of the narrator (or what has been called zero
narration in narratology) reduces the possibilities for explicit commentary, to the point where
37
only implicit forms – like for example an ironical tone or puns – can provide any kind of
metacritique.14
The author‟s choice to make use of an explicit narrating figure thus increases the level of
fictionality in a novel. It is the question whether this is even more so when readers are faced
with an unreliable narrating figure. As I have stipulated above, decisions about a narrator‟s
unreliability are made based on what readers infer from textual clues designed as such by the
implied author. When readers are faced with intratextual signals that point to the unreliability
of the character narrator, this will usually prevent them from identifying with the storytelling
figure. In the case of total identification – namely what a conventional realist novel offers an
invitation to – readers are inclined to adopt the narrator‟s perspective, which severely restricts
the scope of a critical point of view on the narrated events. However, once readers experience
the epiphany of detecting and grasping the purpose of the textual clues to narrative
unreliability, they will mentally reposition themselves from a level of identification with the
character narrator to a level of „secret‟ communication with the implied author. They will
assume a critical attitude towards the text as a whole, and it is my conviction it will lead them
to pick up on metacommentary more swiftly.
The novels I will analyse in the second part of this dissertation both make use of a
homodiegetic, first-person narrator. As I have pointed out in the section on restricting the
generic scope of unreliable narration, this is a commonsense, yet not imperative decision.
Wayne C. Booth claims that the implied author‟s choice of a first-person narrator for the
purpose of unreliability seems a logical one, since
[p]roblems of the narrator‟s suitability for his task – the probability of his knowing enough to tell
the complete story, the likelihood of his having the necessary skills, and so on – are pressed more
strongly on the reader, however inferentially, than in third-person accounts. (1952: 164)
The selection of a narrator that functions as a character in the story and consequently provides
readers with a subjective rendition of events, does increase the chance of this character being
untrustworthy. Greta Olson claims that „it appears necessary to consider the general
limitations of homodiegetic narrators. As inhabitants of their textual worlds, these narrators
cannot have metatextual, omniscient knowledge‟ (2003: 101).
14
Reinfadt, „Narrative Texts‟, Universität Tubingen, 2008-2009. quoted from
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/angl/downloads/narrative-texts/Narrative%20Texts%20Lecture%203.pdf
38
Moreover, both novels feature first-person narrators that are not only subjective and unreliable,
but that explicitly comment on their telling of the story. Fludernik claims there is a gradual
scale of narration that ranges from „an objective backgrounded narrative function in reflector
mode narrative‟ to the use of an overt narrator who „can comment both on the content of the
narration (story world) and on the narrating function itself; the address to a narratee is a part
of this meta-narrative performance‟ (1993: 443). The narrator‟s metafictional comments entail
an even greater distancing between the reader and the told events. The fictional universe is
now mediated by several factors:
1. the events are recounted by a first-person narrator
2. the recognition of the narrator‟s unreliability causes readers to distance themselves
of and critically reflect on the told events
3. the narrator himself overtly comments on the rendition of the events, which
equally causes readers to assume a critical position vis-à-vis the text
4. the reader can pick up on implicit metanarrative commentary that the narrator is
unconscious of but originates directly from the implied author
Another important remark in this respect is that certain forms of unreliable narration like
underreporting or misreporting (and to a lesser extent underregarding and misregarding), can
be self-conscious strategies of the narrator. As I have pointed out above, the unfaithful
rendition of events is not always due to the narrator‟s mistaken judgements or insufficient
knowledge. It is possible that a narrator provides readers with an incomplete or false
testimony and can consequently be considered untrustworthy. In such cases, narrators are
clearly aware of their role as mediators and makes (ab)use of the power this function holds.
5.2 Locating self-conscious and unreliable narration
If we want to establish a common ground between unreliable and self-reflective narration, it is
important to determine to which extent both narrative phenomena are products of the author‟s
intention or whether they are the result of interpretive strategies of the reader. As I have
explained in the first section, the location of narrative unreliability is not exactly clear-cut. To
recapitulate concisely: Booth‟s text-centred theory claims that unreliable narration is a
technique of the implied author, cognitivist-constructionist theories consider the phenomenon
as a naturalization strategy of the reader to account for textual discrepancies and the disciples
of the rhetorical approach tend to regard the concept as the result of the interplay between text,
39
author and reader. Vera Nünning demonstrated the historical variability of character
interpretation, and proves that readers in different historical contexts can interpret the same
narrator in different ways due to divergent values and standards of normalcy.
While we can say that narrative unreliability is always to a certain extent designed as such by
the implied author, but is at least partially dependent on the reader‟s concretization and
interpretation of the text, there can be less doubt to the fact that metafictional passages in a
novel are intentional. The central question to the location of metafiction will not be „who
designed the self-consciousness?‟, yet „who is self-conscious?‟ In our texts, we are faced with
two forms of consciousness: the character narrator and the implied author. In the case of the
narrator‟s overt self-awareness, it can be a commentary on either the events in the story world
or the act of telling itself, as Fludernik pointed out. She claims that narratorial (not authorial)
self-consciousness such as this often takes the form of a parodic awareness of literary
conventions – and this will indeed prove to be the case in Eggers‟ work. When the implied
author provides a metacommentary, it is on a level that transcends the fictional universe, and
the narrator is once again left out of the direct communication between implied author and
authorial audience.
Another difference between the two concepts appears to be located in the reception by the
reader: narrative unreliability is perceptible to changes in frames of reference, metafiction
seems not to be. However, it is possible that passages contemporary readers now regard as
parodic and self-conscious, will be considered „standard‟ by future generations of readers. I
believe that the study of the reception of metafiction is an area of investigation that needs to
be explored more meticulously.
5.3 The ethical implications of unreliable narration in metafiction
A self-conscious novel figuring an unreliable narrator invites a different kind of mental
response than for example a realist novel, where the desired effect would be the reader‟s
identification with the protagonist. In Living to Tell about it James Phelan asserts that the
effect of a story on the reader can be dismantled into three components: 1. the cognitive, or
what the reader understands about the story; 2. the emotive, or what the reader feels when
reading the story; and 3. the ethical, or how the reader values the story (2005: preface). In the
light of my analysis, particularly the third component is of interest to us. How are readers‟
40
judgements of the text and the fictional universe affected by respectively unreliable narration
and self-conscious passages and vice versa: how does readers‟ overall stance towards the text
affect their perception and judgement of the narrating figure?
5.3.1 Quadruple distancing
First of all, the use of an overt narrating figure entails an ethical dimension, as the storyteller
selects from the fictional universe certain events and conveys these to the reader in a certain
way. Phelan claims that
[a]ny character‟s action will typically have an ethical dimension, and any narrator‟s treatment of
the events will inevitably convey certain attitudes toward the subject matter and the audience,
attitudes that, among other things, indicate his or her sense of responsibility to and regard for the
told and the audience. (2005: 20)
Booth labelled this transforming presence of an intruding narrator „artistry‟: indeed, like the
artist frames the artwork, the telling of a story inevitably means the exclusion of non-selected
events. A reliable narrator will simply leave out those events that are of secondary importance
to the story and will provide the reader with all required knowledge, yet an unreliable narrator
can leave out information that is essential for the reader to grasp the full meaning of the text
and can do so either intentionally or without being aware of the hiatus. The diegetic act thus
implies a moral responsibility for the narrator, as speakers can consciously impregnate
discourse with their ideology and it is important that readers recognize that these characters
can make abuse of the power they hold. Susan Suleiman argues that
[d]ans la mesure où le narrateur se pose comme source de l‟histoire qu‟il raconte, il fait figure non
seulement d‟ « auteur » mais aussi d‟autorité. Puisque c‟est sa voix qui nous informe des actions
des personnages et des circonstances où celles-ci ont lieu, et puisque nous devons considérer – en
vertu du pacte formel qui, dans le roman réaliste, lie le destinateur de l‟histoire au destinataire –
que ce que cette voix raconte est « vrai », il en résulte seulement ce que le narrateur nous dit des
actions et des circonstances de l‟univers diégétique, mais aussi tout ce qu‟il énonce comme
jugement et comme interprétation. Le narrateur devient ainsi non seulement source de l‟histoire
mais aussi interprète ultime du sens de celle-ci.15
There are, however, two instances that infuse the text with their respective values: the
character narrator and the implied author. If the values of both voices coincide, the character
narrator can be considered reliable; if not, we are dealing with an unreliable storyteller. In the
15
Susan Suleiman, Le Roman à Thèse, p. 90. Quoted from Jouve, La Poétique des valeurs, p.92
41
latter case, it is the degree of difference between the expressed values that will cause an either
bonding or estranging effect on the reader.
Likewise, metafictional passages cause readers to morally reposition themselves towards the
novel world. At first sight, the effect of self-conscious narrative seems to be that the fictional
universe is stripped of its veracity and is merely used as the basis for any metanarrative
commentary of the implied author. Yet does metafiction always ruin the “effet-fiction”, as
Jouve puts it? As will result from the analysis of Eggers‟ memoir, even though the selfreflective commentary inevitably entails a certain distancing of the reader towards the text,
most metafictional novels allow for at least a partial identification with the narrating figure,
which demands from readers that they should immerse themselves in the story world.
Furthermore, it is this cognitive/emotive appeal that is the essential drive for reading, because
the reader wants to engage with the story, wants to learn something:
Publier un livre fait donc toujours problème : pourquoi mériterait-on d‟être lu ? La stratégie
consiste à mettre en avant l‟intérêt du texte : si le livre existe, c‟est parce qu‟il a quelque chose à
dire. […] Le texte répond ainsi au désir de lecteur. Le repérage des valeurs est en effet un des
moteurs essentiels de l‟investissement du sujet. (2001 : 9-10)
Though it may seem paradoxical, the fictional universe in an auto-reflective text is more
closely connected with extratextual reality than that of a conventional realist model. As
readers recognize their freedom and responsibility as co-producers of textual meaning, they
likewise appreciate that this parallel universe created in their minds will be pervaded with
their own prior knowledge and values. Moreover, through the parodying of existing literary
conventions, the fictional universe is linked to both other literary worlds and empirical reality.
