Reliability in Narrative Discourse: A Comprehensive ...

Poetics Today

(Un)Reliability in Narrative Discourse: A Comprehensive Overview Meir Sternberg Tel Aviv University

Tamar Yacobi Tel Aviv University

Abstract

1 The State of the Art: A Field in Trouble. 2 (Un)Reliable Discourse off to a Stimulating Equivocal Start: Why Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction Falls Short and Where to Go from There: 2.1 Stammering between Narrator and Implied Author, or, Why the Author Needs to Keep Silent; 2.1.1 The Best Version, Considering; 2.1.2 Two-Mindedness; 2.1.3 Confusing the Communicators: Forms, Penalties, Lessons; 2.1.4 The Implied Author Vulnerable to Reliability Judgments?; 2.2 “Person” Overworked or Underworked? The Line between Mediators Erased and Redrawn; 2.2.1 Narrator, Reflector, Informant; 2.2.2 Author vs. Narrator, Narrator vs. Nonnarrator: Distinctions Compared and Correlated; 2.3 Do Narrators Act, Reliably or Otherwise? Narrating-I vs. Experiencing-I; 2.3.1 “Speaks or Acts”?; 2.3.2 Other Variations on the Enacted Narrator: A Brief Comparison of Oddities; 2.3.3 An Example from Proust; 2.3.4 Impossible Ontology: The Mediator Accompanied or Abandoned by the Author; 2.4 Making Bricks without Straw: How to Do Things with an Unworkable Formula? 3 The Constructivist Turn: (Un)Reliability as a Mechanism of Integration: 3.1 The Perspectival Mechanism among Other Lines of Sense-Making; 3.2 The Perspectival Mechanism vis-a`-vis Its Rivals and Partners; 3.3 The Theory Reviewed from a Different Perspective: Correcting Some Misunderstandings and Misapplications; 3.3.1 The Figurative Mechanism; 3.3.2 Reasoning in Face of Unreason: (Un) Reliability as Explained Problem and Explanatory Principle; 3.3.3 Paradigms Poetics Today 36:4 (December 2015) DOI 10.1215/03335372-3455114 q 2016 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Published by Duke University Press

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and/or Participants Misnamed, Misgrouped, Monopolized: Is the Implied Author Necessary for Reliability Judgments?; 3.3.4 (Re)Construction; 3.3.5 (Re)Constructive Modulations: Defining (Un)Reliability and Making Reliability Judgments; 3.3.6 Dangerous Liaisons. 4 Approaches to (Un)Reliability and the Wavering among Them: 4.1 (Un)Reliability in the Beholder’s Eye: The Pedophile among Reliability Judges of Humbert; 4.2 The Reader Mixed-up with Other Reference Points; 4.3 Tissues of Incompatibility: A Brief Comparison; 4.4 The Interactive, Text/Reader Orientation; 4.5 Objectivism: Miniature and Large-Scale Reflexes (Expressions, Giveaways); 4.6 How the Implied Author and Author-Centeredness (Re)Enter by the Backstairs. Keywords constructivism, implied author, informant, integration mechanisms, per-

spectival hypothesis, reflector, sense-making, Tel-Aviv poetics, (un)reliable

How know anyone the Mooi tell true when he say what he say? And when he tell what he tell? And how know we say true, when we tell what we tell? Even if the Mooi have told true. For we may alter it. And no-one know. For all anyone know the Mooi lie like a liar born. Mendax Mooi. And we too. We make it doubly wrong by untruths. Or we make it right by the same. Two negatives making positive. And all else failing and say we say we psychic, how the hell everyone else know that, man? How know and prove that? Your honour, it will be said, with all due respect, the thing don’t stand up in court. Penelope Fitzgerald, “The Mooi” 1. The State of the Art: A Field in Trouble

Some decades ago, the following statement was made: There can be little doubt about the importance of the problem of reliability in narrative and in literature as a whole. It arises with respect to every speaking and reflecting participant in the literary act of communication, from the interlocutors in dialogue scenes to the overall narrator to the author himself; and its resolution determines not our view of the speaker alone but also of the reality evoked and the norms implied in and through his message. And the problem is (predictably) as complex and (unfortunately) as ill-defined as it is important. (Yacobi 1981: 113)

The first part of this general statement, concerning the importance of the problem and often cited since, doubtless remains as true nowadays. The question “Is the narrator or reflector reliable or not?” is omnipresent, the response to it inescapable, however unconscious or automatic or ambivalent, and the answer determines every reading in all its phases and aspects and media, which in narrative begins with its very narrativity: what happens, to what effect, and why? (Sternberg 1978 [1971], 1992, 2001b, 2010). The difference made to narrative analysis — theoretical, historical, sociocultural,


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corpus-oriented, interdisciplinary — is in proportion. If anything, whether narrative or narratological, this importance of reliability judgments has only grown more conspicuous and recognized by far over the decades since. Among the reasons, it is enough to mention the problem’s leap into unrivaled notoriety, even in the culture at large; the masses of work it has generated, especially yet not exclusively in narrative study; and the incessant debates on and around it. These ongoing debates that surround (un)reliability bring us to the second generalization made in the quote above and its immediate sequel, regarding the unhappy state of the field. Sadly, and against expectation, the field continues to be so. That the problem is “as ill-defined as it is important” also remains true decades later, in spite of all the work invested since, or because of it. Not (which only makes things worse) that the field regards its state as unhappy. Quite the reverse, to judge by the height and the frequency of the claims for novelty made in it, unparalleled to our knowledge. For example, no fewer than four of Ansgar Nu¨nning’s problematic articles on the subject of unreliable narration (1997a, 1999b, 2005a, 2008) have “Reconceptualizing” in their titles. Gregory Currie (1995a) would have unreliability “refigured” and Robert Baah (1999) “rethought.” Heyd (2006: 219) promises to take “the most conspicuous approach to U[nreliable]N[arrator]. Bo Pettersson (2005: 82 – 83) describes his article as a “radical reorientation,” especially “in the cognitive narratological study of a rather central narrative feature.” James Phelan (2005: 31) proposes “a new account of unreliability,” while Jennifer Phillips (2009: 62) promises “a new model: the textually evident model” for “the detection of unreliability.” And so forth, in dozens of cases.1 But the high claims are rarely matched by the actual (analytic, interpretive, illustrative) performance. Not that the practitioners in the field are in a position to evaluate its state and their own performance relative to it, if only because of a widespread epistemic shortfall. A little knowledge of the masses of work done on (un)reliability (never mind related issues) since the early 1960s, for better or worse, would appear to be the rule. Even the typically few surveys (e.g., A. Nu¨nning 2005b, Shen 2013, V. Nu¨nning 2015) present no exception, and are therefore unreliable, beginning with their coverage. (The quickest comparison with our list of references will indicate the extent of the shortfall.) This little knowledge, proverbially dangerous — the more so where left unrepaired and unacknowledged, if at all perceived, by so many for decades — is not unique, 1. Tom Kindt (2008: 130) even takes such pretensions at face value, as “fundamental responses.”


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either. Studied or otherwise, it finds parallels elsewhere in the human sciences, even on a far larger scale. One such parallel is narrative analysis in the cognitive (inter)disciplines since the 1970s (see Sternberg 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2009 for a progressive overview); another is the scholarship on inference, again within and among various disciplines (Sternberg 2001a); and readers may want to compare these isolated practices and their results (as detailed there) with the present comprehensive overview of (un)reliability.2 The parallels hardly offer much comfort, needless to say. But they do throw light on, among other troubles, the distance separating here the recurrent high claims of novelty or advance or merit from the actual achievements and the overall state of the art. A, if not the, central measure of this discrepancy, or the other way round, of a field’s healthy state, is the answer(s) given to the key question of what defines the object of study. Here, as the statement quoted above emphasized, the object was at the time “ill-defined,” and so it remains: Are reliability and unreliability value-judgments or descriptions? Data or conjectures? Gradable or ungradable contrasts? Autonomous features or products of fixed combinations of other features? Such, in telegraphic style, are the cruxes that the theory of fiction for the most part either neglects or inadequately treats, for reasons that will emerge in due course. (Yacobi 1981: 113)

For now, we will just add that the definitions remain inadequate, to the point of circularity and even beyond it: [Homer’s] authoritative and therefore reliable reporting. (Phelan and Booth 2005b: 389) A reader is very unlikely to attach an author to a narrator whom that reader has already deemed unreliable. (Lanser 2005: 213) A first-person (homodiegetic) narrator who shows him/herself to be untrustworthy in his/her narration is referred to as unreliable. (Fludernik 2009: 161) [In] unreliable narration . . . the teller of a story cannot be taken at his or her word. (Herman et al. 2005: 623, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory) Those narrators whose account or interpretation of events gives the reader a cause for mistrust have been called “unreliable narrators.” (Neumann and Nu¨nning 2011: 98; most often paralleled, as in Prince 1982: 18; Bennett and Royle 2004: 294; Maunder 2007: 505; Zunshine 2012: 50). [In] unreliable narration . . . the teller of a story cannot be taken at his or her word. (Herman 2009: 194; or taken “literally” in Olson 2003: 105)

As circular definitions, each of these amount of course to saying in different words that an unreliable narrator is a narrator who is unreliable. The differ2. The interested reader can also pursue various theoretical and illustrative details of this overview in the references to our earlier publications.


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ence in the predicate might enlighten someone unfamiliar with the word unreliable — an inquiring child, for example, or a learner of English — but does nothing to identify the concept. It’s like saying that narrative, or a narrator, tells a story (Sternberg 2003b: 530, 595, 616, 2008: 59 – 60, 2010, and note 11 below). These circular definitions also bring to mind the vacuous advice about “reliable intelligence” that Carl von Clausewitz (2007 [1832]: 52) wearily cites in his On War: “The textbooks agree, of course, that we should only believe reliable intelligence, but what is the use of such feeble maxims?” Even more frequent than circularity in the work done on (un)reliable narration is the opposite offense against discourse coherence and meaningfulness, namely, breaches of the argument’s continuity. They range from non sequitur through inconsistency to flat self-contradiction, and the overview below will unfortunately need to draw on this range much of the time. So one brief yet many-sided example, again related to the crux of definition, will suffice for now. In his introduction to literary theory, Jonathan Culler (1997: 88) first defines unreliability as follows: Narrators are sometimes termed unreliable when they provide enough information about situations and clues about their own biases to make us doubt their interpretations of events, or when we find reasons to doubt that the narrator shares the same values as the author.

This definition itself already branches out, indeed polarizes, in sequence into two orientations: readerly (or on the face of it, interactive, textual/readerly) versus authorial; and unresolvably so. According to the former, unreliability (and though omitted here, also reliability, presumably, along with the choice between them) ultimately depends on “us” readers. The very objectivelooking “information” and “clues” provided in the text have this unfavorable effect only when they are “enough” in our judgment “to make us doubt” their source. Within this readerly orientation, then, “narrators” count as unreliable when we find their “interpretation of events” doubtful in the light of what they tell (or, better, give away) about the storyworld and themselves. Besides, what adds up to “enough” for a negative (or, again, positive) reliability judgment, and in whose eyes? Having no objective basis, or measure, such a finding, (with its when’s, where’s, how’s, and why’s) widely varies among “us,” of course, sometimes to the point of reversal; and its making therefore falls in the end to each individual reader. Witness the ever-multiplying quarrels on scholarly record — about whether one “doubts” Henry James’s governess, Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, even Vladimir Nabokov’s pedophilic Humbert — not to mention ordinary life. Or so an exponent of readerly diversity, license, construction, would argue.


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The second part of Culler’s sentence, however, shifts poles, and with it reference points, from the reader all the way to the author, and so necessarily to a communication model governed by that highest authority. The narrators who unwittingly provide evidence against their own reliability are in fact manipulated by the author into betraying themselves, for a purpose, to us, like-minded readers. And this self-betrayal into unreliability must thus turn on the narrator’s failure to concur with the supreme authority behind the scenes. “ We find” unreliability, therefore, when we come “to doubt that the narrator shares the same norms as the author,” to whom (or to which) “we” ourselves are supposedly oriented and attuned. As not everybody is able or willing to assume this posture, moreover, “we” form a special, privileged circle within the work’s overall readership; or so we must believe by the logic of this orientation. Outsiders, inversely, must suffer preclusion from reliability judgment by reference to the author, meaning on the author’s terms. Incongruously strung together in one sentence, then, the readerly and the authorial centers of gravity, and in effect authority, prove not just divergent but mutually incompatible. The “or” whereby Culler joins them — with no attempt at resolution, any more than a warning of polarity — is conceptually as well as grammatically disjunctive: an either/or. Two pages later, however, a third definition crops up: Unreliable narration can result from limitations of point of view — when we gain a sense that the consciousness through which focalization occurs is unable or unwilling to understand the events as competent story-readers would. (ibid.: 90)

The reference point for the judgment of unreliability once more changes abruptly, this time to “competent story-readers,” and once more unresolvably as well, this time vis-a`-vis a pair of earlier alternatives. In a way, it looks like a cross between them. The narrator’s unreliability again depends on “readers” — on a comparative reference to how they “understand the events” — only these “readers” no longer extend to “us” all comers, with all our differences. Instead, they narrow down to another privileged subset thereof: this time to the small, marked, exclusive circle of the “competent,” and the authorlessly competent at that. Again, the members of this narrow subset enjoy a distinctive reading competence, but presumably to a variable extent and effect: not with quite the same interpretive “result” among themselves, hence not vis-a`-vis the narrator to be judged, either, unlike the author’s arguably single, unique reference point. Further, as demonstrated by the history of interpretation in the competent (especially professional) circle, such marked, in-group readers or readings will not even always vary in when-where-how-why details alone: within the limits of a positive or a negative reliability judgment, according to whether the


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narrator’s sense of “the events” proves competent to match or contrastively incompetent. They may well split into positive and negative judges of reliability, as amply shown along and across that history; notoriously so in disputed cases like The Turn of the Screw. Also, those privileged “competent story-readers” nevertheless fall well short of the author’s omnicompetence: an absolute authority by definition, whose “values” the narrator must “share” on pain of betraying unreliability. As one of us has read somewhere, in another framework, competence does not require perfection; but normative (“implied”) authorship evidently does, always in context. And yet, furthermore, the author needn’t even constitute here the measure of (in)competence, readerly and accordingly narratorial as well. Instead, this measure is found as a rule in cultural, scholarly, institutional standards. These, besides, apply generally — to a broad range of aspirants — not, like the authorial measure, ad hoc and ad loc, relative to a single work at a time. So the respective omnicompetence, competence, and incompetence do not necessarily belong to the same hierarchy: they disallow fixed gradation or any other correlation or comparison. And the chasm, even between the third and the second approaches, for all their analogous-looking (because high, demanding, exclusive) reference points, further widens to suit. This third, last cited alternative, therefore, will not reduce or assimilate or adjoin or so much as translate to either its sheer readerly or its authorial predecessor, any more than either of these extremes will to each other, its antipole. Odder still, Culler never tries to decide — any more than to seek a reconciliation or even a common ground — among the lot. A threefold definitional inconsistency results, in short, and with all too many counterparts lurking elsewhere on this front, as will unhappily emerge throughout this overview. Finally, a problem as basic, common, and as a rule unperceived is the inapplicability that runs through the otherwise incompatible definitions here. Though not circular, like the variety exemplified above, they are all unoperational, the next worst vacuous thing. For example, how will any reader, one of “us” or “competent,” determine whether “the narrator shares the same values as the author”? Or “when” do “we gain a sense that the [focal] consciousness . . . is unable or unwilling to understand . . . ”? Regarding all three given definitions, then, where is the indispensable anchorage in the workings of the text and/or the mind, on pain of vacuous talk, left unmotivated, unfollowable, and untestable? Since this example multiply runs to this extreme of incoherence, concerning definition itself too, we will not dwell here on its comparatively less fundamental, though still important and equally typical, problems. Thus, in a compass so small as these two quoted sentences, observe:


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a wordless shift between different aspects of (un)reliability, hence objects of reliability judgment: the factual, representational, epistemic (“information about situations,” or “understand the events”) and the normative, axiological (“values”) kind, or in short, the narrated world as against the narrative’s worldview; a shift between a negative judgment of reliability (“termed unreliable”) and a mere suspicion of unreliability (“doubt . . . doubt”), between “X is and X might be unreliable.” In other words, this means an oscillation between a univocal and an equivocal image of the mediator and the reading of the mediated discourse; a sharp imbalance in coverage and emphasis: “unreliable narration” or “narrators” is focused, reliability neglected (and at most reserved by implication for “the author”); a jump from “narration” to “focalization”; and therefore, worse, also an ambiguity of “unreliable narration” in regard to the subject under judgment: is it the narrator (his “narration” explicitly termed “unreliable” here) or the focalizer (deemed “unable or unwilling to understand the events”)? another ambiguity, subtler but no less genuine, troubling, and we will find, perpetrated elsewhere: Is the “narration” called “unreliable” for its own sins of commission and omission, or because it involves us (in FID, because it even itself merges) with an “unable or unwilling” focalizer? (Compare how the latter is taken for the former in Hansen 2009 or Bushnell 2011.)

All these troubles that lurk in miniature below the examples cited thus far will reappear on more extensive scales of illustration and analysis. Besides the nuclear matter of definition, or along with it, we will review a set of large but more particular issues bearing on (un)reliable discourse, with their respective branches, treatments, and consequences. One of them concerns participants in narrative transmission (implied author, narrator, reflector, informant, experiencer) and how they interrelate. Another consists in the (e.g., factual, ideological, aesthetic) axes of (un)reliability, that is, the objects or targets of our reliability judgments. Still another involves the traditional package dealing of narrational features, so that (un)reliability supposedly correlates with (im)personality, or with (non)existence within the fictional world, or with epistemic (dis)privilege, that is, omniscience as against restrictedness. Here, as regarding the earlier (or further) issues, such package dealing turns out untenable in fact and reason, vis-a`-vis the many-to-many correspondence arising from the Proteus Principle. But this part of the overview, sections 2 – 4, will focus on a more general level of theorizing, analysis, or silent premises done or held by scholars in the field and, correspondingly, our metacriticism of them. By this we mean the existing approaches to (un)reliability and the regrettable tendency of practitioners to waver among them.


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According to Dan Shen (2013: §3), theorists of unreliability “fall essentially into two groups” or approaches: “rhetorical” and “constructivist/ cognitivist.” The first originated in Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), while the second, constructivist approach “has been pioneered by Yacobi (1981, 2001a, 2005a).” Paul McCormick (2011: 560 – 61) polarizes the same approaches, with the same originators, as “author-centric” vs. “reader-centric”; and so in effect do Phelan and Rabinowitz (2005: 550 – 51).3 The constructivist approach “has been pioneered by Yacobi (1981, 2001a, 2005a),” let us add, with a view to replacing the earlier, untenable conception: to a paradigm change, in short. Having been misunderstood by some, these relations need to be emphasized in advance. As we will demonstrate, the two orientations, beginning with the respective definitions of (un)reliability, are not “complementary” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005: 550 – 51; also Shang 2011: 135, 139), or given to “synthesis” (Nu¨nning 2005a, 2008) or linked by “a certain degree of overlap” (Shen 2013: §3), but mutually incompatible,4 and so demand a clear-cut choice.5 Unfortunately, the field exhibits a tendency to mix up these and other principled alternatives, instead. Let us now survey the two polar approaches in order. 2. (Un)Reliable Discourse off to a Stimulating Equivocal Start: Why Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction Falls Short and Where to Go from There

According to Wayne Booth’s (1961a: 158 – 59) famous definition, (un)reliability lies between two participants in the narrative act. One is the narrator, who must be reliable or unreliable; the other is the implied author, by reference to whose values the narrator counts as (un)reliable. What crucially affects the relation between the two is that they differ in their mode of existence and expression, as well as in the variability or constancy of their authority. As Phelan and Booth (2005b: 389) observe, “the implied author and the implied reader do not have a direct textual presence,” so “we can see more clearly how central the narrator of verbal narrative is: the entity who is the immediate source of the narrative text.”6 3. Compare Sternberg 2011: 36, 47 – 48. In another terminological variation, Ansgar Nu¨nning (2005b: 495 – 96) calls the former pole “rhetorical” but multiplies names for the latter, “readercentered and cognitive” as well as oriented to “interactivity.” A problematic yet typical overabundance, as will appear in sections 3 – 4 below. Compare also the variations, nominal and otherwise, in Shen and Xu 2007, McCormick 2009. 4. As Marcus (2012: 2), for a change, describes Yacobi’s proposal: “an alternative to Booth’s model.” 5. Unless “rhetoric(al)” is itself newly conceptualized, as will also appear below. 6. A fellow rhetorical theorist, Harry Shaw (2005: 307 – 9), would further “aggrandize the narrator” at the expense of other participants in “narrative communication,” specifically including the implied author.


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In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961a) and since, however, Booth all too often contradicts this emphatic antithesis in textual presence, centrality, and contact between the silent implied author and the ever-expressive narrator.7 Nor, moreover, does the narrator, including the narrator’s status as reliable or otherwise, lose centrality and distinctiveness in Booth (if not voice itself ) only in relation to the author. The loss goes from bad to worse vis-a`-vis some further major participants in the chain of narrative transmission. Those losses and our proposals for their repair will accordingly be our immediate concern, pursued throughout the first three parts of section 2. There we will uncover and detail these principled weaknesses, their prohibitive cost, their impact on the field ever since, but will also suggest how to make them good, apart and together, within a unified framework and with special regard to the theory of (un)reliable discourse. In what follows, then, subsections 2.1 and 2.2 reveal from different directions how Booth actually fudges and otherwise weakens the narrator’s defining features and role, to the limit of nonexistence. The narrator thereby gets conflated with two participants in narrative transmission that are essentially distinct from him, whether counter or even according to Booth’s own view. These two are, respectively, the implied author and the Jamesian reflector (along with some further audience-blind mediators, neglected by Booth). For now, it is enough to point out that the author and the reflector are both essentially silent, while the narrator conflated with them is vocal by definition. The resulting cumulative loss of distinctive features befalls all three participants, together and apart, always to the detriment of our reliability judgments. Moreover, all these losses have been accumulating since Booth, and often even independently of his own commissions and omissions. On the one hand, for example, the line separating author from narrator has continued to suffer blurring, or even deliberate erasure, in various ways and quarters. The mainstream of narrative theorists and critics still identify the (implied) author with the authorial (omniscient, “third-person,” “heterodiegetic”) narrator, as Booth himself traditionally did. Some object to the implied author (e.g., Juhl 1980; Stecker 1987; Nu¨nning 1997a; Walsh 1997, 2007; Herman and Vervaeck 2011; Herman 2013). And some deem certain texts or segments or media narratorless, or narratorless as well (e.g., Benveniste 1971; Hamburger 1973 [1957]; Cohn 1978: 217 – 65; Banfield 1982; Currie 1995a; Ko¨ppe and Kindt 2011; and Bordwell 2008: 121 – 33 on film). On the other hand, these forms of indiscriminateness have counterparts in the dealings with the oppo7. Even when directly quoting the speech or thought of characters (Sternberg 1981a, 1982a, 1982b).


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sition of the narrator to the reflector, a fortiori to other self-communing, audience-blind mediators, like the secretive diarist. That dividing line has continued to suffer, if not official erasure, as in Booth, then misdrawing, as with Genettian focalization, or sheer neglect (Sternberg 2005). In both regards — on which more later — whatever the variations in (mis)treatment compared with Booth, the consequences for (un)reliability keep accumulating. In 2.3, on top of it, yet another conflation of the narrator ensues, this time between his own selves: as narrating-I in the discourse — facing some narratee, open to reliability judgments — and as experiencing-I in the world, a character among others. Relative to 2.1 – 2.2, this error has since been the most insidious and persistent. Oddly so, because its consequences for the narrator’s (un)reliability should be the most visible, with deterrence to suit. Section 2.4 then returns to Booth’s (ibid.: 158 – 59) well-known definition of (un)reliability and finds it not just, predictably, marred by these cumulative blurs among the four narrative agents: author, narrator, reflector, experiencing self. That definition also turns out unoperational — not given to mapping on narrative discourse — and so redoubles the pressure for a fresh start. 2.1. Stammering between Narrator and Implied Author, or, Why the Author Needs to Keep Silent

The problems begin with “the implied author.” Significantly, Booth coined this term rather than invented the concept,8 not even its differential force visa`-vis the narrator and the characters. For example, he himself (ibid.: 71) harks back to Edward Dowden’s (1877) notion of the writer’s “second self,” originating in his classic essay on George Eliot, and to its revival in Kathleen Tillotson’s The Tale and the Teller (1959). According to Dowden, what most persists in the mind after reading George Eliot’s novels “is the second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them. . . . Behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable historical self, secure from impertinent observation and criticism” (quoted in ibid.: 22). The author/narrator distinction had also emerged in the 1950s, predictably enough, to counter the intentional fallacy (e.g., Gibson 1950; Beardsley 1958: 238 – 40).9 Booth might also cite some of the great modern novelists-theorists. Thus Henry James’s consistent use of “author” as distinct from the often unreliable “narrator” or “reflector.” Or his reference to the speaking-I as “the impersonal author’s concrete deputy or delegate, a convenient substitute or apologist for the creative power otherwise so veiled and disembodied” ( James 1962 8. As duly acknowledged in Booth 1998: 393; cf. Kindt and Mu¨ller 2006: 51. 9. Decades earlier, it had arisen in Russian Formalism. On the notion of author there, including an equivalent of “career author,” see Steiner 1984: 128 – 35, Schmid 2014: §3.1.


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[1934]: 327). Likewise with Marcel Proust’s (1997: 99 – 100) criticism of the biographical approach to an author: it “ignores” the evident fact that a work is “the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there.” Yet only in the guise of Booth’s (1961a, 1961b) “implied author,” however, has this idea of a discriminate authorial self gained such wide currency, or provoked such a long and sharp debate, unsettled yet. It has since been “attacked, defended, deconstructed, resurrected, refined, and redefined” in assorted ways (Lanser 2001: 153).10 So, in notoriety among theorists, the coinage “implied author” equals the ubiquitous “unreliable narrator”; it also involves a fast, if tense, linkage between them, as a sort of mirror images. But the trouble with it runs deeper than the usual quarrels, and accordingly precedes or cuts across them. By this we mean that Booth all too often links “the implied author” much too fast to the authorized or authorized-looking “narrator” — while still generally opposing the unreliable kind — so that the two become equivalent and interchangeable. This alleged equivalence gives rise, first of all, to a basic conceptual difficulty, one that should spring to the eye, with less visible operational implications to match. A narrator is definitionally a speaker, or writer, but a speaking, in effect narrating implied author is a contradiction in terms; worse, their interchange compounds the fallacy, and to exclusionary effect. One of these two participants inevitably becomes redundant, intolerably so, and must leave the narrational scene: you can’t have two speakers at the same time.11 2.1.1. The Best Version, Considering

Before going into the problem, though, it would help to present (or, hopefully, recall) the argument’s other, sounder, better-known idea of the author/narrator relation, with which the narrating author clashes and breaks. The comparison will also throw into sharper relief the extent and the price of Booth’s inconsistency at this key juncture. Along with the dissociation of the historical, flesh-and-blood from the implied author, Booth (1961a, 1961b) insists part of the time on another

10. The controversy has itself been debatably surveyed in Kindt and Mu¨ller 2006, with a useful bibliography. 11. The narrator is a distinctive kind of speaker, counter to the mistaken idea that “a narrator can only be defined circularly as a narrative ‘voice’ or ‘speaker’ of the text” (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 90). Rather, the narrator is the speaker, or inscriber, of a narrative, always subject to a definition of narrative in its narrativity: as an event series, or an event chain, or a beginningmiddle-end sequence, or a certain dynamics of interest, and so forth (Sternberg 2010). A narrator at any lower level than the primary or overall narration accordingly becomes a speaker within a narrative thus defined.


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one that was no more self-evident in the early 1960s (or since, for that matter). That one consisted in the need to distinguish the implied author from the narrator, regardless of whether and how they may appear alike, coextensive, interchangeable. Thus the harping on their distinctness in the following passage, to which we’ll refer henceforth as the best quote or version: Even the novel in which no narrator is dramatised creates an implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes, whether as stage-manager, as puppeteer, or as an indifferent God, silently paring his fingernails. This implied author is always distinct from the “real man” . . . [and ] amounts to a kind of “second self ” . . . wiser, more sensitive, more perceptive than any real man could be. . . . Even the most naı¨ve reader must recognise that something mediating and transforming has come into a story from the moment that the author explicitly places a narrator into the tale, even if he is given no personal characteristics whatever. One of the most frequent reading faults comes from a naı¨ve identification of such narrators with the authors who create them. But in fact there is always a distinction, even though the author himself may not have been aware of it as he wrote. . . . Even when the “I” or “he” thus created is ostensibly the author himself — Fielding, Jane Austen, Dickens, or Meredith — we can always distinguish between the narrator and the created author who presents him. But though the distinction is always present, it is usually important to criticism only when the narrator is explicitly dramatised. (Booth 1961b: 64 – 66)

Ge´rard Genette (1988 [1983]: 139) is accordingly wrong in principle to restrict Booth to a contrast between two authorial “agents,” exclusive of a distinct narrator as a third participant: “For Booth, that notion of the implied author — constructed in opposition to the real author — is broadly identified with the notion of narrator.” The passage just quoted throws this reductive misreading out of court.12 Observe especially Booth’s repeated insistence here on the separation of the (implied) author from the narrator, no matter how unspecified or identical they look. The divide holds (1) “even” where “no narrator is dramatised,” or (2) “even if he is given no personal characteristics whatever,” or (3) even when this narrating voice “is ostensibly the author himself — Fielding, Jane Austen,” and so forth. Or, for good measure, by reference to the genesis prior to the narrative, the distinction holds (4) “even though the [empirical] author himself may not have been aware of it as he wrote.” 12. So does an internal absurdity in Genette. The implied author cannot possibly both lack “a voice,” unlike “the case of the narrator,” and equal “the notion of narrator” (Genette 1988 [1983]: 138, 139). Moreover, even if the implied author could somehow both lack “a voice” and dispense with a narrator, then nobody would remain to tell the narrative.


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In configurations (1) – (4), then, the narrator’s difference from the author may come down to “the zero-sign” of potentiality unrealized yet nonetheless significant in its absence, as a might-have-been (Sternberg 1983a: 186, 2012: 474). Dorrit Cohn (1990: 794; 1999: 125 – 26) misunderstands the term “zerosign” to the point of reversal: as if it were meant “to collapse,” rather than preserve, “the distance separating” narrator from author in “third-person” fiction. Nor does this distance come down to the zero-sign in all such fiction, which may even run to the other limit, namely, the maximum distance (or mirror image) of unreliable telling.13 Even while still minimal, though, the narrator/author difference can go beyond token realization, let alone the zero-degree of sheer potentiality. And terminology apart, Booth himself might well agree — in his differential vein at least — as the following example suggests. In a later essay, Booth (2005: 79 – 80) spells out a fifth noteworthy “even . . . ” point: that this distance kept from (or by) the implied author obtains and matters even in the case of reliable narration, as exemplified by Robert Frost’s “A Time to Talk.” There, the “narrator” or “speaker” is a man whom I cannot resist admiring and do not want to resist: a dutiful, hardworking farmer who, though facing the pressing task of hoeing the hills, cares so much about friendship that he’ll drop his important work and chat. . . . But who, behind that narrator, is the IA [implied author] creating him? Well, in one sense they are identical; the IA obviously intends no ironies against the speaker. But he is not only a friendly farmer; though sharing the virtues of the speaker, he is a much more complex man devoted to poetic form, working hard — probably for hours or days — to achieve effective rhymes . . . meter and line length. . . . [I]t’s wonderful to meet a man who, though he rightly loves farming, considers friendly talk even more important, and yet considers most important of all the writing of a beautiful poem. . . . He is a weirdly richer character than the reliable narrator, though not in shocking contrast. (Ibid.)

The author/narrator distinction needn’t sharpen into a contrast, shocking or otherwise. Yet the distinction does actually sharpen here into a marked one, at least in the “complexity” or “richness” of the respective participants. And it could deepen or thicken still further, into one in reliability proper, along the lines we just suggested. Blind to “poetic form,” the speaker would count as 13. More on the latter option below. For now, see the argument against the “package dealing” of the narrator’s features in Sternberg 1978: 255ff.; 1985: 58 – 128; 2007: 687ff., 2009: 480ff.; Yacobi 1981: 199ff.; 2001a, for example. Such traditional package dealing amounts to the freezing and perpetuating of the above zero-sign in “third-person fiction,” thus disabling unreliable narration a priori there.


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unreliable on the aesthetic axis, though still fully reliable — “identical” to the author — by the moral standard, arguably higher in context.14 The dividing line between author and narrator is also sharper than described in the qualifying statement with which the above “best” quotation from Booth (1961b: 64 – 66) concludes: “But though the distinction is always present, it is usually important to criticism only when the narrator is explicitly dramatised.” This makes a weak, even anticlimactic rider to a strong statement. Worse, this contradicts all that has gone before. For “explicitly” perforce stipulates all of a sudden that some voice other and higher than the narrator puts into words (makes explicit) the narrator’s presence, features, operations, and so distinguishes him from the implied author in a form “important to criticism.” A set of puzzles accordingly arises from this rider. First of all, why the reinforced proviso “explicitly dramatised”? Doesn’t the plain (and in Booth as elsewhere, usual) “dramatised” suffice to distinguish the narrator from the presumably undramatized author? A diametric contrast is surely enough for the purpose. Further, even if not a necessary requirement for distinctiveness, pace Booth, does this overrestrictive phrase make sense? That is, we do not know what the proviso “explicitly dramatised” means in theory, far less in operational terms, and least of all, again, relative to the unintensified “dramatised” that appears throughout the passage. Yet, whatever it means — some kind of verbal portraiture — to whom does it apply and by whom is the explicit dramatization performed? Who could perform it on, say, Fielding’s narrator — often called “dramatised” here (e.g., Booth 1961a: 215) — and all his authorial and overall equivalents? For that matter, who could explicitly dramatize even an overall character narrator as such, whether Jane Eyre or Dostoevsky’s Raw Youth or Ford Madox Ford’s Dowell? No one, except possibly a higher-level narrator or narrator-editor, given the impossibility of a speaking implied author. Or the other way round: lower-level narrators — from Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert to the standard dialogist — visibly receive such explicit mention or treatment from the superordinate narrative voice (e.g., Dr. John Ray Jr.) that quotes and at will introduces them in the given larger discourse frame. So overall character narrators, such as Jane or Dowell, are in principle open to the same treatment, which would not only demote them, to secondary, quoted narrating voices, but also distinguish them from the one that has taken their place. (Imagine Jane Eyre beginning with an overt global frame of quotation, like “So my mother wrote:” Compare the opening of Faulkner’s The Reivers, “Grandfather said:”) Yet this hypothetical superior to Jane or 14. Compare Booth 1961a: 155 – 59.


