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Fw: Re: unreliable?
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EDNOTE. As previously noted PYNCHON-L is having an extended discussion of
PALE FIRE. Mary Krimmel kindly passed on the material from that discussion
to us. It is quoted from David Lodge, the British novelist and critic with a
particular interest in Nabokov.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mary Krimmel" <mary@krimmel.net>
>
> >From: "Otto" <ottosell@yahoo.de>
> >To: <pynchon-l@waste.org>
> >
> >... the chapter is mainly about Kazuo Ishiguro's
> >novel _The Remains of the Day_, 1989 ...
> >
> >"Unreliable narrators are invariably invented characters who are part of
the story they tell. An unreliable "omniscient" narrator is almost a
contradiction in terms, and could only occur in a very deviant, experimental
text. Even a character-narrator cannot be a hundred per cent unreliable. If
everything he or she says is palpably false, that only tells us what we know
already, namely that a novel is a work of fiction. There must be some
possibility of discrimination between truth and falsehood within the
imagined world of the novel, as there in the real world, for the story to
engage our interest.
The point of using an unreliable narrator is indeed to reveal in an
interesting way the gap between appearance and reality, and to show how
human beings distort or conceal the latter. This may not be a conscious, or
mischievous, intention on their part.
(...)
It is interesting to compare Ishiguro's novel with another virtuoso feat in
the use of an unreliable narrator -- Vladimir Nabokovs _Pale Fire_. This
novel takes the unusual form of a long poem by a fictitious American poet
called John Shade, with a detailed commentary upon it by an émigré European
scholar, Shade's neighbour, called Charles Kinbote. The poem is an
autobiographical work centering on the tragic suicide of the poet's
daughter. Shade himself, we gather, had just been murdered when the
manuscript of the poem came into Kinbote's hands. We soon realize that
Kinbote is mad, believing himself to be the exiled king of some Ruritarian
country resembling pre-Revolutionary Russia. He has convinced himself that
Shade was writing a poem about his own history, and that he was shot in
error by an assassin sent to murder Kinbote himself. The purpose of his
commentary is to establish Kinbote's bizarre interpretation of the facts One
of the pleasures of reading it is to discern, by reference to the "reliable"
narrative of Shade's poem, the degree of Kinbote's self-delusion.
Compared with _The Remains of the Day_, _Pale Fire_ is exuberantly comic
at the expense of the unreliable narrator. Yet the effect is not totally
reductive. Kinbote's evocation of his beloved kingdom, Zembla, is vivid,
enchanting and haunting. Nabokov has invested his character with some of his
own eloquence, and much of his own exile's poignant nostalgia. Ishiguro's
novel in contrast accepts the limitations of a narrator quite without
eloquence. If he had been reliable, the effect would, of course, have been
incredibly boring."
> >
> >(David Lodge: _The Art of Fiction_, Penguin 1992, p. 154-57,
> >_Die Kunst des Erzählens_, Heyne, München 1998, p. 221-25)
>
>
>
>
PALE FIRE. Mary Krimmel kindly passed on the material from that discussion
to us. It is quoted from David Lodge, the British novelist and critic with a
particular interest in Nabokov.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mary Krimmel" <mary@krimmel.net>
>
> >From: "Otto" <ottosell@yahoo.de>
> >To: <pynchon-l@waste.org>
> >
> >... the chapter is mainly about Kazuo Ishiguro's
> >novel _The Remains of the Day_, 1989 ...
> >
> >"Unreliable narrators are invariably invented characters who are part of
the story they tell. An unreliable "omniscient" narrator is almost a
contradiction in terms, and could only occur in a very deviant, experimental
text. Even a character-narrator cannot be a hundred per cent unreliable. If
everything he or she says is palpably false, that only tells us what we know
already, namely that a novel is a work of fiction. There must be some
possibility of discrimination between truth and falsehood within the
imagined world of the novel, as there in the real world, for the story to
engage our interest.
The point of using an unreliable narrator is indeed to reveal in an
interesting way the gap between appearance and reality, and to show how
human beings distort or conceal the latter. This may not be a conscious, or
mischievous, intention on their part.
(...)
It is interesting to compare Ishiguro's novel with another virtuoso feat in
the use of an unreliable narrator -- Vladimir Nabokovs _Pale Fire_. This
novel takes the unusual form of a long poem by a fictitious American poet
called John Shade, with a detailed commentary upon it by an émigré European
scholar, Shade's neighbour, called Charles Kinbote. The poem is an
autobiographical work centering on the tragic suicide of the poet's
daughter. Shade himself, we gather, had just been murdered when the
manuscript of the poem came into Kinbote's hands. We soon realize that
Kinbote is mad, believing himself to be the exiled king of some Ruritarian
country resembling pre-Revolutionary Russia. He has convinced himself that
Shade was writing a poem about his own history, and that he was shot in
error by an assassin sent to murder Kinbote himself. The purpose of his
commentary is to establish Kinbote's bizarre interpretation of the facts One
of the pleasures of reading it is to discern, by reference to the "reliable"
narrative of Shade's poem, the degree of Kinbote's self-delusion.
Compared with _The Remains of the Day_, _Pale Fire_ is exuberantly comic
at the expense of the unreliable narrator. Yet the effect is not totally
reductive. Kinbote's evocation of his beloved kingdom, Zembla, is vivid,
enchanting and haunting. Nabokov has invested his character with some of his
own eloquence, and much of his own exile's poignant nostalgia. Ishiguro's
novel in contrast accepts the limitations of a narrator quite without
eloquence. If he had been reliable, the effect would, of course, have been
incredibly boring."
> >
> >(David Lodge: _The Art of Fiction_, Penguin 1992, p. 154-57,
> >_Die Kunst des Erzählens_, Heyne, München 1998, p. 221-25)
>
>
>
>