„[W]hat is interesting here is that by using these conventional novelistic devices which are
usually employed to authenticate the core universe, the narrator manages to achieve opposite
results, validating instead his wider universe. The voice of the narrator is not an exterior
authenticating one; it is the voice of a character‟, Hutcheon clarifies (1980: 63).
This implies that the quadruple distancing between the reader and the fictional universe
encourages a critical point of view from the reader, but does not per se ruin the fictional effect.
Metafictional passages do position the reader on a different ontological level than the
protagonist, yet this does not rule out an emotive or cognitive response to the character.
Unreliable narration can have an estranging or bonding effect on the reader vis-à-vis the
protagonist, but estranging unreliability turns the reader into the accomplice of the implied
42
author (or the textual whole), which heightens the degree of involvement with the text.
Paradoxically though it may seem, both postmodern techniques in fact draws readers into the
work rather than push them away. Because of the level of reading sophistication both
narrative phenomena require, readers are forced to work hard in order to fully comprehend the
complexity of the story.
In order to fully comprehend the effect narrative mechanisms can produce on a reader, it is
important to be familiar with some basic reception theory. As an instrument to the practical
analysis of Eggers‟ and Roth‟s novels, I have selected a work of Vincent Jouve that offers a
detailed analysis of the ethical component of reader reception strategies. Seeking out the
diverse strategies both the author and the narrator can employ to influence the ethical
evaluation of characters or the text as a whole by the reader, Jouve‟s work will enable me to
investigate whether the simultaneous use of both narrative techniques influence the fictional
universe produced reader‟s mind.
5.3.2. “L‟effet-valeur” according to Jouve
In La poétique des valeurs Vincent Jouve attempts to determine the various tools of which a
text disposes to convey values to the reader. These instruments operate on very different
levels: firstly, there are the values expressed by the subjective narrating figure on the
discursive level; secondly, the values conveyed on the narrative level by the text as a whole;
and finally, there are the values the reader is invited to infer from the text on the
programmatic level. According to the level they function on, the instruments can be overt or
covert – to resume Hutcheon‟s terminology – and have different effects on the reader.
Ce qui, à mes yeux, justifie une étude de l‟ « effet-valeur » produit par la fiction, c‟est l‟importance
de la dimension idéologique dans l‟interaction texte/lecteur. D‟une part, tout texte suppose un point
de vue (qui est, forcément, toujours orienté), d‟autre part, le lecteur ne peut élaborer un sens sans
identifier et hiérarchiser des jugements. (2001 : 9)
Jouve differentiates between the “effet-idéologie” – the system of values that is inherent to the
text as a whole and imposes itself on every reader – and the “effet-valeur” of the text, which
are the values explicitly expressed in a text and which can consequently be submitted to a
meticulous study.
43
In order to reveal the ideological mechanisms that operate on the reader, it is important to
investigate where exactly the text is infused with values, locations that Jouve names “les
points-valeurs”. Starting at the most elementary level, the character narrator expresses values
when relating the story. According to Jouve, all discourse is subjective as it articulates an
individual vision:
C‟est d‟abord en tant qu‟il témoigne d‟une vision individuelle qu‟un discours exprime des valeurs.
Toute prise de parole révèle un certain nombre de choix qui renvoient à une hiérarchie. Selon
Catherine Kerbat-Orecchioni, la subjectivité d‟un discours se reconnaît à l‟ensemble des procédés
« par lesquels le locuteur imprime sa marque à l‟énoncé, s‟inscrit dans le message (implicitement
ou explicitement) et se situe par rapport à lui ». (2001: 36)
The most straightforward way to discover the protagonist‟s ideology is through the words the
character utters – either thought or spoken out loud. Narrators can betray their partiality
through semantics (the selection of words suggests preferences; the used register can convey
values concerning authenticity; the use of metaphors, images and a sentimental vocabulary
reveals characters‟ emotions), pragmatics (how do narrators try to address their narratees? Do
they make emotive appeals?), and syntax.
L‟étude du plan syntaxique consiste à s‟interroger sur la façon dont le personnage organise son
discours : si la sélection révèle ses préférences, la combinaison renseigne sur ses intentions. (2001:
52)
Jouve explains that storytellers‟ actions likewise reveal certain values: in a conventional novel
the protagonist has a goal, either set by an internal drive or by an external force. The
achievement or failure of the goal allows for an ethical evaluation of the character. However,
this simple equation of “success – good person” versus “failure – bad person” is not
sustainable when dealing with more complex literary material. It is rather the extent to which
the words and actions of characters coincide that allows the reader to ethically evaluate the
figures, and more specifically to assess their truthfulness.
After having established the “points-valeurs” in a text, i.e. the values expressed by individual
characters, we move to the level of the text as a whole. In the novels I investigate, the
question on the discursive level will be who the values transmitted by the text at a certain
point can be ascribed to: the implied author or the narrator. Jouve argues that the
responsibility for the transmitted values can usually be located with the narrator, in which
case the character functions as „le représentant d‟un « supersystème » idéologique qui
hiérarchise les systèmes partiels représentés par les acteurs‟ – remember the three functions
narrators fulfil through which they can exert this arbitrating power: the ideological function,
44
the directive function and the modalizing function (2001: 92). However, the scholar
recognizes at least two cases in which it is necessary to presuppose a superior textual
authority that guides the narrator‟s rhetoric: the first are first-person narratives featuring
autobiographical narrators that express theirselves in their own name, and thus achieve the
status of „real‟ characters. This assumes a textual instance above the characters that designs
and evaluates them, asserts Jouve. In the second case we are dealing with third-person
narratives that feature ostensibly untrustworthy or fallible narrators: this phenomenon
presupposes an authorial voice that reveals the naiveté or madness of the storyteller to the
reader and similarly permits an ethical evaluation.
On the narrative level then, Jouve postulates that the story as a whole can be considered as an
exemplum from which readers can draw lessons and against which the individual trajectories
of the separate characters can be weighed.
Le PN [programme narratif] d‟un sujet se laisse en effet évaluer sur la base de la vérité construite par le
texte : „la véridiction constitue une isotopie narrative indépendante, susceptible de poser son propre
niveau référentiel et d‟en typologiser les écarts et les déviations, instituant ainsi la « vérité
intrinsèque du récit »‟. (2001: 115)
Jouve remarks that it is not always possible to distil a clear, unique ethical orientation from
the text. He talks about “polyphonies”, a discord of voices and values (a concept that is
readily adaptable to postmodern literature). One of the most important techniques a text can
employ to give voice to contrasting perspectives is irony, a much-discussed notion that I will
address in the following and last paragraph of the theoretical section of this dissertation.
Finally, the text can express values on a programmatic level, i.e. the way it tries to capture and
steer the ideological reception of the text by the reader. This can be done either through the
construction of an ideal reader or through indications of how the text should ideally be read.
Gerald Prince asserts that a text can use various techniques to design and direct itself to a
specific kind of person: direct addresses to the reader (like the „desocupado lector‟ in the
prologue to the Don Quijote quoted above); precisions of the text on the socio-cultural
characteristics of the addressee; the use of a second-person pronoun; the emotive address of
the reader through the evocation of general truths and sentiments that are likely to be
appealing; the use of questions or pseudo-questions that the reader is invited to respond to;
negations; demonstrative inter- or extratextual references; comparisons and analogies;
45
“surjustifications”; and finally, the construction of a narrating figure that the reader is likely to
identify with.16
In order to identify the various reading indications Jouve distinguishes between three types of
signals that guide the reading process: elements of the paratext (like the title and preface),
signals detectable within the text itself and intertextual clues. The “paratext” is a concept
defined by Genette in his 1987 work Seuils as everything that surrounds the text itself and
guides the interpretation. Certain paratextual elements are extremely practical for conveying
values: for example the title, which, through its descriptive function, reveals the subject or
theme of the novel, and simultaneously positions the work in or against a culture through the
connotations it entails. The preface influences the reader ideologically because it states why
and how the work should be read. (2001: 128-129)
Exposer les raisons qui doivent amener à lire un livre consiste essentiellement à valoriser le
sujet traité. … Les indications sur le comment de la lecture, dans la mesure où elles visent à
éviter les erreurs d‟interprétation, révèlent également les options du texte. …Toutes ces
déclarations d‟intention tracent un horizon d‟attente qui oblige à lire le livre dans une
perspective particulière. (2001: 129-130)
As for the intratextual elements, I have mentioned above that the text can offer the reader
various points of view and conflicting voices. However, as in a musical orchestra, some
instruments or voices sound louder than others, and similarly the text will betray the preferred
ideology within the polyphonic ensemble. To conclude I mention the intertextual references
that have an impact on the values readable in the text: Jouve asserts that since Bakhtin we are
aware of the fact that every text refers to other texts, explicitly or not. These intertextual signs
can have an argumentative function (the reference to an authoritative text as an argument), a
hermeneutic function (the reference to a text as explication), or a critical function.
5.3.3. (Dramatic) irony
One of the most potent controlling narrative techniques is irony. It is possible that when the
implied author formulates at a certain point in the text a comment on the values expressed by
the textual whole, the character narrator‟s liability or the extratextual reality, a reader does not
pick up on these self-conscious or parodic allusions due to a lack of literacy or knowledge of
genre conventions. In The Rhetoric of Fiction Booth asserts that unreliable narration itself is a
16
Paraphrased and translated from Jouve 2001: 124-126
46
function of what he labels „dramatic irony‟. According to the author, texts employing an
unreliable narrator display a discrepancy between the utterances or views of the narrating
character and those of the implied author. Likewise, Monika Fludernik claims that textual
inconsistencies signal „the crack in the mirror which then requires a recuperatory move on the
reader‟s part – aligning the discrepancy with an intended higher-level significance: irony.‟17
As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, it is Booth‟s conviction that through this
discrepancy the implied author aims to convey an extra layer of communication to the reader
behind the narrator‟s back.