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Dowell would remain another narrator — who else could make explicit statements? — and so beside the point: only the difference from the implied author matters here. Regarding this author, therefore, the proviso “explicitly dramatised” incurs a vacuous overemphasis15 and amounts to “dramatised” tout court. But even this comedown doesn’t yet resolve the problem with Booth’s qualification. For what would the plain “dramatised” signify and involve here? How would it manifest itself? One needs to ask, since Booth (1961a: 151 – 53) never explains or stipulates its meaning, not even in the section “ Dramatized and Undramatized Narrators.” Another key term left undefined, or not so much as inferable with confidence. In what, then, would “dramatising” consist? Surely not in the narrator being assimilated to or staged within the narrated action: the “dramatised” Fielding, for example, cannot possibly be, since he exists outside the arena of the agents. (In short, the usage here cannot possibly follow the Jamesian refrain “Dramatise, dramatise it.”) “ Dramatised” must, then, signify “characterized” or “personalized.” But if so, how can any narrator remain uncharacterized, given that every word, device, choice found (or perceptibly missing) in the narration cannot but characterize its source? More generally yet, if representation entails evaluation, then we evaluate the narrative representer throughout, with the judgments (from differential judgments to reliability judgments proper) cumulatively making up a portrait, favorable or otherwise, thicker or thinner. In this sense, all narrators are “dramatised,” hence essentially distinct to all intents and purposes. From yet another side, what does the opposition between “always present” and “important to criticism” mean? Why so insist throughout the “best” passage on the author/narrator distinction — to the emphatic removal of any string attached, beginning with the feature “dramatised” — if it is merely “always present,” and unimportantly so in the absence of a “dramatised” narrator? Further, can this omnipresent distinction assume critical importance in some instances and remain unimportant (nonfunctional, useless, irrelevant) in others? The idea of the zero-sign, whereby the unrealized itself 15. Likewise with many other “explicitly’s” in the book, which a good editor would delete. These are all misleading even when proving redundant at second glance (e.g., “the author intrudes explicitly” or “explicitly labeled as narrators” [Booth 1961a: 147, 152]). But some give rise to serious trouble, including unresolvable ambiguity at a key juncture. Consider this variant definition of “unreliable narrators”: the “values” or “facts” in their narrative “explicitly depart from those of the implied author as teller” (Booth 1983 [1961]: 431). Explicitly depart? And what happens to the reliability judgment if, or where, they depart otherwise? Nothing much, probably, but not certainly — if only because of the respect due to a definition by an established theorist.


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(e.g., what is left undramatized in some sense) performs a differential role vis-a`-vis the realized alternative, suggests why it can’t. Even the occurrence of the zero-point, where author and narrator diverge notionally alone — their disparity left unrealized — then counts as a strategic choice and assumes significance against the background of the realization that might have been; and vice versa. In other words, keeping the narrator distinct from the author matters in criticism regardless. Across Booth’s “dramatised/undramatised” antithesis, this author/narrator distinction assumes even greater importance, because its role, or its force, outreaches differentiality pure and simple. Even at what Booth would consider the undramatized extreme, the distinction realizes itself in several regards. One of them is ubiquitous along the narrative process; the rest, indicated by Booth himself, are more substantive but less widespread and, though well meant, not always successfully argued. For one thing, even when the narrator’s position would appear to coincide fully with the author’s, “the zero-sign” of unrealized difference between them remains “conjectural.” At this harmonious extreme itself, to say that a work “immediately reflects the objective world as posited by the author, is not to state a fact but to make an inference.” Nor is it “until the reader has reached the last word,” with the difference still unrealized on the way, that the zero-sign inference of narrator/author harmony establishes itself, complete reliability included. And “only on contextual, probabilistic grounds,” even then (Sternberg 1983a: 186, 2012: 474). So, at the pole of least (“zero”) perspectival disparity, we still have to do with a construct finalized ad hoc in retrospect alone, and not before the end, if ever. The very name it bears — if surviving to the end as “zero” — is a matter of hindsight wisdom. Throughout the reading process, instead, the so-called zero-sign figures as a contingency, at best a likely hypothesis, yet always short of certainty, on pain of unpleasant surprises. In Nabokov’s Pnin, for example, the initial authorized-looking narration turns out to derive from a character whom the endearing Pnin has long abhorred: unless you suspend the final reliability judgment of the narrator — and otherwise keep the zero-sign’s contingency in mind — you will fall prey to the misleading first impression. In the process, therefore, every narrator/author relation, at every point of contact and comparison, equivocally hovers, at times even crucially shifts, between realized and unrealized distance of some sort: in particular, between unreliable telling activated and avoided. All along, it keeps alive in the mind of the implied reader (if only at the back of the mind) as a possible latent ambiguity to be resolved as best we can on the way to the end. Here, in short, this relation corresponds to everything else in narrative, as a genre incom-


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parably rich on all levels in dynamics of (dis)ambiguation, in movements from gapping to gap-filling, temporary or permanent. (See also Sternberg 1978: esp. 245ff, 1992: e.g., 529 – 31, 2001b, 2009: esp. 491 – 92, 2010, and section 3 below on the dynamics of [un]reliability.) For another thing, Booth himself tries here and there to draw substantive distinctions between the two communicators within the domain of reliability. That is, these differences affect even the authority of a narrator who overlaps with the author in most aspects or features, including the rest of those associated with authority. Thus, reconsider the aesthetic skill and awareness denied by Booth to the otherwise reliable farmer who narrates Robert Frost’s “A Time to Talk.” Elsewhere, he also makes a bid for epistemic distinctiveness vis-a`-vis the author. This bid is far less successful — predictably enough, since Booth neither values nor commands the operations of and on knowledge in storytelling (e.g., Sternberg 2007: 696 – 97, 710 – 11) — yet remains notable for the effort. Consider one such bid: “Most authors are distinct from even the most knowing narrator in that they presumably know how everything turns out in the end” (Booth 1961a: 156; echoed in Lanser 1981: 161; Olson 2003: 94; Culler 2004: 26, 33n7). This claim fails to apply not only to “the most knowing,” omniscient narrator, who obviously foreknows the end. It doesn’t even fit the standard limited narrator, who tells the entire tale in retrospect. But if Booth’s wrong claim were true, then the narrator blind-to-the-end would similarly count as unreliable to this extent — now on the axis of knowledge — rather than just different or distanced from the author. Such is actually the case with narrative mediators who don’t have the benefit of long retrospection, such as the diarist, the epistolarist, the sportscaster or other simultaneous narrators, and numberless local monologists and dialogists: their short perspective makes them distinctively vulnerable to this particular irony and reliability judgment. As revealing is a more general but ineffectual attempt to draw an epistemic line between the same highly privileged viewpoints: “very few omniscient narrators are allowed to know or show as much as their authors know” (Booth 1961a: 160). The awkward disjunction “know or show,” pitted against a sheer “know” at that, sufficiently invalidates the claim. Yet, again, Booth’s drive toward distinctiveness — at his best — manifests itself nevertheless. (More on such dividing lines, see Sternberg 1978: 258 – 305 and section 6 below.) Even without this sharper dividing line, however, Booth’s insistence on the apartness of the narrator from the author demonstrably runs, as we showed, to at least five configurations where they appear to merge. How much more so outside these five minimally differential cases or types of narrative, which begin at the zero-degree. Everywhere else, that is, one finds the apartness to


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be more actualized, more perceptible, and infinitely richer in manifestations and in implications for the entire discourse. Nowhere, however, does this difference make such a difference as in the concept and judgment of reliability, which stands or falls by definition on how the two participants relate to each other. In Booth’s (ibid.: 158 – 59) well-known phrasing, “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.” Indeed, many have since taken this relation of concord or discord, with its crucial determinative force, as the main argument for postulating the implied author as a distinct participant or communicator (e.g., RimmonKenan 1983: 91 and section 3.3.3 below). Needless to say, if so much depends on the relation between the two, all the way to the paramount factor of (un)reliability, then these two must not be conflated on any account. 2.1.2. Two-Mindedness The last thing one would expect, or can tolerate, is therefore the incongruity or two-mindedness of finding these two narrative participants (transmitters, communicators) so frequently and variously mixed up, interchanged, shifting or even sharing roles, elsewhere in The Rhetoric of Fiction and since. Moreover, these confusions show there in the treatment, not only of works and writers but also of concepts, arguments, and other matters of theory. All a far cry from the best version, such as it is. This conceptual incongruity already reveals itself on the surface of Booth’s text. It thus conspicuously shows in the open and free switch or extension of the power of narrative discoursing: from the narrator to the implied author, clean against the best quote’s insistent description of the latter’s role and mode of existence. There, the implied author “stands behind the scenes, whether as stage-manager or puppeteer, or as an indifferent God, paring his fingernails.” Obviously, nobody can both absent oneself, except by implication, and express oneself, both guide or manipulate us from behind the scenes and address us onstage, as a voice among others, only unquestionable. Recall the more rigorous terms used in our opening statement. “A narrator is definitionally a speaker, or writer, but a speaking, in effect narrating implied author is a contradiction in terms; worse, their interchange compounds the fallacy.” How this glaring inconsistency at the heart of such a classic and controversial work has escaped detection in the field since 1961, or at least exposure, comes therefore as another, equal surprise. This is how Seymour Chatman (1978: 148) presents Booth’s conception: “Unlike the narrator, the implied author can tell us nothing. He, or better, it, has no voice, no direct means of communicating. It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole.” Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 90 – 91) follows suit: “The implied author is — in


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opposition [to the narrator] and by definition — voiceless and silent,” hence “a construct.” Further, in line with this voicelessness, or to ensure it, the implied author “must be de-personified” and denied a place, let alone a role in the set-up of “narrative communication” (ibid.). Or Nilli Diengott (1993: 72): “Booth . . . does not confuse the implied author and the following entities: real author, narrator, and character.” Or regarding cinematic unreliability: “It cannot be the implied author who misreports because implied authors do not report at all. They are, by definition, behind the reports” (Anderson 2010: 87).16 It is as if such paraphrases were all referring to another book than The Rhetoric of Fiction. To compound the blindness, they may even themselves newly exhibit Booth’s inconsistency. Thus Chatman’s (1978: 148) categorical statement that “unlike the narrator, the implied author can tell us nothing,” having “no direct means of communicating,” gets inverted three pages later. There, Chatman’s model of narrative communication establishes the implied author as a fixture, or invariant, while reducing the narrator to an “optional” participant. This means, of course, that in the narrator’s absence, it is the implied author that perforce tells us everything, and in direct communication too. Paul Ricoeur (1988: 163, 170) says so explicitly: “There is always an implied author. The story is told by someone,” to whom the real author delegates the role of “the narrator immanent in the work — the narrative voice.” The collective blindness to the blurring of this divide grows odder still, considering that the inconsistency in question should leap to the eye on multiple grounds, even apart from its bareness, its centrality, and the ongoing debate on both concepts, especially their relation. From the very outset, Booth (1961a: 3) thus undermines the author/narrator polarity — or, in other words, conflates its extremes — by treating the author as an overt discourser, our own immediate communicational partner: One of the most obviously artificial devices of the storyteller is the trick of going beneath the surface of the action to obtain a reliable view of the character’s mind and heart. Whatever our ideas may be about the natural way to tell a story, artifice is unmistakably present whenever the author tells us what no one in the so-called real life could possibly know. . . . 16. For a rare exception, after thirty years, see Nelles 1993: 25 – 26, itself surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) ignored since on this crux. For example, Phelan (2005: 38 – 49, with a reference to Nelles 1993 on another point) claims to revise Booth’s concept of the implied author. In fact he doesn’t, if you compare the respective definitions (Eskin 2007: 801 – 2). But he might have done so in precisely this crucial regard: by highlighting Booth’s incongruous appeal to a talkative implied author, and so also helping to keep the narrator in the business and in the potential trouble that distinguish him or her from the reticent implied authority.


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“There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” With one stroke the unknown author has given us a kind of information never obtained about real people, even about our most intimate friends. Yet it is information that we must accept without question if we are to grasp the story that is to follow. (Our emphases)

If so, then the author speaks to us readers immediately as, or instead of, a privileged narrator: one “unknown,” “reliable,” and (or because) omniscient, hence wielding an authority beyond question. In short, the fictional “storyteller . . . tells us” in person whatever we need to know and understand. This usage of Booth (1961a), complete with the zigzag between author and narrator, storyteller and teller, recalls that of the preceding half century, which he has not outgrown. For example, rather than following Henry James’s newly considered and discriminate terminology, he echoes the older indiscriminate language of the Jamesians, notably including Percy Lubbock (1966 [1921]), the best of them. Even closer to home, his unstable discourse recalls the two pioneering essays that anticipated much of his book: W. J. Harvey’s “George Eliot and the Omniscient Author Convention” (1958) and Kathleen Tillotson’s The Tale and the Teller (1959). All three contemporaries working for a new departure still have one foot in the past, with an instability, nominal and notional, to match. The indiscriminateness of the outset, just exemplified, proceeds to run through the book, with constant free alternation between the author and the supposedly authorized narrator as voices, discoursers, our communicational partners. Indeed, such is the extent and the frequency of Booth’s twomindedness that one sometimes wonders which of the two, the distinction or the conflation between these participants, is the intended, official theory and which the divergence from it. This wonder gains further point from the evidence that there is more to Booth’s author coming to speak in propria persona than lingering oldfashioned usage or careless thinking and writing. A major drive behind this unhappy role-assignment would appear to lie in the topos of works or authors as valuable friends. Booth (1961a, and more overtly in 1980, 1988) takes up this neglected metaphor with enthusiasm. Among the nineteenth-century proponents, he thus approvingly cites William Ellery Channing: “In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages” (Booth 1980: 6). Channing’s harping on the direct communication of ideas and thoughts (e.g., “talk to us . . . give us . . . voices”) typically recalls and explains Booth’s. (So does Holden Caulfield’s wish to have a phone conversation with his favorite authors.)


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Now, these implied authorial friends (e.g., Fielding or George Eliot) must address us straight, since mediation (e.g., by a narrator) would complicate their teaching, distance the contact with them, and so put the whole precious experience at risk. The incompatibility of immediate discourse with the discourser’s implied existence is either forgotten or overridden in the visionary zeal of the argument. So a manifold two-mindedness betrays itself. Distinction or conflation? And if the latter, unwitting or goal-driven? Or maybe an unresolved tug-ofwar within one of these polarities or both of them? However that may be, there results a chronic inconsistency in Booth, with every fresh occurrence of the speaking implied author newly pointing the logical absurdity. In turn, this threatens the very concept of narrator and the very definition of (un) reliable narrator. 2.1.3. Confusing the Communicators: Forms, Penalties, Lessons The frequent, clear-cut, and variform recurrences of the problem in the sequel, moreover, eliminate any lingering doubt about it. At times, we even hear, “the second self is given an overt, speaking role in the story,” as when “Fielding comments” on the novelistic events, characters, or discourse (Booth 1961a: 71). A note ad loc further reveals that such statements are not only absurd and inconsistent but also garbled. There, against himself in effect, Booth quotes the definition of the “second self ” from the horse’s mouth, that of its coiner, Dowden: “ ‘the second self ’ ” of narratives “ ‘writes them and lives and speaks through them’” — not in them. Obviously, if the so-called implied author or second self performs “an overt, speaking role,” and “in the story” itself at that, as though belonging to the storyworld, he is anything but implied or authorial, except in incongruous name. The more incongruous, if possible, because the name “author” occasionally even changes reference, or equivocates, between the implied and the historical self.17 This further instability mars even what we call the best quote and, operationally as well as conceptually, the very definition of (un)reliability. How to judge the narrator (un)reliable by reference, let alone equivocal reference, to the historical author?18 Among the arguments made in the best quote for the distinctness of the narrator concept and viewpoint (“voice”) by appeal to the implied author, Booth interpolates a 17. This already manifests itself long prior to Booth (1984), which, under Bakhtin’s influence, comes to find the relation between the two authors essentially problematic. 18. We will now just add that the known attributes of the historical author are even less freely transferable to the narrator than to the implied author. For example, is there really a convention whereby narrators assume “the same sex as the author unless there are contrary indications” (Culler 1984: 4 on Lanser 1981: 167)? And besides sex, the doubt about the sameness of any other feature pales.


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point bearing on the historical counterpart during the work’s genesis: the distinction persists “even though the author himself may not have been aware of it as he wrote.” Similarly, Booth (1961a: 373) lumps together the implied with the historical author, when collocating a textual and a paratextual self-dissociation from the narrator. The one is voiced by William Gerhardi (“The ‘I’ of this novel is not me”) in the body of Futility (1922); the other by Nabokov (“There are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with [ Humbert Humbert]”) in the postscript to Lolita (1989 [1955]: 315), added after the novel’s original publication at that. As with the unstable authorial referents, so with the referring terms. Booth at times also shifts away even from the label “author” to some term (e.g., “poet” or “novelist”) that may denote the historical writer in person: the fleshand-blood author or the first self, as it were, (mis)cast in the narrator’s role. An example would be Homer’s Odyssey, where “the poet again does not hesitate either to speak in his own person or to give divine testimony” (Booth 1961a: 6). Likewise, the commentary in Austen’s Persuasion illustrates what “a skillful novelist can, by the use of her own direct voice, accomplish in a few pages” (ibid.: 252). Though far less common than the other (implied author/narrator) mixture, it adds its bit of trouble, from the sheer disambiguating of the terms’ reference to the sorting out of the participants, authorities, and (un)reliabilities involved. But even these do not yet reveal the author/narrator conflation at its most perceptible (though, as ever, oddly unperceived) and self-defeating. On a large scale, the book’s entire part 2, opening with a chapter on “The Uses of Reliable Commentary,” is titled “The Author’s Voice in Fiction” (ibid.: 167ff.). On the opposite scale, the alternation occurs in a compass so small as a formal “either/or” within a sentence. Thus, Booth points to a narrative mode “that allows for direct appearances by the author or his reliable spokesman” (ibid.: 8, 175). Such bizarre alternatives may also run to the limit of selfcontradiction: does “Fielding comment” and offer us “explicit evidence” in his own name, or is “our picture of him built . . . by the narrator’s explicit commentary” (ibid.: 71 – 73)? More often, one encounters such breaches of the narrator’s monopoly on overt communication with us as: “ What, after all, does an author do when he ‘intrudes’ to ‘tell’ us something about his story?” (ibid.: 8); or the loss of “illusion if the author is present, constantly reminding us of his unnatural wisdom” (ibid.: 45); or “ Who says so? Not Stephen [ Dedalus], but the omniscient, infallible author” (ibid.: 163). It is equally important to note, however, what our exposure of “the author’s voice in fiction” as inconsistent within Booth (1961a), and as preposterous given a distinct speaker, or teller, does not mean. Our criticism and counterproposals do not deny the implied author a “voice” in the larger,


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figurative sense: a message, for example, or a viewpoint, more generally. Far less do we thereby deprive this author of a communicative role as the reader’s frame-sharer and conversational partner by way of implication. Condemning the implied author to such absolute muteness, let alone exclusion — as some have proposed — diametrically opposes Booth’s authorial talker who addresses the reader from within the narrative. Yet this opposite extreme proves as untenable. For instance: If the implied author is only a construct, if its defining property (as opposed to the narrator) is that it “has no voice, no direct means of communicating,” then it seems a contradiction in terms to cast it in the role of the addresser in a communication situation. (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 91; see also Diengott 1993: 72; Nu¨nning 1997b: 100 – 103; Toolan 2001: 66; Kindt and Mu¨ller 2006: 156 – 58, 2011: 68 – 69; Lanser 2011: 153 – 54; Richardson 2011: 7; and regarding film, Anderson 2010: 87 – 88; contrast Abbott 2011: 469)

This “If . . . if . . . then . . . a contradiction in terms” bears the name of logic in vain. The logical trappings only bring out that the argument does not follow. Thus, how does being a “construct” preclude being an “addresser in a communication situation”? If it did, then how would the author possibly transmit to us the signals and validations of the narrator’s (un)reliability? (For their necessity, see Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 102 – 3.) Moreover, if it were impossible for a “construct” to be an “addresser in a communication,” then the narrator wouldn’t be such an addresser, either, since the narrator is likewise a construct. No text greets us with an authoritative overall portrait of the narrator; nor does any text expound the narrator’s intentions, commissions, omissions, all along. Instead, the so-called narratorial features, (un)reliability always included, are largely a matter of inference, and processual inference at that: work-length, gradual, distributed, uncertain, modifiable, even reversible throughout, and possibly kept ambiguous to the very end, as in James’s Turn of the Screw (Sternberg 1985: 222 – 27) or Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata (Yacobi 2005a). This makes a process of (re)construction par excellence, one comparable and indeed cross-referring all along to that of the author figure. By the same token, why would having “no voice, no direct means of communicating” make it impossible (“a contradiction in terms”) for the author to fulfill the role of addresser or communicator?19 Only on the premise, erroneous in both fact and reason, that communication must be voiced, direct, explicit, as if there were no communication outside such language, or outside language altogether. This error becomes particularly glaring within “a semiotic model of communication” (invoked by Rimmon-Kenan [1983: 89]). 19. Or to belong to “the narrative situation” (Genette 1988 [1983]: 137, 139ff.)?


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Even in verbal discourse, however, readers have always felt that Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare, or D. H. Lawrence, for example, “speaks to them” through the characters and the orchestration of the whole. This is exactly, you will recall, how Dowden’s “second self ” operates as well as “lives.” In endowing the implied author with an articulated, narrator-like voice, then, Booth stands at the pole opposed to the silencers and expellers, as well as the depersonalizers, of the narrative’s highest authority. Even so, who would expect to find that speaking implied author literally boasting additional features that are by nature distinctively reserved for the narrator vis-a`-vis the author? One such feature consists in being “dramatized,” on which “perhaps the most important differences in narrative effect depend” (Booth 1961a: 151). Above, we have already seen Booth’s poor handling of this feature: he never defines it; he leaves it ambiguous between “emplotted” or “assimilated to the storyworld” (as in James) and “characterized” or “personalized” (the more current term now); nor does he appreciate how variously yet inevitably it depicts and distinguishes the members of any group to which it applies. Nevertheless, Booth does recognize in principle that, among communicators, “dramatization” can apply to narrators alone, exclusive of implied authors. How could it be otherwise, given the latter’s disembodied existence, as a “core of norms and choices” (ibid.: 151 – 53, 74)? Against this definitional, reasonable, indeed mandatory premise and practice, complete with distinctive power, however, Booth sometimes opts for dramatizing the undramatizable communicator, and under this very label, too. In Emma, for example, we have “a beautiful case of the dramatized author as friend and guide. ‘Jane Austen,’ like ‘Henry Fielding’ is a paragon of wit, wisdom, and virtue” (ibid.: 264). An exemplary “case,” mind you, not an exception. And the lure of the friendship metaphor helps to explain the obliviousness to the breach of narrative logic involved. The price, moreover, outreaches the fresh offense against a reasoned, consistent, and discriminate theorizing of the narrative communicators, with all its implications. As we’ll argue below, dramatizing the implied authors (and not every author is so “beautiful” as Jane Austen) makes them vulnerable to reliability judgment. It brings them down to earth, as it were. If anything, theorists and critics are all too inclined to associate an embodied (dramatized, personal, humanized, individuated) with an unreliable viewpoint, as vice versa.20 Another distinctive narratorial feature, even higher in importance, because still more constitutive, lies in mediacy. By self-evident definition, the narrator is a mediator, while the implied author (his views, values, 20. In turn, what follows on this matter in this subsection will be taken up in section 6 below.


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goals, etc.) is mediated (“implied”) through the narrator and the further links (reflectors, narratees, secondary narrators) in the communication chain that this primary narrator (reliable or otherwise) launches, maintains, and at will extends by quoting lower-level voices and views (they, too, reliable or otherwise). At the same time, the narrator mediates (again, reliably or otherwise) the fictional world for the information of the audiences concerned, including us readers who have no direct access to it. Booth, though, occasionally projects onto the author this constitutive narratorial feature in turn. Thus, “realistic narration” seeks to create “the illusion that the events are taking place unmediated by the author” (ibid.: 57). Which means, of course, that behind and beyond this illusive fac ade, the implied author does mediate the events. What room and role this leaves for the narrator, if any, remains unclear. Nor is it clear whether the given account, and with it the supposedly mediating author, can be unreliable, as can every other mediator. And whatever the answer, would the mediating author be judged (un)reliable by (circular) reference to his own norms? But the shift in the last quote between “narration” and “author” further increases one’s wonder. Does the conflation run to the exchange of the very names? Yes, we do find the author literally termed “narrator” sometimes. In “ ‘The Killers,’ for example, there is no narrator other than the implicit second self that Hemingway creates” (ibid.: 151): an implicit authorial self as exclusive vocal narrator. Or “the great narrators” have always contrived to make their “summary interesting, as Fielding does” (ibid.: 170). Worse, we also find the implied author described as co-narrator, one operating under the shared name alongside another “narrator” whom he at the same time, in his authorial capacity, invents and manipulates from behind the scenes. Here is a theoretical formulation, already cited in another context, which both asserts and illustrates precisely this. With “unreliable narrators,” the “values” or the “facts” in the narrative “depart from those of the implied author as teller” (Booth 1983 [1961]: 431): two global communicators, one unreliable, the other reliable, performing the same narrative role at once. The mind boggles at this impossibility. Yet Marcel Ayme´’s La jument verte (The Green Mare), for instance, supposedly deploys “two narrators, the unspecified author, suave, ironic, but reliable in his basic opinions, the other a painted portrait of a green mare, a kind of lustful goddess of love” (1961a: 180). Moreover, the former narrator, so-called, allegedly recounts and comments throughout: he “tells us [things] again and again” in his voice as reliable author, Booth (ibid.) insists. On the other hand, though Booth never points it out, the second “narrator,” the mare, gets framed within the discourse of the first, expresses herself only from time to time, and in silent thought rather than voiced speech: a monologist, not even a communicative, narrating, “dramatic”


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one — Browning fashion — hence a reflector actually. So neither of the socalled narrators is one, in fact. The disappearance of any narrator proper, let alone any continuous one, from the scene of narration here maximizes the alleged narrating role of the implied author. Yet he nevertheless doubles, besides, as “the image of the ‘author’ who has his existence only in the book” (ibid.: 181), unlike his historical creator and counterpart, Marcel Ayme´. So there results fiction’s busiest participant, engaged concurrently and exclusively in all the work-length narrative jobs, to the point of inconceivable monopoly, at least outside factual storytelling. In the football register, it would be easier to imagine a player who kicks a ball from the corner of the pitch and rushes with lightning speed to head the ball into the goal. Inversely, we find, the hierarchy of roles and powers may reverse itself to the narrator’s advantage. In Lolita, for example, Humbert enjoys authorlike “full and unlimited control” — even, beyond the grave, over Dr. John Ray’s framing “Foreword” — so no wonder “readers have overlooked Nabokov’s ironies” (ibid.: 390). The role-and-power reversal between the speaking and the implying discoursers may go still further. “It is from the narrator’s norms that Tom [ Jones] departs when he gets himself into trouble,” but “the author is always there on his platform to remind us, through his wisdom and benevolence, . . . of what human life ought to be and might be” (ibid.: 217). Given even the plain meanings of the terms — as well as the respective definitions and the insistent divide in the best quote above — you would rather expect the implied author’s norms to be violated and the narrator to preach their crucial bearing on a good life. Indeed, a few lines down, this reversal of roles reverses back to normal for a short time, if only concerning the speaking part. Here “the narrator” regains his voice in turn, becoming “a rich and provocative chorus,” with all the “wisdom and learning and benevolence” that have just been attributed to the author (ibid.). Soon there follows yet another variant, however, one that preserves the narrator’s speaking role, but at the expense of the overall narrative structure and priorities. “It is not Fielding we care about, but the narrator created to speak in his name” (ibid.): in the name of the historical Fielding, that is, and so presumably “created” by him as well. For the supposedly in-between implied author — the “Fielding” we do care about, according to Booth elsewhere (ibid.: 215 – 18) — is kept out of sight here. In the absence of the implied author, moreover, even his distinctive epithet may transfer to the speaker, along with the other authorial attributes and privileges. Thus the reference to “the implicit character of the narrator” (ibid.: 219; cf. Genette 1988 [1983]: 139).


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2.1.4. The Implied Author Vulnerable to Reliability Judgments?

Even so, finally, one would expect that such mixtures, waverings, interchanges between features, powers, rankings, operations, even names — with their cumulative damaging effects — must end when it comes to the author’s definitional as against the narrator’s variable reliability. Booth’s inconsistency knows no limit, however, and this foundational premise collapses in turn at his hands. If you find it hard to believe even by now — and no wonder — look at this sequence of claims, for example. It goes from the sheer impossibility of the author’s character-like existence to the self-made chaotic incoherence of the author’s dramatized unreliability. The author thus becomes vulnerable to a whole range of exposures or self-exposures. In Tom Jones, we hear, “Fielding dramatises himself and his telling” (Booth 1961b: 76), as though dramatization applied to the implied author at all. Still, however bizarre, the reference here is to Fielding’s implied self, not to his narrator and his telling. But the immediate sequel must surely refer to the narrator: “even though he is essentially reliable,” we need to ascertain it afresh at every point by “comparing word to word and word to deed.” Who else than the narrator can this ensuing “he” be? After all, the author is “reliable” by definition and the measure of all other, essentially questionable voices or views in discourse, beginning with the narrator. Or so you would think. Booth (ibid.: 77), instead, goes on to discuss in explicit terms the possibility (impossibility, rather) of “the author” operating without “the traditional omniscience,” and so, no longer “undramatised,” becoming vulnerable in effect to reliability judgments. In The Awkward Age, for example, “James” does not see through “surfaces” but only conjectures about their “meaning”: “The author is dramatised . . . as partially ignorant of what is happening” — hence inevitably fallible. (Compare Booth 1961a: 161 – 62 on the “occasional guesses” made by “Fielding” in Joseph Andrews.) So the implied author may turn unreliable not only in the eyes of readers who object to his norms, judging them and their champion from without;21 the same judgment may come from the implied reader, acting on internal, authorial evidence, such as the failures of knowledge attributed to “James.” The implied author as selfbetrayer or self-compromiser, so to speak. This undercuts the very idea of the author as the source, reference point, manipulator of (un)reliability — part of his general omnicompetence at that — and with it Booth’s entire theory.22 21. E.g., Suleiman 1976, Sparshott 1986, Edmiston 1987, Le Guin 1997, Otway 2015: 20 – 21; compare Sternberg 1984: 812 – 16 on how the author discredits himself by cheating in James’s Tragic Muse. 22. Recall his definition of (un)reliability by appeal to the narrator’s being in or out of accord with the implied author as supreme authority.


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2.2. “Person” Overworked or Underworked? The Line between Mediators Erased and Redrawn 2.2.1. Narrator, Reflector, Informant On top of blurring the line that sepa-

rates narrator from implied author, Booth (1961a, 1961b) erases that between the narrator and the nonnarrating, especially focal subject as mediators of authorial communication.23 Booth (1961a: 150) notoriously attacks the distinction of “person” as “the most overworked” in narrative study and overdue for a long rest. To take the simplest example, this reductive move would equate under “narration,” instead of contrasting as “narration” vs. “reflection,” the statements “I felt happy” and “She felt happy,” provided that both attribute the experience of happiness to the same female experiencer in the same form of summary insideview. Self-report interchanges, as a narrative act, with outside report about the self. Or so Booth in effect preaches. In effect, since Booth lacks the metalanguage whereby to describe the alleged equivalence with such precision, as part of his general unfamiliarity with the theory of reported (vocal or mental) discourse. In what follows, this will increasingly prove a major and typical shortfall. Small wonder, considering the strong association of both narrating and nonnarrating discourse with quoting — inevitably so in fiction — and the prevalent obliviousness to it. No less significantly, as will also emerge, the polarity that Booth declares unhelpful, hence best eliminated, assumes multiple forms, linguistic and conceptual, starting with the respective labels. In traditional polar terms, which Booth often adopts, if only to equate them, he would thereby erase the difference between “first-” and “third-person” narrator or, interchangeably for him, as for others, including his opponents, between “narrator” and “reflector.” (More generally, the difference erased is between “narrator” and what we will call “informant,” after Sternberg 2005 on “[un]self-consciousness.”) Further, the erasure would abolish the very disparity in the verbal reference to these mediators, so as to complete the assimilation of (mainly) the reflecting to the narrating person and participant role.24 23. Or, rather, mediators of authorial communication according to the “best quote”: where Booth keeps it silent (“implied”), in other words, because where turned vocal, it necessarily dispenses with mediation. This proviso is in force throughout section 2; thereafter, authorial silence goes without saying. 24. For some earlier criticism, especially opposed to Booth’s dismissal of the variations in “person,” see, for example, Goldknopf 1969: 15ff.; Cohn 1966: 100 – 102, 1981: 163ff.; Stanzel 1978: 154 – 57, 1984: 82ff., 1990: 812; Fludernik 1996: 166ff. But these are in turn open to criticism for their insufficient attention to the difference between the grammatical person (e.g., first, second, third) on the surface and the discoursive participant role (e.g., narrator, reflector) it manifests, our focal concern in what ensues. On this difference in the framework of deixis, see Sternberg 1983d. On the other hand, the designation of the reflector as narrator, or vice versa — sometimes including the overt erasure of the dividing line — has continued to manifest itself over the


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The so-called third-person narrators thus come to include Jane Austen’s Emma, James’s Maisie, Fleda Vetch, Lambert Strether, and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, each of them responsible for a “masterpiece” in narrative art (e.g., Booth 1961a: 201). And their alleged equivalence (hence assimilability) to narrators proper consists, inter alia, in their sharing of the variable or spectrum that is our primary concern: both kinds of mediator equally range from the positive to the negative limit of reliability. As “evidence” that the disparity between these two mediators is “less important than has often been claimed,” Booth adduces “the fact” that such key variables as “dramatized” vs. “undramatized” (or “scene” vs. “summary”) also co-occur across the traditional dividing line: they supposedly “apply to both first- and third-person narration alike” (ibid.: 151). With the distinction erased, a list of four “great narrators” singles out “Cid Hamete Benengeli, Tristram Shandy, the ‘I’ of Middlemarch, and Strether, through whose vision [‘narration,’ as it were] most of The Ambassadors comes to us” (ibid.: 149 – 50). However, does Strether — or would Emma, Fleda, Gregor — actually belong here, among narrators? They are all, instead, focal thinking (experiencing, observing) and, unawares, mediating subjects who, as such, do not at all communicate, let alone narrate anything to anyone — either to their fellow characters within the imagined world or to exterior readers. (As such, because these subjects evidently do narrate and otherwise communicate when switching roles in the storyworld from private experiencers to public expressors:25 to participants in fictional dialogue scenes, to tellers-within-a-tale, or to overt discoursers at large.) The list of four “great narrators,” therefore, already recoils on the erasure of the distinction. It enables us to anticipate in brief the main and most relevant penalty incurred, namely, that lumping the four together erases a significant difference in (un)reliability as well. By this difference we do not mean that, as some have oddly claimed, the variable feature of (un)reliability — including the very name — applies only to one of the mediator types as opposed to the other. For example, the three narrators proper on decades since Booth 1961a. These recurrences extend from, say, Hardy 1968: 10 or Ross 1976: 1232, who persist in calling Strether a “narrator,” through Genette 1980 et al., who place the homodiegetic narrator among focalizers/focalizations, to Heyd 2006: 270 or Hansen 2009. Phelan 2014: 52 – 54 goes so far as to refer even to each of the three interior monologists of The Sound and the Fury (Benjy and Quentin, on top of Jason) as “character narrator.” Among these, the Genettian conflation is the most elusive and prevalent, so it will receive further mention in the sequel. 25. That is, they turn from “reflectors” (Henry James) or “filters” (Chatman 1986, 1990) or “focalizers” (Bal 1985, Prince 2001) to “narrators,” in pairings and parlances that we will discuss below, starting with this section.


