In a message dated 21/12/2004 04:41:05 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
If the narrator started spouting Freudian jargon would we have to accept that?
If that was the writer's choice, yes. Art can be an ugly business.
We would surely take it that there was a tension between author and narrator, if
the author were VN.
Not necessarily. I suspect VN enjoyed every minute of writing the narratives of Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote, although he himself had nothing in common with either character.
I thank Andrew Brown for continuing the discussion in such detail.
I just want to comment on his two points above.
My word "tension" was crude. I could have just said "distinction". Of course VN must have loved wrting "as" these people. But, as he said (in "On a book entitled 'Lolita'"), it is childish to identify the author with the narrator, and I am simply arguing that this principle applies to third-person as well as to first-person narration in VN's fiction.
We have to "accept", tautologically, that Humbert, Kinbote, or a hypothetical Freudian narrator lovingly-hatingly conjured up by VN is "writing" as he is, as part of the fiction. Of course we can enjoy and admire a story set in a flat world. But that is very different from our believing that the world is flat. And a significant part of the story may well be precisely that we have to imagine such a flat world, precisely because we do not believe the world is flat.
Anthony Stadlen