All of the great uses of unreliable narration depend for their success on far more subtle effects than
merely flattering the reader or making him work. Whenever an author conveys to his reader an
unspoken point, he creates a sense of collusion against all those, whether in the story or out of it,
who do not get that point. Irony is always thus in part a device for excluding as well as for
including, and those who are included, those who happen to have the necessary information to
grasp the irony, cannot but derive at least a part of their pleasure from a sense that others are
excluded. In the irony with which we are concerned, the speaker is himself the butt of the ironic
point.18
Irony is thus the formal means through which the narrator can unknowingly provide readers
with information about both the events in the story world and his or her state of mind. In these
cases the implied author communicates directly to the authorial audience. Readers that grasp
this distance between what the narrator tells us and the underlying meaning the implied author
seeks to communicate, will experience a feeling of joy because they are included in a secret
communication that less attentive or less informed readers might not comprehend. The
principle of inclusion-exclusion makes irony a powerful narrative mechanism. Greta Olson
correctly argues that the detection of narrative unreliability requires a certain reading
sophistication.
Detecting irony and narrator unreliability comprises an interpretive strategy that involves reading
against the grain of the text and assuming that one understands the unspoken message beyond the
literal one. (2003: 94)
Indeed, as Olson points out, the implied author does not point a finger at the unreliable
narrator or wink at the reader, yet employs a more subtle communication. Whether or not
readers grasp the underlying communication depends on the frames of reference they can fall
back on. „In all these instances it is indeed the general context that makes us read these
passages ironically; it is our own moral convictions as well as the stylistic conventions and the
17
Fludernik 1993: 352
Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1961: p. 304. Quoted from Olson,
„Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators‟. p. 94
18
47
interpretative norms which one constructs for the text as a whole19 that determine the ironical
reading,‟ Monika Fludernik argues (1993: 351).
Parallel to this phenomenon, metafiction makes use of a similar mechanism of inclusion and
exclusion: parody. In metafictional passages readers can detect both the inclusion of the old
form the passage seeks to deconstruct and the exclusion of the realist illusion of this form
through overt commentary. Linda Hutcheon claims that the consequence of this strategy of
inclusion and exclusion is
the unmasking of the system or of the creative process whose function has given way to
mechanical convention. [...] If a new parodic form does not develop when an old one becomes
insufficiently motivated, the old form tends to degenerate into pure convention; witness the popular
traditional novel, the best-seller. (1980: 24)
Like irony, parody actively draws on readers‟ pre-existing knowledge of both intra- and
extratextual frames of reference and the detection of for example a generic pastiche can incite
a feeling of understanding of the reader vis-à-vis the text.
Concluding, self-conscious and unreliable narration are two narrative phenomena that are in
part strategies of the implied author or the narrator, but depend to a large extent on their
concretization and interpretation by the reader. Both of them imply a distancing element
between the reader and the narrative world in the sense that readers are forced to assume a
critical stance towards the critiques at hand in the text. However, both techniques can also
strengthen the bond between reader and text: once readers understand (the meaning of) ironic
distance between the narrator‟s view and that of the implied author, they turn into the
accomplice of the implied author, and thus the text as a whole. The aggregate of morally
manipulative signals Jouve points out guide the reader during the intense reading process.
This guidance can be overt and harmless, but can likewise be manipulative and much harder
to detect. I won‟t keep you waiting any longer.
19
Note of the author: „As frequently identified in the concept of the implied author‟
48
II. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
1. Introduction
1.1 The author
Let us begin with a word on the author: Dave Eggers, to say the least, is a man of social
engagement. Besides writing his semi-autobiographical memoir A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius, Eggers has published an extensive and wide-ranging list of works, among
which I want to name the novel You Shall know our Velocity; a book on the life of Sudan
refugee Valentino Achak Deng entitled What is the What; the critical Teachers Have It Easy:
The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America‟s Teachers; Surviving Justice: America‟s
Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a collection of interviews with people who were
wrongfully sentenced to death; Voices of witness, „a series of oral history-based books
illuminating human rights crises around the world‟ (Korthals Altes 2008: 122); and the nonfictional Zeitoun, the story of the Syrian-American Abdulrahman Zeitoun who travelled to
New Orleans after the hurricane Katrina to single-handedly assist rescue workers in an old
canoe. Next to his writings, Eggers is the founder of the non-profit organisation 826 Valencia,
a creative writing and tutoring lab which addresses itself to young people between 8 and 18
and which has now been extended to six more American cities besides the original San
Francisco base. Eggers is also the founder of the independent publishing house McSweeney‟s,
which produces a quarterly literary journal Timothy McSweeney‟s Quarterly Concern –
featuring satirical short stories by promising literary talent and established writers alike –, a
monthly journal, The Believer, and since 2005 a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. To
finish, Eggers published The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled
Americans, „a guide to the American language sometime in the future, when all or most of our
country‟s problems are solved and the present administration is a distant memory.‟ 20 The
satirical dictionary includes contributions from Kurt Vonnegut, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan
Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, T.C. Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates; is
accompanied by a soundtrack composed by among others R.E.M., Tom Waits and David
Byrne and guarantees the buyer that all profits go to organisations that „express their outrage
over the Bush administration‟s assault on free speech, overtime, drinking water, truth, the rule
20
Quoted from http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/7/11.html. Author unknown
49
of law, humility, the separation of church and state, a woman‟s right to choose, and every
good idea this country ever had.‟21
Please note that I did not write the above to make the reader of this paper feel more
sympathetic (or antipathetic, for the odd Bush-supporter) towards Eggers. I realise that the
inclusion of these facts on Eggers‟ life and work might and probably will cause some of you
to accuse me of the intentional fallacy, yet considering the fact that we are dealing with a
slightly fictionalized autobiographical novel, the protagonist and the author supposedly being
one and the same person, I am of the conviction that it is important that readers are familiar
with the extratextual ethos of the author, as he is not only a prolific writer, but likewise the
socially engaged author of many satirical works of societal value that seek to educate the
reader.
1.2 The novel
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, abbreviated by the author himself and from now
on in this paper as AHWOSG, is a book that is hard to classify. Although the work, which
Eggers 22 himself describes as a memoir, is based on the author‟s true life story and was
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of non-fiction, it clearly contains fictionalized
or hyperbolic elements. Eggers has definitely not written the classic memoir, if we interpret
the genre in terms of
what the French critic Philippe Lejeune calls 'le pacte autobiographique', the agreement according
to which a reader accepts that the individual who writes 'I' in the text is the same person whose
name appears on the title page.23
The blurring of the fiction/non-fiction border is a strategy the implied author uses consciously,
and from the beginning of the novel he self-consciously and self-critically warns the reader
about „his propensity to exaggerate‟ in the long apologetic preface to the 2007 Picador edition.
Eggers makes no effort to conceal the creative liberties he took when writing his family
memoir; he is on the contrary the first to point them out. AHWOSG could therefore be labelled
a work of „creative or narrative non-fiction‟, a recent term that is applied to non-fiction that
makes use of literary tools in order to achieve a diegetic power similar to that of a novel.
21
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/7/11.html on 21/7/2009
Unless explicitely stated otherwise, I will from now on refer to the implied author as „Eggers‟ and to the
narrator as „Dave‟ to avoid any confusion.
23
Brian Dillon, quoted from www.therichmondreview.com on 21/7/2009
22
50
Besides ambiguity concerning the truthfulness of its content, there can likewise be a debate
about the book‟s tone and intention: is it a memoir making use of irony to convey strong and
heartfelt emotion, or is it a satirical work exploiting emotionally charged facts that are likely
to appeal to the reader in order to parody the memoirist genre? Or both? Liesbeth Korthals
Altes writes in her paper on narrative sincerity that Eggers‟ work has been understood by
several critics as belonging to a recently surfaced current in contemporary American literature
that rejects post-modern irony in favour of emotionality, sharing and truthful commitment.
According to the scholar, AHWOSG offers the reader an ethics of sincerity.
The autobiographical reading and the impression of sincerity are reinforced by devices suggesting
non-literary communication and an anti-aesthetic stance, such as the colloquial speech in dialogues
and the on-going monologue or rather address to the reader, the marked expression of subjectivity,
the abundant use of pathos, the narrator‟s honest self-criticism (which includes hyperbole, as in the
title), and the expression of „first impulse speech‟. (2008: 123)
Korthals Altes recognizes that even though the book contains ironic and self-relativizing
elements, in the end the work is authentic in its emotionality and seeks to draw the reader into
the life of the author. According to other critics, the book „is fitted with a bullet-proof vest of
self-mocking irony‟24 that makes it hard for readers to become completely absorbed in the
story world and interferes with the emotional appeal the book undeniably tries to make. One
critic even deemed the self-centredness of the braggart protagonist and his obsession with the
grandeur of his actions so irritating it might stop one from reading any further.25
1.3 The plot
AHWOSG tells the story of 21-year old Dave Eggers, who loses both his parents to cancer in a
span of 32 days and is given the responsibility over his eight-year old brother Christopher
(Toph). Dave and his older siblings Beth and Bill sell their parental house in the Midwest
town Lake Forest and move to San Francisco where Dave and Toph rent an apartment
together. Starting out with the best intentions, the brothers are soon overwhelmed by the
squalor of their bacheloresque home. The slightly manic-depressive protagonist oscillates
emotionally between on the one hand utopic visions of himself as the ideal „new‟ parent, with
fresh and liberal pedagogic ideas that will make his younger brother grow up to be an
incredibly intelligent, independent and handsome person who might just make it to the Oval
24
25
Bob Wake, quoted from www.culturevulture.net/Books/Heartbreaking.htm on 21/7/2009
Sandrijn Dierickx, freely translated from www.urbanmag.be on 21/7/2009.
51
Office. On the other hand, the too-young father is plagued by dark guilt-ridden fantasies in
which he pictures child-protection services to be right outside the door to take Toph away to a
family that eats home-cooked meals every night, where clothes get washed regularly and
children are never left in the hands of malevolent babysitters.