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the list would accordingly be open as such to reliability judgments, but not Strether as reflector, in whose case such judgment never arises, or not under this name (e.g., Stanzel 1984: 150 – 52; Chatman 1990: 149 – 54; Fludernik 2005: 28).26 If anything, we would argue, the shoe is on the other foot. Compared with the list’s three genuine narrators, a Strether isn’t even an equally vulnerable, much less invulnerable subject: he is, instead, more exposed to reliability judgments and, above all, more liable to betray unreliability. Exactly because, among the listed quartet, he alone does not narrate his story and storyworld to anyone, but unknowingly mediates (“reflects”) them from within, therefore he, and he alone, has no awareness of any audience observing him — far less privy to the workings of his mind — and so no reason to guard against selfexposure. Concerning the liability to exposure, recall how it varies within narration itself: between the “dramatized” and the “undramatized” type, or between specific representation and commentary (2.1 above). So (un)awareness of audience, or (un)self-consciousness, now adds a third variable. In particular instances, the forms taken by these three variables freely converge or diverge, with the threat to the mediator’s reliability heightened or lowered accordingly. All other things being equal, however, this very unawareness also makes a Strether at reflection more reliable (or less unreliable) than a corresponding narrator. He has no outside audience to persuade, impress, amuse, bamboozle, intimidate, spare, with his account fashioned or manipulated accordingly. He can therefore, if not speak, then think his mind, as it were, the way other solitaries can inscribe their minds. “All his life, Mark Twain wrote double letters: one he sent and the other he wrote for himself — and there he wrote what he thought” (Shklovsky 1977 [1926]: 7). 2.2.2. Author vs. Narrator, Narrator vs. Nonnarrator: Distinctions Compared and Correlated This unself-consciousness both maximizes and moderates Stre-

ther’s (or, in principle, any informant’s) vulnerability to judgment, compared with all the genuine narrators on the list. Another comparison, though, yields a difference, not just in the degree of threatened (potential) unreliability but in kind, so that the genuine narrator likewise comes to figure as a fallible antipole. In terms of this comparison, Strether is poles apart from the (implied) author in 2.1 above, to whom — unlike the narrator, a fortiori the 26. In this regard, Booth knows better. Yet, as will appear below, his narrator/reflector merger conceals from sight quite a few important differences — (un)awareness of audience, above all — within their shared (un)reliability.


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nonnarrating informant — unreliability does not apply at all: as master rather than mediator of the fiction, he enjoys the highest authority by definition.27 Taken together, then, 2.1 on author/narrator and 2.2 on narrator/reflector suggest a qualitative distinction on the front of (un)reliability and a quantitative subgrouping at the unprivileged pole. At the same time, the author’s categorical distinctness in this regard from both of his delegates or mediators in 2.2, as well as from his closest narratorial analogue in 2.1, complicate the relations between the two pairings at issue. Nor is it the only complicating factor here. Rather, the parallel found in 2.2.1 to the narrator/author blurring, and the cumulative damage incurred, go with at least six notable differences between the two pairs of terms. (Or seven, if you count the difference in reliability that we have just outlined and will likewise take up below.) (1) Blurring versus Erasure The first point of unlikeness accounts for our differential usage of “blurring” and “erasure,” respectively, amid the shared conflation of agents in narrative discourse. If Booth’s earlier conflation of narrative agents in 2.1 is undeclared, even self-contradictory, intermittent, and at times possibly unwitting, this one (narrator/reflector) is deliberate, articulated, and conceptual: indeed, part of a larger fallacious doctrine regarding “person” (to be discussed below). Small wonder that, once introduced (Booth 1961a: 150 – 51), it recurs throughout The Rhetoric of Fiction, particularly in the chapters dealing with (un)reliability. (2) Roles Interchanged or Subsumed, Conflated or Discriminated The latter, narrator/reflector merger does not take the form of a thoughtless interchange of the two participants in question, and with it their names — the concepts plus the terms for them. Instead, Booth now defiantly subsumes the narrator/reflector pair under a common rubric, the narratorial one, most often.28 On the largest scale, part 3 of Booth (1961a) keeps alternating between the mediator types, under the heading “Impersonal Narration” (271 – 398). In smaller compass, recall the fourfold list of “great narrators” that includes Strether, to whom and whose like Booth sometimes co-refers as a Jamesian “reflector.” But the thinking subjects that James termed reflectors, mirrors, registers, or vessels (or centers) of consciousness, he himself also explicitly and less famously distinguished as “non-narrator” (308).29 Elsewhere, more 27. The definition that, as shown in 2.1, Booth’s two- or many-mindedness virtually unmakes, at a prohibitive price. 28. But see section 2.3. 29. This flatly contradicts Franz Stanzel’s (1984: 151) claim that James subsumed reflector under narrator and, odder still, that Booth “follows James’s example.” Also, James’s “nonnarrator” contrasts with the abuse of the term in Currie 1995b: 136 – 37: there it serves to distinguish secondary and all other lower-level addressors of narrative (so-called non-narrating characters) from primary narrators, as though narratorhood hinged on the level or scope of the


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specifically, James (1962 [1934]: 70) refers to Rowland Mallet — the center of consciousness in Roderick Hudson — as “exactly such a mirror, not a bit autobiographic or formally ‘first person’ though he be.” Thus James long anticipates the distinction widespread today between “ Who perceives?” and “ Who narrates?” What’s more, he anticipates it without proceeding to confuse the two distinct mediators, as Genette (1980: 189ff.) does, with a huge following, when he locates the “first-person narrator” among perceivers (“focalizations” or “focalizers”). Booth would therefore have done well to take his cue from this early anticipation, as would his apparent antipoles of the Genettian and other varieties. Further, while opposing these two mediating subjects, James also insists on their co-occurrence in practice. The narrator requires one or more nonnarrators if he wishes to internalize the narrated world and reflect it from within.30 At the same time, the nonnarrators willy-nilly require a narrator to communicate (quote, transmit) their thought and world-imaging (indeed, their reflection) to us readers, in one form or another. Hence the strangeness of the idea, current since Cohn (1978: 217 – 65), that there exist “autonomous interior monologues,” definitionally “unmediated” and narratorless, even belonging to “non-narrative” fiction.31 It is as if these monologues could dispense with a narrator’s transmission, via quoting, and somehow jump on their own from the innermost recesses of the mind onto the page before us. As untenable is the even more widespread (at least prior to Sternberg 1981a, 1982a, 1982b, 1985: 365 – 440) “direct speech fallacy.” Thereby direct quotation reproduces verbatim the original utterance or thought, so as to discourse addressed to an audience. More on this soon, including the comparable misleading reference to the primary teller as “the narrator” (e.g., Phelan and Booth 2005b: 388). 30. But the narrator may not wish to do so, not even in the form of local insideviews that uncover the agent’s motive or design — not the reflector’s thought per se, as in James — and predictably run through the narrative mainstream. Thus the Bible’s frequent abstention from such insideviews and its modern “objective” counterparts in, for example, Dashiell Hammett’s novels and Hemingway’s short fiction (Sternberg 1985, 2001b, 2005: 232). Even omniscient and authoritative narration, then, can dispense with reflection. Booth’s (1961a: 18) opinion to the contrary goes against reason and empirics alike: “The act of narration . . . is itself the author’s presentation of a prolonged ‘inside view’ of a character.” He is among the first to voice this unwarranted demand of interiority but hardly the last: Fludernik’s (1996) definitional “experientiality” rests and founders on it, for example, as does Palmer (2004) on fictional minds, various applications of ToM (Theory of Mind) to narrative (Zunshine 2006), and all the conceptions of narrativity that would restrict it to mind-driven human agency (Sternberg 2003a, 2003b, 2009, 2010: 576 – 81). The narrator/reflector dependency relation, based on strict entailment, goes only the other way, as the next sentence in the text explains. 31. This idea has been echoed in, for example, Genette 1988 [1983]: 51, Fludernik 1993b: 738, 1996: 126, 218, Cohn 1999: 104 – 5; Tumanov 1997: 5ff. and refuted in Sternberg 2005: 248 – 51.


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preclude the narrator’s interference (a fortiori unreliable interference) with the original in the quoting. Interestingly, some (among them, Hough [1970: 220]; Cohn [1978: 14, 100ff.]; Banfield [1982]; Jahn [1997: 451ff.]) would extend this fallacious preclusion to free indirect discourse, a staple of James’s (earlier of Austen’s, later of Woolf ’s) enactment of the reflector at mindwork.32 So assumed to be unmediated, in form or in effect, both direct and free indirect quoting then wrongly come to enjoy the presumption of the quoter’s reliability: they copy the subject’s original reflecting, as it were, with the highest possible truth-value of literal object/image correspondence. This theoretical formulation is exactly what the fallacy amounts to, including the straight bearing on our topic. James himself, again, knows better than to fall into any such impossible uncoupling of reflection from narration. The Preface to The Ambassadors thus encapsulates the favored Jamesian two-in-one composite: Other persons in no small number were to people the scene, and each with his or her axe to grind, his or her situation to treat. . . . [ But] Strether’s sense of these things, and Strether’s only, should avail me for showing them: I should know them but through his more or less groping knowledge of them, since his very gropings would figure among his most interesting motions. ( James 1962 [1934]: 317 – 18)

Observe the lucid distinction of roles, viewpoints, and even grammatical persons within the given textual composite or montage of The Ambassadors. There is Strether’s groping “sense” or “knowledge” of the world he progressively encounters; and there is “me . . . I,” as the narrator who “knows” and “shows” that world through his reflector’s groping sense or knowledge and, in theory, only through them.33 So the two distinct participants34 combine to establish Strether as focus of both narration and interest, while generating a variety of other Jamesian 32. Like direct discourse, “it reproduces verbatim the character’s own mental language” (Cohn 1978: 14) or spoken language (Hough 1970: 220). Examined in, e.g., Sternberg 1982a, 1991b, 2001a. 33. Here and there, Booth in effect acknowledges this twofold, against his official reduction of the two mediators to “narrators.” For instance, “the third-person reflector can be shown” — by a narrator, presumably — in such and such a way, or state, or movement (1961a: 157). There recurs even the thematic “show” verb used by James above, only in the cagey passive voice, leaving unnamed the (narrating) agent who shows the reflector at work. 34. Actually, three at least, and so the perspectival montage thickens into a three-in-one. For it necessarily includes (“implies”) the reader’s viewpoint: as one not only to be reckoned with but also shiftable between reliability and the reverse (e.g., between knowledge and ignorance) through appropriate narrative manipulations. Further, where the discourse quotes Strether’s speech, rather than mind, the perspectival montage grows fourfold, because Strether’s interlocutor (as well as James’s) comes into it too. (See the detailed analysis of The Ambassadors in Sternberg 1971: 299 – 431.) But these refinements can wait. For now, we just point again to the direct relevance of quoting and its theory for our present topic.


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effects that lie beyond Strether’s ken altogether. Central to these effects is the play of the narrative universals (suspense, curiosity, surprise) all along, but in a novel, internalized form. Thus transformed, the dynamics of narrative interest is launched and sustained by the narrator through the partial, gapped, mobile reflection of the world on Strether’s way from ignorance to knowledge (Sternberg 1978: 290ff.; also ibid.: 129ff. on the comparable poetics of Jane Austen). Moreover, the distinction within the two-in-one notably includes the variable of reliability, as suggested by the “groping . . . gropings” reserved for Strether. He must be at least temporarily unreliable — yet dynamically, decreasingly so, as a rule, just like Austen’s heroines — on his zigzag way to “knowledge” by trial and error; while the authorized narrator penetrates and exhibits Strether’s hidden mental ordeal, so as to (mis)direct the inferences about it and the world, it vis-a`-vis the world, that are progressively (re)formed by the likewise groping reader. Even amid co-occurrence, then, the narrator/ nonnarrator distinctness persists — or even grows more salient — as it also does no matter what change the relations between these two otherwise undergo elsewhere. (Think of how the same montages [narrator/reflector, speaking quoter/thinking quotee] attach in principle to the limited and diverse insideviews offered by the classical epic or novel.) Exactly such reflecting nonnarrators are, in Booth, yoked together by fiat with narrators proper as “narrators,” rather than as (say) “mediators” or “mediating subjects,” terms that would pinpoint their true and high common denominator, always short of identity. (More in section 2.3 below, devoted to a special yet widespread interplay between the two kinds of mediator, with further references.) (3) The Reflector among Types of Informant

This mix-up would extend to the types of informant overlooked here, as often elsewhere (Sternberg 2005), complete with their distinctive, reflector-like liability to unreliable mediation. Under the influence of James and the “inward turn” he pioneered, preached, and practiced, Booth mentions and annexes to “narration” the interior, silent self-communers only, and worse, only the “third-person,” Strethertype ones among them. This arbitrary focus leaves out all counterparts other than third-person and other than interior or silent, with their different effects on (un)reliability at that. Glaring and typical, these omissions are worth specifying a little. To start with, the range of interior self-communers itself narrows down in Booth (1961a) along two exclusionary lines, and it demands repair accordingly. Along one line, he confines them to the Jamesian “third-person” kind (Maisie, Strether, Gregor), exclusive of the Joycean direct, “first-person”


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interior monologists (Molly Bloom and all her self-discoursing precursors in traditional storytelling). Though as reflectorial as what Booth (e.g., ibid.: 153) calls “the third-person reflector,” these latter subjects are left unmentioned, or at any rate unnamed, falling into a sort of limbo. Conveniently so, given that Booth subscribes to the prevalent miscorrelation of narrator/reflector (under these or other labels) with first/third person. (On which later.) And the more indiscriminately so, because the difference between the Jamesian and the Joycean varieties of reflector (insideview, mind quoting) has significant implications for reliability judgments. Given the polarity in the formal directness of the respective quotations, for example, they vary, if not in whether, then at least in how easily and flexibly, the quoting narrator can (in)validate in person, by way of commentary, what the quoted mind represents to itself. Contrast the apparent enclosedness (“autonomy”) of Molly Bloom’s directly quoted self-address, as thinking-I, with the openness of little Maisie’s equally secret reflection to glosses and adjustments from her privileged nondirect quoter. As James (1954 [1897]: 10) himself generalizes in the Preface to the novel, Maisie’s own childish “terms” do “play their part — since her simpler conclusions quite depend on them; but our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies.”35 By a second typical confinement, mention in Booth depends on the scale or scope of the inner self-communing discourse. Thereby, only a global or sustained (as well as third-person) reflection will count as such, not any insideview of a character’s mind: not any and every thought quotation, in short, however local. (Likewise with the discourse quoted in narration: global or sustained as well as first-person speech, or writing, as against local dialogic or epistolary utterance. In short, theorists tend to privilege framing over inset narratorial speech, and the more deeply inset — a dialogue turn, say — the worse for it. By the same token, a quotation within quotation has a better chance of mention or analysis by narratologists — they would call it a tale within a tale — than a quotation within quotation within quotation. Thus, Phelan and Booth’s [2005b: 388] encyclopedia entry “Narrator” opens, instead, with a definition of “the narrator,” whose definite article stipulates all-inclusive, if not exclusive, telling. It therefore forecloses or prelimits the object to be defined: “The 35. Booth (1961a: 152) notes in passing that some characters “are not fully qualified to narrate or ‘reflect’ a story.” Incapable of any or of good mediation? Their accounts inherently opaque or inherently, if helplessly, unreliable? Or somewhere between the extremes, as inferable from “not fully qualified”? Whatever their trouble, they can mostly be helped to some extent, depending on the variations within reflecting and between it and narrating: on the variables of person and directness in their (e.g., Maisie’s) quoting by a higher-level transmitter.


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narrator is the agent . . . that tells or transmits everything . . . in a narrative to a narratee” [ibid.: 389].) This second narrowing down, resulting in another unbalanced coverage of the field, is almost automatic within narratology. It typifies a state of the art, especially in America, where few narratologists have much interest, let alone competence, in quotation: and vice versa with students of quoting, most of whom belong nowadays to other disciplines. The theory of quotation has traditionally (over)specialized in small, often sentence-length instances thereof — whether in direct, indirect, free indirect, or summary form; whether quoting speech or thought; and whether harmonious or disharmonious with the quoter’s framing perspective. All these local manifestations, along with the expertise on them — and they have been closely studied over the decades — remain beyond the ken of the narrative (over) specialist in large, most often text-length, forms of storytelling. The results of such mutual, if not studied, ignorance are detrimental to either isolationist party and to any comprehensive approach to (narrative) discourse.36 As it happens, the problem breaks surface in Booth 1983 (1961), the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction. In the Afterword there (ibid.: 409), he comes to regret the absence of “erlebte Rede, style indirect libre, and their English equivalents” from the original book, along with other matters of “ ‘language’ and ‘style.’ ” But the “self-defense . . . that a great deal of what I discuss under irony and the unreliable narrator is the equivalent of what others discuss under terms like erlebte Rede or under Bakhtin’s ‘polyphony’ and ‘heteroglossia’” (ibid.) does not exactly testify to a belated understanding, twenty years later, of the nature and magnitude of the omission. Booth having now finally discovered that the two enterprises study “irony and the unreliable narrator” in variant guises — better late than never — he adduces their practical overlap to extenuate his open disregard at the time for a foreign but relevant, intersecting enterprise. The holes in this defense, though, will leap to the expert’s eye, notably that immediately bearing on the present discussion. Even in claiming an overlap, the self-defense still privileges “the unreliable narrator” over the reflector, whose hidden thoughts, right or wrong, analysts of “erlebte Rede, style indirect libre” actually favor. But other holes also gape in those few regretful lines. Thus, the missing insight that the alleged “equivalents” (German, French, English) are in fact all quotational, that they encompass various forms of quoting other than the 36. For a better idea of what such a comprehensive approach would encompass, see the “universals of quotation” and the list of assorted-looking phenomena that fall under them (Sternberg 1982a: 107 – 10; 2009: 487 – 92).


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one named here — free indirectness — that they range from effects of “irony and the unreliable narrator” all the way to the opposite pole of sympathy and reliability, that they modulate from the local to the global . . . (See especially Sternberg 1981a, 1982a, 1982b, 1983c, 1983d, 1986, 1991a, 2001a, 2009: 480 – 524; but also, for example, Cohn 1966, 1978; McHale 1978, 2014; Yacobi 2000, 2007; and the most comprehensive survey and bibliography to date, particularly of the free indirect style, in Fludernik 1993a.) The few scholarly references given by the later Booth do not inspire confidence, either. Nor does his consignment of the named patterns of rendering (or re-presenting) discourse to fictional “language” and the persistent Aristotelian reduction of fictional language to a medium. Nor does his failure to identify “erlebte Rede, style indirect libre” even in a passage analyzed by him “as reminder” after the fact of what can be done on this matter (Booth 1983 [1961]: 410 – 11). In historical retrospect, again, Booth’s late expression of regret has not visibly changed things for the better, not even among his close followers. More recent parallels of omission and commission abound: not least, an assortment of strange acts perpetrated on the free indirect style, now become voguish again, if only in name. This briefly exemplifies the unhealthy, indeed unrecognized division of labor between the two inseparable scholarly enterprises. Thereby, macrocosm in, microcosm out, or the reverse, depending on the limitation in one’s expertise. So this overview of ours newly calls for repairing these unbalanced coverages and thus unifying the field in this essential regard. Taken together, Booth’s two lines of exclusion from self-communing (or, negatively speaking, unself-conscious, audience-blind, nonnarrating) mediacy reduces to a minimum the diversity and sheer extent of this broad range or repertoire of intermediaries, on which fiction peculiarly draws. It comes down to a focus on the long-term, if not work-length, third-person reflector. Booth thus privileges the Strether family at the expense of the rest: other interior self-communers remain out of sight, while self-communers other than interior go altogether unrepresented as such. By these we mean the reflector’s exteriorizing but equally nonnarrating (not-communicationminded) fellows: the diarist writing for his or her own eyes, and the vocal monologist. (E.g., Bridget Jones at her desk and Tom Jones “crying to himself ” in voiced yet private self-address, respectively.)37 37. All these limitations in Booth are typical and ongoing, even within the German tradition, where the subject has drawn most notice (Sternberg 2005: 245 – 51). They persists as late as, for example, the overviews of “mediacy” in Jahn (2005) and Alber and Fludernik (2014): the latter with the addition of the reader to the two fictional or intratextual mediators. Nor, as typically,


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If anything, as inscribers or exclaimers, prosaists or voices — owing to their media, in short — these two kinds of informant draw far closer to the narrator, who likewise writes or speaks, than do the thinking subjects, whose very recourse to language at silent thought has been debated. As formulators of discourse, the writing and the vocal monologists fare better in a way than other self-communers: they are comparatively less exposed to adverse reliability judgments on such grounds as incoherence or lack of control. In other words, the difference regarding this exposure and selfexposure that we have drawn between the narrating as opposed to the informing mediators — against Booth’s proposal to conflate them — modulates further. Going by the threat of the mediator’s self-exposure, the binarism now turns into a threefold descending order: silent reflectors, private verbalizers, narrators. The two verbalizers may accordingly appear more eligible for subsumption under or assimilation to narrator. Yet they remain self-communing, hence not communicators, narrational or otherwise, but informants. At the same time, the conflations in section 2.1 and here (2.2) also differ in their negative effects on range and subgrouping. Unlike the (implied) author/ narrator binary polarity, the mediating agent opposed to the narrator here — the informant — branches out into a number of self-directed types: selfaddressing, self-recording, self-perceiving, or, as with the hearer (Sternberg 1986), otherwise egocentric in leading the self ’s secret life. Finally, such decoupling, reconceptualizing, and subgrouping as we propose within 2.2 have in turn a noteworthy terminological implication for the pole of self-communion rescued from Booth’s erasure. The widening of this distinct secret-life umbrella, as befits half of the range of mediacy, and the discrimination among the subtypes it encompasses — not least in terms of reliability — demands an appropriate analytic lexicon. This demand highlights the superiority of the inclusive “informant” (Sternberg 2005) to Henry James’s narrowly mind-and-person-centered “vessel” or “reflector” that Booth and others adopt.38 Moreover, it’s not even that you have to choose between the terms. Rather, as master concept and name for the audienceless or audience-blind discourser, informant provides the missing superordinate term, opposed to the audience-minded “narrator,” yet subdivisible into the Jamesian and other do the implications of the differences for (un)reliability arise there, let alone outreach, develop or correct the passing glances at it in Booth (1961a) or Stanzel (1984: e.g., 150 – 52). 38. The co-adopters notably include his critics: e.g., Cohn (1978; 1981: esp. 170 – 74), Stanzel (1984), Fludernik (1996). But though they supposedly adhere to the Jamesian distinction that he would erase, their usage remains problematic on further grounds (see Sternberg 2005: 245 – 51).


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(e.g., vocal or writing) informant types. As such, it definitely enriches the available relevant lexicon, so as to equip narrative analysts with a tool kit that twins the benefits of full coverage and fine discrimination in the approach to these ego-centered mediators.39 When referring to Booth and similar echoers of James, though, we will, of course, keep to their narrower pair of terms. (4) One-way or Two-way Interchange?

Unlike the implied author’s one-way substitution for and assimilation to the narrator by Booth, those of narrator and reflector manifestly (if less frequently) go the other way too. In his (ab)usage, “the narrator of ‘Four Meetings’” thus appears among “James’s reflectors” whose reliability has been questioned (Booth 1961a: 365). And the teller of The Aspern Papers, engaged within the action in an “unscrupulous” hunt for those papers, is also supposed to double, in and through the telling about it, as “a large, lucid reflector” of “old Venice” (ibid.: 358). The “insensitive” plot agent-cum-teller must, while thus engaged, somehow reliably (“lucidly”) evoke the past. Further, though seldom so implausible, such doubling allegedly typifies narrative (ibid.: 151). This second example, especially when generalized, recalls afresh Genette (1980) and his adherents on focalizing. Booth’s entire criticism of the narrator/reflector pair here (in 2.2) may look like another early glance, avant la lettre, at the issue of “who narrates?” vis-a`-vis “who sees?,” except that it would of course erase rather than formalize the distinction. However, Booth’s reading of The Aspern Papers imperceptibly shifts from the erasure of that dividing line between narrator and reflector (seer, thinker, perceiver) to a doubling of the roles they perform in the tale as a single multipurpose figure. (5) Nine Points of Contact: The Balance of Similarity and Dissimilarity Like the narrator and the author, the narrator and the reflector have some important points of similarity. These two notably share a mediating role and an openness to reliability judgments, complete with the perspectival mechanism of integration on which they turn. (See section 3.) Booth does not dwell on these basic similarities. However, he much exaggerates the similarities that he does mention, just as he underrates or overlooks their differential counterpoints, in his rush to erase the “overworked” dividing line and produce the desired union: 39. Apropos (un)reliability itself, “informant” also enjoys the specific advantage of alluding to the related line drawn in communication theory: between the “communication” intentionally signaled by the transmitter and the “information” unknowingly betrayed in the transmitting process (MacKay 1972, cited in Yacobi 1981).


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Further evidence that this distinction is less important than has often been claimed is seen in the fact that all of the following functional distinctions apply to both firstand third-person narration alike.40 (1961a: 150 – 51)

Here are those alleged commonalities: (a) “Dramatized and Undramatized Narrators”; (b) “Observers and Narrator-Agents”; (c) “Scene and Summary”; (d) “Commentary”; (e) “Self-Conscious Narrators”; (f ) “Variations of Distance”; (g) “Variations in Support or Correction”; (h) “Privilege”; (i) “Inside Views” (ibid.: 151 – 65). The nine-point list, whatever its precedents or one’s reservations about it — and them — marks a genuine advance in narrative theory. But, we would argue, it is demonstrably not a “fact” that all these nine factors apply to both narrator and reflector, much less that they co-apply in the same way. So the “evidence” in fact changes from positive to negative, from unitary to differential, including double-edged. If anything, the distinction between the two mediators turns out even more vital by far than claimed by its endorsers to this day, never mind its would-be or unwitting eliders, from Booth onward. Further, this divide has multiple intersections and correlations with (un)reliability, which need to be recognized: they will all prove meaningful, we believe, especially when sorted out and generalized or relativized or both. Here lies the constructive value of the following (shortened) demonstration of our counterargument. A quick bird’s-eye view, to start with. Among the nine listed variables of storytelling, only (d), (f), and (g) equally apply across the narrator/reflector line, more or less. And these three commonalities are interrelated at that. The six remaining factors, instead, help to draw, thicken, establish, and bring out this dividing line, so as to preclude its erasure. The divisions, moreover, concern and affect (un)reliability — the narrator’s as against the reflector’s — which Booth and others generally fail to keep in view here. Now for a closer look, going from the right pairings to the wrong, actually differential ones. Although Booth (ibid.: 155) himself attributes (d) to “narrators” only, reflectors (and a fortiori journal-keeping informants) can also engage in “commentary” on “any aspect of human experience,” as well as in report on it. In Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness, for instance, the running commentary on people, groups, events, songs, even forms of discourse, outreaches most narrations. Moreover, what ensues from this family likeness is worth empha40. As if the term “third-person narration” weren’t conceptually troublesome enough, it also incurs an ambiguity in reference: between pointing to the reflector (e.g., Strether), as oddly meant here, and to the Fielding-type narrator proper, as most of us loosely use it.


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sizing again. Since commentary brings into the open the commentator’s opinions, values, worldview — directly so, unlike a concrete representation of the world — it therefore incomparably both provokes and enables reliability judgments, for better or worse. In this open self-expression, then, the two mediators equally range between ingratiating and exposing themselves. On this range, if Fielding polarizes with Barry Lyndon as commentator, so does Molly with Jason Compson. The likeness between the two participants recurs in (f ) “Variations of Distance,” which stretch “from identification to complete opposition.” Further, concerning either mediator, the entire spectrum of variations can exhibit itself on “any axis of value, moral, intellectual, aesthetic,” and vis-a`-vis any other participant: the author, the reader, and (though less crucially) the other characters (ibid.). Among the nine aspects found here, this shared variability makes not only one of the few correct pairings but also the richest of the lot. It nevertheless has its weaker points too.41 For now, we will just mention the principled hole, or at best indeterminacy, left here about the relation between distance and (un)reliability. Booth (ibid.: 158) presents the latter as just one, though “probably the most important” one, of the former’s “kinds”: it consists in the distance of “the fallible or unreliable narrator” from “the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator.” Indeed, the famous definition of (un)reliability that ensues — on which more below — is supposed to be cast in terms of “this kind of distance” from the implied author (ibid.). But why a “kind”? What kind, exactly? How related to the other “kinds”? How to measure it, or them? And do the answers affect the narrator/reflector coupling in (f), among other undeclared points of difference? (We will come back to these issues in 2.4 below on operational problems and in section 5 on “Axes.”) A related helpful coupling involves the supportive or corrective “Variations” in (g), which have often been taken up since, not always with due acknowledgment. As the full subheading indicates, they concern the presence or absence of alternative accounts, “from other sources,” that verify or modify42 the one given by the (un)reliable subject, whether narrating or reflecting. The examples given would indeed appear to cut across this difference in mediator: the stand-alone Gully Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth, for 41. This even apart from Booth’s habitual underplaying of the differences between the narrator/reflector pair amid commonality as well, and the conspicuous absence of ensuing elaboration and illustration. Doubly conspicuous, this absence, in a book on narrative rhetoric, and one that emphasizes how “we badly need thoroughgoing studies” of such variations at work (1961a: 157). Compare the focus on narrative rhetoric, including the rhetoric of authority, in Sternberg 1978: esp. 56 – 158, 183 – 235, 276 – 305; 1985: esp. 84 – 128, 441 – 515; 1998: 471 – 519; and Yacobi 2005a: 112ff., 2005b. 42. Or for that matter, oppose, belie, invert, ambiguate, replace . . .


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instance, or the four Gospels, all narrative, as against the four versions (three of them interior monologues) in The Sound and the Fury. Likewise common to narrator and reflector are the variables and subvariables mentioned there, such as the difference between an alternative account from within the narrated world and from without (or the bizarre claim about “the effects of isolation” produced by the unaccompanied mediator, to which we will return).43 On the other hand, the two mediators begin to part ways, even to polarize immediately, and crucially, after the sweeping generalization about their unity across the board. They diverge, that is, as early as (a), which marks “perhaps the most important difference in narrative effect,” and no later than (a)’s heading at that. “Dramatized and Undramatized Narrators” already reveals what Booth himself fails to state, much less to explain, in the three ensuing pages: that this distinction (or variable) doesn’t at all apply to reflectors, in any sense. Narrators, as we argued, are always “dramatized” in the sense that their discourse necessarily characterizes or individualizes them, if only as discoursers. Which is why even their forms of discourse can imply their (un)reliability: contrast the bumbling Zeitblom in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus with an omnicompetent yet personalized (e.g., distinctively British) narrator like Patrick O’Brian’s.44 But narrators can be left undramatized as existents, never mind fictional existents, observers, agents past or present. Think of the disembodied voice that narrates Genesis or James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, for example, and with high authority as a rule. But reflectors cannot be left so, in this actional, experiential sense, either. For they are invariably “dramatized” by what and how they experience (“reflect”), combined with the individual character and biography that emerge in the process. Think of Elizabeth Bennet, Lambert Strether, Gregor Samsa, Molly and Leopold Bloom, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compson, for example. Across their reflectorial variations, they all grow as richly individual (“dramatized”) in the reading as any actual person in the living, and better known. (The same holds for other kinds of informant, like the private vocal self-communer, Tom Jones fashion, or the journal writer.) In Joyce’s Portrait, the reflecting Stephen thus contrasts with the undramatized omniscient narrator who lays bare his mind throughout; but Stephen would remain unaffected as such 43. On the arts, notably including the perspectival arts, of repetition with variation, see Sternberg 1985: 365 – 440, 1986, 1991b, 1998 passim; and, in cinematic narrative, Shaham 2010, 2013. 44. So those forms can rather than must imply it: against Schauber and Spolsky 1986: 30, who misgeneralize that “dramatized” entails “unreliable,” and in Booth’s name too.