Beth and I are still thinking it‟s too early to leave Toph with anyone but family, that to do
otherwise would cause him to feel unwanted and alone, leading to the warping of his fragile psyche,
then to experimentation with inhalants, to the joining of some River‟s Edge kind of gang, too much
flannel and too little remorse, the cutting of his own tats, the drinking of lamb‟s blood, the
inevitable initiation-fulfilling murder of me and Beth in our sleep. (2007: 106)
The death of the protagonist‟s parents has had a double effect on him: on the one side, there is
a feeling of impending doom, the inkling that the worst is yet to come for the Eggers family
and that he and his loved ones will die sudden, horrible or trivial deaths; on the other side
there is a sentiment of grandeur, a feeling of being chosen, of being owed by the world, of
being at the centre of the universe. The alternation of these contradictory feelings constitutes
the bulk of the novel:
We cannot be stopped from looking with pity upon all the world‟s sorry inhabitants, they
unblessed by our charms, unchallenged by our trials, unscarred and thus weak, gelatinous. [...]
It‟s unfair. The matchups, US v. Them (or you) are unfair. We are dangerous. We are daring
and immortal. Fog whips up from under the cliffs and billows over the highway. (2007:50)
The scenes between Dave and Toph make up the heartbreaking part of the book, along with
the meticulous description of their mother‟s long and painful struggle with stomach cancer
and „the altogether vaguer demise of his father from lung cancer (a death no less affecting for
appearing in the book as little more than a haze of cigarette smoke and a series of sudden
falls).‟26 The strange, pseudo-parental relationship the brothers maintain shrouds the undealt
with pain for the early loss of their parents. They play father-and-son games: Dave puts Toph
over his knee and pretends to be beating him with his belt so as to put off any noisy
neighbours. However perverse this game may seem to an outsider, compared to the real
beatings Dave‟s alcoholic and violent father used to give him, the fake whippings Toph gets
are peanuts. This suggests that older brother Dave makes a better „father‟ than Toph‟s real
father would have been.
After dinner, we play games for our own amusement and the edification of the neighbours. In
addition to the belt-cracking game mentioned earlier, there is the game that involves Toph
pretending that he‟s a kid, while I pretend I‟m a parent.
26
Brian Dillon, quoted from www.therichmondreview.com on 21/7/2009
52
“Dad, can I drive the car?” he asks as I sit, reading the paper.
“No, son, you can‟t,” I say, still reading the paper.
“But why?”
“Because I said so.”
“But Daaaad!”
“I said no!”
“I hate you! I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you!”
Then he runs to his room and slams the door.
A few seconds later he opens the door.
“Was that good?” he asks.
“Yeah yeah,” I say. “That was pretty good.” (2007: 90)
Once things settle down for the Eggers brothers in Frisco, the young Dave and some of his
high school friends found the satirical magazine Might – which will turn out to be a failure in
every possible way –, using a large sum of his inheritance money and the money from extrahours graphic work to cover the costs of the magazine‟s first issue. Besides the hard work and
double shifts, the burden of raising a younger brother interferes with twentysomething Dave‟s
desperate attempts to live a normal life. He tries to get out once in a while, have some drinks
with his peers, meet some girls, yet is steadfastly plagued by feelings of guilt on these outings.
His obsession with women and the incredible importance he attributes to how he and Toph
come across with other people reinforces the impression of his mental instability. This lack of
solidity in the protagonist‟s psyche is reinforced by the style implied author Eggers employs:
the closing scene of a simple frisbee game on the beach triggers painful memories, the flashes
of the traumatic past alternating with the present in a chaotic crescendo that reaches its climax
at the end of the novel in a long and angry reproach to the reader and the world.
53
2. Analysis
In order to analyse the connection between metafictional comments and the perception of the
narrator, I will select number of self-conscious passages in the novel and link these to a
possible interpretation of (un)reliability, constricting myself to what Linda Hutcheon labels
overt metafiction. In order to detect narrative controlling devices I will make use of the
textual subdivision paratext – intratext – intertext Jouve proposed and will for each respective
part analyze the textual clues and effects on the reader. Finally, I will try to link the passages
to Phelan‟s notion of estranging vs. bonding unreliability: does the passage inspire trust or
does it disturb the reader, distantiating the reader from the narrator and/or the implied author?
The paratext of AHWOSG is quite elaborate (some 45 pages of the total 500), and amounts to
one long, self-conscious, and manipulative framing of the memoir. The body of the text is
inclined toward the realist tradition, were it not for the passages in which characters step out
of their roles to comment on the novel and its ethical implications. The intertextual references
are scarce and of little importance to my analysis, hence I will not discuss them in this
dissertation.
2.1 Paratext
2.1.1 Self-conscious parodying of the memoir: title, epigraphs and preface
The intricate paratext to AHWOSG commences with the striking „This was uncalled for.‟
Whether Eggers means this in the sense that he imagines nobody has been waiting for his
memoir and thus implicitly denounces the book before the reader has turned the first page, or
whether the author tries to convey that he had by no means been waiting for the unfortunate
events that befell him – „this‟ referring to the content of the book rather than the book in its
entirety -, trying to minimize the pathos of his work, the ambiguous statement is but a
foreshadowing of the tone of the novel in general. Hidden between the publishing details on
the copyright page, the attentive reader encounters – beneath a quite irrelevant note on the
author‟s weight, height, chubbiness of his hands and place on the sexual-orientation scale – a
note regarding the factual truth of the work:
NOTE: This is a work of fiction, only that in many cases, the author could not remember the exact
words said by certain people, and exact descriptions of certain things, so had to fill in gaps as best
he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real, are not products of the
54
author‟s imagination, because at the time of this writing, the author had no imagination whatsoever
for those sort of things, and could not conceive of making up a story or characters – it felt like
driving a car in a clown suit – especially when there was so much to say about his own, true, sorry
and inspirational story, the actual people that he has known, and of course the many twists and
turns of his own thrilling and complex mind. Any resemblance to persons living or dead should be
plainly apparent to them and those who know them, especially if the author has been kind enough
to have provided their real names and, in some cases, their phone numbers. All events described
herein actually happened, though on occasion the author has taken certain, very small liberties with
chronology, because that is his right as an American.
In this parody on the familiar disclaimer, Eggers pinpoints a fundamental problematic of all
non-fiction writing: no text, not even journalistic works written in documentary style, can be
free of their author‟s mark. The modernists raised the awareness that the author always
functions as a mediating factor between the events and the final text, and that even non-fiction
writing operates within the linguistic and literary paradigm of the author. Consequently, can
there be something like non-fiction? Creative non-fiction tackles this problem by making no
absolute truth-claims, by recognizing and fully employing the arsenal of literary instruments,
while Eggers adds an extra dimension by using self-conscious tools to play mind-games with
the reader. The metatextual message to the reader becomes even more ironic when we step
into the novel itself: already in the preface the note is contradicted: „[f]or all the author‟s
bluster everywhere, this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been
fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes‟ (2007: ix).
A vital clue as to the book‟s intention is available to the reader without so much as opening it.
The cover of the paperback version I have used for my analysis features a beautifully painted
sunset reminiscent of impressionist art, with on the left side a draped, red velvet curtain. The
presence of the pompous curtain not only evokes the exaggerative style of the baroque period,
it also seems a hint to the reader: don‟t take this too seriously. In a second instance, the
curtain brings the connotation of a theatre into the text: it could either be opening – pointing
out the artificiality and stagedness of the „play‟ that is to come – or closing – which, in
combination with the sunset, would most dramatically announce the theme of both Eggers‟
parents‟ demise. In the middle of these grotesque elements, the ostentatious title is suspended
in mid-air: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers explains the choice of title as
following in the extensive acknowledgements that preceed the actual body of the text:
The author wishes to acknowledge your problems with the title [...] many of you, particularly those
among you who seek out the maudlin and melodramatic, were struck by the “Heartbreaking” part.
55
Others thought the “Staggering Genius” element seemed like a pretty good recommendation. (2007:
xxv)
According to Jouve, the title fulfils a descriptive function in that it points out the central
theme of the novel. Ironically, Eggers points to both the heartbreaking component (sincere
emotion) and the staggering genius (witty irony), leaving us no clue as to the true intentions of
the work. However, through the title‟s self-consciousness, the work positions itself against the
canonical memoirist genre. The ironical reading of the title is reinforced by Eggers‟ utterance
some pages later that „maybe writing memoirs was Bad. Maybe writing about actual events,
in the first person, if not from Ireland and before you turned seventy, was Bad.‟ (2007: xxii)
The doubt about the ethical corectness of exposing one‟s personal life to the world, exploiting
it for ethical, commercial or psychological reasons will prove to be one of the main themes of
the book.
Subsequently the work features a deconstructionist list of „rules and suggestions for
enjoyment of this book‟ that more or less recommends the reader not to read too much of the
work, as the author claims that most of it is „uneven‟. Next to the list comes a preface that
states which parts of the novel were fictionalized and which were left out: some characters
were renamed, there have been „a few instances of location-switching‟, the author admits that
„some really great sex scenes were omitted, at the request of those who are now married or
involved‟, and concludes with the enumeration of epigraphs that will not be used in this book.
In the preface, Eggers explicitly admits that to him, the framing of the novel is as important as
the novel itself, adding to the confusion about the true intention of the book:
See, I like the scaffolding. I like the scaffolding as much as I like the building. Especially if that
scaffolding is beautiful, in its way. (2007: xii)
Where Jouve assumes that the preface gives readers advice on why and how the book should
be read, Eggers turns this principle around: he advises readers not to read the book and
confuses them about whether the overall tone of the novel is ironic or sincere. The result of
this is that the reader cognitively constructs a manipulative (ergo untrustworthy) implied
author, who for the time being does not coincide with the first-person narrator in the memoir
itself.
56
2.1.2 A helping hand: table of contents and acknowledgements
Subsequently, the by now puzzled or at least sceptical readers come across a table of contents
of a surprising tone: all of the sudden the manipulative author offers a helping hand in
disentangling the complex web of meaning, as the table contains part of the first sentence and
the key words of every chapter, besides the usual page numbers. Has the implied author
changed his intentions for the better or is this yet another way to put readers on the wrong foot?
The next item that can be encountered is a prolonged acknowledgements section in which the
author acknowledges his human flaws and that, „in a spirit of interpretive glasnost‟ (2007:
xviii), helpingly states over twenty themes and dialectics addressed in the book:
The Painfully, Endlessly Self-Conscious Book Aspect. This is probably obvious enough already.
The point is, the author doesn‟t have the energy or, more important, skill, to fib about this being
anything other than him telling you about things, and is not a good enough liar to do it in any
completely sublimated narrative way. At the same time, he will be clear and up-front about this
being a self-conscious memoir, which you may come to appreciate, and which is the next theme:
The Knowingness About the Book‟s Self-Consciousness Aspect. While the author is self-conscious
about being self-conscious, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality; Further,
and if you‟re one of those people who can tell what‟s going to happen before it actually happens,
you‟ve predicted the next element here: he also plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his
knowingness about his self-consciousness of self-referentiality. Further, he is fully cognizant, way
ahead of you, in terms of knowing about and fully admitting the gimmickry inherent in all this, and
will pre-empt your claim of the book‟s irrelevance due to said gimmickry by saying that the
gimmickry is simply a defense to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the
core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at – avert...your...eyes! – but
nevertheless useful, at least to the author, even in caricatured or condensed form, because telling as
many people about it as possible helps, he thinks, to dilute the pain and bitterness and thus
facilitate its flushing from his soul, the pursuit of which is the basis of the next cluster of themes:
The Telling the World of Suffering as Means of Flushing or at Least Diluting of Pain Aspect.
(2007: ixxx-xxxi)
Eggers‟ smug and all too eager assistance of the reader in the interpretation process- even
including a chart of the interrelation of the themes in graphic form-, starts acquiring an
uncanny dimension when next follows a detailed and honest (?) account of the money he was
paid for the book. Eggers starts making appeals to readers, both emotionally and
pragmatically, as he implores them to interact with him in real life, to send him pictures,
creating the illusion that the person talking (i.e. a version of Eggers, the real-life person)
encounters himself at the same ontological level as the reader because: you can send him mail!
57
You can communicate with him, the author! This is no one-way solipsism! Concluding, the
benevolent Eggers – the „advocate of trust‟ according to Altes – slips in an incomplete guide
to symbols and metaphors used in the book and a drawing of a stapler.
The alteration between postmodern deconstructionism and seemingly emotional sincerity has
a double effect on the reader: on the one hand, the irony employed in the paratext points out to
the reader that the implied author of AHWOSG is a skilled and self-conscious agent who will
not be afraid to manipulate any possible interpretation of the work. Readers will therefore be
attentive and on their guard. Yet on the other hand, Eggers searches to convey the feeling that
the story that is about to follow is the true story of a real-life person, an intuition that is
confirmed by over 599.000 Google-entries about Dave Eggers and his biography. The
jumbling of ontological levels, combined with the plea for real-life interaction makes it very
difficult for a reader to keep in mind that the protagonist who appears on page 1 of the
memoir is not entirely the same person as the one talking in the paratext. Eggers succeeds
very cunningly in coaxing the reader into believing that Dave Eggers the author and Dave
Eggers the narrator are one and the same. The consequence of this manipulation is that once
readers are inclined to believe narrator Dave coincides with implied author Eggers, they are
more likely to forgive any possible hiatus in the narrative, as the narrator is „only human‟.
2.2 The memoir
The ethics of sincerity and emotionality the author employs in the second part of the paratext
seems to have prepped the reader for the blatantly poignant autobiography that is to follow. In
spite of the exaggerated affectedness, Eggers manages to maintain his grasp on the reader
through a series of narrative tricks that are not always easy to perceive: in contrast to the
overtly self-parodying paratext, the memoir itself is less explicitly self-reflective. However,
first it is necessary to consider the nature of our narrative guide.
2.2.1 The narrator as flawed human being
AHWOSG features a first-person homodiegetic narrator, the default mode for unreliable
narration according to Bruno Zerweck (cfr. supra), as the cognitive scope of a character in the
story is limited to its own consciousness. Moreover, a character that is physically and
emotionally affected by the recounted events will not be objective and is thus liable to provide
58
the reader with a biased account. Indeed, readers of Eggers‟ memoir are confronted with
several textual clues that point to the fabulator‟s unreliability.
The most obvious indicators of Dave‟s capriciousness are the numerous discrepancies
between his utterances and other characters‟ opinions and/or actions. For example, the
protagonist mentions on two occasions that he is a gifted singer, an opinion clearly not shared
by young Toph:
Fuck it – I go solo. I hit the Steve Perry notes, I do the Steve Perry vibrato. I can do these things
because I am an extraordinary singer.
“Can I sing or what?” I yell. ....
“No.” He smiles hugely. “You can‟t sing at all.” (2007: 48-49)
There are times when I am concerned about Toph‟s expression when I‟m really singing, with
vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts – his expression one that to the untrained eye might look
like abject terror, or revulsion – but I know well enough that it is awe. I understand his awe. I
deserve his awe. I am an extraordinary singer. (2007: 53)
Likewise, Dave leads the reader to believe on several occasions he is dashing and handsome,
yet at another point in the novel reveals his insecurity regarding his scrawny body. The reader
is left wondering whether these contradictions are a form of deliberate misreporting, or
whether insecure Dave is just doing what so many humans do: he is trying to make a strong
first impression. If this includes some exaggeration of his qualities in order to make himself
look better than he actually is, does this not reveal his lack of self-confidence rather than a
truly malicious character? The implied author weighs the actions of the narrator against the
moral authority of the twenty-first century par excellence: a therapist. „[T]hat was probably
bad, what I did to Jenna; a therapist would say that was bad‟ (2007: 139). The inclusion of an
extra-textual norm postulates without a doubt that the protagonist‟s actions are indeed morally
incorrect. However, the interpretation of attributing these flaws and contradictions to the
storyteller‟s fallibility rather than immorality is corroborated by several moments of genuine
doubt in the narrator‟s mind.
They are scared. They are jealous.
We are pathetic. We are stars.
We are either sad and sickly or we are glamorous and new. We walk in and the choices race
through my head. Sad and sickly? Or glamorous and new? Sad/sickly or glamorous/new?
Sad/sickly? Glamorous/new? (2007: 96)
The implied author urges the reader towards the interpretation of fallibility: because the
narrator is obviously suffering from a very low self-esteem, the reader is likely to take pity on
59
poor, manic-depressive Dave. How could an insecure character like that ever consciously
manipulate the reader? However, Dave does not stick to innocent exaggerations of his
appearances and talents, as he deliberately witholds crucial information. The swindling takes
on cunning proportions when Dave suddenly reveals in the second part of the novel that his
supposedly dreadfully normal, even plain youth in a Midwestern suburb was not that ordinary
at all, that he grew up with a violent and alcoholic father and a mother who rests with her
husband‟s addiction. This underreporting is of a more serious nature, as the information is
vital to the understanding of Dave‟s unstable psyche. Nevertheless, is it not understandable
that a memory so painful and degrading about one‟s own family is not something a person
would reveal straight away?
The implied author plays the trump card when he lets Dave self-consciously admit on several
occasions that his account is imperfect, that he is the victim of memory gaps, that he cannot
help lying to people, even providing comments on his cognitive limitations and self-critical
evaluations of his warped mind.
I don‟t know. I don‟t ask questions. Before, when I said I asked questions, I lied. (2007: 12)
People ask questions, and before I can formulate a truth-oriented answer, I lie. I lie about how my
parents died –“you remember that embassy bombing, the one in Tunisia?” – about how old I am – I
always say forty-one – how old Toph is, how tall he is; when they ask about him they get the most
elaborate lies – he‟s just lost an arm, he‟s got the brain of an infant, a halfwit, a badger (I only use
that one in his presence); that he‟s in the merchant marine, he‟s in jail, in juvie, is back out, selling
crack – “Oh, give him some crack and you should see his face light up!”- that he‟s playing in the
CBA. (2007: 137)
The self-reflective „honesty‟ of the narrator in combination with his overt emotional
instability and eagerness to please the onlooker, inspires both empathy for the figure of the
imperfect reporter and trust for the implied author. The reader gets the feeling that though
Dave is indeed a defective narrator, implied author Eggers will somehow signal when the
textual version of himself is exaggerating or lying again. The addition of self-reflective
commentary to the unreliable narration thus causes a bonding effect between reader and
implied author Eggers.
2.2.2 Overt self-consciousness
Bearing in mind Linda Hutcheon‟s distinction between linguistic and diegetic metafiction, it
is interesting to note that a work filled with postmodern narrative tricks and ironic gimmickry
60
like AHWOSG hardly makes use of its status as language. Where one would expect word play
to be the most readily accessible way for an author to convey self-conscious irony, Eggers
chooses the less downtrodden path and opts for self-reflective narrative devices to provide
comments on the ethical implications of the storytelling act. On some occasions, specifically
when talking about Might magazine, the satirical quarterly that Dave and his friends have
founded, the author comes up with some witty postmodern puns, yet the kind of language
used in the body of the work is generally of the realistic-emotional kind that is to be expected
in a memoir. However, Eggers breaks with all genre conventions on a diegetic level, both in
the guise of the unreliable narrator and through characters who break out of their role to
cheekily comment on the narrative.
The metanarrative discussion of the diegetic act starts on a low-key level, with metaphorical
references to the telling of the story. Already in the imagery, the central theme of the many
self-reflective discussions that are to follow is made clear.
I have it in my head that I will sell these tables, will find a boutique somewhere in town and will
sell them for, say $1000 per, and when I am hard at work on one of my tables, deep “inside” one,
you might say, solving the unique problem of a new piece – is this rendering of a severed foot too
facile, too commercial? – it seems that what I am doing is noble, meaningful, and will all too likely
make me celebrated and wealthy. (54)
This passage metaphorically voices Dave‟s concerns about the writing of the book, the tables
being the vehicle for the writing process itself. Throughout the memoir, the narrator struggles
with the question whether using one‟s tragic family history as literary material amounts to
selling your soul in order to become „celebrated and wealthy‟. The explicit questioning of the
ethical impetus for writing the novel through metafictional devices anticipates any possible
critique on these motivations. Bob Wake claims that these contrivances „bring into focus the
self-doubt and conflicted motivations that autobiographical writers rarely admit to: Am I
selling out my family and friends for the sake of a publishing contract?‟27 The anticipation of
any ethical questioning of the author‟s drive once again reveals Eggers‟ dexterity as a writer:
by making his narrator question the motifs for telling his tragic life story, the reader is
inclined to consider the implied author an ethically cognisant agent, who does not gratuitously
abuses his tragic youth as gossip fodder, yet mindfully and carefully brings his story to an
attentive and moved audience. This feeling is reinforced by the several ironical allusions to
the abuse of personal history:
27
Bob Wake, quoted from www.culturevulture.net/Books/Heartbreaking.htm on 21/7/2009
61
It was freakish. Or sad. Could he really be doing all this for attention? Could he really be milking
his own past to solicit sympathy from a too-long indifferent public?