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were his self-effacing omniscient quoter to transform into a dramatized Fieldingesque counterpart. A typical and well-motivated polarity, this, between the invariant (reflecting) and the variable (narrating) mediator on the axis of (a).45 Much the same gulf between variable narrator and invariant reflector manifests itself in (b), concerning the emplotted (non)agency (or, better, âgency) of the respective mediators. The discussion of “[ Nonagentive] Observers and Narrator-Agents” even begins with “Among dramatized narrators . . . ,” for an obvious reason. Only among them do the two possibilities of âgency supposedly coexist and always force a choice that makes a difference. As Booth (ibid.: 153 – 54) puts it, this results either in “mere observers” of the narrated action, such as “the ‘I’ of Tom Jones,” or in “narrator-agents,” who play a role, smaller (e.g., Nick Carraway) or larger (Moll Flanders), in the narrated events themselves. This is true enough, but far from adequate. Above all, it misses the connection of the variable (b) to the mediator’s (un)reliability. A mediator-agent is, or was, personally involved, and the tale he mediates falls under suspicion accordingly, unless verified; a “mere observer” isn’t or wasn’t, by definition, and so the mediacy doesn’t, or not on the ground of involvement. (Henry James duly comments in the Prefaces that his embattled “vessels” are fine perceivers, except where their emotions get in the way.) What with this oversight, Booth’s account here also requires some major corrections. Two of them are symmetrical and directly relevant.46 On the one hand, Booth’s location of the âgency variable “among dramatized narrators” leaves out altogether the undramatized (i.e., disembodied) kind of narrators, who invariably belong to the nonagentive pole of so-called mere observers, and to it alone. Recall the effaced — and reliable — narrator of Joyce’s Portrait. On the other hand, Booth’s location of this âgency variable “among dramatized narrators” illicitly widens its range, because he smuggles in reflectors under the so-called narratorial umbrella, with a view to establishing the alleged parity, no doubt.47 So Booth’s (ibid.: 154) examples of “narrator-agents” include Nick Carraway, Moll Flanders, Tristram Shandy, 45. Instead of avowing this polarity, as his heading “Dramatized and Undramatized Narrators” silently did by the reflector’s omission, Booth equivocates. His label for focal experiencers, such as Gabriel in Joyce’s “The Dead,” thus alternates between “narrators” and “reflectors” or “thirdperson ‘centers of consciousness’” (Booth 1961a: 153): as if they somehow fit into the narrational picture in all but insignificant grammatical person. Even so, there is no mention there, equivocal or otherwise, of an undramatized quasi-narrating reflector, and the truth accordingly comes out by omission again: no such creature inhabits any literary or possible world. 46. A third relates to point 2.3 below, on the narrating and experiencing selves. 47. In the corresponding essay, Booth 1961b: 67, they are explicitly introduced by name, as “third-person reflectors,” along with the other, narrating, “first-person kind of mediator,”


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“and — in the third person — Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers.” Actually, of course, Paul is indeed an agent but a nonnarrator, just like all reflectors: as such, either they enter the arena to reflect it (as Paul and Strether do), or the arena enters them to internalize the reflected action itself (as with the dormant Molly Bloom). Moreover, the rule governing these primary or largescale thinking subjects applies to all their local counterparts, down to the briefest and plainest insideview of an agent: a glance in passing at a motive, intuition, or just state of mind. Reflectors accordingly participate by nature in the social or secret, interpersonal or interior action, or in both. And our reliability judgments of them take this built-in involvement into account. Much the same holds for the other types of informant, with their externalized (written/voiced) self-communion in the first person, like the diarist and the audible soliloquist. Consider the active, even leading role taken by Samuel Pepys or Bridget Jones in the events they privately record. Similarly — and likewise comparable to Bloom or Morel in voiceless thought — with Tom Jones in vocal self-address, reproaching himself for what he has (mis)done, for instance. Tom having lost Mr. Allworthy’s good opinion, there follows a chapter titled “A Conversation Which Mr. Jones Had with Himself,” where “he cried, ‘Well, then, I will give Mr. Allworthy the only instance he requires of my obedience. I will go this moment — but wither? — why, let Fortune direct . . . ’ ” (Tom Jones, VII. 2). And so, with this voiced inner speech, begin his colorful adventures on the loose. Therefore, not only the general term “informant-agents” but also the specific “reflector-agents,” although it may look contradictory, would mirror the exact and invariant truth. So much so that, unless used for emphasis, the hyphenated addition of agency would be redundant. Next, perhaps an even less obvious case of a similarity forced, or a distinction missed. What’s wrong with (c), a purely formal variable, on the face of it, and accordingly sharable by all discoursers? “All narrators and observers, whether first or third person, can relay their tales to us primarily as scene . . . , primarily as summary . . . , or, most commonly, as a combination of the two” (Booth 1961a: 154). Not so, again, because only genuine, audience-oriented “narrators and observers,” whether “first or third [or indeed second] person,” can, and must, exercise this choice of representational proportions between the narrated and the narrative, action and discourse time (Sternberg 1978: 14 – 34, also in Index under “Scene”). Even in everyday storytelling, we constantly vary these proportions, with an eye to foregrounding or to sheer rather than smuggled in under the latter umbrella. But this, needless to say, doesn’t change the outcome.


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tempo. As in art, moreover, so in life, we are viewed accordingly. The narrative’s proportioning exhibits, for better or worse, our skill, repertoire, sense of importance, ability to suit representational means to communicative ends, and selectivity at large. All these are objects of reliability judgment that distinctively bear on what, how, why the narrator chooses to tell, undertell, overtell (Sternberg 1978: 14 – 34, 56 – 128, 236 – 305; 1985 passim; 1986; 1998 passim; 2001b).48 Within the wider circle of nonnarrators itself, the same variable proportioning (e.g., between scene and summary) falls to some, who make a virtue of this necessity. The reader’s judgment of the preference and performance involved again follows, needless to say. Witness the use of these variations by discourse-making fictional informants, such as the diarist, and their counterparts in real life — Pepys, for example. But no such free choice is given to reflectors (even less than to ourselves in unmediated silent thought or observation), because they just perceive or imagine the world as they happen to do in their minds. And the objective world that they reflect does not by nature fall into any longer or shorter variations, any scenic or condensed units, but moves forward at a steady pace. Nor does it matter, as far as textual representation goes, whether they chance or choose to cover the storyworld to a richer (scene-like) or a thinner (summary-like) effect, because, pace Booth, they do not “relay their tales to us.” Or not except through the intervention of another, narratorial mediator, who alone decides what and how (e.g., scenically or otherwise) they should reflect the world for our eyes. The ultimate responsibility for the consequences therefore lurks behind the reflector, whose original selections and priorities get manipulated to serve another’s purpose. Two quick examples. Recall James’s description of point of view in The Ambassadors as a two-in-one, where “Strether’s sense of these things, and Strether’s only, should avail me for showing them”: his sense, my showing. Another example would be the contrast between the direct, elaborate, apparently reproductive quoting of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue and the form of summary called “psycho-narration” (Cohn 1978: 21 – 57). This contrast springs from the choices about proportioning made by the 48. Only the bias of Jamesians against summary (as abridged, undertold “telling,” by way of direct commentary) led them to judge the author responsible for it incompetent: unreliable, in effect, on artistic, not, as more usual, on ideological grounds. Here also lies one of the reasons why Phelan (2005: 49 – 53) is wrong to identify undertelling as a “type of unreliability”: a package deal easy to refute by confronting it with summary. The more so owing to Booth’s eloquent defense of summarized “undertelling.”


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respective narrators-quoters, and the author behind them, of course, not by the reflectors-quotees themselves.49 In short, reflectors operate within the storyworld (or fabula); while narrators operate on the discourse that we encounter (sjuzhet ), moving, inter alia, between scenic and summary account of the (reflected as well as unreflected) storyworld. Though technical-looking, this quantitative variable may come to bear on our reliability judgments, as on our sense of tempo and importance (Sternberg 1978: 14ff.) Of the two narratorial extremes of proportioning, summary is much closer to commentary and accordingly more self-revealing, for better or worse. Likewise divisive (rather than unifying, because shared by all mediators) is the factor of “self-consciousness” in Booth’s own sense. It refers to awareness of oneself as a writer (Booth 1961a: 155; 1952) and most perceptibly exhibits itself in metanarrative commentary. Among the examples cited by him are Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Doctor Faustus as against the unself-consciously told Huckleberry Finn or Ring Lardner’s “Haircut.” The latter two, or their mediators, are essentially no less “self-conscious” in another sense (i.e., audience-minded), which we already introduced and will soon take up. Huck and the barber accordingly further share what this mindfulness entails for reliability, as we also hinted. Booth’s exclusion of them is categorical, however, since they supposedly lack the art- or discourse-consciousness that the others (e.g., Tristram) all exhibit, even flaunt.50 And whatever the reasonableness of this exclusion, let us add one remark on those who show themselves art-conscious par excellence. They comment on their own discourse or on the very fact that they are writing, speaking, addressing, (mis)telling. The metanarrative commentary they present, therefore, not only reflects the metacommentator’s (un)reliability — like every utterance, only with selfexposure much heightened — but can even bear on it straight. Fielding’s narrator thus keeps declaring his omnicompetence, Zeitblom his incompetence; others call themselves truth tellers or liars. But the main question, of course, is who exhibits this art-consciousness. Revealingly, Booth’s (1961a: 155) paragraph on this issue again carries a giveaway subheading: “Self-Conscious Narrators,” which, moreover, echoes the title of an earlier article (Booth 1952). The subheading already belies his general claim about this variable’s co-applicability to the other, interior type of mediator, quoted above; and it also belies the claim’s specific recurrence in the paragraph here, namely, the statement that this feature cuts “across the 49. It therefore makes no sense for Cohn (1978) and her followers to postulate this higher-level narrating mediator in the latter, psychonarrative case alone. For details and further references, see again Sternberg 2005: 248 – 51. 50. Huck does not lack it: recall his comment on Twain stretching the truth.


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distinction between observers and narrator-agents of all kinds” (Booth 1961a: 155).51 Instead of crosscutting, this feature divides the two kinds at issue — reflectors and narrators — into have-nots (all unself-conscious) and haves, respectively. Thus, it should go without saying that reflectors cannot possibly be “aware” of themselves as writers, or speakers, much less serve as commentators on their own discourse. How can they, given that, in playing their role, they do not write or speak by definition — let alone to an audience — but only think, observe, “reflect” in this double sense? Look again at Strether, mentating with no inkling of the narrator/author-to-audience communication that uncovers, relays, frames, molds, and at will annotates his mental process. Inversely, and as definitionally, narrators cannot but possess this awareness — unless asleep or comatose, in which case they turn reflectors — and the ability to express it as and when they like. In the passage at issue, indeed, Booth himself reaffirms its one-mediator heading, “Self-conscious Narrators,” and newly contradicts his own initial statement (“Cutting across . . . ”), by proceeding to reserve for “narrators” both the feature of “self-consciousness” and its illustration (from “Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy,” and so forth). A half retreat from this awkward reflectorless monopoly ensues, though. The final clause, “and narrators or observers . . . ,” tries to salvage that initial statement, or half of it, by having the negative possibility, at least, “cut across the distinction.” Opposed to the foregoing “self-conscious narrators,” we now hear, is an alliance of unself-conscious “narrators or observers.” But, again, how can the “narrators” cited (Huck Finn, the Stranger, the barber) possibly “seem unaware that they are writing . . . speaking”? And how can “observers,” like The Victim’s Asa Leventhal, gain an awareness of “ ‘reflecting’ a literary (or just a narrative) work”? Witness the shock effect of Molly Bloom exclaiming, “O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh” ( Joyce 1986 [1922]: 633) in mid-monologue. As to (h) “Privilege,” it doubtless bears a strong and immediate relation to our topic: its presence evidently makes for (and its absence, disprivilege, militates against) reliability. However, this crucial factor receives such an odd treatment here that we must begin with some caveats, on pain of misunderstanding. The first thing to be noted about Booth’s “privilege” is its confinement to the epistemic, informational variety, and so to judgment by standards like knowledge, full coverage or disclosure, or truth-telling within the fiction. “Observers and narrator-agents,” whatever their other features, “can be either privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly 51. Contrast also the later generalization in Phelan and Booth (2005b: 391): “Self-consciousness refers to a narrator’s conscious efforts to craft the narrative.”


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natural means or limited to realistic vision and inference. Complete privilege is what we usually call omniscience” (Booth 1961a: 160): if, that is, privilege can be called “complete” without omnipotence, for example. The latter makes an equal, separate privilege, equally delegated or denied by the author, and with a comparable bearing on reliability.52 Second, there’s a further confinement within this confinement, whereby (h) “Privilege” reduces to (i) “Inside Views.” As Booth (ibid.) himself notes, “the most important single privilege is that of obtaining an inside view of another [?] character.”53 Even so, more precisely, the reduced (h) does not equal (i) but subsumes it, because (i) is in turn arbitrarily reserved for a certain variable aspect of insideviews, namely, their relative depth. These two variables are therefore best reconsidered together, as feature and subfeature or prime manifestation. Third, the pages on these joint issues aren’t much concerned with the official topic, the narrator/reflector parity. (They mostly read like a digression on “dramaticness.”) Booth’s few relevant glances at the topic, however, turn out newly untenable or incoherent, in attempting to uphold the parity. To start with, a brief statement of the facts concerning (h) – (i) and their rationale. Pace Booth, the variable of epistemic (dis)privilege, omniscient vs. restricted, again governs narrators only, with few exceptions. So Tom Jones, for example, contrasts with Pamela in informational access and disclosure, or War and Peace with A Raw Youth, or Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower with John Fowles’s The Collector. Such privileged access and disclosure means, of course, a narrator possessing and at will transmitting (“sharing”) full, hard, categorical, unquestioned information about the storyworld: the relevant knowledge, in short, or, as the law would have it, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Whereas the lack of access and disclosure entails the reverse: either a disturbing absence or a doubtful emergence of such information, either an obstacle or a pretense to knowledge, always with some loss of confidence in the narrator. Who trusts the account given by someone who must leave gaps about the narrated world, or who would pass them off as facts? Among other epistemic branches of (dis)privilege, such as (omni)presence and (omni)temporality, this contrast manifests itself in the free access to 52. For details, see Sternberg 1985: 84 – 128, 2007: 687ff. Some of the problems with the conception of omniscience in Booth and others, especially regarding (un)reliability, have already been mentioned and will recur below. 53. The word queried should have been deleted, because the privileged inside viewer needn’t be a character and, given the epistemic constraints on sublunary characters as mind readers, usually isn’t.


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another’s secret life. Does the narrator have or lack the power of mindreading with authority, that is, of offering a superhumanly reliable insideview of the character(s) in some form of quotation (e.g., direct, indirect, free indirect, telescoped or psycho-narrated)? With authority, mind you, since a limited narrator may also indulge in reading minds of fellow characters, but the insideviews on offer then remain suspect, pending validation, if only given the human or humanlike constraints on such knowledge (Sternberg 1985: 86 – 87, 96 – 98). And the deeper, fuller, less indirect, or less modalized (“perhaps,” “probably”) the narrator’s insideview, the sharper the qualitative contrast in reliable access and disclosure between these extremes of narration. On the other hand, reflectors of all kinds and scopes are traditionally “one of us” in epistemic disprivilege, notably in the access to another’s mind. For millennia, they have been kept subject to the realistic limits of knowledge built into the human condition, together with the blind spots peculiar to each of them (Sternberg 1978: 133ff. on Jane Austen; also, ibid.: 290ff., 1984: 777 – 84; Yacobi 1985, 2011 on Henry James). Not that reflectors are precluded from omniscience — witness already the Bible’s God observing and judging the created world — but that the cost in perspectival, “presentational” realism and interest has usually been deemed prohibitive. Indeed, God in the Bible is the exception that proves the rule, and even there we find the extent minimized or miniatured. Both God’s insideviews of human minds and the narrator’s insideviews of His mastermind are — however otherwise remarkable, indeed revolutionary — strictly local; nothing like the extensive equivalent in the modern and at times even the classical novel.54 God thus surveys the whole created universe at a glance “and behold, very good” (Genesis 1:31): so the narrator free indirectly reports the divine view. Like the omniscient narrator, though, God himself also freely penetrates other minds. The very first manifestation has the best claim to exemplify this divine mind-reading in little, complete with the art of indirection and the rhetoric of reliability deployed in the process. When God welcomes Abel’s offering but not Cain’s, “Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. And the Lord said to Cain, Why art thou angry, and why has thy countenance fallen?”. This rhetorical question paves the way for a divine lesson on human free agency between good and evil: Cain, if he chooses, can master his ill feeling (Genesis 4:3 – 6). Within this small compass, God’s voiced insideview of Cain’s raging mind amounts to three words, “ . . . art thou angry,” or two in the original. Nothing very striking about it, least of all to the hasty reader. However, in the context of these verses — never 54. Here the difference in the magnitude of quotation asserts itself again.


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mind the wider one — it gains an impressive salience along with authority, as befits a first occurrence of its kind. Briefly, note the structure of repetition, with the close parallel it draws (even nearer to identity in the Hebrew) between the narrator’s account of Cain and God’s: the superknower in the Bible’s discourse reinforces the superknower in the Bible’s world, as vice versa. And the appearance of these mind-readings in immediate succession (“angry . . . angry”) crowns the mutual reinforcement. So the apparent and conspicuous redundancy pays off with a vengeance in terms of the omniscience effect. Of these two privileged mind-readers, further, God even outdoes the narrator. He proceeds from laying bare Cain’s anger to an insight into the (revolutionary) workings of his free choice, and humanity’s at large, including the open outcome. Who knows the internal mechanism so well as the Creator? So divine omnipotence serves to reinforce the demonstration of omniscience or, specifically, “omnimentality.” Finally, note the care taken to repeat the internal-to-external order in the two accounts of how Cain reacted to the favor invidiously shown to his brother Abel: first anger, and only then the fallen countenance. The discourse thus goes out of its way to rule out the possibility that the hidden anger was inferred by God from the expression visible on the face. And the motivation for this preventive step is ultimately suasive: it lies in the rhetoric of heavenly omniscience, focused here on the direct access, the superknowledge, and the total reliability of the Mind-Reader. It brings home that God, like the narrator, requires no such metonymic inference from the public to the secret life. This inferential device, like all gap-filling, is by nature oblique, fallible, and so the lot of disprivileged humans alone.55 A memorable miniature of reflection, no doubt, but a miniature still. The Bible’s innovative, elaborate art of mind quotation — direct, indirect, free indirect, telescoped — goes with a modest extension (Sternberg 1979b, 1983c, 1985: Index under “Free Indirect Discourse,” “Inner Life,” “Monologue,” “Quotation”; 1986; 1998: Index under “Quotation”). And narrative since has tended to avoid the privileging of reflectors (or other informants) even subject to a comparable delicate balance. This, in short, is how and why the epistemic variable (h) – (i) divides the types of mediator. Booth’s (1961a: 160 – 65) glances at the topic accordingly show themselves to be neither cogent nor even consistent. On the informational front, as on all others, (a) – (g), he would of course like to equate the 55. For some comparable examples, bringing the same art of indirection and rhetoric of reliability to bear on pinpoint divine insights into the human heart, see Sternberg 1985: 90 – 99. Note the addition there of a favorable contrast to human blindness, including the prophet’s.


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reflector with the narrator, who indisputably varies between the extremes. Yet even the passing and unmotivated claim that “any sustained inside view, of whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator” (ibid.: 164) is flatly contradicted by Booth’s own handling and naming of one such character, the only one given a detailed treatment here. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Booth now argues, we encounter Stephen’s “mental record of everything that happens. We see his consciousness at work on the world” (ibid.: 163): a typical Jamesian reflector, in fact. Moreover, the workings of Stephen’s mind get transmitted to us in “an infallible report, even less subject to critical doubts than the typical Elizabethan soliloquy” (ibid.). But who transmits the report of his mind? Given the hero’s frequent lapses and shortfalls, he himself cannot produce this impeccable mind-reading as a self-report. And surprisingly, Booth for once agrees. Having quoted from the novel a characteristic insideview, “ ‘The equation of the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock’s,’” he proceeds to comment on it: “ Who says so? Not Stephen, but the omniscient infallible author” (ibid.). Rather than turning “into a narrator,” then, “the character whose mind is shown” distinctively operates as a reflector, and of the humanly fallible variety to match. This review of the nine points of contact between the narrator and the reflector as mediators, then, goes to demonstrate five general arguments. They all refute, or at least outreach, Booth’s attempt to reduce mediation to unity: (i) The differences between the two mediators outweigh the similarities by far. (ii) All along the nine-point line, either relation of (dis)parity has significant consequences for the respective (un)reliabilities and for this problem at large. (iii) In the last analysis, the differences all spring from the critical yet neglected distinction between narrator and reflector or informant in general, namely, (un)self-consciousness: audience-awareness as against audience-blindness. (iv) The otherwise meaningful and operational differences within the informant type (silent, vocal, writing) pale beside this master distinction: it accommodates them by way of ramifying, not blurring, let alone erasure. (v) This distinction of so-called person, complete with what it implies for (un)reliable discourse, is, if anything, underworked rather than overworked. (To be taken up in due course below.)


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As Booth’s “best quote” counters his own author/(authorial) narrator blur, so he himself, apparently forgetting his radical call for the erasure of the “overworked” narrator/reflector difference, points to this difference from time to time. This happens most continuously throughout the volume’s second and best part, “The Author’s Voice in Fiction” (ibid.: 169 – 266). There, the very theme consists in how the authorial narrator’s reliable commentary and other (e.g., epistemic) privileges, with their multiple effects or benefits, are unavailable to any other mediating subject, reflectors notably among them. For example, Booth invidiously juxtaposes the “cumbersome ‘mirror-views’” popular in modern fiction — where the reflector’s self-directed gaze does duty for the traditional character sketch — with precisely such a sketch as immediately, economically, and tellingly drawn by an authorial narrator. Here “the reliable narrator’s voice” clearly outdoes “the character’s subjective vision” (ibid.: 172): a superior means to the common end. No wonder the differential comparisons of the respective powers, devices, and functions so multiply and cover such ground. After all, Booth’s (1961a) whole argument ultimately stands or falls on the difference made by “the author’s voice” at the extreme of “telling,” as opposed to authorless “showing.” Likewise with the unrivaled operation of indisputable and humanly inaccessible “fact” in the control of “dramatic irony”: as when a quotation reveals from within the psyche how one character “misinterprets another’s unspoken thought or motives.” Evidently, an “omniscient” could alone give us an unquestionable insideview of a reflector’s mistaken, ironized insideview of some narrative agent (ibid.: 172 – 73). Inversely, still harping on the difference, Booth also argues in effect that it works both ways: that the so-called third person may elsewhere work in the reflector’s favor vis-a`-vis any narrator. This admission does not come easily to Booth, though, given his tendency both to favor the narrator, especially if authorial, and to assimilate the reflector even to a narrator that is other, weaker than authorial. Nor does he ever make it explicitly, in general terms (hence our qualified language above). Yet he does briefly acknowledge the uncongenial fact, or superior effect. Take the argument that opens with the inconsistent claim that “third-person ‘centers of consciousness’ . . . fill precisely the function of avowed narrators — though they can add intensities of their own” (ibid.: 153): evidently, a backreference to the categorical equation of the two mediators. But then, attributing to the “centers” further “intensities” undercuts their reduction to “precisely” narrator-like behavior, of course, in establishing a multifold operational disparity. And the immediate follow-up reinforces this sense of difference. (6) A Little (Unintended) Self-Correction


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What Booth proceeds to suggest are “the very real,” indeed “overwhelming advantages” distinctively enjoyed (or yielded) by the “third-person reflector” in all that concerns “vividness and naturalness” (ibid.). As with the advantages of the author’s voice, it all depends on the effects sought: for example, vivid illusion here, as against economy, authority, or situational irony there. But the operational variety and dynamism involved — so that advantage may even turn into disadvantage with the change of context — only underscores our point: the unwisdom of erasing a priori the line that divides the two mediators. 2.3. Do Narrators Act, Reliably or Otherwise? Narrating-I vs. Experiencing-I 2.3.1. “Speaks or Acts”? As indicated in our preliminary outline, the

narrator suffers at Booth’s hands yet another conflation, now between the narrator’s own selves: the narrating-I in the discourse — addressing some narratee, open to reliability judgments all along — and the experiencing-I in the narrated world, a character among others and, like them, a possible reflector. Booth never adopts (or reinvents) this distinction but keeps mixing up the two I’s involved. The trouble starts at the very heart of the matter, the famous definition of (un)reliability. Every scholar in the field will recognize it, as will quite a few essayists and reviewers in the media. It has even got into the OED : A narrator [is] 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 1961a: 158 – 59)

Apart from its wide familiarity, this definition has been cited, analyzed, interpreted dozens of times, by followers and by opponents of various persuasions.56 It is therefore astonishing that the incongruity of one phrase in it would seem to have gone unnoticed for so long, namely, “or acts” as an alternative to “speaks.” Does a narrator’s act(ion) exhibit his (un)reliability and invite judgment as such? Moreover, what act(ion) can a narrator perform as a narrator, other than “speaking”? Within a broader, semiotic framework, one might think of a narrative acted out in dumb show, reliably or otherwise, by a pantomime artist, for example. In Tristram Shandy, this is how Corporal 56. For example: Booth 1961b: 72; Stanzel 1984: 151; Edmiston 1987: 147; Fowler 1987: 177; Kozloff 1988: 112; Ricoeur 1988: 313n14; Diengott 1995: 45; Wall 1994: 18; Currie 1995a: 20; Preston 1997: 144, 147; A. Nu¨nning 1997b: 85; 1999a: 53; 2005a: 85; 2005b: 495; 2008: 29; Zerweck 2001: 151; Olson 2003: 96; Meindl 2004: 59; V. Nu¨nning 2004: 236; Ferenz 2005: 154; Pettersson 2005: 61; Phelan 2005: 33; Kindt and Mu¨ller 2006: 92; Rawlings 2007; Shen and Xu 2007: 50; Shen 2013: §4; Jedlicˇkova 2008: 281; Kindt 2008: 131, 133; Phillips 2009: 61; Anderson 2010: 82; Gerrig 2010: 30;Bode 2011: 207; Shang 2011: 135; Tammi 2005: 225; DonelsonSims 2013: 56; Kukkonen 2013: 208; Baah 2014; Otway 2015: 3.


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Trim reliably, as well as decorously, tells Uncle Toby about the accident of Tristram’s circumcision by the sash window: Trim, by the help of his forefinger, laid flat upon the table, and the edge of his hand striking across it at right angles, made a shift to tell his story so, that priests and virgins might have listened to it. (Sterne 1983 [1759 – 67]: 303)

The same semiotic medium also makes unreliable telling possible, as can be illustrated from the same novel regarding much the same piquant incident and subject to the same proprieties. This is how Mrs. Bridget describes to Corporal Trim the results of the injury that Captain Shandy suffered in the groin: Come — come — said Bridget — holding the palm of her left-hand parallel to the plane of the horizon, and sliding the fingers of the other over it, in a way which could not have been done, had there been the least wart or protuberance — ’Tis every syllable of it false, cried the Corporal, before she had half finished the sentence. (Ibid.: 532)

In denial, interestingly, the Corporal treats the dumb show as a piece of scurrilous language. Booth’s horizons, though, rarely stretch beyond literary art, where the narrator “speaks” in a verbal medium, audible or legible.57 And it is specifically this literary narrator whom Booth would have play the double role of speaker and actor. On our part, therefore, we addressees must then judge the narrator’s (say, Fielding’s) reliability by attentively “comparing” the manifestations of these two roles: “word to word and word to deed” (Booth 1961b: 76). But the latter matching of the narrator’s supposed products would, of course, remain unfeasible.58 Contrast “It was for him to act, for me to write” (Cervantes 1998 [1605]: 1170): so Cid Hamete Benengeli divides the labor with the hero, Don Quixote. How, then, does the alleged scenario that the narrator “acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms)” possibly determine the narrator’s (un)reliability, let alone define it? An impossible dependency relation either way, if you think about it. Instead, the narrating-I “speaks” to the narratee in the discourse, while the experiencing-I “acts” and usually “speech-acts” as well as reflects in the narrated world. So this dividing line cuts across their (auto)biographical continuity. 57. Thus the emphasis on “verbal narrative” as late as Phelan and Booth 2005b: 389, when wider (semiotic, crossmedium) definitions of narrative already proliferate, and against Aristotle’s medium-free idea of mimesis. See also note 95 below. 58. On a related question in psychology, “Detecting Deceit via Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior,” see the experiments reported in Vrij et al. 2000.


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For a short example, consider one of Kate Davidson’s (1985: 265) playful variations on E. M. Forster’s classic minimal narrative “The king died and then the queen died”: The King died. It all seemed perfect. But then the Queen began carrying on, guilt and sin, acting like it was all my fault, until I could stand it no longer. When they found her body the next day, everybody said she must have died of grief.

The experiencing-I having presumably killed the queen — his accomplice in regicide — the narrating self admits and explains the act. Homicidal, now as then, maybe, and unrepentant, but strictly reliable in his information, unlike “everybody” else at court. And reliable, moreover, though he in all likelihood did not “act in accordance with the norms” of his implied author, Kate Davidson. Furthermore, even ethical reliability is within the reach of this narrating-I. Were he repentant as well, along with an assortment of confessed murderers in story and history, the narrator might become reliable allaround in evoking the misdeeds (“acts”) of his experiencing self. Inversely, a narrator can have changed for the worse relative to his experiencing self — an innocent, for example — so that the autobiography turns unreliable. It now mistells the good deeds performed at the time. Hence the basic mutual independence, rather than alternativity (“or”), between present speech and the past action spoken about, as between narrating and experiencing (feeling, thinking, observing, no less than behaving) generally. That Booth has missed such a fundamental difference, and in the definition of (un)reliability at that — as well as in analytic and interpretive practice throughout — is hardly to be expected. But more astonishing still, though never queried or remarked upon, either, the mysterious phrase “or acts” has been silently yet pointedly echoed, time and again, with suggestive variations. In the standard Dictionary of Narratology, for example, Gerald Prince’s (2003 [1987]: 82, 102) relevant entries clearly allude to their source. They reminiscently define “Reliable narrator” as one “behaving in accordance with the implied author’s norms,” agent-like, and “Unreliable narrator” as one “whose norms and behavior” do not accord with those implied “norms,” counteragent-like. If anything, the replacement of “acts” by “[mis]behaving/ [mis]behavior” even heightens the false impression of the narrator’s character-likeness.59 Monika Fludernik’s Introduction to Narratology (2009) offers both a closer and a truncated paraphrase of the original definition’s “speaks or acts.” There, a narrator will allegedly “lose credibility” when “s/he violates valid social 59. This despite the fact that Prince’s Dictionary (2003 [1987]: 27) contains an entry on the two I’s involved.


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norms in word or deed” (2009: 27). The narrator turns into a (mis)doer, as it were, and suffers judgment accordingly. The experiencing agent, in short, assimilates to the narrating self, who must therefore bear the responsibility for “word or deed.” Also, Fludernik (2009: 86) in effect goes on to associate this norm-violating narrator “in word or deed” with other unsavory characters: the hypocrite, for example, defined by “contradictions between actual behavior [‘deed’] and expressed intentions.” So Fludernik’s narrator comes to assume a double role and a double load, both springing from the same fallacy. Even so, you may by now wonder at a couple of omissions, one limiting the “speaks or acts” formula and the other corresponding to it in a more perceptible form. For one thing, unlike Prince’s echoes as well as Booth’s original, the reference in Fludernik shrinks to the narrator as misdoer, with a resulting loss of “credibility,” and ignores the narrator as well-doer, to the opposite, favorable effect. Even more exclusionary, the violator of “social norms in word or deed” looms so large here that the norm-abiding counterpart remains out of sight altogether. Obviously and typically, the emphasis falls on the unreliable half of the problem or the spectrum, to the point of monopoly. Typically, we said, because Fludernik maintains the same halving emphasis elsewhere, as in the (circular) definition provided by the book’s glossary: “A first-person (homodiegetic) narrator who shows him/herself to be untrustworthy . . . is referred to as unreliable” (ibid.: 161). Typically, also, because this (half) focus, though undeclared, has virtually become the rule in the last decades, clean against Booth (1961a).60 For another thing, the given language here brings out a second common and curious omission. If the incongruous “deed” can generate a loss of “credibility” — though, revealingly, this nowhere manifests itself in the examples that ensue in Fludernik, any more than in that of the regicide above — why not the plausible “thought”? Plausible, because thought quoted in fiction is at least always representational (re-presentational), just like quoted utterance, and so always subject to reliability judgments, such as those we constantly make on a character that doubles as a reflector: from Emma Bovary or Molly Bloom to a local insideviewee.61 Indeed, experiencing-I’s are more than simply agents, as are other characters, with whom they interact. The term “experiencers” fits them all and helps to recall that, parallel to their agentive doing, they must all lead an inner life, from the most basic drives, goals, thoughts, and emotions (e.g., love, fear) 60. Further references to this halving will appear throughout. 61. For once, the “speaks or acts” howler does extend to a fallible reflector, “lying or acting unreliably in other ways” (Chatman 1990: 150). How the latter can happen within a mind is another question.