No, no. He is not calculating enough, cynical enough. It would take some kind of monster,
malformed and needy. Really, what sort of person would do that kind of thing? (2007: 351)
This excerpt from one of the interior monologues, sprung from narrator Dave‟s imagination,
clearly makes use of the principle of dramatic irony. The reader is well aware that the implied
author in fact does milk his own past to solicit sympathy and redemption, thus grasping an
underlying meaning contrary to Dave‟s literal utterance.
The degree of self-reflectiveness increases throughout the book, as on a number of occasions
characters start discussing the fact that they are manipulated like puppets for the entertainment
of the audience. For example, eight-year old Toph suddenly transforms into a wise voice of
conscience who reprimands Dave for his gimmickry:
To adequately relate even five minutes of internal thought-making would take forever – it‟s
maddening, actually, when you sit down, as I will once I put you to bed, to try to render something
like this, a time or a place, and ending up with only this kind of feebleness – one, two dimensions
of twenty.”
“So you‟re reduced to complaining about it. Or worse, doing little tricks, out of frustration.”
“Right. Right”.”
“The gimmicks, bells, whistles. Diagrams. Here is a picture of a stapler, all that.”
“Right.”
“You know, to be honest, though, what I see is less a problem with form, all that garbage, and
more a problem of conscience. You‟re completely paralyzed with guilt about relating all this in the
first place, especially the stuff earlier on. You feel somehow obligated to do it, but you also know
that Mom and Dad would hate it, would crucify you-” (2007: 115)
Toph-as-conscience reproaches Dave for (ab)using their family history as narrative material:
“But don‟t you see this is a kind of cannibalism? That you‟re grabbing at people, toys from a
box, dressing them up, taking them apart, ripping their heads off, discarding them when-”
(2007: 318-319) The metaphor of the narrator as man-eater returns in a dialogue with another
rogue character: Dave‟s manic-depressive friend John, who coincidentally has been given the
same name as Dave‟s psychologically unstable father.
“Let me out.”
“No.”
“I‟m not this. I can‟t be reduced to this.” [...]
“You wanted this. You wanted the attention.”
62
“Whatever. I‟m just another one of the people whose tragedies you felt fit into the overall message.
You don‟t really care so much about the people who just get along and do fine, do you? Those
people don‟t make it into the story, do they? [...] The only people who get speaking parts are those
whose lives are grabbed by chaos-” [...]
“You‟re like a...a cannibal or something. Don‟t you see how this is just flesh-eating?
You‟re...making lampshades from human sk-”
“Oh Jesus.”
“Let me out.”
“I can‟t let you out here.” (2007: 423-425)
These individual condemnatory passages are opposed to the values conveyed by the text as a
whole (i.e. the implied author) on the subject: writing the memoir was necessary for Eggers to
dilute the pain. The voice of the implied author and the norms and values he propagates, can
be found in more explicit terms in the extremely self-conscious middle chapter of the book. In
the hinge chapter between the first and second, more overtly self-conscious part, Dave applies
for a role in a reality show: MTV‟s The Real World. What starts out as an application
interview turns out to be a metanarrative vehicle that clusters several revealing anecdotes
about the narrator‟s life. The middle part truly is a turning point in the sense that there a shift
from self-conscious, yet emotionally unstable Dave to a more authoritative narrating figure
(who might or might not be Dave, but rather seems an instance that hovers between the
narrator and the implied author), and dialogues with a semi-divine voice reminiscent of Harry
Mulisch‟ angels in The Discovery of Heaven.
And why are you telling me this?
I don‟t know. These are the stories I tell. Isn‟t that what you‟re looking for? These terrible deaths
tearing through this pristine community, all the more strange and tragic given the context, the
incongruity –
So tell me something. This isn‟t really a transcript of the interview, is it?
No.
It‟s not much like the actual interview at all, is it?
Not that much, no.
This is a device, this interview style. Manufactured and fake.
It is.
It‟s a good device, though. Kind of a catchall for a bunch of anecdotes that would be too awkward
to force otherwise.
Yes. (2007: 196-197)
So why are you here?
I want you to share my suffering. [...]
63
Why do you want to share your suffering?
By sharing it I will dilute it.
But it seems like it might be just the opposite – by sharing it you might be amplifying it.
What do you mean?
Well, by telling everyone about it, you purge yourself, but then, because everyone knows this thing
about you, everyone knows your story, won‟t you be constantly reminded of it, unable to escape it?
[...] I don‟t hold on to anything anymore. Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes,
and spit it back out. It‟s just not my thing anymore. (209-210)
In spite of some references to the interview frame, the conversation is detached from the rest
of the novel, more or less floating in a narrative vacuum. The self-reflective observations
contrast the way the implied author deals with his personal history to the shameless
exhibitionism that is the standard in contemporary voyeuristic media culture. Though a reality
TV-show is a supposedly sincere display of emotion, most performances of this kind feature
actors and are 100% directed. Eggers plays with this connotation:
Let me share this. I can do it any way you want, too – I can do it funny, or maudlin, or just straight,
uninflected – anything. You tell me. I can do it sad, or inspirational, or angry. It‟s all there, all
these things at once, so it‟s up to you – you choose, you pick. (2007: 236)
Dave begs the interviewer to give him a platform for telling his story to the world, up to the
point where he offers himself to the television company in a form of moral prostitution. He
tells them they can have him any way they want, he will be their circus dog and perform tricks
and tragic tales. Though this passage thematizes the impossibility of an authentic
representation of the self, the implied author clearly seeks to oppose the memoir and the
literary medium to the faux reality that is consumed daily by the TV-addicted mass today. The
metacommentary on this Big Brother-type of cheap exposure again draws the reader closer to
the honest self-revelation AHWOSG offers. A kind of „bonding metafiction‟, one could say.
Finally, the implied author conveys his stance most effectively through a beautiful metaphor:
the memories of his past are like a snake skin; in order for the snake to be reborn, its old skin
must be shed. This does not affect the snake in any way, as the skin is already dead.
You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man
walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. [...]
These things details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for
anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it
where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake‟s long-shed skin and we
know something of the snake, we know that it‟s of this approximate girth and the approximate
length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is
64
thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in
Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped
off and he and everyone could look at it.
And you‟re the snake?
Sure. I‟m the snake. So, should the snake bring it with him, this skin, should he tuck it under his
arm? Should he?
No?
No, of course not! He‟s got no fucking arms! How the fuck would a snake carry a skin? Please. But
like the snake, I have no arms – metaphorically speaking – to carry these things with. Besides,
these things aren‟t even mine. None of this is mine. My father is not mine, not in that way. His
death and what he‟s done are not mine. Nor are my upbringing nor my town not its tragedies. How
can these things be mine? Holding me responsible for keeping hidden this information is ridiculous.
I was born into a town and a family and the town and the family happened to me. I own none of it.
It is everyone‟s. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect
those who are part of it, but I do not claim exclusivity. Have it, take it from me. Do with it what
you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be
believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.
But what about privacy?
Cheap, overabundant, easily gotten, lost, regained, bought, sold. (2007: 215-216)
Although the address is technically directed at the interviewer, it is clear that the real
addressee here is the reader. More specifically, the argument is meant for those who might
criticize Eggers‟ openheartedness concerning his past.28
Concluding, through the ethics of sincerity as Korthals Altes calls it, Eggers tightens the bond
between reader and implied author. The metanarrative discussions of the ethics in the novel
provide a counterweight for any possible critique on the author‟s motivations for publishing
his life story. Moreover, the detection of unreliable narration cognitively repositions the
reader from a level of identification with the narrator to a level of secret communication with
the implied author. Therefore, Eggers uses his alter ego Dave as a puppeteer would use a
puppet: by explicitly pointing out the strings to the audience, it becomes aware of the man
behind the puppet show. Eggers desperately wants to be trusted by the reader, even if it means
laying bare and deconstructing every single narrative mechanism he employs. This way,
though the form of the novel and used techniques are in the postmodern tradition, yet the gist
of the memoir remains the tragic story that other memoirs display.
28
The people that come to mind here are Eggers‟ brother and sister, whose reactions to the novel were very
negative. Especially Dave‟s siter Beth found he grossly understated her role in Toph‟s upbringing.
65
So instead of lamenting the end of unmediated experience, I will celebrate it, revel in the
simultaneous living of an experience and its dozen or so echoes in art and media, the echoes
making the experience not cheaper but richer, aha! being that much more layered, the depth
luxurious, not soul-sucking or numbing but edifying, ramifying. So there is the first experience, the
friend and the threatened suicide, then there are the echoes from these things having been done
before, then the awareness of echoes, the anger at the presence of echoes, then the acceptance,
embracing of presence of echoes – as enrichment – and above all the recognition of the value of the
friend threatening suicide and having stomach pumped, as both life experience and also as fodder
for experimental short story or passage in a novel, not to mention more reason to feel experientially
superior to other‟s one‟s age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things
that I have seen. ... So I could be aware of the dangers of the self-consciousness, but at the same
time, I‟ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise,
and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. There is
always the core, that can‟t be articulated.
Only caricatured. (270-271)
The irony, intermedial references and other gimmickry the author employs, reinforce the
impression of good intentions on the level of the implied author. Eggers has truly written a
work of genius, as in spite of all the bells ans whistles, in spite of all the play and irony, the
transaction of emotion is potent and sincere. The sentiment that lingers after reading the novel
is not one of identification, yet a strong feeling of emotional connection and empathy with
Dave Eggers.
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III. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock. A Confession
1. Introduction
1.1 The author
The Jewish-American author Philip Roth has published nearly thirty books in the course of
his prolific career. In 1997 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his Zuckerman novel American
Pastoral. Roth‟s first works, including Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go are of a comicrealistic tendency. His 1969 work Portnoy‟s Complaint is his first experimental novel and
marks the transition to a more self-conscious kind of fiction. Roth‟s most famous work
includes the Zuckerman-cycle, a series of nine novels published from the seventies onward,
featuring Nathan Zuckerman, an alter ego of the author. These works set the tone for themes
addressed in Roth‟s later work, such as the relationship between a writer‟s life and work and
the dangers involving the fictionalization of the self. His well-acclaimed work, often with
strong autobiographical influences, also figures more serious themes such as the
problematization of Jewish identity and the political situation in America. In the course of his
career, Roth received the National Book Award twice, and was awarded the PEN/Faulkner
Award on three occasions, one of which was for Operation Shylock.
1.2 The novel
While encouragingly subtitled „a confession‟, Operation Shylock turns out to be far from a
realistic memoir. Though the work has some autobiographical foundations, the events
recounted by protagonist Philip Roth 29 – a mimetic reflection of the real-life persona,
including thinning hair and crooked Jewish nose – are too much of the „espionage novel meets
psychological thriller‟-type to be in any way credible. Further into the novel, it becomes clear
to the reader that verisimilitude is no priority of the author, as he openly and self-consciously
addresses the question of the distinction between life and art in an ever more intricate web of
doubles and confused identities.
29
Note: Unless explicitely stated otherwise, I will from now on refer to the flesh-and-blood author as „Roth‟ and
the protagonist as „Philip‟.
67
The plot begins with the author-narrator „Philip Roth‟ who, recovering from a nervous
breakdown induced by Halcion – a sleeping pill with vicious side-effects, causing
hallucinations, „depersonalization and derealization; paranoid reactions‟ (2000: 25) and
depression -, receives news of a doppelgänger that has assumed his identity. Using his
namesake‟s fame as a writer to gain access to the higher echelons of Jewish eminency, this
second „Philip Roth‟ is preaching Diasporism, an anti-Zionist current advocating the exodus
of Ashkenazi Jews from Israel to their European countries of origin. The anti-Semitic feelings
that still linger in those countries will be disbanded by submitting the European population to
a program of moral reorientation called Anti-Semites Anonymous. The still-enfeebled Roth
hubristically decides to go to Israel to face the usurper and put the charade to an end. The
events that follow are so unlikely the reader is inclined to believe the narrator is still under the
influence of the malicious Halcion and the whole story is one long hallucinatory trip of a
receding mental patient, a possibility the writer himself hints at on more than one occasion.
The writer, who some seven months earlier had suffered a frightening nervous breakdown
presumably generated by hazardous sleeping medication prescribed in the aftermath of a botchedup minor surgical procedure, is so perplexed by all these events and by his own incongruously selfsubverting behavior in response to them that he begins to fear that he is headed for a relapse. The
implausibility of so much that is happening even causes him, in an extreme moment of
disorientation, to ask himself if any of it is happening and if he is not in his rural Connecticut home
living through one of those hallucinatory episodes whose unimpeachable persuasiveness had
brought him close to committing suicide the summer before. (2000: 242)
Paradoxically, once both Philips – who appear to be close to identical twins – meet, the
confusion of identities only increases. Philip-the-writer impulsively gives in to a perverse urge
and impersonates his impersonator, deceiving some of his oldest friends and accepting a
million-dollar cheque from a man called Smilesburger in the name of Philip-the-diasporist.
The not yet fully recovered writer is thrown back and forth between lucid moments in which
he tries to rationalize his nemesis by calling him „Moishe Pipik‟ (a deflating Yiddish
nickname) and moments of paranoia in which he has the terrible feeling of being caught in a
web of espionage and counterintelligence involving the Mossad and the PLO.
Interesting is that these events, unlikely and confusing as they may seem, are set against the
realistic backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial in Jerusalem at the time of the First Intifada in the
1980s. The Demjanjuk case, not uncoincidentally another example of confounded identity,
was to decide whether the churchgoing, and loving pater familias John Demjanjuk was the
68
same person as „Ivan the Terrible‟, the murderer and tormentor of several thousand of Jewish
prisoners at the Treblinka death camp four decades earlier.
The deceit and impersonation reach a climax when Pipik‟s attractive girlfriend “Jinx”
confesses to Philip that his evil twin is plotting to kidnap Demjanjuk‟s son to both force a
confession out of the father and to boycott Philip for accepting the diasporism money. The
next morning Philip himself is kidnapped and left alone in a classroom, clueless as to his
captors, their motifs and intentions, facing an unintelligible Hebrew proverb on the
blackboard. It is in the anxious hours the writer spends alone with his paranoid thoughts that
he reflects on his ambiguous identity as an American Jew, on the events that befell him and
on their meaning, on the general incomprehensibility of reality and on the impossibility of
reflecting reality in art.
How can I convince them that there is nothing artful here, no subtle aim or hidden plan
undergirding everything, that these events are nonsensical and empty of meaning, that there is no
pattern or sequence arising from some dark or sinister motive of mine or any motive of mine at all,
that this is in no way an imaginative creation accessible to an interpretive critique but simply a
muddle, a mix-up, and a silly fucking mess! (2000: 313)
In the end, it turns out that Smilesburger is working for Israeli intelligence: having discovered
the presence of his proselytic double and grasping the opportunity of this coincidence, he
wants Philip to continue the Diasporism act to intrude into Yasir Arafat‟s inner circle. In the
epilogue the reader learns that Philip actually did go through with the operation and put his
initiation as a spy into words in Operation Shylock. Philip claims in the epilogue that he was
approached by Smilesburger right before the publication of the novel, offering him a bribe to
drop the final Mossad-implicating chapter for his own safety. Philip initially refuses. „What
are you trying to tell me? Will the Mossad put a contract out on me the way the Ayatollah did
with Rushdie?‟ (2000: 383), the author sneers. However, the incriminating chapter is not
included in (or left out from?) the final version of the novel.
69
2. Analysis
Like AHWOSG, Roth‟s book features a homodiegetic, unreliable and self-conscious narrator.
Nevertheless, the metafictional passages in Operation Shylock are less obvious and more
complex than those that can be read in Eggers‟ work. The self-reflective passages are cleverly
thematized rather than ostensible frame-breaks, which leaves the author more room to play
with intricate self-reflective motifs. In the text, there are three Philip Roths playing a boggling
mind-game with the reader: the flesh-and-blood author, the narrator and the double. The
different Roths melt into each other, making it hard for the reader to grasp who is talking
when: Roth the implied author or Philip the narrator. In contrast to AHWOSG‟s flaunting selfparody and deconstructionism, the juggling of ontological levels in Operation Shylock leaves
the reader completely puzzled as to what is real and what is not, and Philip‟s self-reflective
musings on the torn Jewish identity and writing as a Jew make up some of the most
interesting passages of the novel. Though Operation Shylock is categorized as fiction, Roth
consciously makes use of real elements to give his unlikely story credibility: real-life
characters like the infamous Demjanjuk, Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld and the Jewish
martyr Klinghoffer; the nervous breakdown the author indeed suffered and is described in his
ex-wife Claire Bloom‟s memoir Leaving a Doll‟s House; the all-too real Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and the uprisings during the First Intifada. By using a very tangible backdrop, the
reader gets the intense feeling that some of the book must be real.
2.1 Paratext
The at first sight somewhat obscure title Operation Shylock is in fact a witty find. In the first
place it summons the figure of Shylock, the usuring Jew in Shakespeare‟s play The Merchant
of Venice who asks his debtor Antonio for a pound of flesh in the famous soliloquy „Hath not
a Jew eyes”. Whether Shakespeare intended the play to carry an anti-Semitic meaning or
whether the depiction of Shylock was meant to implicitly criticize the intolerance towards
Jews in Elizabethan society remains a disputed question until today. What is certain, however,
is that the figure of the usurious and vengeful Shylock has been used by anti-Semites as the
embodiment and proof of a malicious Jewish essence. Including the Nazis employed
Shakespeare‟s character in their propaganda. By choosing this title, Roth hints at one of the
book‟s main themes: the split Jewish identity. Indeed, subtitled „a confession‟, the novel
promises to reveal some of the more obscure thoughts and episodes in the head and life of
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Philip Roth. The meaning of the word „operation‟ becomes fully clear near the end of the
book, when all the events turn out to have been orchestrated by the Mossad to urge the
protagonist into an undercover operation code-named Operation Shylock.
The preface, meant to guide the reader towards an ideal interpretation, opens with a note on
the accuracy of the work. One of the central themes in this novel too, is the question of fiction
vs. non-fiction. In comparison to Eggers however – who openly admits to being liable to
memory gaps and exaggerations from the first page onwards – the narrator of Operation
Shylock claims that he was forced to alter the factual truth.
For legal reasons I had to alter a number of facts in this book. These are minor changes that mainly
involve details of identification and locale and are of little significance to the overall story and its
verisimilitude. Any name that has been changed is marked with a small circle the first time it
appears. I‟ve drawn Operation Shylock from notebook journals. The book is as accurate an account
as I am able to give of actual occurrences that I lived through during my middle fifties. (2000: 13)
By locating the source of unreliability outside of the novel, namely in the hands of a Mossadagent, the author tries to prompt the reader into feeling complicit with the narrator. This
passage makes it obvious that the narrating figure is aware of his diegetic duty, while
similarly evoking the familiar excitement of the ominous opening tune of a thriller. On the
very last page of the book, we encounter another hint as to the factual truth of the work. What
at first sight seems to be the standard fictional disclaimer turns out to have a twist:
NOTE TO THE READER
This book is a work of fiction. The formal conversational exchange with Aharon Appelfeld quoted
in chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in The New York Times on March 11, 1988; the verbatim minutes
of the January 27, 1988, morning session of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem District
Court provided the courtroom exchanges quoted in chapter 9. Otherwise the names, characters,
places, and incidents either are products of the author‟s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This
confession is false.