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upward. That inner life, in turn, represents (or re-presents) the storyworld from within, privately and subjectively, yet also transparently, in the shape of insideviews that lay bare (that is, quote, re-present) the experiencer’s mind and mental representations for our eyes only. So, taken literally, Cid Hamete Benengeli’s “It was for him to act, for me to write” even simplifies matters with regard to Don Quixote — as experiencer cum agent — a fortiori to a selfnarrator’s earlier avatars. Along with their plot agency, such experiencers also can and generally do play reflectors of a special (local, intermittent, often bare-bones) kind, as well as (e.g., dialogic) speakers and (e.g., epistolary) writers within the narrated world. And in either of these capacities — reflection or expression — they themselves lie open to reliability judgments, like all discoursers as against mere agents. In a panoramic novel like Tom Jones, where the omniscient narrator keeps dipping into the hidden life of numerous characters, all far from perfect and some pretty bad, we make hundreds of such judgments. Also, our illustration from the insideview of God in Genesis goes to show how poetic the glances at the mind can become. Yet these exemplars only highlight the rule: passing insideviews, with their aids to understanding and calls for (re)evaluating, are a staple of narrative. The main reason why they seldom figure in narratological work on (un)reliability and point of view generally has already been indicated in 2.2 above: their miniature scale, compared with what counts as proper, literary, self-valuable reflection, Jamesian or Joycean. Hence also their confinement to plot (as goals or motives or reactions), instead. For better or worse, though, this inner life (always quotable but sometimes unquoted, only inferable) is common to all agents qua experiencers and runs across all quoting forms: direct, indirect, free indirect, telescoped, and so on. What nevertheless keeps experiencing-I’s apart from other discoursers (including fellow characters in analogous roles) is that their discourse, private or public, reflectorial or conversational or otherwise communicational, gets quoted by their own later selves as narrating-I’s. Thus Pip quotes his former self throughout and, like most fictional self-judges, to a self-distancing or ironic or comic effect as a rule. Having never seen “my father or my mother,” Pip recalls, my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the . . . inscription, Also Georgiana Wife of the Above, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. (Dickens 1965 [1861]: 35)

In semiotic terms, the child “unreasonably” reads “the letters” on the tombstones, not as letters, that is, arbitrary symbols of his parents, but as miniature


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iconic likenesses of them. By a similar fanciful miscoding, “I read ‘Wife of the Above’ as a complimentary reference to my father’s exaltation to a better world” (ibid.: 73). Decoded by little Pip, “the Above” changes from an anaphoric backreference to the father mentioned in the preceding, “higher up” text to a noun that locates its paternal referent in a higher world than this one, up there in heaven. Here and there, Pip nevertheless agrees with his younger self. Thus his supportive comment on the boy’s uncanny vision of Miss Havisham hanging by her neck: “I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards” (ibid.: 93 – 94), presumably to this day, narration time. Barry Lyndon represents the opposite and much less common extreme: the imbalance of the narrator’s self-approval and self-disapproval tilts on the former side. In retrospect, Barry hardly ever finds fault with anything about his egregious past: self, deeds, words, thoughts, evaluations, vis-a`-vis the rest of the world. Of course, we readers judge the narrators in turn, not least by their own reliability judgments, when we newly evaluate the discourse of their experiencing selves from our vantage point. This is largely how Pip shows himself a reliable, and Barry Lyndon an unreliable, autobiographer. As with all speakers, then, the reliability of self-narrators cannot be defined, or determined, by reference to their action outside the discourse. On the contrary, by such action they (as well as we integrators) evaluate other characters, beginning with their former selves as agents. And by the correspondence of action to speech, the self-narrators (along with us interpreters again) judge the reliability of others, whose accounts (e.g., Joe’s, Magwitch’s, Pumblechook’s) are thereby found sincere or hypocritical, practicing or belying what they now preach, for example. This specifically includes the correspondence of the action to the discourse agency (narrating, thinking, mediating, reading, projecting, assessing) of their former, experiencing selves, as with Pip and Barry. Yet the misdirection inspired by Booth still persists, as just illustrated, even among reputable theorists. Moreover, the erroneous “speaks or acts” also reappears as a telltale clash between different speakers and/or agents, for example, or a giveaway of unreliability in the form of “speaks vs. acts.” Greta Olson (2003: 94) thus refers to “the ironic distance” between “the views, actions, and voice of the unreliable narrator and those of the implied author.” (Here, for good measure, the latter assumes agency in turn, as well as voicedness: a remarkable achievement for a disembodied party.) Or observe how Ansgar Nu¨nning (1999b: 64), having quoted the Boothian definition at issue and declared it “canonical,” proceeds to assert that “unreliable narrators” (typically ignoring in turn the reliable variety) are marked by “internal contradictions” or “dis-


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crepancies” arising “between utterances and actions.”62 Again, what actions other than utterances, or even what single nonverbal acts, does the narrator perform qua narrator? None, as a rule, so the “actions” to which Nu¨nning points (like those invoked by Booth, Prince, Fludernik) must come from some agent in the storyworld, as must, presumably, the “utterances” that contradict those actions. The “utterances” involved cannot be the narrator’s, either — part of the given narrative discourse — because if they were, how could their words run, to inconsistent effect, against another’s deeds? They could never, that is, “internally contradict” the “actions” of a different person in the storyworld, not even those carried out by the narrator’s earlier, acting self. For internal contradiction, the utterer must be the same person as the agent: for example, a liar’s (or a hypocrite’s) public discourse as against private dealings. And only a character (Tartuffe, Becky Sharp) can perform both roles. Narrating liars and hypocrites, along with their fellow mediators, will give themselves away otherwise than by such double speak/act roleplaying: in and through their discourse after the fact alone, including clashes within it. Hence the unequivocal implications for how this last quote, from Nu¨nning, brings together utterances, actions, and unreliable narrators. Neither of the contradictory elements paired there, the linguistic or the extralinguistic, is associated with the narrator; nor therefore is the unreliability, if any, that their clash may generate. Carried to its logical conclusion, then, Nu¨nning’s statement hardly makes any sense, and as a result of the same fallacy: narrating voices get mixed up with experiencing agents, their own former I’s included. 2.3.2. Other Variations on the Enacted Narrator: A Brief Comparison of Oddities The oddity of Booth et al.’s position here (“or acts”) will assume

further sharpness and significance if compared with a similar-looking remark made by Chatman (1993: 190) on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”: Because there is something terribly wrong with the “I”-narrator-protagonist, we suspect that there might be something wrong with the story he tells. It would be surprising if his account of the events were more reliable than his deeds.

Chatman likewise fuses the two I’s, even in name, into a single “ ‘I’-narratorprotagonist,” then speaks of the narrator-protagonist’s “deeds” (here, murder) as “reliable,” or unreliable, and in this repeats the incongruity. The adjective just doesn’t fit the noun. 62. He also cites William Riggan (1981: 36) on “a gaping discrepancy between the teller’s conduct and the moral views he propounds.” Further analogues could be multiplied, and some will appear in what follows.


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But Chatman misspeaks, it would appear, while actually trying to advance a different argument. Thereby, if we put it in general terms, the reader infers from the “deeds” themselves, on their own, the (un)reliability of the doer’s later “account of the events.” Having committed a crime — as did Defoe’s Moll Flanders or Margaret Atwood’s Grace Marks — “it would be surprising” if she told the truth about herself, her victim, and the storyworld at large. Like the doing, like the telling, in brief. Or so, for better or worse, would Chatman in effect have you reason.63 Like the simple confusion of narrator and experiencer, this reasoning between them has diverse parallels elsewhere. For comic relief, here is one that reduces it ad absurdum. In a review of Patrick McGrath’s novel Dr. Haggard’s Disease, Joseph Coates (1993) declares the eponymous narrator unreliable by quasi-logical argument from (experiential) major to (narrational) minor: “The doctor, a romantic schlemiel par excellence, can’t really be trusted even in his own racket, much less in storytelling. (He botches an appendectomy so badly that he sews the finger of his rubber glove to the wound, leading to abdominal swelling that earns the poor patient the nurses’ soubriquet ‘Dr. Haggard’s pregnant man.’).” QED. A brief comparison, in our own terms, would now help. This inference pattern from deed to word — based on their metonymic contiguity, their temporal as well as personal continuity, their likeness in origin and behavior type — is evidently different from Booth’s simple equation of past deed and present word as measures of (un)reliability. Further, in contrast to that erroneous equation, this inference pattern from (the experiencer’s) deed to (the narrator’s) word is well motivated, because grounded in the logic of reality. This grounding makes it both plausible and attractive, in the context of reliability judgment, among others, as with Moll above. Small wonder this pattern is therefore also very widely applied in life and art, since inference from precedent or from the past at large constitutes a staple of reasoning about the world, for good or for ill. Besides, there lurks a hidden alternative, never presented as such, in Chatman’s statement. Thereby, we supposedly infer, not from the past “deeds” (e.g., Moll’s crimes), but from the ex-doer (Moll having been a criminal) to the (un)reliability of “the account of events.” Further, by the standards of reasoning and sheer humanity alike, this hidden alternative is more dangerous in its assumptions and results than Chatman’s overt inference pattern. Give a dog a bad name and bury him, or her. Nor does it help 63. At least, if you disregard for the purpose his unreasonable mixtures, jumps, and additions. One, already mentioned, is Chatman’s reference to “deeds” as themselves (un)reliable — like, perhaps even following, Booth — rather than indicators or triggers of (un)reliability judgment by metonymy. For a more careful formulation, see Phelan 1996: 111.


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that Chatman occasionally forgets or reverses his own procedure, as when he denies the unreliability of Humbert the “child molester” (1993: 191). But all these complications do not affect the difference, in the point intended and its potential usefulness, vis-a`-vis Booth’s sheer mix-up of selves, with their respective forms of behavior. Per Krogh Hansen (2007) does not just fall into the same error of leaving the reliability judgment ambiguous (or shuttling) between the two distinct I’s. He even makes a theoretical point of associating unreliability with the experiencing self.64 Based on the opinion that “concepts like ‘unreliable,’ ‘untrustworthy,’ and ‘fallible’ all come from our intercourse with human beings, not texts” (Olson 2003: 99), he argues that “it is therefore perhaps obvious to consider them under the realm of narrative ‘existents’; that is, as a matter in the story instead of the discourse” (Hansen 2007: 229). Perhaps obvious? Definitely fallacious would be more like it.65 Hansen goes wrong in the very premise, because even if the term “unreliable” and its synonyms “come from our intercourse with human beings,” this intercourse itself is discoursive or specifically textual (conversational, epistolary, electronic). So the opposition of human “intercourse” to “texts” breaks down, and with it the entire supposed conclusion (“it is therefore . . . ”). The claim that “unreliable” applies only to “narrative existents” (the analogues of “human beings”), and to the storyworld where they live, move, and act (as against the discourse telling about it, or them), simply does not follow. In both theory and practice, moreover, this illogical conclusion is the exact reverse of the truth: (un)reliability entails a discourse(r), narrative or otherwise, self-communing (informant, reflector, experiencer) and/ or audience-directed (narrator), whose representations of the storyworld (existents certainly included) we judge by some norm (e.g., moral, ontic, epistemic). As though this multiple error about the object of study were not enough, Hansen (ibid.) proceeds to compound it by reversing in turn the focus of earlier scholarship. Not only does he misdescribe some works on unreliable narration (e.g., Olson 2003) as “narrator-character studies.”66 Against the entire discourse-oriented narratological record since 1961, and even against his own bibliography, Hansen also goes so far as to claim that this characterboundness (i.e., orientation to the story’s experiencing-I) “has made discourse 64. Nielsen 2004: 146 goes to the other extreme in “cutting the existential link between character and narrator.” 65. And presumably unwelcome to Olson herself. 66. The lapses into the experiencing-I that we diagnosed above would therefore probably be regarded by him as further manifestations of such a focus on “character.”


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narratologists ignore the concept” of unreliability. There is apparently no limit to the surprises encountered on this front. Finally, some betray this confusion on a scale even wider than (un)reliability itself. Thus Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 90): “I define the narrator minimally, as the agent which at the very least narrates or engages in some activity serving the needs of narration.” Here the incongruous “speaks or acts” allegedly grows all-inclusive and definitional of the entire limitless category of “narrator.” But let’s first get out of the way another incongruity, one even more disabling, yet unrelated to our immediate concern with the narrating/ experiencing selves and the failure to keep them distinct. In a word, then, both parts of Rimmon-Kenan’s definition turn out useless, because circular: first “narrator . . . narrates,” then “narrator . . . narration.”67 The second tautology, though, also imports Booth’s mysterious “or acts” addendum and generalizes it even beyond the context of (un)reliability, to narratorhood at large. But, again, what nonlinguistic (or otherwise nonsemiotic) “activity” could possibly define “narrator”? Clearing one’s throat? Acquiring a word processor? Taking stimulants to keep going? And how would such an activity count as reliable, or turn unreliable, or itself give away the narrator who “engages in” it as an aid to narration? Again, no reasonable answer is imaginable concerning the umbrella term of narratorhood, either. 2.3.3. An Example from Proust Beyond the famous definition of (un)reliability itself, the mixture of selves lurking in “speaks or acts” runs through a variety of particular analyses in Booth and elsewhere. For example, he claims that Proust’s great “quest novel,” Remembrance of Things Past,

moves toward unequivocal illumination. The narrator, Marcel, involves the reader in his own confusions until, at the end of the book, he finally can speak with full reliability for the values on which it is based. Both narrator and reader constantly discover truths that Marcel Proust has known all along. In the end Marcel discovers the ultimate truth about art and life, the truth about memory and art as ways out of the world of time. It is this discovery that leads him, in fact, to write the book his reader has just read. (Booth 1961a: 290)

In “the narrator, Marcel,” which referent (or whose perspective) suffers from “confusions”? The narrator as such, in self-narration after the event? Marcel as agent, experiencer, learner at the time? Both? And if both, then regarding the same points, or to the same extent? The choice among these alternatives evidently makes a great, even strategic difference throughout the novel. Like67. See note 11 above.


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wise with the reader’s involvement “in his own confusions”: to which of these two Marcels does “his own” refer? The trouble is that Booth again fails to distinguish the two selves at issue, now in a specific context. So the referring expressions, together or apart, are used by him indiscriminately, and the referents therefore fall not so much into ambiguity as into a blur or else into a mistaken identity. Thus the “confusions” within the storyworld allegedly overtake the narrator as well as or along with the experiencing “Marcel,” since only “at the end of the book” can “he finally speak with full authority” for its “values.” This “he” in Booth certainly (and falsely) refers, or co-refers, to the narrator; and not only on account of “speak” but also of the immediate sequel. En route to the end, it adds, “Both narrator and reader constantly discover truths that Marcel Proust has known all along.” Or, more explicitly still, the other way round: “ We must be misled and confused, like the narrator, until the final revelation” (ibid.: 292).68 In fact, however, the one (“he”) who discovers those truths in the reader’s company, and remains confused prior to their discovery, is Marcel as character and experiencing-I alone. By contrast, the narrating-I “has known all along,” perhaps not the whole truth, reserved for Marcel Proust’s silent implied author, but a large part of it: if only because he narrates in retrospect the long ordeal of discovery undergone by his former, experiencing self.69 This also invalidates the claim that Proust’s novel tells “the story of how Marcel becomes a reliable narrator” (ibid.). It is not that the character, far less the narrator, undergoes a process of transformation. He does not develop progressively in the story before us into (or toward) reliability, the way Pip does in the second half of Great Expectations, or the way Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet or even Emma Woodhouse evolve as reflectors-cumheroines. Instead, having seen the light at the end of the novel’s action, Marcel belatedly assumes whatever (un)reliability we find or have found in the narrating-I from the opening of the novel onward. It is indeed from such a late vantage point, with the resulting hindsight wisdom, that the narrator begins and continues “to write the book his reader has just read.”70 As such, moreover, if he is responsible for the reader’s 68. Compare Olson 2003: 94: “Detective stories [often] feature narrators . . . who do not and cannot provide their readers with vital pieces of the puzzle until they themselves have found them out, typically towards the end of the narrative.” 69. The mistake committed here recalls the misstatement that nobody but an omniscient narrator can know how the story turned out. See section 2.1.1 above. 70. Assuming, for now, that this is indeed the book he writes. Joshua Landy (2004) impressively argues otherwise, but the question needn’t detain us.


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frequent puzzlement on the way, it is not so much because he himself does not know as because he (like Proust his creator behind him) does not choose to tell ahead of time. Instead, he adheres on the whole to the limited perspective and the slow order of discovery undergone by his younger, experiencing, evolving self.71 2.3.4. Impossible Ontology: The Fictional Mediator Accompanied or Abandoned by the Author A related confusion arises from an odd manner of

speaking favored by Booth. The oddity incurs another ontological mix — or more than one — but now driven to the limit of impossibility. For example, “Perhaps the most important effect of traveling with a narrator who is unaccompanied by a helpful author [as commentator] is that of decreasing emotional distance” (ibid.: 274). Taken literally, this formulation entails the absurdity that both the reader (as the so-called narrator’s fellow traveler) and the author (as the narrator’s possible companion) also belong, like the narrator, to the field of imagined existence and experience, the storyworld. Just innocent metaphors, even dead, hence imperceptible too? Not so, it turns out, and the imperceptibility only aggravates matters in the cited, widely recurrent example and analogous ones, because it conceals (normalizes, naturalizes) the tangle of errors that lurk there. Why else haven’t they been spotted over the decades, not even the inconceivable ontology? First, Booth picks the wrong mediator “unaccompanied by a helpful author” for us to travel with. Actually, it’s not “a narrator” (e.g., Jane Eyre or “Fielding,” the originator of the co-traveling reader metaphor and its chief exemplar here [ibid.: 215 – 18]) but a reflector, like Catherine Anne Porter’s Miranda in the immediate sequel. Indeed, this very paragraph goes on to replace “narrator” with “central” or “reflected intelligence” (ibid.; also ibid.: 282, in reference to Gregor Samsa). Even so, of course, numberless instances are at stake — given the ubiquity of local and intermittent reflecting — as well as the strategic novelty of modern psycho-fiction. Second and more directly relevant to the point at issue: a central intelligence means in turn an experiencing subject, and one that (like Strether in Paris) reflects other experiencing characters — again, as opposed to a narrating-I. Indeed, among the shifting indiscriminate usages multiplied here, 71. For a complementary large-scale example, see Booth 1961a: 347 – 54 on James’s story “The Liar.” Arguing that the center of interest resides in “Lyons-as-Liar,” not in “Capadose-asLiar,” Booth dwells on Lyons the painter as a vicious lying agent — incomparably worse than the harmless fantasist, Capadose, the victim of his machinations — rather than on Lyons the reflector, who mediates the events as best he can, the way he (mis)perceives them. On the adherence to the reflector’s or experiencing-I’s “order of discovery,” see Sternberg 1978: 129 – 58 on Jane Austen; ibid.: 178 – 82, 273 – 75 on the detective story; and ibid.: 282 – 303 on Henry James, with a detailed illustration from The Ambassadors in Sternberg 1971: 299 – 431.


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Booth (ibid.) refers to the figure of the experiencer as such by its plainest name, “hero or heroine.” All this clinches the difference from the reader traveling with or the author accompanying “a narrator” and redoubles the difference from an authorial narrator like Fielding’s, who, essentially existing outside the imagined world, is beyond experiencing in this sense. Third, the metaphor of shared movement leads (or lures) Booth not only to conflate different narrative existents and discrete spheres of existence but also to literalize that impossible tangle and to endow it with an affective role or impact. For instance, an experiencer “unaccompanied by a helpful author” — as if these two might keep or part company — will produce on us the effect of “decreasing emotional distance.” How come? Because the reflector or character whose mind is on view will then be left lonely, “an isolated, unaided consciousness, without the support that a reliable narrator or observer would lend” (ibid.): a mind doomed, as it were, to solitary confinement, suffering, even death, once abandoned by the author. For good measure, apparently, Booth (ibid.: 275) adds that, the authorial narrator having absconded, no “lover” must accompany the hero(ine), either, as if all three coexisted in the same world and might equally undergo or share (or, to be sure, avoid) a harsh experience there. In face of such total isolation, our distance from the experiencing subject allegedly decreases, while fellow feeling increases to match. All this sounds like an incredible argument.72 Yet Booth keeps repeating it with variations,73 concerning such diverse “isolated sufferers” as Porter’s Miranda, Hale in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Marcher in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” Gregor in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (ibid.: 274 – 82). And the supposed decrease in distance from them, a fortiori ironic distance, correlates by implication with an increase in their reliability: our fellow feeling presumably affects judgment. Finally, even on such impossible premises — experience shared or attended by an authorial narrator, or sharable but actually avoided, across an ontic gulf — this claim has no general validity. The isolated mind needn’t be that of a sufferer. Among a diversity of other choices, the narrative can equally single out an ordinary mind on an ordinary day, privileged by Virginia Woolf in her “Modern Fiction” manifesto. It can also establish a comic or heroic solitary as reflector, like the eponymous focus of James’s “Pandora” and Julius Caesar in Thornton Wilder’s Ides of March, respectively. The isolated mind can even 72. Such transworld grouping, traveling, abandonment, involves an ontic jump that is profitably comparable with metalepsis. 73. And not Booth alone. E.g., in Robinson Crusoe, the eponymous hero must narrate his own story, because “an omniscient observer would ipso facto have compromised Crusoe’s solitude” (Goldknopf 1972: 53 – 54).


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reverse from the patient to the agent of the suffering. It will then belong to, say, a victimizer like The Sound and the Fury’s Jason Compson. In which case a sustained insideview will increase, not decrease, emotional distance, regardless of authorial “accompaniment.” If anything, as Booth (ibid.: 306 – 7) himself insists elsewhere, any such explicit reliable rhetoric is dispensable, and would be an insult, when we readers view from within the workings of this monstrous psyche. Hence Faulkner’s choice to present them in direct interior monologue: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say . . . ” 2.4. Making Bricks without Straw: How to Do Things with an Unworkable Formula?

According to Phillips (2009: 61), Booth has established “a model for the detection of unreliable narration.” Among all the things involved, this is the one that he has most certainly failed to do. In fact, the worst thing about Booth’s conception of (un)reliability is its lack of operational force. Reconsider his formal definition: 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. (1961a: 158 – 59)

At its uttermost extreme, an unoperational statement is virtually meaningless, as are the circular definitions that we have illustrated at the outset. Recall, for example, “A narrator may be more or less reliable; in other words, (parts of ) his account may be more or less worthy of trust in terms of the narrative itself” (Prince 1982: 18). Falling short of this extreme, Booth’s above definition rather belongs to the second-worst case.74 Like metaphysical statements, it has meaning of sorts: “X accords or fails to accord with Y” sounds like an intelligible proposition. But this formula of Booth’s has no traceable refer74. Herman and Vervaeck 2011: 1 describe Booth’s concept of implied author as “circular.” But this mixes up constructedness with circularity, or being the result of processing with the tautology of the product. By the same illogic, moreover, every (re)constructed pattern (including the most basic one, the fabula) would turn circular, and the criticism would become pointless as well. Still more and more obviously unreasonable is their claim that “all arguments in defense of the implied author are perfectly circular” (ibid.: 3). Contrast, for example, the arguments from the purposiveness of discourse or from intentionality. Debatable, yes; tautological, no. Booth’s entire definition does become circular, though, in Nu¨nning’s (2005b) rephrasing, whereby the reliable/unreliable contrast hinges on “the degree and kind of distance that separates the values, tastes, and moral judgments of a given narrator from the norms of the implied author.” For Booth (1961a: 158), (un)reliability is a matter of “distance” anyway, and Nu¨nning fails to specify (1) the meaning of “distance” generally; (2) its particular application to (un)reliability; (3) “the degree and kind” that separate the reliable from the unreliable narrator. The resulting compounded tautology perhaps explains why it is not true that “the majority of critics who have followed in Booth’s footsteps” have appealed to “distance” (Nu¨nning 2005b). See below.


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ence, hence no purchase on the world — or here the discourse world — no identifying power, and no cutting edge: no teeth, as they say. In plain language, the definition as given is inapplicable to narrative discourse, because its key terms and relations cannot be mapped on or matched with that discourse, so as to establish who’s who and what’s what in it. How to get at “the implied author,” at “the implied author’s norms,” and at the narrator’s concord or discord with both? In short, how to do the things supposed to be done with these definitional words in order to determine (un)reliable narration, let alone reflection, altogether forgotten here? One looks in vain for an answer, or so much as a clue. It is important to understand that this problem goes incomparably deeper than the standard complaint, from both doctrinal opponents and more friendly quoters: that the implied author and norms are difficult to reconstruct. But one can live with difficulty. The real trouble is that Booth leaves us without any idea of how to go about reconstructing, however problematically or debatably, this author and normative scheme and their relation to the narrator (or any other mediator). Nor do we gain such an idea when, over forty years later, Phelan and Booth offer a couple of paraphrases or variants: A reliable narrator is one whose reports and judgments are endorsed by the implied author, and an unreliable narrator is one whose reports and judgments are not endorsed. (Phelan and Booth 2005a: 371; also Phelan 1996: 76) Booth [draws a] distinction between reliable and unreliable narrators, that is, between narrators whose telling conforms with the telling the implied author would do and those whose telling deviates from what the implied author would do. (Phelan and Booth 2005b: 390; also Phelan 2005: 49)

Both of these may look like nice and faithful paraphrases of the original definition. In the first, the variable of the narrator’s (lack of ) accord with the implied author’s normative scheme is replaced by the author’s (lack of ) endorsement of the narrator’s “reports and judgments”; in the second, this (lack of) accord with the implied author’s norms changes to one with the implied author’s hypothetical telling. But a closer look will reveal that these are definitely not faithful paraphrases; nor — what far outranks it in importance — are they any more operational than the original (Booth 1961a) definition. Quite the contrary, in fact. Thus, if we have to judge between inadequacies, “accord” (present or absent) is at least a more specific relation than endorsement (ditto). It is even harder to imagine what the operational correlates of a narrator


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“endorsed . . . not endorsed” might be, given the silent implied author in a work of fiction. Worse still fares the question, How to get at “the telling the implied author would do,” if he could, so as to determine whether (and where, and wherefore) the narrator’s actual telling “conforms” with it? On top of everything (complete with 2.1 – 2.3) that bedevils the original formula, two insurmountable obstacles stand in the way. For one thing, the standard of conformity (accord) or otherwise with the author’s hypothetical telling proves counterproductive. Thus, Booth (ibid.: 176) deems Nick Carraway a reliable narrator. But the disembodied implied author of The Great Gatsby never “would” or could tell the story himself in the “dramatized,” personal manner of Nick. So Nick must be unreliable by the standard of nonconformity with the ideal performance, regardless. So must be, a priori, all other “dramatized” narrators, including those mentioned and authorized by Booth, Phelan, you, or ourselves. A univocal, foolproof, time-saving criterion, doubtless, but not many will adopt it on consideration.75 Further, the very idea of an implied author’s hypothetical version is misconceived, simply because not thought through. There cannot possibly be any such thing as an authorial narratable version, or better or best version, not even in theory. For an implied author is implied by, and reconstructed from, a given narrative discourse in its fullest specificity: these words (or images, or signs at large) representing these events in this order through this narration and further mediation. Associating an implied author with a discourse alternative to the implying one — let alone as its narrator — is therefore an absurdity. Concerning the questions raised by these two paraphrases, then, one must conclude that the answers are again both evidently indispensable and hopelessly elusive. If anything, these two late substitutes, of 2005, remain even more unmappable on the narrative discourse than is the original formula: still less amenable to implementation. Other definitional changes are likewise for the worse. Thus, the following substitute phrasing newly radicalizes vacuity: “If the implied author does share the narrator’s values, then the latter is reliable,” and if not, unreliable (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 104; or Phelan 1996: 110; or Culler 1997: 98). It only shifts from the Phelan and Booth (2005a, 2005b) 75. This authorial if-telling, with its automatism and boomerang effect, radically differs from the familiar and well-motivated comparison of the given discourse (Nick’s, say), with an alternative narratorial version. For example, “Is The Great Gatsby the same novel it would have been if instead of the deeply involved Nick, it were narrated by an omniscient narrator?” (Booth 1961a: 346). This hypothetical scenario (“if . . . ”) rests on the master principle of narrative theory, already expressed in James’s maxim that there are five million ways of telling a story and conceptualized in some historic oppositions: Aristotle’s “whole/plot” or the Russian Formalist “fabula/sjuzhet” (Sternberg 1978: 8ff.; 1992; 2006; on yet another hypothetical reasoning in narrative and its analysis, see Sternberg 2008 on If-Plots).


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standard of (and judgment by) conformity, or hypothetical perfection, to that of commonality. For a different kind of change, look at the variation in Prince (2003 [1987]: 102): an “unreliable narrator” is one “whose values (tastes, judgments, moral sense) diverge from those of the implied author.” Now “diverge” equals the original “not in accord,” more or less. But the latter’s explicit negative form highlights that the substitution of “diverge,” without any equivalent to “accord,” covers only the negative pole or half of the phenomenon, unreliable narration. The shift to “diverge” accordingly makes another kind of operational difference for the worse. So does the replacement of “not to accord” with “deviate,” favored by Phelan (2005: e.g., 49 – 50), for instance, to the neglect of reliability in practice as well.76 In either case — divergence or deviance — the reduction to a half, and the negative half, follows the dominant trend, which has long established itself as the mainstream, regardless of the definition and the terminology assigned to the privileged, unreliable focus of interest. But here it also follows from the very choice of the substitute term. However, over the decades since 1961, the missing operational answer (or what passes for it) has been frequently and variously read into the words of Booth’s definition: through unwitting projection, as a rule, of what is not there to be read. Thus, we said that Booth’s (1961a) definition has “meaning of sorts,” though without identifiable reference. Nu¨nning (1997a: 84), however, speaks instead of a very different thing — more pragmatic than semantic — when he refers to the “meaning effect that Wayne C. Booth christened ‘the unreliable narrator.’ ” An effect might indeed deliver the goods, certainly in the tradition of Aristotle, who defines art by the pleasure it generates and tragedy by its more specific impact, catharsis. But nothing like an effect, semantic or otherwise, manifests itself in Booth’s definition, least of all the one that Nu¨nning (ibid.: 88, 2005a: 91) has in mind and claims that “most readers intuitively recognize.” Thereby, “the given effect of what is called unreliable narration consists of directing the reader’s attention from the level of the story to the speaker and of foregrounding the peculiarities of the narrator’s psychology.”77 Whatever the merit of this supposed effect — hardly distinctive enough for the purpose — it does not come from the definition here.78 76. And a conspicuously inconsistent neglect at that. How to reconcile this narrowing down to “deviant” unreliability with the inclusive emphasis on (un)reliability in Phelan and Booth (2005a: 371, 2005b: 390) above, as well as in Booth (1961a: 158 – 59)? Regarding “deviant” itself, see also note 15 above on Booth 1983[1961]: 431. 77. Nu¨nning keeps returning to these alleged effects: e.g., 1999a: 59, 65; 2005b: 496. 78. Funnily, Nu¨nning attributes much the same shortfall to others, in particular to Chatman on Booth’s model of unreliability. Nu¨nning (e.g., 2008: 37 – 38) repeatedly, and rightly, charges him with failing to say (or, with heavy irony, to “enlighten the uninitiated”) “how the narrator’s


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The theoretical record, however, shows plenty of other groundless and usually unsuccessful attempts at rendering the definition applicable to the discourse givens before us. Olson (2003), for example, unknowingly and miscellaneously “operationalizes” Booth’s approach to unreliability by projecting onto it an assortment of markers or measures that are in fact lacking, unsuitable or even downright misplaced there. One of them relates again to an effect. Thus, Booth allegedly explicates “unreliable narration as a function of irony” (ibid.: 93, 94; also Shang 2011: 136; Nu¨nning and Shcwanecke 2015: 190). To elucidate one equivocal and debated term by reference to another does not help much; but, for what it’s worth, this pair actually holds the opposite relation, in Booth as elsewhere. For instance, a narrator’s unreliability through ignorance (e.g., Dowell’s in The Good Soldier) produces the invidious discrepancy in awareness known as situational irony; so irony, of a certain kind at least, proves to be an effect (“function”) of unreliable narration, not vice versa. Then, on the same page, you encounter another claim, whereby Booth’s model of such narrating has “a tripartite structure,” as follows: “(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)” (Olson 2003). An operational model, structure, definition? Only in appearance, and even so, alien to Booth again, now in several regards. First and foremost, he would judge unacceptable the anchorage of the entire procedure in “a reader,” and one working out of authorial control and free of constraint at that. Indeed, Olson (ibid.) must have forgotten that she herself already attributed to Booth “a text-immanent model of narrator unreliability.”79 And the two models, the reader- as against the text-oriented, or the inferential (if not purely subjective) vs. the objectivist, are, of course, incompatible. Olson, though, shifts or vacillates between them.80 In fact, she retrojects into Booth (1961a) the reader-orientation of the alternative, constructivist approach to (un)reliability in Yacobi (1981), probably as mediated by and mixed with Nu¨nning (1999b). Nor is Olson the first, or the last, retrojector of this uncongenial vantage point and activity — displacing the unreliability is apprehended in the reading process . . . how the hand of the omnipresent implied author behind the narrator’s back may in fact be discerned,” and how this author’s “secret communication with the implied reader” proceeds. All true, but also applicable nearer to home. 79. See also Olson 2003: 96, by appeal to Nu¨nning as well. “Author-oriented” would be far closer to the truth, but would merely substitute another contradiction here vis-a`-vis “a reader who . . . ” 80. As do other analysts: see especially section 4 below.


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author’s — or Booth the only victim of such retrojection (or unappreciative beneficiary, depending on where you stand). But suppose we project the reader into Booth’s original definition, even so. Would it help? Hardly, because how would this imported reader tell whether or not the narrator “speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms)”? Take an example from Booth’s own practice. “How do we know that it is Yeats [who says ‘That is no country for old men’] and not some character as remote from him as Caliban is remote from Browning . . . ? We infer it as the dramatized statement unfolds” (1961a: 162). So, how do we know? We infer it. But how we infer it remains a mystery in turn.81 Alternatively, by reference to the “tripartite structure” that Olson (2003) wishes on Booth: how would the “(1) reader . . . [recognize] a dichotomy between (2) the personalized narrator’s perceptions and expressions and (3) those of the implied author”? Apart from the usual absence of clues, aids, ways to such readerly recognition, part (3) compounds it with an impossibility. “The implied author,” silent, mediated, disembodied, has no “perceptions and expressions” to be contrasted with “the personalized narrator’s.” And the impersonal narrator is besides left out of (2), or else he would redouble the impossibility of “a dichotomy”: he has no “perceptions,” either, and presumably counts as reliable, like the implied author. So nothing remains for the “reader” to “recognize.” In a more complex example, look at what happens, or doesn’t happen, when Gregory Currie (1995a: 20, 1995b: 262 – 63) approvingly rephrases Booth’s defining formula in terms of our perception: “On this model, we perceive narrative unreliability when we perceive a disparity between the (determining [or ‘authoritative’]) intentions of the implied author concerning what is true in the story and the (reporting) intentions of the narrator con81. As nothing could be less specific than “ We infer it,” any added detail must count as an improvement. So this follow-up by a follower is a little better — more specific — though still well short of the mark: the authorial “image,” or second self, “can be inferred from the particular choices manifested in the text” (Rabinowitz 1995: 383). Elsewhere, the same follower belittles the task, as though such a vague formula or its like could meet the operational challenge. “After all, the theoretical . . . hazards in figuring out what an author is ‘saying about the world’ are not really so great” (Rabinowitz 1981: 409): clean against the evidence presented here, as well as the endless debates on the matter. Comparatively, moreover, Rabinowitz pronounces it easier to infer than “to specify how” novels “relate to the views of their readers.” The latter “task is, in fact, far more troublesome than determining the views of an author, perhaps because critics have devoted less attention to it” (ibid.). Again, the attention devoted to the author hasn’t yielded much by way of “determining the views”; nor does that shifted to the reader in what ensues, despite a few interesting suggestions made there. These few generalities hardly amount to a modus operandi even in theory, much less in practice. Armed with them, one cannot begin to specify the relation between a narrative and the values, opinions, premises of its audience.


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cerning what she would have the reader believe occurred.” Note first the extent to which Currie makes things (especially the task of definition) easier for himself in and through this paraphrase: it involves no fewer than three limitations of scope, two of them silent and all of them prevalent. This threefold not only subsumes but also outreaches the narrowings of (un)reliability’s range that have emerged above, and the cost mounts accordingly. With each of the three shrinkages, the operational value of the proposed “model” diminishes. The most common among those typical shrinkages, one we already encountered (in Culler 1997; Nu¨nning 1997a; Olson 2003; Phelan 2005; Fludernik 2009) and virtually omnipresent over the last decades, requires no particular emphasis by now, except in its operational aspect. Unsurprisingly, it consists in narrowing the object of definition and of analysis in general from (un)reliability, that is, the reliable/unreliable polarity or spectrum, to unreliability alone. This goes even further than halving the task, because it entails a focus on the easier half. Currie’s “disparity,” allegedly the mark of the unreliable case, lends itself more readily to perception than would the (unmentioned) parity between the reliable narrator and the implied author. Hence, to repeat, the popularity of deviationist approaches to narrative at large and their impotence in face of the nondeviant, which they accordingly try to bury in some way: by ignoring, depreciating, even illegitimating it (Sternberg 1992: esp. 469 – 70, 493 – 99; 2006: 219 – 22; 2007: 714 – 16). Currie opts for a second line of least resistance in narrowing the range to the teller that is most distinguishable from the implied author. “I shall speak only of intradiegetic narrators,” as he puts is, “merely for the sake of simplicity” (Currie 1995a: 20). What with the “merely” thrown in, this looks more like an excuse for a second convenient halving of the object to be covered than like a genuine methodological reason offered by a philosopher intent on economy of presentation. But the excuse does nonetheless invoke the truth, in that the reduction to the “intradiegetic” half again obviously simplifies the task. As Currie (ibid.) proceeds to admit in effect, such narrators “are more commonly the source of narrative unreliability, and their role in opposition to the implied author is easier to conceptualize,” relative to the “difficult” case of the “extradiegetic narrators.” Quite so. Hence also the various parallels among literary (or other) narratologists. Some likewise confine Booth’s definition to narrators that are “dramatized” (Schauber and Spolsky 1986: 30), “personalized” (Olson 2003: 93; Jedlicˇkova 2008: 281), “first-person” (Fludernik 2009: 27), or “homodiegetic” (V. Nu¨nning 2015: 90), while the mainstream restrict unreliability to such narrators in their own name. (For details, see section 6 below on package dealing.)


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Somewhat less typically, third, Currie shifts to a more convenient axis or aspect of reliability judgment. Thereby, his paraphrase changes Booth’s measure and reference point of (un)reliability from “norms” to facts (“what is true in the story”), or, if you will, reduces them from variform or all-round normativity (e.g., moral, intellectual, aesthetic, epistemic . . . ) to factual or “epistemic” normativity: to truth-value, in short. And a “disparity” regarding the facts is on the whole easier for us to “perceive” (and establish) than one regarding values. By empirical criteria, the first is indeed less, and less bitterly, disputed than the second. So, the threshold of difficulty gets lowered thrice, even further down than usual elsewhere. Yet the apparently new appeal to what “we perceive” in the case of “narrative unreliability” would not appear to make a real difference, or not for the better. Ultimately, everything turns on one question: How are we supposed to perceive the implied-author/narrator “disparity”? This question persists, just as its perceiver-less equivalent does in Booth, so that the definition, and the approach as a whole, still remain unoperational. They fail to supply any clue (never mind an answer) to the three mysteries left by the original variant: the implied author, the authorial norms, factual as otherwise, and the narrator’s concord or discord (here, disparity, a fortiori parity) vis-a`-vis both. This repeats itself with some fresh variations in Dan Shen (2013: §2). Like Currie, Shen immediately juxtaposes original with gloss, so that the supposed improvements become easier to pinpoint and assess. Having quoted Booth’s formal definition, she introduces “the reader” as such into her paraphrase of it and its corollaries: “If the reader discovers unreliability as encoded by the implied author for the purpose of generating irony, s/he experiences a narrative distance between the narrator and the implied author, and a secret communion occurs between the latter and the reader behind the narrator’s back ([ Booth 1983]: 300 – 09).” The conditional opening “If . . . ” is appropriate indeed, and an understatement at that. In this paraphrase, the approach grows even less operational, or more unoperational, if possible, because three further unknowns come up: “irony . . . distance . . . secret communion.” It’s all words, words, words, by which “the reader” will never “discover unreliability” — let alone reliability, again conspicuously omitted from the paraphrase altogether. Like Olson (2003), Shen (2013) probably retrojects into Booth the orientation to “the reader” under the influence of Yacobi (1981 and so forth), whom she prominently mentions in this context. With the same operational end no less evidently in view, Olson et al. also retroject into Booth another hallmark of Tel Aviv poetics (e.g., Sternberg 1978, 1981a, 1983a, 1983c, 1985): the view


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of incoherences (notably “gaps”) in the discourse as the most kinetic pressure and trigger for sense-making, perspectival or otherwise. She retroactively associates Booth’s narrator with “inconsistency” or “contradiction” in the telling, which would supposedly dissociate this narrator from the implied author (Olson 2003: 93 – 96 passim). Only, as we have long demonstrated and explained, they needn’t.82 Such tensions equally lend themselves in principle to resolutions other than the narrator’s unreliability: in terms of genre (e.g., satire’s high tolerance for inconsistency), or of genesis (e.g., some hitch in the process of composition), or of storyworld (e.g., a lover’s mixed feelings), for example, all of them implying a reliable narrator. (See the next section, with references there.) These tense features of the narrative, then, cannot serve as a fail-safe operational automatism, either, in or outside Booth. (“Spot a disharmony and you’ve caught out the narrator.”) Likewise with Alice Jedlicˇkova’s (2008: 281) intensified claim: Booth “famously” defined unreliability “as a set of inconsistencies and contradictions resulting from the confrontation of the actions and speech of a personal narrator with the norms of the work, personified in the implied author.” She throws in both “actions” (to widen the range of potential disharmonies) and “a personal narrator” (most vulnerable to imputations of disharmony). Even so, the reinforced array of disharmonies that ensue remain explicable along lines other than unreliable narration. In Fludernik (2009), the reinforcements pile up still higher, to no avail again. According to her version of Booth, “a reader only realizes that a firstperson narrator is unreliable because s/he assumes that the implied author holds views in direct conflict with those held by the first-person narrator” (ibid.: 27). Most of the intensifiers are familiar, and disproved, by now. “First-person narrator” recurs here for vulnerability, as the usual suspect; “unreliable” for applicability, since reliable, harmonious narrative would preclude any retrojection of disharmonies into Booth, and is therefore best passed over in silence; and “conflict” appears, of course, as a variant of “disharmony,” “inconsistency,” and the like, in another attempt to provide Booth’s unreliability with an operational determinant. Fludernik, though, is not satisfied with mere “conflict” but raises it to “direct conflict,” and so overreaches herself, even relative to her predecessors. The conflict with the implied author’s “views” need not be direct, because any friction might in principle suffice for unreliability. (Think of all mildly, or marginally, lessthan-authorized narrators.) Nor can that conflict possibly be direct, since the implied author’s “views” are reconstructed, not manifest, like the narrator’s. 82. Nor does consistency ensure reliability, since it may equally typify the negative pole, including a consistently unreliable teller or informant. See note 113 below.


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This perforce renders them only obliquely conflictual as well as obliquely accessible, if at all.83 Another measure, this overzeal, of the need, the desire, and the failure to nail down the elusive terms of the definition. Even apart from the openly dissenting voices, then, the corrective, restrictive, practical, intensifying variations we have illustrated bespeak a shared discontent. They throw into doubt the truism that Booth has produced a “rare consensus.” His has allegedly been the “canonical” or “dominant” approach to (un)reliability (or, more exactly and ironically, unreliability), which “the great majority have followed.”84 What may appear a common ground or point of convergence, duly quoted, turns out a bone of contention. And the contenders include those who merely quote the original formula — with no visible, hopefully operational injection — since they too must do something in practice to get at the accord, or lack thereof, between the viewpoints at issue. Even more significant than the discontent, however, is the unavailing patchwork it has generated for so long and on such a scale. In face of Booth’s definition and the assorted, ongoing attempts to make it workable, all in vain, there comes to mind the hopeful project of looking in the dark for a black cat that may or may not be there. What with the cumulative mix-ups traced and assessed earlier in this section, this discouraging expense of spirit cries out for a fresh start. 3. The Constructivist Turn: (Un)Reliability as a Mechanism of Integration

3.1. The Perspectival Mechanism among Other Lines of Sense-Making

According to Christoph Bode (2011: 206 – 210), Wayne Booth’s “reflections on unreliable narrators” came to “obstruct and hold back progress for decades.” However, “as early as 1981, Tamar Yacobi recognized [the need for a receiver-based alternative] in a groundbreaking essay” that “suggested thinking of unreliability as the ‘resolution of textual tensions,’ as an interpretative strategy” among others. In the more precise definition, or redefinition, advanced here, unreliability is a perspectival hypothesis that we readers (hearers, viewers) form as sense-makers, especially under the pressure or threat of ill-constructed discourse. It 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” (Yacobi: 1981: 119), whether narrator or informant (e.g., reflector). Facing troublesome 83. Hence also the impossibility of Booth’s (1961a: 75) own scenario, whereby the implied author remains in (or falls out of ) “harmony with his explicit narrative character.” 84. E.g., Nu¨nning 1997b: 83, recurring in every later article of his on the topic; also Phelan 1996: 110; 2005: 33, etc.


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discourse, in short, we then devise (construct, reconstruct) and blame the mediator’s unreliability. Now for the larger picture. (Un)reliability as a reading option and construct(ion), or (re)construct(ion), is best theorized within the widest framework of our mind’s structuring activity at large, namely, integration: “Integration,” as the overall quest for coherence, driven by our rage for order, includes a variety of patterning and sense-making mechanisms common to all discourse, along with type-specific devices like enchainment in narrative or entailment in logic. These all-discoursive integrational mechanisms encompass, inter alia, assimilating troublesome or just unrelated discourse elements to syntax, coreference, stylistic register, generic rule, or breach, analogical gestalt, hierarchical . . . sequence, ideological bias, editorial interference, memory lapse, Freudian slip, irony, and point of view. (Sternberg 2012: 412; also 1983a: 166)

This reading operation is accordingly all-inclusive on all fronts. So much so that it subsumes even extensive dealings with the text on the audience’s part, like “interpretation,” “motivation,” and “naturalization.” “Troublesome or just unrelated discourse elements” thus encompass everything, on any level of the text, that requires, invites, or allows assimilation to some pattern in some beholder’s eye. Integration also operates on both local and global issues, on both temporary and permanent difficulties, such as gaps opened and closed along the narrative sequence or left ambiguous to the end.85 As a “quest for coherence” and an answer to “our rage for order,” moreover, integration not only covers all “patterning and sense-making mechanisms” available to the human mind; this activity, besides, ranges in turn between all-discoursive and type-specific measures or workings. All this diversity, again, renders integration “miscellaneous, open-ended, and performed or performable regardless of discourse goals” (Sternberg 2012: 426). Across the board, finally, these patternings and products of integration are always hypothetical, revisable, debatable. Out of “the vast repertoire of integration” (ibid.: 408n76), Tamar Yacobi (starting from 1981) has picked out five mechanisms that have a close bearing on reliability judgment, as either its perspectival operating mode or at least as strong and frequent alternatives to its integration through (un)reliable perspective. These five are: (1) the genetic, (2) the generic, (3) the functional, (4) the existential, and (5) the perspectival one itself. Let us now first outline this quintet and some notable interrelations among its members, with a special reference to the perspectival hypothesis of (un)reliability. 85. Sternberg 1978: 50 – 55 and Index under “Gaps”; 1985 passim and Index under “Gaps.”


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The Genetic Mechanism

The genetic mechanism explains oddities and incoherences in terms of the causal factors that produced the text and left their mark on it. These include both cases of the historical author marring the text in the process of creation and mishaps in the product’s transmission later on (e.g., a typo or Freudian slip and a censored or badly edited text, respectively). Indeed, such a genetic trouble spot comes in all sizes. It can be just one word, as in “Saul was one year old when he began to reign,” incompatible with his being the tallest man in Israel when anointed for kingship (1 Samuel 13:1, 10:23),86 or the mysterious “morning glew,” in line 34 of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which many editions silently change to “dew.” But there is also an abundance of larger genetic difficulties (i.e., ones best readable as genetic). Long passages have thus been illogically transposed by mistake, as in chapter 59 of Vanity Fair: two paragraphs about Jos Sedley’s postponement of a visit to his family appeared in early editions after the report of the visit. The text was reorganized by Gordon N. Ray in the early 1950s, approximately parallel to the discovery that two chapters in James’s The Ambassadors (1903) had been transposed: now by the printer rather than the novelist.87 Regarding the fictional world itself, trouble frequently arises there when the reconstruction of the fabulaic chronology of events comes up against impossible time schemes. Brian Boyd (1995) discusses a variety of such problems in Nabokov’s novels, especially Lolita. There, such temporal impossibility has led a group of critics “to build wholescale interpretations” of Quilty’s murder as a “fabrication or delusion” of the unreliable Humbert Humbert (ibid.: 64 – 65, 73). Nor do all genetic difficulties result from carelessness. Some narratives remain unfinished because of the writer’s death (e.g., Tristram Shandy or The Mystery of Edwin Drood ). Others end differently than the writer intended: Dickens’s Great Expectations under the influence of his friend Bulwer Lytton, John Barth’s The Floating Opera under the pressure of the only publisher who agreed to accept it. (Barth restored the original ending after he became an established author.) But how do readers integrate the respective endings, and does background knowledge affect the integration? Among professional readers, disciplinary goals, routines, and expectations have too long entrenched scholars within what seem like two opposed and mutually ignoring methodologies: what Meir Sternberg (1985: 7 – 23; 1998: passim) calls “source-oriented versus discourse-oriented inquiry.”88 The 86. See Sternberg 1985: 14, 2011: 36, and also below; a modern equivalent would be a pointless, hence probably genetic mistake in a chess notation (Sternberg 2012: 369 – 70). 87. See Ray 1955: 495 – 96; Rosenbaum 1964: 353 – 67; McGunn 1992: 95 – 100. 88. This opposition has gained currency in the study of ancient literature, as the genetic mechanism is beginning to figure in narrative theory. See also Bernaerts and Van Hulle 2013.


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former inquirers explain all oddities (or even invent some) in genetic terms: witness the long, notorious tradition of source criticism in biblical and Homeric scholarship, for instance. On the other hand, literary, narrative, and other discourse theorists (semioticians, pragmaticists, philosophers of language) concentrate on the given text, ignoring “the trials of genesis that they must daily experience as writers, readers, speakers, listeners alert to the self-exposure of others” (Sternberg 2001a: 153).89 But what may seem to them like a safe, even commendable, because necessary, disregard for a body of experience “unworthy of theorizing into a universal mechanism of integrative inference” (ibid.) has a boomerang effect, with direct consequences for reliability judgment. “Idealizing error out of the system also minimizes the subjective element, hence the perspectivity lying at the heart of discourse. . . . Wide asunder in intentionality, betraying one’s own self and enacting another’s self-betrayal . . . yet refer the giveaway alike to the workings of a subject’s mind” (ibid.). In brief, the overzealous discourse-oriented analysts not only deprive themselves of genesis as an ever-available integration principle but also pay for their narrow priorities with a lowered alertness and appeal to the perspectival mechanism, which is very much their own business. Believers in a perfect, because divinely inspired Scripture, the ancient rabbis were the most discourse-oriented sense-makers known to history. Even in face of “Saul was one year old when he began to reign,” they predictably found a way out by twisting “one year” into the figurative meaning of newborn innocence. “But then their choice to wrench the sense in order to save the wording dramatizes the antithesis between their doctrinal commitment and the literary interpreter’s pragmatic orientation to the received text” (Sternberg 1985: 14). The Generic Mechanism

As an entirely unique, original, matchless discourse would elude comprehension, and so doesn’t exist,90 the generic mechanism is in turn ever-available to the comprehender, and frequently highlighted at that. Thereby, in the face of a problematic discourse, the sense-maker grasps it as a token of a certain discourse type that regularly accommodates (neutralizes, settles, exploits, even celebrates) the problem. In poetry, for instance, numberless linguistic (e.g., grammatical) difficulties (e.g., roughnesses) have been resolved by appeal to poetic license or, inversely, constraint: meter, rhyme, stanzaic form, poetic diction. We sense-makers likewise invoke genre to justify stylistic exaggeration in parody; or thematic and normative simplification in 89. In direct reference to Yacobi 1981, Shen 2013: §3.1.3 still cavils at the equalizing of genetic to perspectival integration. Old priorities die hard. 90. Or the other way round, according to the Law of Reciprocity: “ Whatever is expressed, or expressible, is explicable” (Sternberg 2001a: 149ff., 2003b: 545 – 46, 567, 592).


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didactic literature, cinema, or visual media, as against the complexities found in the rest of ideological discourse (Sternberg 1985: 36ff.; 1998). So the generic mechanism, like its fellows and rivals, operates across all the levels of (narrative) discourse in the various media. Among those levels, however, the one that most concerns this alternative to the perspectival hypothesis of unreliability, and perspectival integration at large, is again the storyworld: the narrated reality as both target and source of the reader’s operations for coherence. On this level, genre encodes or enables a referential stylization, to some extent, in some part or aspect of the narrated world. This often involves divergences from what is generally accepted as the model of actual reality, with the principles and probabilities that govern it, down to the laws of nature. Here is an extreme case in point from Hugh Mearns’s “Antigonish” (1899): Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d go away.

This tissue of impossible nonsense makes generic sense precisely as nonsense, just the way that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books more famously and richly do as a whole. But genre usually integrates (“stylizes”) the narrated world in response to less fundamental challenges, as well as on a larger scale. For instance, the plot of comedy imposes on the fictive world at least two generic constraints: progressive complication from the start and the happy resolution of the imbroglio toward the end. “The more intricate or seemingly hopeless the entanglement and the greater the final reversal of fortune, the sharper the comic effect — but also the clash with our everyday canons of probability” (Yacobi 1981: 115). Hence also the widespread generic compromise, or from the reader’s side, the ability to explain the genre’s drive toward moderating both the comic impact and the ontic clash, with an eye to a viable balance between the two. Comedy, that is, “institutionalizes a relaxation (rather than a suspension) of the norms of actional probability” (ibid.), thus maneuvering between the extremes of tragic or realistic and sheer fantastic ontology. In the comic plot, then, the difficulty encountered (and resolved through the generic mechanism) is between internal and external models of reality. But in some genres, like satire, the problem (again, together with the resolution) runs to internal inconsistency, that is, self-contradictory references to the world. Sheldon Sacks (1966: 7) observes that since all “objects of satire” exist “only outside the fictional world created in the book,” it follows that satirical unity and coherence are located, not within that represented


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world (as in novels), but in the attack on the outside object that is satirized in and through its various representations along the text. To maximize this attack, satire even allows internal self-contradictions. In Gulliver’s Travels, accordingly, the indignant Gulliver who opposes the Lilliputian wars and the militant Gulliver who defends England’s use of terrible weapons should not be judged, and found wanting, in realistic terms: those of psychological or narratorial consistency, which Sacks deems irrelevant to satire. On the contrary, a consistent agent would lessen the opportunities (and with them the variety and the rhetoric) of attack against outside targets, such as warfare. For the informing principle of satire — the effective exposure of real-world objects — calls for a multidirectional use of all agents and situations. Like everyone and everything else there, Gulliver becomes more effective once the constraints of realistic consistency have been loosened. Behind a fac ade of biographical continuity that somehow sustains the illusion of a coherent figure, Gulliver doubles as satiric object and satiric voice. His inconsistency, which would doubtless count as self-betraying in other genres, has little to do with unreliability; it promotes, instead, the impact and the economy of the book’s many-sided attack on the evils and foibles of outer reality. The Functional Mechanism

A work’s aesthetic, thematic, and persuasive goals operate as a major, versatile guideline to its integration: they make functional sense of its peculiarities — clashes, breaches, dissonances — as well as of its regular features. The respective functional sense-makings, however, vary, at times even polarize, in the effort demanded, the awareness of the act or process involved, and the confidence in the outcome: difficult and easy integration, respectively. Contrast, for example, “gaps” and “blanks”: the first opened to generate interest, the second left open for want of interest (Sternberg 1985: 235 – 58; 2003a: 362 – 63; 2003b: 551, 557, 626; 2007: 730 – 34, 754). Inversely, it is the peculiarities, rather than the standard, normative features, that do most to indicate the work’s functional design. Across all variables, however, the logic of integration consists here in some teleo-logic. Given its distinctiveness as an appeal to purpose, a means/end combination, how does this functionalizing relate to other integration mechanisms? To begin with, functional is essentially opposed to genetic explanation, as a step is to a slip. And this helps to account for the fact that the genesis is so often invoked as a last resort, one compounding a negative judgment of the text (“something gone wrong”) with a viewpoint and a repair outside the text. Indeed, the “threat” of a genetic explanation often drives readers to seek an alternative (“literary”) solution, functional and/or otherwise. As for those other integration mechanisms, they all may (rather than, like the genetic kind, must) operate without a functional dimension or comp-


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lement. Facing a problem in the discourse, readers then seek or at least find a descriptive model that solves it in terms other than purposive. The integration achieved can be purely existential (“such is the world”), generic (“this is the way comedies end, happily”), perspectival (“this misunderstanding is typical of the naive subject”), and so forth. Nor need the functional mechanism go with any other integration. For example, one can make sense of informational gaps, with the temporal discontinuities that open, maintain, and at will close them, by reference to their effects: the universal narrative interests — suspense, curiosity, surprise — and the play of ambiguity attached to the process (e.g., Sternberg 1978, 1985, 1992, 2001b, 2003a, 2003b, 2010). Still, the functional principle can and very often does co-occur, or even cooperate, with other integration mechanisms, except its genetic antipole. In a way, this antipole can itself play a role in these mergers (convergences, intersections), if only as a “threat” that launches or reinforces a quest for a strong, preferably multifold alternative. Thus the thick interpretations figured out by “literary” analysts of Homer or the Bible in reaction to traditional source criticism. But thick sense-making also abounds elsewhere. As early as Aristotle’s Poetics, for instance, tragedy is defined in terms of its “final cause,” namely, its cathartic effect or working. Simultaneously, however, and no less characteristically, the features of tragedy find their rationale, hence also their unity, in other Aristotelian “causes.” At their head, there stands the (existential) mimesis of a certain action along certain (generic) lines, themselves combined with generally artistic patterning, notably unbroken causal sequence throughout. An orchestration of synthesizing mechanisms, in effect. Similarly, most readers of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” for instance, are not content to provide an existential rationale for its “unrealistic” world, but go on to associate it with symbolic, thematic, and rhetorical functions. Likewise, the naı¨vete´ of an unreliable narrator like Huck Finn, who believes he’ll go to hell for helping Jim escape, functions to mediate the irony and ideological point of Mark Twain. The Existential Mechanism

The existential mechanism assimilates oddities and incongruities to the unusual (e.g., supernatural) ontology posited by the text. More generally, and less perceptibly, it assimilates all reality items in discourse, including the most ordinary ones, to appropriate reality frames, scripts, models, keys. As such, the existential mechanism differs from all the previous ones in its essentially reality-like nature: its mimetic (world-based, representational, or specifically fictionalizing) operation. What the genetic, the generic, and the functional mechanisms have in common is that even when the discourse


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elements that they address belong to the fictional world — as do events, characters, objects, spacetimes, interpersonal relations — those elements are not necessarily integrated, explained, and reconciled in terms of this discourse’s fictional world, or any other for that matter. Instead, they are assimilable (and often indeed assimilated) outside mimesis, by reference to nonrepresentational as well as extrafictional principles: the accidents of genesis, the ways of a specific genre, the functional ends and workings of the discourse. Recall the examples from the one-year-old King Saul, the “man who wasn’t there” in “Antigonish,” the inconsistencies in Gulliver, the universals of narrative, the final cause of tragedy. On the other hand, the existential is an essentially mimetic principle. So, whether or not the elements that it brings into pattern belong to the fictional world, the integrating, explanatory, sense-making pattern brought to bear on them is necessarily fictional: a reality model or scheme within which they cohere. Its logic, briefly, consists in onto-logic. The existential (onto)logic therefore bears a family likeness to the Russian Formalists’ “motivation” of artistic discourse by reference to “life”: what Sternberg (1978: 246 – 305, 1979a, 1983a, 2012) terms “mimetic motivation.” But two notable differences, at least, separate these concepts. First, Viktor Shklovsky and other Russian Formalists depreciated (mimetically) “motivated” art, just as the literati do genetic integration, and for a similar reason: because it distracts attention from the artwork as such. As he puts it, such motivation conceals the artistic “device” behind a lifelike facade, instead of “laying it bare” with a view to estrangement (Sternberg 1983a: esp. 149ff., 2006, 2012: esp. 338ff.). This antimimetic dogma has persisted since in the vocal bias against representation (or from the reader’s side, “naturalization” or “recuperation”) among modernists, structuralists, poststructuralists, unnaturalists. By contrast, the existential mechanism is in principle equal to any alternative resource, in this as in other respects. Second, behind every mimetic motivation there necessarily, even definitionally lurks an aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or in other words, functional motivation that outranks and determines it, the way every end governs the means to (or, as we say, the means that serve) this end. By contrast, the existential can operate without the functional mechanism. A reader who encounters a strange object or development, for example, can assimilate it to the peculiarity of the fictional world in question (“This reality model accommodates gods or ghosts or Martians”) and conclude the process of sensemaking there. The reader’s existence-based quest for coherence and its outcome will then count as (possibly goalless, nonfunctional) integration rather than motivation (definitionally either goal-driven, teleological, if “aesthetic,” or overlying a teleology, if “mimetic”). But the reader, of course, may also


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join together the existential and the teleological rationales to produce a double motivation (e.g., “This reality model accommodates gods in order to enable abrupt, supernatural turns in human affairs”). In short, the choice lies between fictionalizing with or without functionalizing. Likewise, the existential may but needn’t pair off with the generic mechanism. Readers thus often look for coherence to generic existential conventions, such as those of science fiction or the animal fable, which involve and so justify departures from reality as we know (or believe to know) it. Other generic codes delimit the work’s frame of reference, as in the case of neoclassical drama, with its restrictive unities of action, time, and place, all of them existential. Or recall how still other generic conventions make low-probability acceptable (as does the comic plot) or even self-contradiction (as with satires or the licensing of permanent gaps, with their multiple, rival closures). But while the generic mechanism is definitionally convention-bound, the existential one is not, and so may operate independently of it, just as it may do without the functional (teleo)logic or any other counterpart. In some narratives, the peculiar reality narrated owes little to preexistent stylizations, latitudes, or constraints: the discourse creates, instead, a world of its own. In Muriel Spark’s “The Seraph and the Zambezi” (1994 [1958]), for example, ordinary people coexist with two fictional characters who are drawn from Baudelaire’s novella La fanfarlo but adjusted to normal twentieth-century reality. Then this mixed lot comes into contact with a six-winged seraph from heaven. So the initial ontic dissonance redoubles with the growing number and order of existents that are yoked together by violence into uncommon coexistence. For the dynamic organizing principle of this hybrid world is predominantly intratextual: rather than borrowing or importing the tale’s strange population and its probabilities from some generic repertoire, it evolves them from within.91 More often, the existential principle dispenses with generic convention in favor of other ready-made models of reality: above all, some accepted worldview within some cultural-historical framework, or in brief, some idea of “reality” or “the real” prevalent at such junctures. This brings us to our last point for now. The variety of “worlds” that readers encounter or (re)construct in fiction, with their (sometimes markedly) varying laws of probability, explains and underlines the centrality of the existential (onto)logic within our quest for sense and coherence.92 91. Compare Yacobi 1981: 116 – 17 on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” together with Yacobi 1988 on “collocation”; Sternberg 2001a: 155 on the intratextual “breach of natural law” in Beckett’s Watt; and, on a wider scale, Sternberg 1985: 99 – 128 on the revolutionary “omnipotence effect” integral to the ontology of biblical narrative. 92. This variety includes the set of worlds whose interplay constitutes the reality of every work. For details, see Sternberg 1983b, with illustration from the James Bond saga.


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So, in a still more principled fashion, does the indispensability of this (onto)logic to representational discourse in all media, not least storytelling. As a mimesis of action, narrativity and narrative entail, hence enforce, representation — specifically, of a world on the move — and with it existential integration (or motivation). In fictional narrative, this means the very (re)construction of the nonactual ontology: fictionalizing, with or without a functional drive behind it. What further highlights the omnipresence of such existential operations is that they needn’t involve any spectacular or effortful world-making. On the contrary, among the readerly uses of the existential mechanism, even in fiction, the most prevalent consists in smoothly assimilating textual elements to the ontic key and probabilities that govern “the real world.” The claim, or sense, of realism is itself existential, of course.93 Moreover, the arrangement of familiar details within a familiar reality model is often so smooth as to turn automatic: rather than perceived by the sense-maker, it comes down to mere registration in one’s stride. (This automatism includes the routine whereby we integrators activate the cognitivist “scripts”: that of, say, ordering food in a restaurant.) The existential integration normally becomes perceptible when the text deviates from what the reader considers real or familiar or ordinary, as in most of the examples above. Even so, in extreme cases, such as stories about Nazi extermination camps, the real becomes so inconceivable that it dramatizes “the issue of persuading readers to accept what outreaches their experience and threatens their world picture” (Yacobi 2005b: 212). Seeking a way out, one may then “waver between an objective [existential] and a subjective [ perspectival] reading of the problematic reports” (ibid.). This wavering brings us to the alternative mimetic integration, the focus of our overview as a whole. The Perspectival Mechanism The perspectival mechanism explains oddities in the discourse by attributing them to a fictional subject (mediator, narrator, reflector) through whose perspective the represented world is taken to be refracted, and so (re)constructing that mediating subject as unreliable. Inversely, to integrate the oddities in terms of some other mechanism is to (re)construct a reliable mediator. More specifically, this definition implies the prevalent either/or choice between the two mimetic mechanisms. Where does the better explanation for the textual oddities lie: in the mediated world or the mediating subject, in the represented action or the representer? In the existential or the perspectival mechanism? In an inference of reliability or unreliability? 93. Marcus 2012, though, seems to have forgotten this obvious point.


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As always with hypothesis-making, the answer (gap-filling, mechanism) chosen in face of any particular mimetic branching can remarkably vary among integrators, all the way to diametric opposition. But in certain instances — even going by the empirical evidence of relative frequencies — some answer counts as more probable than the alternative(s); and we will now exemplify the workings of the perspectival hypothesis from such instances. If you disagree that they are best perspectivized into unreliability — or into reliability — it would help to know why, and you are welcome to substitute your own cases in point. This would productively compound our illustration of readings and their interplay with meta-illustration, rather than oppose it via counter-illustration. So we all gain either way. The perspectival mechanism comes into play, for example, when Browning’s Duke unapologetically recounts to the envoy of his prospective fatherin-law how he got rid of his “Last Duchess”; or when Lambert Strether, the reflector throughout James’s The Ambassadors, gradually comes to see the relations between Chad and Madame de Vionnet as “a virtuous attachment,” until he suddenly discovers the couple’s intimacy in the river scene. On a different axis of reliability judgment, consider the initial wavering of V., the narrator in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1992 [1941]: 3). Having declared that he will not reveal the name of his informational source because he promised to keep it secret, he does mention it immediately after, “on second thought.” Nabokov is probably alluding here, behind V.’s back, to the opening paragraph of Gogol’s Overcoat, where the narrator betrays the same irresoluteness — only more funnily — as to whether to disclose the name of his protagonist’s department. Both the allusion itself and V.’s blindness to it compound his unreliability as narrator, polarizing with the author’s expertise. In all these cases, the inferred source of tensions and hence the mechanism of their resolution are found in the mediator’s deficient perspective. Thus attributing unreliability to him (or elsewhere, her) brings into pattern the respective incongruities (e.g., moral, cognitive, artistic) as well as otherwise unrelated elements. So fictional (un)reliability is not, as thought in Booth (1961a) and often since, “a character trait attaching to the (probabilistic) portrait of the narrator but a feature ascribed (or lifted) ad-hoc on a relational basis, depending on the (equally hypothetical) norms operative in context. What is deemed ‘reliable’ in one context, including reading-context, as well as authorial and generic framework, may turn out to be unreliable in another, or even explained outside the sphere of a narrator’s failings” (Yacobi 2005a: 110). Even such a small group of examples begins to indicate the rich variety that characterizes the perspectival mechanism of unreliability. Here are some


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common factors and aspects of this inexhaustible variety, which our overview will progressively survey, analyze, detail, extend, and illustrate. (1) The variable of self-consciousness divides mediators into narrators as against informants. The examples just given thus feature two narrators (Nabokov’s biographer and Browning’s monologist) and an informant ( James’s reflector). As explained in section 2.2 above, with earlier references, this division between “self-conscious,” audience-minded communicators and “unself-conscious,” audience-blind informants affects the potential (un)reliability of the two mediator types. Unaware that their words or thoughts are quoted and transmitted to an audience by a higher, communicative authority, informants or self-communers express themselves without restraint, exposing their fantasies, weaknesses, or problematic value-schemes. They are therefore more vulnerable to reliability judgments than speakers or tellers, who are in principle far more guarded and self-controlled, because they take into account their audience’s response. At the same time, informants are more reliable than narrators — other things being equal — since they have no designs on any external addressee. Even so, either mediating group further subdivides along related lines that further affect their (un)reliability or our judgment. Thus, reflectors like Strether or Molly Bloom, the workings of their minds completely internalized, are even more prone to self-exposure compared with private writers or speakers: the diary of a Bridget Jones or the vocal self-address of a Tom Jones. Among narrating communicators, subdivision goes by the nature or identity of the addressee, for example. When addressing a small or intimate audience, addressers may feel free to confess what they would deny or suppress or distort vis-a`-vis a different group. As Guido da Montefeltro, burning in Dante’s (2009: 220) Inferno, puts it: If I believed that my reply were made to one who could ever climb to the world again, this flame would shake no more. But since no shade ever returned — if what I am told is true — from this blind world into the living light, without fear of dishonor [infamia ] I answer you.

Related conventions, or motivations, are narrators unbosoming themselves to priests or strangers or, as in Chekhov’s “Heartache,” animals.


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Here also belongs the difference between the Duke negotiating with the count’s envoy in the privacy of his art collection — witnessed only by his Last Duchess on the wall, “as if alive” (Browning 1951 [1842]: 52. l.47) — and addressing a large faceless reading public in Nabokov’s novel. At the same time, since both texts are fictional, what either teller considers to be his autonomous communication is quoted by the respective authors, for the pleasure and judgment of their own readers. So, in their blindness to the framing rhetorical communication between author and readers, the ironized fictional tellers reveal a vulnerability partly analogous to informants like Strether or Bridget Jones.94 (2) The examples from Dante’s Inferno and Browning’s dramatic monologue, along with an abundance of further variations in what has gone before, suggest that the perspectival mechanism cuts across generic lines. Moreover, this diversity extends not just to other literary or verbal genres, like drama, but to other media and semiotic codes. One such code is pantomime: recall how Tristram Shandy enacts both reliable and unreliable telling in dumb show (2.3.1). More familiar today is the occurrence, and study, of (un)reliability in the cinema (e.g., Chatman 1978, 1990; Wilson 1986; Kozloff 1988; Burgoyne 1990; Ferenz 2005; Bordwell 2008: 121 – 33; Hansen 2009; Laass 2008; Anderson 2010; Otway 2015). But the rule extends to painting and music as well. Just consider the following explanation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 522, “Musical Joke”: “In order to follow the joke, one has to treat the piece as a work of fiction, to pretend (as Mozart evidently did) that it was written not by Mozart but by some imaginary hero: some overambitious, small-town Kapellmeister who, as First Violin, leads his minorleague musicians in a performance of his own divertimento, blissfully unaware that it hasn’t a trace of the taste and craftsmanship expected by cultivated aristocratic patrons. His inability to meet those expectations forms the heart of the jest” (Godt 1986).95 94. More on this neglected key factor of “unself-consciousness” as audience-(un)awareness, see the discussion and the references (especially the synoptic Sternberg 2005) offered already in section 2.3 above. 95. On (un)reliability in painting, compare William Hogarth’s engraving False Perspective. On ekphrasis and perspectival integration, see Yacobi 2000, 2002, 2004, 2007. On pantomime, recall the examples from Tristram Shandy of (un)truthful telling in dumb show. On digital fiction, see Ensslin 2012. Contrast the widespread assumption since Booth 1961a, at times made explicit, that (un)reliable narration is a verbal or even literary phenomenon. Heyd 2011: 3, for example, sees “unreliability as a linguistic mechanism” describable “in terms of linguistic pragmatics,” with narrativity presumably confined to the same medium. See also note 58 above.