The ambiguity of this passage stems from the confusion the deictic marker „this‟ brings about.
Does it refer to the note to the reader, utterly complicating any possible disentagling of
fictional and non-fictional strands, or to the confession as a whole and is it merely an
indication that the novel is indeed fictional? The puzzling of the reader is exactly what Roth
tries to achieve, as he mentions at one point in the book: „isn‟t that the message? The
unsureness of everything?‟ (2000: 393).
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2.2 Intratext
2.2.1 Narrator(s) in the twilight zone
The narrator in Operation Shylock is quite ostensibly an unreliable one, as he informs the
reader from the beginning that he is mentally unstable and frequently wonders whether the
utterly strange things that are happening to him are not all hallucinations, including the
apparition of his doppelgänger. In the summarizing middle chapter of the book, Philip‟s
instability is phrased as following.
The implausibility of so much that is happening even causes him, in an extreme moment of
disorientation, to ask himself if any of it is happening and if he is not in his rural Connecticut home
living through one of those hallucinatory episodes whose unimpeachable persuasiveness had
brought him close to committing suicide the summer before. His control over himself begins to
seem nearly as tenuous to him as his influence over the other Philip Roth. (2000: 242)
Once more, the central theme addressed by the self-conscious narrator is the question of
reality and fiction. Unlike with Eggers, the self-reflectiveness does not inspire empathic
feelings for the narrator or reorient the reader towards a stage of complicit communication
with the implied author. Rather, the metafictional layer of the book adds to the confusion of
ontological levels, as an implied author‟s self reflective comments on the writing of a story
about a writer writing about himself and his alter ego can not possibly presume to be
straightforward, especially not if all these entities carry the same name. The protagonist and
implied author duel for the limelight spot in the discourse: while Philip sincerely struggles
with his mental instability, trying to distinguish real events from what his paranoid mind is
making him believe, implied author Roth addresses a different topic:
[O]nce off the phone I immediately came up with an explanation not wholly disconnected form
what I‟d thought the night before in bed. Although the idea probably originated in Aharon‟s remark
that he felt that he was reading to me out of a story I‟d written, it was nonetheless another
ridiculously subjective attempt to convert into a mental event of the kind I was professionally all
too familiar with what had once again been established as all too objectively real. It‟s Zuckerman, I
thought, whimsically, stupidly, escapistly, it‟s Kepesh, it‟s Tarnopol and Portnoy – it‟s all of them
in once, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me. In
other words, if it‟s not Halcion and it‟s no dream, then it‟s got to be literature – as though there
cannot be a life-without ten thousand times more unimaginable than the life-within. (2000: 34)
72
Ironically, it is exactly in the moments of the protagonist‟s paranoiac doubt as to the
authenticity of the here and now that the most lucid contemplations are offered. In a series of
interior monologues of a striking rhetoric, Roth addresses – both literally and metaphorically
through his character „Philip Roth‟ – the issue of a writer‟s inevitable implication in the text
and the threats to one‟s identity this dividing of the self poses. This brings us to a second
important theme: who is Pipik? Several explanations are offered or hinted at in the work,
always linked to the theme of the storification of the self.
Yes, suppose this Pipik of mine is none other than the Satiric Spirit in the flesh, and the whole
thing a send-up, a satire of authorship! How could I have missed it? Yes, yes, the Spirit of Satire is
of course who he is, here to poke fun at me and other outmoded devotees of what is important and
what is real. (2000: 199)
Pipik himself explains his identity in relation to Philip as: „I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT
WORDS‟ (2000: 87). Indeed, Roth has no intention of providing the reader with a simple
solution. Were David Lynch a writer, this is the book he would have written.
I stopped myself right there. Everything I had been thinking – and, what‟s worse, eagerly believing
– shocked me and frightened me. What I was elaborating so thoroughly as a rational explanation of
reality was infused with just the sort of rationality that the psychiatrists regularly hear from the
most far-gone paranoid on the schizophrenic ward. [...] Better for real things to be incontrollable,
better for one‟s life to be indecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make
causal sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of
these three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been
doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We‟ve
all heard that one before. (2000: 290)
As will result on more than one occasion, implied author Roth dismisses the quest for
truthfulness in this book. He confuses the reader by including a number of alter ego‟s of
himself, and by the combination of real and invented elements without the inclusion of any
hint as to their ontological status.
2.2.2 Narrative self-consciousness
The self-consciousness in Operation Shylock is, like in the previous novel, mainly of the
diegetic kind, yet where Eggers lets his characters step out of their roles to blithely bicker
about what is happening within the fictional frame, Roth does not often allow ostensible
frame breaks. Nevertheless, in the middle of the work, the discourse changes from the
subjective and unstable narrator to the voice of an authoritative narrative figure who gives a
73
summary of „the Pipik plot so far‟ (2000: 239). As it turns out, this pseudo-omniscient voice
is Philip writing down his adventures in 1999, revealing his later self through a disruption of
chronology. While telling the reader about a cloth Star of David Jinx held while recounting
her story to him in Jerusalem, the narrator says: „I still have it. I am looking at it while I write‟
(2000: 221). This later version of Philip – adding yet another layer and persona to the heap –
is the voice that will inform the reader in the epilogue that he did in fact undertake an
intelligence operation for the Mossad. This mature narrator seems to conspire with the
implied author in the slightly condescending way they both look at the Philip that is
struggling with reality in Israel.
I began to doubt while I packed my bag to go, if he had actually searched the room and,
disturbingly for a moment, even to wonder if he had ever been here. [...] I had but one goal and that
was to disappear. The rest I‟d puzzle out or not when I‟d successfully accomplished an escape.
And don‟t write about it afterward, I told myself. Even the gullible now have contempt for the idea
of objectivity; the latest thing they‟ve swallowed whole is that it‟s impossible to report anything
faithfully other than one‟s own temperature; everything is allegory – so what possible chance
would I have to persuade anyone of a reality like this one? [...] [N]o one will ever believe your
version to be anything other than your version. (2000: 215-216)
Through Philip‟s exasparation over the impossibility to write about his adventures due to their
incredibility, the implied author conveys an awareness of his audience: Roth realizes that the
readers of his novel are postmodern readers, conscious of recent literary insights concerning
plurality of meaning. Unlike in AHWOSG, the metafictional comments on the narrator‟s
unreliability do not bring the reader closer to the text or its protagonist. Rather, the implied
author‟s attention is clearly focused on a different point than his narrator‟s. The irony is that
Philip‟s struggle to stay in touch with reality loses credibility as the book is categorized as
fiction, consequently rendering irrelevant the whole question of whether the events are
delusions or whether they are true. However, by making use of existent characters and locales,
the novel does achieve a certain „effet-réel‟. Had Roth chosen a different name for his narrator,
the book would instantly have lost its credibility.
Concluding, Roth puzzles his readers to the point where they themselves feel like Philip,
desperately trying to distinguish fact from fiction. This approaches the reader to the
protagonist in a certain way, yet the effect would have been much stronger had Roth spent
some less time playing witty mind-games and some more time deepening out his characters.
The incredibly ingeniously written reflections on the warped psyche of the protagonist, on
Jewry, Diasporism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict combined with the exciting element of
74
espionage make the book a wonderful read, yet the story itself does not stick. The result of the
metafictional commentary in Operation Shylock is thus rather estranging than bonding.
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IV. Conclusion
This dissertation sought to clarify both the notion of narrative unreliability as the mechanism
of metafiction. Both narrative phenomena intersect in the mind of the reader, as both of them
influence the perception of the fictional universe. It was my goal to investigate whether or not
self-reflective passages influence the perception of the narrating character by the reader and
conversely whether the perception of the narrator‟s unreliability would make a reader more
attentive towards self-conscious remarks. In order to scrutinize the effect of narrative
mechanisms on the reader, I briefly expounded Vincent Jouve‟s reception theory, that
determines the ethically manipulative „points‟ in a text.
Both novels I have selected for the empirical analysis of the theoretical part of my work
employ metafictional passages to produce the confusion of ontological levels in the reader‟s
mind. Because both novels feature autodiegetic narrators, the authors have opportunity to play
with the gray area between the fictional universe and the real-life world, as the reader is
inclined to see the narrator as a paper version of the author. Eggers uses extremely selfconscious forms of narration to convey a true story, seemingly employing irony as a way of
lightening his tragic life‟s account while being quite aware that the forced gimmickry makes
the story all the more desperate. In contrast, Roth‟s book about fictional events establishes a
link to reality through the use of autobiographical and historical facts, places and characters,
while the metafictional passages are situated on a level that is closer to that of the unreliable
narrator‟s. Because of the author‟s self-reflective thematization of the impossibility to write
an authentic story – unlike AHWOSG not countered by an ethics of sincerity that, in spite of
the postmodern awareness of the impossibility of non-fiction, tries to give a true account (true
of heart, as Eggers puts it) – the only parts of the novel that come across as real are those
which are indeed based on real-life facts. The effect of the self-reflective commentary thus
seems contrary to one another.
I hope this dissertation has contributed something to the intricate study of narrative
mechanisms. I am aware of the fact that I did not manage to establish an obvious causal
relationship between unreliable narration and metafiction, yet considering my choice of
material for analysis this would have been a very difficult task indeed. Perhaps the analysis of
works of a less complex structure might enable the future scholar to ascertain a link between
the type of self-reflectiveness and the interpretation of unreliability. Rather, the insights
76
provided in this paper can be the starting point for future explorations on the effect of the
simultaneous use of narrative techniques. To my knowledge, no such systematic investigation
has been conducted up to day; most works on unreliable narration, metafiction or other
postmodern narrative mechanisms remain niche-investigations. Yet after having analyzed
both concepts and linked them to reception theories, it is my strong conviction is that the
result of a comparative inquiry might turn out to be surprising. In order to establish a more
obvious connection between the use of self-conscious passages in a novel and the
interpretation of unreliability, it does however seem necessary to explore a broad corpus of
postmodern texts.
77
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