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(3) V.’s narrative incompetence, the Duke’s immorality, and Strether’s misinterpretation of the couple’s liaison also exemplify the diversity of the objects that provoke or elicit our reliability judgments, or in short, of the axes of (un)reliability: here, aesthetic or discoursive, moral, and factual, respectively. We will devote an entire section to this issue, so a few brief introductory remarks will again do for now. Aesthetics, morality, factuality: these three have the best claim to importance as such axes of (un)reliability, if we go by their relative centrality and frequency in narrative. But narrative is here one thing, and narrative study, especially theory, another. Thus, the critical record shows that all these three axes are — in different ways, contexts, formulations — activated by readers and analysts, no matter how intuitively. But theory does not follow, let alone systematize, the practice. For example, the aesthetic axis is hardly ever mentioned. Booth is often unjustly reduced to the judgment of morality, and as a rule, by those oriented to factuality, instead. Philosophers of (un)reliability also tend to privilege the latter, but occupationally, for a change, since it belongs to their concern with knowledge and truth-value. And so forth. Moreover, the threefold list by no means covers the possible axes of (un)reliability. They equally include, among other extensions, the mediator’s empathy, imaginativeness, intellectual power, and actually every transmissional feature or behavior that counts as an object of judgment by some standard in some narrative framework. Of yore, even being a gentleman constituted such an axis in the eyes of some, as now does, for better or worse, being a (wo)man. And all these values also fall into hierarchies, which are no less variable. So, like the coavailability, selections, workings, and other variabilities of the integrative mechanisms themselves, all this follows the Proteus Principle and newly shows it at work. (The next variables and interplays in section 3.1 and 3.2 follow suit, as do the revisits of these protean dynamics in 3.3.) Further, this diversity of axes and their scales complicates the problem of comparing or correlating different (un)reliabilities. Thus V.’s aesthetic failings do not easily juxtapose with the Duke’s moral callousness. At the same time, note how the Duke stands directly opposed to V. (or to Zeitblom) in his rhetorical control, even when they may look alike in avowing their shortfalls. For instance, his disclaimer, “Even had you skill / In speech — (which I have not)” (Browning 1951 [1842]: 58, ll. 35 – 36), is a classical rhetorical trope that exemplifies (and so exploits) what it denies. From still another viewpoint, the Duke’s rhetorical skill is impressive enough to persuade a competent reader like Robert Langbaum that it not only outranks any rival axis but even neutralizes the


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question of reliability altogether. “Moral judgment is in fact important as the thing to be suspended, as a measure of the price we pay for the privilege of appreciating to the full this extraordinary man” (Langbaum 1963: 83; discussed in Yacobi 1987b: 342 – 44). (4) Another quantitative variable concerns magnitude, namely, the size of the discourse segment found troublesome and consequently integrated in perspectival terms. At various junctures in section 2 above, following Sternberg’s theory of quotation and of narrative as quotation, we reemphasized that (un)reliability comes in all magnitudes, as well as at all discourse levels and in assorted discourse forms. The quoted discourse that is subject to our reliability judgment may extend all the way from global to local: from text-length, as with a primary narrator or reflector or other informant (e.g., diarist), to sentence- or even phrase-length, as with a brief quotation of speech or thought in direct, indirect, free indirect, or the infinitely multiform telescoped (i.e., summary) shape. In between, there come assorted part-time narrators or informants of different extensions and levels (e.g., secondary, tertiary, etc., as well as primary), ranging from the quartet of mediators in The Sound and the Fury to a local dialogist or self-communer. And this entire spectrum can manifest itself even along a single narrative’s linear chain of quoted transmission. We also reemphasized, apropos Booth (1961a, 1983 [1961]), the important implications of this protean variable of magnitude for the study of (un)reliability and the integrity of narrative theory as a whole. So our overview will continue to demonstrate. To specify these generalities a bit, let us add that, generically speaking, the discourse of irony and satire abounds in sharp exposures of unreliability on a small scale. In the opening scene of Dickens’s Bleak House (1977 [1853]:53 – 54), for example, we hear that Mr. Tangle “knows more of [the interminable trial of ] Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody.” Yet, in attempting to correct the Lord High Chancellor on that matter, Tangle is “crushed” by information he wasn’t aware of. Likewise, Thackeray’s narrator in Vanity Fair repeatedly quotes Becky Sharp’s apparently heartfelt dialogic speech, whose hypocrisy is immediately exposed in a following insideview of her selfish and cynical thought at the time. (5) Let us now turn to the factor of metacommentary: explicit vs. implicit suggestions of (un)reliability.96 This is yet another variable that has 96. On a closely related issue, “Degree of Normative Explicitness” — the authorial values declared or implied — see Yacobi 1987a: 32ff. and the corresponding section in Yacobi 2015 [1987]: 517 – 21.


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not nearly received sufficient attention. Such explicit announcements of (un)reliability may appear in any part of the narrative, starting with its title (e.g., Justine Larbalestier’s Liar or Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman”). But they usually (re)appear somewhere in the body of the text and in the form of statements concerning one’s own (un) reliability and/or another’s. Thus, at one pole, we have the authorial narrator of Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman reliably calling himself “the most reliable witness” (1969: 81). At the other extreme, the youthful narrator of Liar (2012) begins by calling herself so but promises to mend her ways in the following tale. But will she? We must wait and see, as best we can. Contrast the adult and reliable narrating-I in Dickens’s Great Expectations, who repeatedly points out his shortfalls as a younger experiencing-I, with explicit evaluative comments. Still more authoritative is the metacommentary of an omniscient narrator on what a quoted character tells or knows. For example, at some key junctures in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” (1960: 26 – 27) the little boy’s misbeliefs are quoted in reflection, as insideviews, and immediately corrected by the all-knowing narrator who has quoted them. Thus, when the boy believes his father got killed, he tries to comfort himself with the thought that his father “ ‘was brave!’ ” In the same sentence, though, the narrator hastens to add, “not knowing that his father had gone to that war . . . for booty.” Analogous meta-statements can appear in footnotes, as they do in Tristram Shandy or in Memoirs of Barry Lyndon. They may also form direct responses to another’s version, as with the acerbic exchanges between the rival philosophers in Gore Vidal’s Julian. Not to mention paratexts, like James’s Notebooks and Prefaces or Nabokov’s Postscript to Lolita, where he dissociates himself from Humbert Humbert. But some paratexts are internalized, even fictionalized. Take the two prefaces to Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel, Les liaisons dangereuses. There, the editor and the publisher contradict each other regarding the authenticity of the letters collected in the book, so that at least one must be unreliable. But which one? This question brings us to the next point, namely, the variable force of such meta-statements. As with the protean open-endedness and context-dependence of other factors, an explicit allegation of (un)reliability can be refuted, or at least challenged, by some other participant or somewhere later along the reading process, with the emergence of new information. Like every other element, therefore, a reliability judgment of such an explicit comment, or one based on it, gains finality only at the very end of the text, if ever.


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Moreover, a (self-)description of a mediator as lying, truth-telling, exaggerating, withholding information, and so forth can always be ironic, like any other statement.97 And if so, the question is who originates, who shares, and who suffers the irony, and to what effect. A notorious example appears in Don Quixote, where the Spanish reteller of the Knight’s adventures accuses his source — the Moorish “historian,” Cid Hamete Benengeli — of telling lies about the characters. To begin with, he attributes them to the historian’s nationality, “as lying is a very common propensity” among Moors (Cervantes 1998 [1605]). But then he qualifies the charge, admitting that, as regards praise for the Christian knight and hero, Don Quixote, such an enemy would have made “omissions rather than additions” in the course of the tale (ibid.). So, notwithstanding the alleged Moorish propensity for lying, the global narrator’s confinement of the Moor’s faults to omissions, or undertelling, implies the reliability of whatever this historian did tell. On the other hand, the book’s thrust against the overtreatment and overpraise of knight-errantry in popular contemporary romance also invites an ironic reading of the accusation and its half withdrawal. In terms of this reading, again, which of the nationally opposed tellers is an object of the author’s irony and which, if any, a sharer in it?98 On the other hand, explicitness about (un)reliability is certainly not the rule. Implicitness remains more common, more diverse, and often more intricate.99 This includes, as just stressed and briefly exemplified, the play and sequence of implications that complicate the explicit references to (un)reliability themselves. In any case, readers must then start from scratch the process of deciding whether, where, why the perspectival principle explains the textual tensions better than other mechanisms. At its limit, the process may turn so complex and challenging as the dependence of the speaker’s unreliability, in Blake Morrison’s “Teeth,” on a hidden allusion to Browning’s “My Last Duchess” 97. We will not go here into the liar paradox, with its mainly philosophical interest. 98. Compare how the editor of the Memoirs of Barry Lyndon exposes his own frailties while commenting on those of his eponymous narrator. As early as the Editor’s first note (Thackeray n.d.: 8), he draws attention to Barry’s contradicting himself “in another part of his memoir,” and then he exposes an anti-Irish bias in gratuitously adding that lying “is a practice not unusual with his [Barry’s] nation.” Or is this a deliberate parodic allusion to the Spanish overall narrator of Don Quixote attacking and generalizing the lies spread by the Moorish historian whose manuscript he quotes? 99. But this does not mean that the implicit is more informative than the explicit, so that “we learn more from assumption than from assertion” (Rabinowitz 1981: 416). The respective amounts of learning depend on too many variables to be frozen into this (or any other) comparative rule. Contrast, for example, a startling “assertion” with a routine “assumption,” which goes without saying, as it were.


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(Yacobi 2000); or, in Nabokov’s (2010: 997) “The Vane Sisters,” on our spotting and deciphering the sisters’ message from beyond the grave, concealed by Nabokov as an acrostic (“Icicles by Cythia, meter from me, Sybil”) in the last paragraph, unknown to the narrator who has written it. (6) Finally, a point of central importance, namely, the dynamics of (un)reliability. Such dynamics, like that of every object or element in narrative, can have two different motors: disclosure and development (Sternberg 1978: esp. 128, 1981b, 1992, 1998: 539 – 628, 2009: 469 – 71, 499 – 502, 510 – 11). In the one case, the reader’s judgment of the mediator changes along the narrative sequence, owing to the delayed emergence, behind time, of new information. In the other case, the change (e.g., belated enlightenment, like Dowell’s in The Good Soldier) occurs to or within the mediator during the process of mediation itself: the narrator (reflector, diarist) thereby becomes more reliable, or less, from that point onward. While the first case involves the dynamics of reading, the second doubles as a dynamics of speaking/writing/thinking within the represented world: a mediation plot. Readers change their minds about a mediator’s reliability on receiving, at some juncture, new information that presses for a retrospective review and reformation of the happening or the discourse about it or both. Such changes frequently occur when familiar or conventional “signs” of (un)reliability lead us to make a hasty judgment of the narrator or reflector, or at least to fix his or her status before the end of the text. In Muriel Spark’s “Miss Pinkerton’s Apocalypse” (1994 [1958]), for instance, the narrator seems a typical omniscient figure: undramatized, mind reading, aptly commenting on the events and the participants. But then, in the last six sentences, she abruptly assumes an embodied existence and character. She thus declares that, “personally,” she prefers one agent’s version of the (unrealistic) events over the other’s. The reason she gives is that the former, Miss Pinkerton, “is a neighbor of mine” and that she herself experienced a similar “visitation from a saucer” (ibid.: 133). This startling new information, dramatizing the narrator as a human character among others within the fictive world, throws into doubt her reliability about all that has gone before.100 For instance, is her bias responsible for the fact that Miss 100. Contrast this abruptly generated and lingering doubt with the package deal that some analysts (e.g., Anderson 2010: 103n8) would impose between (un)reliability and temporary gaps — resolved (closed, disambiguated) sooner or later — to the exclusion of their permanent counterparts, left open and ambiguous to the end or, as here, even surprisingly forced open toward the end.


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Pinkerton has been represented in a much more favorable light than all the other participants? And how are we to understand the unrealistic events reported by her in the tale?101 A similar surprise and surprise dynamics, as mentioned above, await us near the end of Nabokov’s Pnin: the narrator/author “zero-point” again realizes itself with a vengeance. Compare also Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” where the change is due to a shift in the operative criteria or value scale. As shown in Yacobi (2001a), while Gimpel remains a fool, as both experiencing- and narrating-I, our judgment gradually puts his moral superiority to everyone else above his intellectual inferiority. Or so the author’s rhetoric would have us do. The dynamics of (un)reliability, however, can also evolve along the narration or the reflection itself, leading the reader to activate the perspectival mechanism to a different effect at different stages in the process. Such a dynamism usually exhibits itself where the act of communication is long enough to motivate and, if necessary, resolve it, or where the telling is simultaneous with the happening. (The latter possibility includes the diary and the epistolary novel.) In any case, this dynamics of (un)reliability then varies from the interpretive change, just exemplified from Spark, Nabokov, and Bashevis Singer, not only in its cause (development rather than disclosure, the world itself altered rather than the discourse about the world) but also in its effect. There, the new interpretation forces a review and a revision of the entire preceding text that has been mediated by the narrator or reflector in question; here it applies not or not only in retrospect but prospectively, starting with the point in the text where we note a change in the mediator, for the better or for the worse. In other words, it is from this point onward that a shift distinctively occurs in the centrality or operation of the perspectival as against other mechanisms — especially the existential — due to a change in the frequency and the sharpness of the tensions we encounter. In Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, new and most disturbing information about people close to him is sprung on Dowell, once possibly even during the narration itself (Ford 1946 [1915]: 216). So we can see a difference in the explanatory mechanisms that suggest themselves before and after the moments of Dowell’s discovery and at least epistemic development. As a result, not only is the narrated past newly illuminated: above all, his boundless ignorance, with all its implications for the sense made of the lives and the decades concerned. At the same 101. A fuller analysis of this dynamics is presented in Yacobi 2001b.


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time, the narration mimes to a certain extent the experiencing-I’s order of discovery, in ways it would take too long to specify here. Very briefly, the points of discovery mark a felt decrease in the narration’s reference to strange conduct that requires integrational or at any rate perspectival operations on the reader’s part. In other words, they produce an impression of some (always relative) growth in the narrator’s understanding and factual reliability, as it were, once Dowell has experienced an unsettling surprise about the true state of affairs. 3.2. The Perspectival Mechanism vis-a`-vis Its Rivals and Partners

As already emphasized, more than once, our reliability judgment — negative, positive, or both — crucially depends on the interrelations between the perspectival and the other mechanisms. It is therefore time to flesh them out a little. Perspectival and Genetic. The reference of the genetic principle to circumstances outside the discourse and its evaluative implications sharply differentiate it from all other integration mechanisms. Nevertheless, it has a significant common denominator with the perspectival principle in that both resolve referential problems by attributing their occurrence to some source of report. The difference between these principles lies in the answer to the question: who is responsible, the author or one of his fictional creations, whether dialogist, narrator or center of consciousness? (Yacobi 1981: 121)

The common denominator between the two sense-making principles manifests itself when they present rival solutions to a difficulty, as in Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, whose reading has been debated since its publication (1891). Tolstoy’s radical message against all sex, mediated there by a wife murderer who advocates total celibacy, has troubled many readers. Some, rejecting the message and its homicidal advocate, have figured out a perspectival substitute, with a normal author behind an insane unreliable teller. Others, pointing to more or less the same elements in the text as oddities, transfer the blame, genetically, to the unsound author.102 The difference in the identity of the responsible party leads to one in the respective structures of irony. The communication of an authorial ironist, who deliberately attributes some incongruity to the perspective of a fictional speaker, is poles apart from the genetic exposure of the creator himself, inadvertently ironized in mismanaging the text or the storyworld. In other words, in opting for the perspectival explanation, we share the irony directed by the author at an unreliable fictional subject, while a genetic explanation saves the 102. For a comparative review of these approaches to the Sonata, see Yacobi 2005a: esp.: 117 – 21.


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implied author from an adverse reliability judgment by throwing the blame on the historical writer, among other pretextual sources of trouble. These points of contact fall into new patterns of similarity and dissimilarity when the genetic principle is dramatized within the fictional world. Observe the performance of imaginary amateur “biographers,” such as V., the eponymous hero’s half brother in Nabokov’s Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or Serenus Zeitblom, who narrates the life of his friend Adrian Leverku¨hn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. In the very first paragraph of the former novel, V.’s wavering between two contradictory reports betrays his lack of authorial skill (Nabokov 1992 [1941]: 3). Mann’s Zeitblom repeatedly points out to us his incompetence, “chagrined by a sense of [his] artistic shortcomings and lack of self-control” (Mann 1966 [1947]: 4). Within the fictive world, either “biographer” takes full responsibility for what he sees as his genetic doubts or failures. On the rhetorical level, these confessions serve to indicate, or even measure, the perspectival distance between the quoting ironic professional author and the inset bumbling amateur within the fiction. At the same time, the commentary and frank self-criticism of these “biographers” make for reliability on axes other than the aesthetic. Again, both differ from the professional writer who narrates Andre´ Gide’s The Counterfeiters, with his famous commentary in the chapter “The Author Reviews His Characters” (1966 [1925]: 195 – 97). His narration gives rise to a finer balance between reliability (among other things, in his analogy to the historical author) and unreliability (in his analogy to the character-author Edouard).103 Speaking of confessions, Salman Rushdie’s “ ‘Errata’; or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children” (1991) illustrates how these two mechanisms can alternate and even interchange. Starting with a list of the various errors of historical fact that mar the telling of Saleem, the book’s fictive narrator, Rushdie (ibid.: 23) admits that “one answer [for the errata] could be that the author has been sloppy in his research.” He then goes on to “confess that the novel does contain a few mistakes that are mine as well as Saleem’s” (ibid.). Yet, during the genetic process, it occurred to Rushdie that the errors can be an asset rather than a drawback. Accordingly, “unintentional mistakes were, on being discovered, not expunged from the text but, rather, emphasized, given more prominence in the story” to serve as “a way of telling the reader to maintain a healthy distrust” of Saleem’s unreliable narration (ibid.: 23 – 25). So the novelist’s genetic errata newly transformed into indicators of the teller’s perspectival unreliability.104 103. For a detailed comparison between the (un)reliabilities of Mann’s Zeitblom and Gide’s narrator, see Yacobi 1987b: 365 – 70. The latter also contrasts with the eponymous history teller in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (Sternberg 1978: 44 – 45, 252 – 54). 104. Compare Eco 1985: 4 – 7 on The Name of the Rose. Perhaps the fear of lapsing into an “un-


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Perspectival and Existential. As mimetic constructs, the perspectival and the existential mechanisms share the “referential sphere” of the text (Sternberg 2012: 453). In other words, while the existential principle explains oddities in terms of the represented world and its laws of probability, the perspectival mechanism explains them in terms of the subjective perspective through which the world is refracted. In simple cases, it’s either the one (e.g., the fantastic worlds encountered by Gulliver) or the other (the hallucinations of the traumatized Septimus). Where the text follows a drama either of deteriorating perception (as in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”) or of gradual enlightenment (as with Strether and Dowell), the relative use of the two mimetic integration mechanisms changes throughout the reading process accordingly: in each case, the mechanism dominant at the beginning increasingly becomes less effective and is finally abandoned in favor of the other at the end. However, the “shared referentiality” (ibid.) of these two mimetic integrators sometimes turns into a mutually exclusive rivalry, as, notoriously, in The Turn of the Screw. There, either the fictive world accommodates the apparitions of the dead servants and the narrating governess counts as its (and their) lucid mediator, or the governess is abnormal and projects her supernatural hallucinations into a fictive world that corresponds to our ordinary reality-model (ibid.).105 Perspectival and Functional. As repeatedly noted above, the functional mechanism can (but need not) join any of the descriptive mechanisms, excluding the genetic but including the perspectival. When these two meet, the function(s) attributable to the problematic perspective may widely vary. Against the claim of Kathleen Wall (1994), Nu¨nning (1997a: 88), and others, unreliability does not necessarily, far less exclusively, operate to highlight the teller’s psychology (or psychopathology). It often serves purely aesthetic goals, like comic relief or estrangement, as with the Lilliputian report on Gulliver’s watch (Swift 2004 [1726]: 36 – 37). Another perspective-centered functional model consists in the report of a foreign traveler, whose estranged (mis)underEnglish” idiom explains why Nabokov so often posited nonnative speakers as the fictive narrators of his English texts. Thus V. deplores his “miserable English” (Nabokov 1992 [1941]: 32). For further variations of dramatized genesis, see Sternberg 2001a: 154 – 55 and, on a far bigger, canon-length scale, Sternberg 1998: 520 – 638, on “Law, Narrative, and the Poetics of Genesis.” 105. For a discussion of this rivalry, in the Jamesian tale and other cases, see Sternberg 1985: 222 – 27, and 2012: 453 – 57 in section 7.3, “Appeal to Existence or to Perspective? Unrealistic World and/or Unreliable Subject.” As demonstrated in Sternberg 1978 [1971] and 1985, moreover, it is permanent gaps that give rise to such rival objective/subjective, existential/perspectival closures, among other unresolvable ambiguities (including objective/objective and perspectival/perspectival closures).


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standings of the society he visits serve ideological, often satirical, purposes (as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters). Amid this variability, two related functions are built into narrative unreliability. One invariant consists in the effect and workings of ambiguity, arising from the ever-present rivalry between the perspectival and the other integrating mechanisms. Another, far more distinctive constant is the impact of problematic representation on narrativity. The gapped, equivocal version(s) of events conveyed by tellers or informants motivate(s) the universals of narrative, with their threefold play of interest: suspense, curiosity, and surprise (e.g., Sternberg 1978, 1985: 264ff., 1992, 2001b, 2003a, 2003b, 2010). For instance, Gimpel the Fool’s report of the odd circumstances in which his children were born opens a curiosity gap about his paternity. And on top of the doubts about the past, there may also arise here suspense regarding future discoveries and their consequences. Strether, on the other hand, is shocked to observe the intimacy of the couple he assumed to be “virtuous,” and it is this surprise that arouses suspense about the effects of the discovery on all the parties concerned, not least Strether himself, whose embassy has become such a fiasco. The narrative universals of curiosity, suspense, and surprise are thus closely related to the mediator’s (mis)conceptions and (mis)interpretations of reality. Perspectival and Generic. In turn, the generic principle of integration may join forces or join battle with the perspectival, so that they become complements or alternatives, respectively. Such alternativity occurs in satires like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” where the act of communication hovers between two models; the explicit and global speaker is either deliberately ironic, and accordingly a reliable satirist, or a genuine advocate of the “proposal,” and so himself ironized and satirized. Note that both alternatives expose someone’s unreliability. But while the satire’s authorial eiron, “Swift,” fictionalizes (dramatizes, quotes) the horrible plan of exporting baby flesh, so as to expose anyone who will miss its implications — let alone favor it — the object of irony (for instance, the obtuse unreliable speaker, according to one reading of the Proposal) remains unaware of any satiric intent.106 Is there a genre where (un)reliability is the rule? Since genre is a sort of historical and cultural convention, such a rule is presumably always contextdependent as well as a matter of sense-making. Thus, some of the quarrels about the definition of the dramatic monologue, or about the reading of particular monologues — such as Tennyson’s “Ulysses” — originate in the assumption that the monologists “very often . . . condemn themselves” and 106. See Yacobi 1987a: 34, 2015 [1987]: 519 – 20 on this satire as an example of “commentary mediated by way of reversal.”


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are “predominantly . . . weak, vain, brutal or all three” (Hobsbaum 1975: 228). Some even harden the “very often” into an invariant: “the untrustworthiness” of the dramatic monologist “is obvious and, in fact, a constitutive feature” (Hu¨hn 2015: 173). To this extent, Ralph Rader (1976: 142) rightly objects to such forced unreliability, which results in critics inventing dissonance where it doesn’t exist, as if it were part of the generic rule of the dramatic monologue. Rader’s (ibid.: 140) proposal of generic subdivision between the unreliable monologue and the reliable mask lyric, however, suffers from much the same problem, including the failure to accommodate cases of ambiguity.107 However, in certain (sub)genres, the question of the global narrator’s (un)reliability is more pertinent or prominent than usual, due to some focusing factor. Examples include confessions; the narrator’s conventional subjectivity, as in the dramatic monologue; conventional suppressiveness, as with the reports of the suspects in the detective story; or explicit reference to (un)reliability, as again in the detective story but also in a growing number of contemporary tales where tellers declare in advance their propensity for telling lies (e.g., Liar, All Men Are Liars, I, Lucifer). Needless to say, though, the fact that the issue is highlighted doesn’t necessarily point to the answer. Conventions of reliability sometimes exhibit more firmness, like that bearing on omniscient narration or on the detective’s solution of the crime. But even these aren’t fail-safe, either. The omniscient narrator can turn out limited and even biased in mid-discourse, as in “Miss Pinkerton’s Apocalypse,” or the gaps formally closed by the detective are liable to reopen thereafter, as in The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr. Indeed, James Thurber parodies the tendency of readers to link a genre to fixed features and binding laws, which in turn predetermine expectations and sense-making. In his “Macbeth Murder Mystery,” the heroine is a lover of detective fiction, who comes across Shakespeare’s Macbeth “on the counter with the other Penguin books” (Thurber 1957: 60), all of them detective stories, and so reads it as a detective “mystery.” She assimilates Shakespeare’s tragedy, by force if necessary, to the model of her favorite genre, including the (in)appropriate gaps and priorities, suspicions, (dis)trust, and the model’s traditional answers or closures. For example, Macduff is a less “expected” possible regicide than Macbeth and his wife; he also finds the body, as it were, and makes an artificial, poetic exclamation about it (“Sacrilegious murder has made his masterpiece”). This establishes him as the heroine’s prime suspect. 107. Or to accommodate the dynamics of reading, whereby a first impression of an unreliable monologist is gradually complicated and finally tipped over to the reliable pole. On the reading process of such a monologue, see Yacobi 1987a: 26 – 28, 2015 [1987]: 509 – 11.


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In forcing her privileged generic structure on the wrong literary work, the lady proves an unreliable reader. Dramatizing (mostly local) unreliable readers, inadequate along the aesthetic or some other “axis,” is part of a long tradition. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy thus chides a virtual reader for being “so inattentive in reading the last chapter” that she didn’t notice he had told her in effect that his mother “was not a papist” (1983 [1759 – 67]: 47). Further, Tristram exploits her supposed inattention to contrast the reader or the reading habits that he deplores with those that he envisages: “’Tis to rebuke a vicious taste . . . of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart” (ibid.: 48). Nabokov in Lolita famously takes the exposure of improper readers one step further. When Humbert alludes to Carmen’s murder by her lover, the analogy implied by the allusion lures the (erudite) reader to expect that Humbert will kill Lolita in turn. But the expected shot, “Then I pulled my automatic,” hits this overclever analogy-maker, instead — “I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did” (Nabokov 1989 [1955]: 282). In retrospect, the categorical “I pulled . . . ” turns out to be a quote from an unreliable reader’s fantasy, immediately contradicted by the facts — “It never even occurred to me to do it” — and again illustrating Humbert’s aesthetic control, similar to that of Browning’s Duke. 3.3. The Theory Reviewed from a Different Perspective: Correcting Some Misunderstandings and Misapplications 3.3.1. The Figurative Mechanism To repeat, this quintet of mechanisms, first

selected in Yacobi (1981) from “the vast repertoire of integration,” are “not a closed, let alone a complete set.” Rather, they have been chosen “in the service of a fresh approach to . . . (un)reliability as a perspectival hypothesis: its collocation with the other four integrating mechanisms sharply illuminates both its hypothetical status and its perspectivizing distinctness vis-a`-vis the various alternatives” (Sternberg 2012: 407n76; emphasis in original; see also Sternberg 2001a: 152ff.). So, adding or dropping some mechanism(s) would make a heuristic, or expository, not a theoretical difference to the new conception of (un)reliability in terms of sense-making: to the constructivist turn on this front. Among analysts who have adopted or otherwise discussed the fivefold sense-making,108 however, “some appear to mistake this selective quintet —

108. E.g., Cohn 1999: 73, 148; Zerweck 2001: 164ff.; Ferenz 2005: 138ff.; A. Nu¨nning 2005a: 98; Hansen 2007: 239 – 40; Shen and Xu 2007: 51 – 52; McCormick 2009: 332ff.; Segal 2011: 299 – 301; Marcus 2012; Fludernik 2012: 360 – 61; Alber 2013; Shen 2013.


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chosen with a particular end in view, at that — for . . . the whole range of human, or at least narrative, integration” (Sternberg 2012: 408n76). Or else it gets reduced to the subset of one — the perspectival mechanism — that exclusively bears on unreliable discourse (e.g., in Zerweck 2001: 154, Bode 2011: 210 – 11, or the Nu¨nning references, on which more in section 4 below). Among other correctives, therefore, we will now add a sixth mechanism, that of figuration, as another integrational alternative to (un) reliability, one that again doubles as rival and aid or complement to it. But what heightens the illustrative value of this addition is its unlikeness as well as its likeness to the rest. Compared with the five mechanisms above, the figurative one is thus distinctively anchored in the text’s language, or semiotic code, not just manifestable in it, implementable on it, or otherwise related to it. Like unreliability itself and its counterparts within the other mechanisms, we would now argue, figuration is not a given but a construct born of reading, one designed to make sense of the text along a certain line, by a certain rationale. Unlike the existential kind, a reader using this mechanism does not grasp the piece of text concerned (e.g., “ We saw the pig”) as a direct (straight, descriptive, “literal”) reference or misreference to the narrated world — to an actual pig allegedly seen there by “us.” Instead, that reader turns the language into a pejorative reference to some disliked human, via whatever operations count as “figurative” or “metaphorical” (and we will leave aside that debate). So, calling a word or a phrase metaphorical, or otherwise figurative, is a hypothetical integration, one that always actually or potentially competes for the best fit, or the most attractive, with nonmetaphorical (as well as otherwise metaphorical) alternative routes to sense-making. After all, within P. G. Wodehouse’s (1961) novel Pigs Have Wings, the direct object in “we saw the pig” would most probably read — or even subliminally register — as a literal reference to an omnivorous hoofed mammal (sus scrofa), generated by the existential mechanism, for a change. It also makes a significant difference that Wodehouse locates the action in the countryside, and among characters with an order of priorities reflected in the title. Given the novel’s world, where the hoofed mammals loom so large — almost stealing the show from their human breeders, exhibitors, observers, admirers — the incentives for a metaphorical understanding (“gap-filling”) evaporate: both the unusualness of seeing a real live pig and its negative associations. Instead, the straightest world construction becomes the line of least resistance. The rivalry between these opposite lines of coherence sometimes turns from ever-potential to manifest on the interpretive record. In Browning’s (1951 [1842]: 52) “My Last Duchess,” for instance, the Duke complains that


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in his wife’s eyes, “’twas all one! My favour at her breast, / The dropping of the daylight in the West” (our emphasis), and the rest of the things that equally pleased the late Duchess. Victorian readers had no trouble with recognizing and understanding the concrete metonymy (or synecdoche) intended. The OED indeed cites “my favour at her breast” among the examples for this figurative meaning: “Something given as a mark of favour,” such as “a glove, etc., given to a lover, or in mediæval chivalry by a lady to her knight, to be worn conspicuously as a token of affection.” Nowadays, uninformed or lazy readers, including students of English literature, often miss the encoded figuration altogether. Instead, such anachronists take “favour” for an abstract noun, with the result that the Duke’s use of it becomes puzzling, yet they must contrive some literal resolution. Thus pulled out of metonymy, “my favour” supposedly means “the Duke’s charm to her” or that the Duke “is physically attracted to her,” not to mention more vulgar conjectures. Interestingly, these opposed (figurative vs. literal or existential) resolutions make no visible difference to the Duke’s reliability in criticizing his last Duchess’s “’twas all one!” attitude: as if his “favour at her breast” were no more valuable than anything else in her life. As throughout the dramatic monologue, readers’ judgments of his judgment would fall between the extremes of admiration (e.g., Langbaum’s [1963] classic genre-based analysis) and outrage (the automatic response of some nowadays).109 As this simple case illustrates, opting for one or another of the opposed mechanisms here can reflect a variation more systematic and significant than individual preference, in response to apparent oddity on the verbal surface. Here it is a change in the historical context of language use — or its knowledge — that drives some readers to construct a literalism where their predecessors would register a figuration; and vice versa. But even readers that agree on the figurativity of a phrase might yet disagree about the figure or the kind of figure that will integrate the text. Consider Andrew Marvell’s “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow” (“To His Coy Mistress,” ll. 11 – 12). It has been singled out by T. S. Eliot (1950 [1921]: 254) for illustrating the poem’s witty “images.” But, in response, J. V. Cunningham (1953 – 54: 35) notoriously attacks readers who, in their “ignorance,” “envisage some monstrous and expanding cabbage.” “To the educated man of Marvell’s day,” he argues, “vegetable” is “an abstract and philosophical term” for “the principle of generation and corruption, of augmentation and decay.” This makes, therefore, “no image at all but a conceit,” namely: “a proposition referring to one field of experience in terms of an intellectual 109. On the reliability judgment here, see further details in Booth 1961a: 250n6: Yacobi 1981: 124 – 25, 1987b: 341 – 44, 2000: 722ff.


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structure derived from another field” (ibid.: 35 – 36). So Cunningham’s quarrel is evidently not with the figuration of “vegetable love” but with its alleged twisting into sensory, visual imagery. Again, as with other integrational activities, readers often jump unawares to an interpretive conclusion about (for, against) metaphor, particularly when the context seems “right” or the metaphorical relation familiar or (not the same thing) obvious. As the examples likewise suggest, we become aware of the interpretive choice here when the resolution is ambiguous or controversial. But authors sometimes go out of their way to prevent such hesitation or, constructively speaking, to make the lucid figuration artful, complex, interesting in some other way. In Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip repeatedly associates Wemmick with a post-office: “Mr. Wemmick,” said I, “I want to ask your opinion. I am very desirous to serve a friend.” Wemmick tightened his post-office and shook his head. (Dickens 1965 [1861]: 309) “I have an impending engagement,” said I, glancing at Wemmick, who was putting fish into the post-office. (Ibid.: 402) Wemmick leaned back in his chair, staring at me, with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his pen put horizontally into the post. (Ibid.: 421) When I did at last turn my eyes in Wemmick’s direction, I found that he had unposted his pen. (Ibid.: 423)

Out of context, these representations of Wemmick verge on nonsense. The relative improbability of seeing an actual pig in an urban environment hardly compares with them. So are we to attribute them to the narrator rather than the narrated, inferring that Pip falls into unreliability here, and here alone? This shift from existential to perspectival sense-making would appear too abrupt, local, and out of character, hence best adopted as a last resort. But what viable alternative might apply here? Unlike “Antigonish,” these pieces of apparent nonsense do not come to make generic sense as nonsense, trading on the preposterousness of their literal, existential reference. In context, this (non)sense is even precluded in advance, according to Dickens’s rule of perceptibly, playfully literalizing the figurative. Thereby, the narrative introduces or repeats a figuration to describe a character — by way of simile and/or metaphor — before proceeding to realize the figure in terms of action, or storyworld, to comic effect. Here, the figurative occurrences indeed lead the way, overtly casting Wemmick’s mouth as a post-office, and so identifying beforehand the “post-offices” to come as figurative references to his mouth: His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. (Ibid.: 196)


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Wemmick was at his desk, lunching — and crunching — on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. (Ibid.: 221)

In the given linear ordering of the post-office references here, with Dickens’s customary practice behind it, the figurative (not, as in Pigs Have Wings, the literal) construction, therefore, springs to mind first throughout. But if the existential logic doesn’t apply here — and if it did, the resulting illogic would make the narrator suspect — its perspectival counterpart notably does, to the opposite, authorizing effect. The fact that Pip implements Dickens’s playful progression suggests his reliability on the artistic axis as well. 3.3.2 Reasoning in the Face of Unreason: (Un)reliability as Explained Problem and Explanatory Principle Now for a set of more determinate responses to

and misunderstandings of the constructivist turn, by scholars friendly to it as well as by opponents.110 Let us begin with the challenging argument about narration developed by Richard Walsh (1997, 2007). To the titular question, “ Who is the Narrator?,” he unequivocally responds: “The narrator is either a character who narrates or the author. There is no intermediate position” (1997: 505). However, in trying to fit unreliable narration into this binary scheme, as it must, his argument proves unequal to the task. Interestingly, Walsh (ibid.) declares himself “in broad sympathy” with Yacobi’s (1981, 1987b) “systematic analysis of unreliable narration” and enumerates the five alternative mechanisms of “resolving interpretive incongruities.” Yet he gets most of the basics wrong: The need for a concept of unreliable narration arises when we wish to explain inconsistencies in the narrative without blaming the author, which is not to say that we do not sometimes find the author culpable. When we discover Sancho, in chapter 25 of Don Quixote, riding the ass that was stolen from him in chapter 23, we can dismiss it as an oversight on Cervantes’ part. We need more substantial reasons than inconsistency alone if we are to identify unreliable narration. To be interpreted as unreliable, narrative must provide some logic by which its inconsistencies can be explained — some means of accounting for the narrator’s selfcontradictions or manifest distortions. Unreliability cannot simply be attributed to an impersonal narrator; it must be motivated in terms of the psychology of a narrating character. (Walsh 1997: 505; also Walsh 2007: 83)

The fundamental misunderstandings of the theory that lurk here recur in narrative scholarship, even among other sympathizers or professed followers. 110. For some accurate outlines of the mechanisms, see McCormick 2009: 332ff.; Segal 2011: 299 – 301; Fludernik 2012: 360 – 61.


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Let us therefore try to sort them out, using the above concentrated quotation as point of reference and ordering: (1) The quoted passage starts off on the wrong foot: “The need for a concept of unreliable narration arises when we wish to explain inconsistencies in the narrative without blaming the author, which is not to say that we do not sometimes find the author culpable.” Rather, given this wish,111 what “arises” is not the “need for a concept of unreliable narration” but the need for some mechanism of sense-making, such as the perspectival one of “unreliable narration,” that will avert from “the author” any blame for the apparent “inconsistencies” and may even credit him or her with turning them to (e.g., perspectival) account. Averting blame for inconsistencies means transferring it and them elsewhere — to the perspective of an unreliable mediator, to a suitable frame of existence, to the work’s genetic process, to a genre, to a function, or to some other (e.g., figurative) explanatory principle. Any such transfer will leave the author intact, in control, authoritative, indeed reliable, as the authorial power is by definition. Given a communicative model of fiction, dominated by this power, here exactly lies the point of all the mechanisms, not merely or specifically the perspectival one: to keep the author reliable, that is, or at least to save and if possible to strengthen the authorial reliability, whatever the consequences for other agents, elements, even originators. What distinguishes the perspectival mechanism is that it eliminates the threat to the author’s reliability on, or by direct appeal to, the axis of reliability itself, to whose negative pole this mechanism (or the integrator wielding it) transfers some mediator instead, willy-nilly. (2) Inversely, the various mechanisms do not all occur “in the case of unreliable narration” (Zerweck 2001: 154), of course. Rather, they include the case of unreliable narration as one among equals. If anything, again, the rest of them all assume, or even operate to (re)establish, reliable narration. This shift of orientation to sense-making through alternative mechanisms, then, also differs in coverage from the prevalent unbalanced, because one-sided or unipolar, approaches. The above passage from Walsh itself, as well as Zerweck, typically and exclusively harp on “unreliable narration.” By contrast, we are definitionally concerned 111. This emphasis will recall, we hope, that the premise (“wish”) involving “the author” (implied or otherwise) is not a necessary condition for the appeal to any mechanism, including the perspectival one. However widespread the premise, integration can freely dispense with it, as do the opponents of implied author/receiver communication, or of any authorial agency (Bordwell 1985, 2008 on film), let alone radical constructivists. For details, see the comments on Shen (2013) in section 3.3.3 below.


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with reliable no less than unreliable telling, and always as rival interpretive (even more exactly, integrative) options at that. (3) Walsh’s (1997: 505) “[without] blaming the author” and “sometimes find the author culpable” involve two different authorial referents. First comes the implied author, who benefits from the entire multifold saving procedure above; then comes the historical, flesh-and-blood author, always liable to be sacrificed (as Cervantes is by Walsh himself, who reads an inconsistency in Don Quixote “as an oversight”) to the authority of his implied self and namesake. But for Walsh (or his analogues) to draw this necessary distinction, required even by his own argument, would mean to defeat his very thesis, directly belying its binarism. “The narrator is either a character who narrates or the author. There is no intermediate position.” Once the two author figures have been distinguished, however, the implied one (even if somehow renamed out of “authorship”) must occupy exactly the denied “intermediate position”: between the historical, genetic author (e.g., “Cervantes” liable to “oversight”) and the reader (whether or not doubled to suit). Moreover, in face of “inconsistencies,” would such an intermediate authorial communicator be vulnerable to negative reliability judgment, the way the real-life authorial creator is to genetic blame? Or would an appropriate renaming of the intermediary avert the embarrassment (not to call it the logical monster) of an unreliable implied author and the consequent pressure for interposing some further, narratorial and/or reflectorial mediator(s) to suffer the judgment on incoherent discourse, instead? Cumulative, by a kind of chain reaction, the dilemmas that begin with the need to recognize the two author figures only grow more unresolvable, and the binary thesis accordingly untenable. Other excluders of the implied author might get into similar trouble — especially if their plain “author” supposedly doubles as narrator — but not they alone. Compare this jump between the same distinct author figures: “In literary narratives, narrative unreliability is usually encoded by the author as a rhetorical device. Only occasionally is this due to the author’s own slips or failings” (Shen 2013: §2). Except that another twist immediately follows, in the “contrast to non-literary narratives, where narratorial unreliability is more often a result of the author’s own limitations” (ibid.). In this follow-up, “the author” both combines the historical with the implied figure and doubles as narrator, so that the mixture becomes threefold. It is as if the fictional and the nonfictional authors were both manifold, only in varying degrees. Compare also Fludernik (2012: 360): “Textual inconsistencies can be laid at the doorstep of the author, who apparently slipped up.”


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Which of the relevant authors slipped up? The implied author, who then turns unreliable, if only ad loc, or the historical author, on whom we then throw the blame in order to keep the implied self consistent? The latter, we have argued in presenting the genetic mechanism, but this answer and the rationale behind it have proved less than evident to some. Jedlic´kova (2008: 283) even explicitly misrelates the “implied author” to “the genetic logic of the narrative.”112 Likewise, only with the ambiguity doubled, Zerweck (2001: 154) on the genetic principle: “readers” who turn to it “resolve textual contradictions by interpreting them within the authorial or the historical context of the work” (our emphasis). Both of the contexts named are ambiguous, and so possibly baffling or misleading. In genetic integration, “authorial ” must specifically designate the empirical storyteller (e.g., as careless writer) rather than the implied author (e.g., as maker of difficult, intricate patterns, below a faulty-looking surface). By the same token, “historical context” must not be understood here as a reference to, say, the world or world picture operative at the time — which involves other mechanisms than genesis — but to the work’s history of composition and transmission down the ages, along which it suffered interferences that range from editing to adaptation. Now for trouble with the receiving end, back to the passage from Walsh: (4) “ We need more substantial reasons than inconsistency if we are to identify unreliable narration.” But who’s “we”? If “we” refers to the huge aggregate of individual readers, then “we need” nothing beyond “inconsistency” for the purpose, as not only the popular but even the scholarly record of interpretations and reliability judgments massively establishes. There, a failure of consistency is often reason enough for distrust in the narrator or the informant.113 As with this practice, so with the perspectival principle it invokes. Who will stop any reader from turning to this principle and, consciously or otherwise, applying its distinctive chain of inference: “(a) This doesn’t make sense (or worst 112. Compare also Ferenz 2005: 138 – 39, 143. 113. But maintenance of consistency is not reason enough for trust in the narrator or informant, as Spolsky (1993: 86) misgeneralizes. It fails to suffice, if only because mediators can be consistently unreliable as well as reliable: the way Baron Mu¨nchhausen is fantastical, Jason Compson heartless, or Serenus Zeitblom unskillful. On the other hand, they needn’t be consistently so, either, as Booth (1961b: 72) would have them in demanding work-length unreliability. Instead, like every narrative component, the mediator’s authority remains subject throughout to the two universal forces of change — the dynamics of disclosure or development — and change (“inconsistency”) for the better or for the worse or both. (See 3.1 above, with examples and earlier references there.)


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of all, looks inconsistent), therefore (b) the narrator mistells, and (c) proves unreliable”? But then, in demanding “more substantial reasons [for unreliability] than inconsistency alone,” Walsh places “we” at the opposite extreme — the correct reader — and with it the approach to (un) reliability as a whole. Note that “we” as mere implied readership will not suffice to justify the demand for those more substantial reasons. Thus, playing the implied reader, you may find Barry Lyndon’s discourse contradicting itself or prevalent norms, take the contradiction as the implied Thackeray’s sign of perspectival trouble, dissent, irony, and so attribute it to Barry’s unreliability. “Inconsistency alone” will then trigger the process of authorized sense-making at the expense of the narrator. “More substantial reasons” are needed only “if we are to identify unreliable narration” — complete with the verb’s objectivizing, veridical force — rather than to infer it, even with the approval of our implied author. In brief, “identify” entails the truth, factuality, objectivity of what is identified as unreliable, and it accordingly postulates a single correct reading — by “us” due performers — in line with the author’s intention and execution. This objectivism stands diametrically opposed to constructivism and far outreaches in text-basedness the standard model of implied communication. But it has parallels elsewhere in the field.114 (5) Even so, what do these “more substantial reasons [than inconsistency]” consist in? How do they identify (substantiate, establish, determine, objectivize) unreliability, according to Walsh at least? In what ensues, he never stipulates or requires any discourse feature that would clinch matters by way of irresistible proof — not even in theory — so as to enable a certain and exclusive “identification” of unreliability. Little wonder, because the objectivist’s reading is wishful thinking, as Walsh’s own relative “more” in effect acknowledges. His actual argument, however, falls much below that, apparently oblivious to the lessons of the cited “systematic analysis” in “Yacobi 1981, 1987.” Reconsider the progression of this argument. First: “To be interpreted as unreliable, narrative must provide some logic by which its inconsistencies can be explained.” True, but unreliability itself provides exactly such a logic of explanation — a perspectival one, as distinct from existential, genetic, functional, metaphorical, and so on. Perspectivizing 114. See section 4.5 below on Nu¨nning and others. It also finds parallels outside (un)reliability altogether, including the very idea of narrativity: on how the objectivist/constructivist opposition manifests itself there, see Sternberg 2010.


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the narrative’s inconsistencies means explaining them by reference to some unreliable (here, inconsistent, inconsistency-prone) narrator or other mediator. Any extra rationale, then, would seem gratuitous. But it turns out next that Walsh insists on precisely such an extra. He proceeds to translate “some logic” as “some means of accounting for the narrator’s self-contradictions or manifest distortions”: he thereby raises the demand to some logic besides and behind the perspectival logic of explanation involved in unreliability. In plain language, the question now comes to bear on the force that drives the inadequate narrative performance: What makes the unreliable narrator unreliable? And the answer must then, as it were, trace the inadequacy back to some appropriate cause. The extra, “more substantial reason” that “we” allegedly “need” for unreliability now shifts or extends its ground to this further explanation.115 Even so, unreliability supplies in turn that additionally required “logic besides and behind the perspectival logic of explanation.” For it always lends itself to assimilation to some end, as driving force. (Indeed, as “final cause,” in causal Aristotelian parlance.) Inevitably so, because, like everything else in fictional discourse, unreliability has a teleo-logic to inform and motivate it. “This unreliable narrator,” we then say, “makes for the work’s art of ambiguity, for its drive toward estrangement, or for its play of narrative interest, based on gaps in information, which a deficient narrator conveniently leaves,” and so forth. Everyone can think of such ends, moreover, from the common to the professional reader, from the constructivist to the implied to the putative objectivist “we.” A “substantial reason” beyond doubt, this goal-drivenness should accordingly satisfy Walsh in turn, yet again it doesn’t — now because he silently rules it out. The added “reason” for unreliability that he specifically, exclusively, indefensibly, yet typically demands is not just a “logic,” far less any teleologic, but a psychologic: “Unreliability cannot simply be attributed to an impersonal narrator; it must be motivated in terms of the psychology of a narrating character.” Why cannot it be impersonalized? Why must it be psychologized?116 Only because the nonpersonal or nonpsychological alternative would ipso facto refute once again Walsh’s theory of narration.117 If an impersonal narrator is likewise readable as untrustworthy (Sternberg 1978: 255ff., Yacobi 1981: 119 – 21, 2001a, 115. Again, not the constructivist’s “we,” whose reliability judgment makes do with “the narrator’s self-contradictions” and “distortions.” In other words, these “we” all settle for “the narrator is unreliable, because such is my reading of these tensions.” 116. Or in other words, why demand, or at least risk, the conflation of the narrating- and the experiencing-I? 117. “Once again” mainly alludes to the cumulative dilemmas traced in point (3) above.


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2001b, Cohn 1999: 132ff.), and if such untrustworthiness is explicable by reference to the authorial strategy, regardless of the unauthorized subject’s personality or psychology (ibid.), then goodbye again to the binary thesis: “The narrator is either a character who narrates or the author. There is no intermediate position.” On the contrary, some mediator — always liable to unreliability, whether akin or unconnected or opposed to the character’s personal weaknesses — proves inevitable and omnipresent. As usual in the field, to conclude, Walsh would package deal unreliable narration and the mimetic (e.g., psychological) motivation for it — against the grain of narrative’s free, “protean” interlinkages. (So do Ryan 1981, Zerweck 2001: 155ff., and on film, Anderson 2010: 83ff., among many others. See section 6 below.) 3.3.3 Paradigms and/or Participants Misnamed, Misgrouped, Monopolized: Is the Implied Author Necessary for Reliability Judgments? Dan Shen

(2013), we recall, divides theories of unreliability “into two groups”: one takes the “rhetorical approach” that arose in Booth (1961a), while the other “favors a constructivist/cognitivist approach” as “pioneered by Yacobi [1981, 2001a, 2005a].” This division corresponds to the facts, and its dividing line cuts across a variety of minor, superficial, or illusory differences or claims for novelty among the overabundant “theories” in the field. At the same time, Shen misdescribes both of the approaches distinguished by her and their relations. Shen’s first point of comparison between the approaches has to do with their “coverage.” In this regard, she asserts, there is no conflict, but rather complementarity. The rhetorical approach tries to reveal how the implied reader (a critic who tries to enter into that reading position) deals with one type of textual incongruity — the gap between narrator and implied author — while Yacobi’s constructivist approach tries to show how different actual readers deal with textual incongruities in general. (Shen 2013: §3.1.3)

This in fact narrows down either of the approaches in some crucial way and misconceives their relation. On the one hand, Shen, like others before her, uses the definite article to singularize and harmonize “the rhetorical approach,” as if the work done by Booth et al. were an instance or exemplar of a uniform well-defined project or paradigm of rhetorical study, and so hardly distinguishable in essentials from the rest of the project. But the long history of the rhetorical field invalidates this common impression, since it branches out along various lines, into different practices, and some of the variety even immediately relates to our concerns. Within the larger framework, it is true that “the rhetorical approach” as practiced by Booth and the Boothians has notoriously focused on “the implied author” communicating


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with “the implied reader” through the in-between (un)reliable narrator. But this focus remains a matter of choice, not of conceptual necessity (arising from the nature and workings of rhetoric); nor is it even the standard practice (of “rhetorical” theory and analysis) over the millennia. In fact, the approaches to the field developed since Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric have generally conceived of the parties to the rhetorical encounter as an actual, historical, flesh-and-blood speaker or author addressing an analogous real audience.118 Indeed, according to the leaders of the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians themselves, this two-sided actual mode of existence is what distinguishes rhetoric from poetics, as already in the respective works of the ancient originator (Crane 1952a, 1953, Olson 1965, Beasley 2007). From their viewpoint, Booth (1982: 59) admits, “I’m always whoring after strange gods, like rhetoric.” Furthermore, the dominant conception of the rhetorical encounter between actual parties might well be extended (adapted, applied) to a rhetoric of fiction; this has even actually happened among those opposed or oblivious to “implied” participantship. (Good examples would be The Rhetoric of Fictionality [ Richard Walsh 2007: e.g., 84] and, in film theory, David Bordwell [1985: 235ff.] on “rhetorical narration.”) And the number of those opposed or indifferent greatly multiplies, even within narratology itself, in view of the fact that “rhetoric,” as term, object, and approach or mode of analysis alike, no longer entails persuasion in the usage of narratologists, not even in official Boothland. “Rhetoric” now amounts, instead, to an older or wishfully differential name for a communication model of (fictional) discourse. In all but name, sometimes attended (“defined,” as it were) by other arbitrary divisive attachments,119 these two lines of inquiry are now one and the same.120 The two do not just belong but reduce to the same large paradigm of discourse (including narrative) theory. In essentials, every rhetorical analysis is communicational and every communication model rhetorical, both equally opposing the purely reader-centered, interpretive, authorless extreme. Typically, the very definition of “narrative . . . as a rhe118. A telling measure of this wide consensus is that “the implied author” rarely occurs in the massive Blackwell Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism (2004); and what’s more, the few existing references come from Boothians. A marked isolation, for better or worse. 119. For example, “the key ideas” associated, in Phelan 2005: 18 – 21, 160ff., with “the rhetorical perspective” or “the rhetorical approach to narrative” (our emphasis) are all exterior, not inherent, to the approach. Other students of rhetoric and narrative rhetoric — in whatever sense, field, direction — can therefore take them, or, as has usually been done, leave them at will. But then, as we now argue, the same holds in principle for Booth’s own key idea, or rather Dowden’s, of implied, second-self authorship. 120. Unless, of course, rhetoric reverts to the study of persuasion — as does our own work cited in note 126 below — and so to a special case or branch of the latter.


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torical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (Phelan 2005: 18) — no suasive feature included — echoes almost verbatim that of “narrative discourse” as “someone telling someone else that something happened,” with “some purposes or interests” in view (Smith 1980: 219, 232). As typically, the “dual-track” premise associated with “the standard rhetorical approach to character narration,” that “the narrator directly addresses a narratee and, through that direct address, the implied author indirectly addresses the authorial audience” (Phelan 2005: 12), closely parallels our longtime functionalist idea of narration as “two communicative processes [that] simultaneously rise and develop, the narratorial and the authorial.” Each has “its own features, its own aims, and possibly,” as in the frame story or dialogue scene, “its own addressee,” but with the former serving the latter ( Yacobi 1981: 124ff.). More generally, still, that supposed “rhetorical” assumption conforms (as Yacobi’s outline of the communicative twofold explicitly does) to the universal pattern of “inset” within “frame” and “rhetoric within rhetoric” built into speech quotation at large, up to narrative size (Sternberg 1973, 1977, 1979a, 1982a, 1982b, 1983a, 1985: e.g., 419ff., 1991a, 1991b, and so forth). These telltale echoes will suffice for now to establish the point. There is no principled ground for differentiating this self-styled “rhetorical approach” — either by name, let alone with definite article, or via superimposed requirements — from other communicational (hence rhetorical) varieties, as if it had a monopoly on the basic, widespread author-to-audience discourse frame involved. Our immediate concern is with the string that Booth himself (followed by Shen and other Boothians) would attach to the mode of existence that characterizes the parties to the discourse: as though the “someone telling” and the “someone else” told must live, operate, communicate by implication alone. But no discourse model strictly entails an implied participant at either the transmitting or the receiving end — let alone at both ends — not even in the case of unreliable narration. The claim to the contrary originated in Booth, whose definition of (un)reliability hinges on the implied author. So this dependence is necessarily assumed, if not always cited or expressed, by all Boothians, regardless of variations (e.g., those mentioned above or surveyed in Kindt and Mu¨ller 2006). A communication addressed by an inset unreliable narrator, as just said, does demand or presuppose, and therefore does “imply,” an authorial communicator silently operating against the narrator within the frame that we the audience share. Among Booth’s followers, however, quite a number go further, so much so as to overreach themselves. They not only express or emphasize the original


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dependency relation, but would impose it beyond its proper sphere: on all approaches to (un)reliability as such — however uncommunicational, altogether frameless — in the guise of an inescapable corollary. The firmest package deal (“ X, hence Y,” a fortiori “No X without Y”) would accordingly result, across the board of unreliability and its theory or even of narrative theory at large. Such extremism is demonstrably wrong. Here are some of its voices, complete with interesting small differences: “The unreliable narrator is at virtual odds with the implied author; otherwise his unreliability could not emerge” (Chatman 1978: 149). Or, in positive terms: “unreliable or ‘discrepant’ narration” serves as “the test case” of implied authorship: “The narrator alone tells or shows the text, and if we cannot accept his account, we must infer that it belongs to someone (or something) else,” that it derives from “the source we call the implied author” (Chatman 1990: 90, 131). “Unreliability in narrative makes no sense without appeal to the concept [or, it requires the concept] of implied author” (Currie 1995b: 279, 1995a: 19). “The concept of unreliable narration presupposes the existence of a constructive agent who builds into the text explicit signs . . . for the authorial or hypothetical ideal audience in order to draw readers’ attention to an unreliable narrator’s unwitting self-exposure” (Nu¨nning 2005a: 100); the alleged necessity of “presupposes,” regardless, is echoed, for example, in “a fallible narrator presupposes a cunning implied author who wants the intended reader to perceive the strategy of unreliability and thereby ‘get the joke’” (Phelan and Rabinowitz in Herman et al. 2012: 52).121 Or, with specific reference to the working of the perspectival mechanism: “the interpretive move to read an inconsistency as a sign of unreliability rests on the assumption that someone [the implied author] designed the inconsistency as a signal of unreliability” (Phelan 2005: 48).122

Across the variations, observe the set of hard, unqualified logical or quasi-logical terms (“otherwise . . . must . . . makes no sense without . . . requires . . . presupposes . . . rests on the assumption”) that allegedly enforce the linkage, through mandatory reference of unreliability to implied authorship. But why should the first hinge on the second? As usual with package deals, this strong linkage (amounting to a dependency relation, no 121. But it is not true that all users of the implied author must or do exclusively, rigorously, “see the concept as a ‘presupposition of unreliability’” (Kindt and Mu¨ller 2006: 92): let alone, in the hyperbole of an analytic philosopher, as an “absolute” one (Currie 1995a: 27). So the foregoing assorted variants show, or those in the next quote and the next note, even when likewise twinning the two concepts. 122. Further variations on this mislinkage include Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 91; Cohn 2000: 307; Wood 2002: 18; Su 2010: 395; Shen 2013: §2; Korthals-Altes 2014: 166 – 67.


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less) is illusory: once examined, the supposedly mandatory authorial reference point shows itself logically dispensable. It has indeed been replaced with an assortment of other reference points, even by some of the package-dealers. An unhealthy embarrassment of riches, this, because it newly indicates a field in trouble. Yet it nevertheless impressively demonstrates what Boothians omit to consider or even acknowledge: in how many ways theorists of (un)reliability have sought, for better or worse, to oust the implied author as normative, directing, God-like communicator, logical pretensions and all. For example, an unreliable mediator is instead deemed constructible (no longer reconstructible) by appeal to: “the actual writer” (e.g., Stecker 1987: 268); “the image of the author constructed on the basis of a writer’s previous oeuvre” (Korthals-Altes 2014: 158); “a point of view other than the narrator’s,” though not necessarily the implied author’s (Olson 2003: 106n10); the narrator’s discourse alone (Walton 1976: 58, Prince 2003 [1987]: 101, Gerrig 2010: 31); the narrator’s qualities alone (e.g., “intelligent” vs. “confused” in Walton 1990: 358 – 59); the relation between the narrator’s “mimetic” and “non-mimetic statements” (Martinez-Bonati 1981: 35); “competent story-readers” (Culler 1997: 90; moreover, contrast ibid.: 88 and section 1 above); “a reasonable person” (Hobsbaum 1995: 37); “the total work” as “a frame of reference” (Nu¨nning 1997a: 107; and contrast section 4 below); “the facts and the norms or values of the fictional world” (Hansen 2009); “the ‘original narrative,’ on which the current story is allegedly based” (Fein 1993: 572); or, on the contrary, the author’s “stark rejection” of his own early work (Herman and Vervaeck 2008: 234); “common sense” (Ryan 2011: 41); “extratextual information” (ibid.).

By the same token, moreover, not only does each of these assorted substitutes for the implied author prove dispensable, in turn, but their assortment also proves so as a whole. Witness the numberless unexpected, idiosyncratic, arbitrary-looking reliability judgments formed by individual subjects licensed by radical constructivism. Not so much as “common sense” or “a reasonable person” figures there as a ground, let alone authority, that is alternative to implied authorship. (Thus the pedophile approving of Lolita’s Humbert in the next section. But the apparently free constructor at judgment might be anyone: not excluding innovative professional readers and viewers on scholarly


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record, or whatever opponent you deem a misinterpreter.) The protean spirit of discourse, here actually expressed in the multiformity of theoretical discourse about (un)reliable narration, again refutes the bid for package dealing.123 Associating rhetoric/communication with such implied (authorial, receiving) participants, exclusive of their actual selves and analogues, is therefore far from definitional or obligatory. It comes down, instead, to a strategic choice of paradigm to be freely made (as within the Boothian “rhetorical approach” and some of the other communication models), or dismissed (as in Walsh above or in Bordwell 1985, Stecker 1987, Nu¨nning 1997a, Herman 2013), or juxtaposed with the empirical alternative, but never turned into a rule or a criterial feature, as Shen and earlier “rhetorical” monopolists would have it. In short, the “rhetorical-communicational” approach to (narrative) discourse, embracing all possible receivers as such, is a (narratological) framework more inclusive, diversified, and wide-ranging by far than usual or possible for the Boothian variant, with its implied communication partners, let alone with the author in total control. So, accordingly, is this “rhetorical-communicational” approach to (un)reliability within (narrative) discourse, when measured against the same limited and limiting variant. Inversely, and more obviously, “Yacobi’s constructivist approach” is not limited to “actual readers,” either in theory or in practice. Implied readers are not just as free but also as forced as their empirical counterparts — or selves — to make sense by appeal to mechanisms from the repertoire of integration. All the more so, if possible, under the basic threat presented by apparently faulty (unintegrated, discordant, let alone senseless) telling to intelligibility and orientation in general. Not to speak of the mind’s rage 123. In a related attempt to universalize the implied author, now through logical overstatement, and beyond the domain of (un)reliability, Booth and his followers endow the author with the power of having us do as implied: with discoursive on top of fictional, world-making omnipotence, in effect. Thus, among many other examples, the reference to “constraining” the reader/reading (Chatman 1990: 88, Phelan 2005: 48 – 49, Nu¨nning 2008: 56) or even to “coercing” (Zunshine 2006: 91), “compelling” (Preston 1997: 151), “predetermining” (ibid.: 144), or to the author “controlling his reader” and “imposing the fictional world” upon us (Booth 1961a: xiii). It is amusing to find advocates and fellow travelers of “the rhetorical approach” wishing on the author the exercise of brute discourse power rather than persuasion. But it all amounts to idle talk. The only genuine constraints on readers are those that each of us chooses or chances to like, accept, even invent, at any given moment in the experience of any given discourse. Everyone can always take or leave the model of author/reader communication itself, as well as (if taken) everything within it. And that these contingencies, or liberties, sometimes converge among receivers, more or less, and possibly under the author’s apparent guidance (“rhetoric”) too, or due to our own persuasive or enlightening contact with each other, does not change this basic fact. If anything, the discoursive omnipotence is the audience’s, given to every single member of it, not the author’s.


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for order, at a still higher or deeper level. (Reconsider the programmatic statement about it cited at the outset of section 3.1.) On top of everything, such a basic threat is liable to compromise the author himself or herself — unless saved by the reader’s perspectival deflections or other diversionary maneuvers. Our newer analytic and interpretive paradigm, therefore, welcomes all comers at either end of discourse. What’s more, as we will now go on to explain, it accommodates them a fortiori, because it constitutes the higherlevel, superordinate paradigm. 3.3.4 (Re)Construction

This all-inclusive authorship and readership already determines the relation between the “constructivist” and the “rhetorical”communicational approaches to discourse, fictional discourse, narrative discourse, and (un)reliable narrating in particular. This relation has shown itself to be, not a “complementary” one, as Shen (in the quote above) or Phelan and Rabinowitz (2005: 550 – 51) think, nor a “contrasting” and “incompatible” one (Shen and Xu 2007: 50), but a whole/part one.124 The constructivist model subsumes the ‘“rhetorical”-communicational: it accommodates both an implied and an actual author/reader encounter — with an authorized reconstruction of (un)reliability, or reliability judgment, to suit — as well as a one-sided readerly construction at will.125 To put this argument (developed in, for example, Sternberg 1978: 10ff., 1983a, 2003b: esp. 611, 2012: 426ff.) in a nutshell, reconstruction amounts to obliquely guided, rule-governed, goaldriven construction. Hence our use of “(re)construction,” where possible, to cover both of them for the sake of generality. (More importantly still, this is also why, as will appear, we can ourselves favor the reconstructive model as sense-makers — including reliability judges, perspectival integrators — without detriment to our constructivist orientation and definition.) The constructivist principle, then, subsumes the two (reconstructive) communication models along with the unipolar (constructive) interpretation model. At the same time, it keeps them distinct and, if anything, brings out their distinctiveness amid the unity of multiple, changeable, text-length inference under the Proteus Principle. Being (re)constructors, all three readers concerned — one implied and two actual — can equally bring all the mech124. The relation of incompatibility holds only vis-a`-vis the special, exclusionary Boothian model on its own, rather than as an extreme variant, or limit case, of the larger “rhetorical”communicational group. The first’s stark authorial reference-point cannot live with any other variant of the second, never mind with our constructivist paradigm (or its re-constructive branch, to be specified next). The description of the two approaches as continuous, given by McHale and Segal (2015: 211), of all people, in their account of the Tel Aviv School is therefore extremely strange. The more so in view of the accurate description in Segal 2011: 299 – 301. 125. Needless to say, a one-sided readerly construction is actual, not implied.


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anisms of integration to bear upon their hypothesis-making, pattern-making, sense-making throughout. So these three readers can, among other operations, alike turn to the perspectival mechanism for harmonizing textual difficulties at the expense of a narrator or informant. Only, they perform this same inferential, mediator-(re)constructing operation in response to the guidance of the implied author, the actual author, and neither author, respectively. As the integrator’s overarching, superordinate activity, the constructivist rationale brings all these sub-operations under a single umbrella. Across their differences, however significant, they are all parts of one sensemaking whole. The same whole/part relation applies even more evidently to the still narrower “rhetorical”-persuasive line, sometimes emerging in The Rhetoric of Fiction, but, alas, fallen into neglect since.126 If you proceed to look at the middle of the above quote from Shen’s (2013: §3.1.3) attempted comparison itself, this conclusion will only broaden and strengthen, on further grounds than who discourses with whom. For, to go by that comparison, the reader within “the rhetorical approach,” whether implied or actual, does not in fact merely address “one type of textual incongruity — the gap between narrator and implied author,” either. The scope of this approach having already narrowed down to a single kind of rhetoric and reader, it now comes down to a single target, as well. The textual object of integration gets reduced here to the absolute minimum of “one [i.e., perspectival] type.” Again, this shrinkage in object is not inherent to the rhetorical-communicational approach as such, nor customary there, but imposed by Shen, who pushes the limitation even further than do Booth himself and some of his other adherents. Booth (1961a), though limited in various respects, would never agree that the rhetoric of fiction deals only with “the gap between narrator and implied author.” On the contrary, his “Variations of Distance” include further discrepancies, such as between narrator and character, between narrator and reader, between author and reader (ibid.: 155 – 59). Of course, these discrepancies still leave his approach conspicuously thin, restricted to one dimension, in fact. They all lie between narrative views or voices, excluding the equivalent tensions within the plot, the storyworld, the thematics, the language, and elsewhere in the discourse. So Booth’s discrepancies amount to nothing like the wanted overall conception of narrative discourse as a dynamic system of gaps, let alone as a multilevel web of puz126. Ironically, in a way, we have ourselves pursued this line under this very name, including the rhetoric of (un)reliability (e.g., Sternberg 1971, 1973, 1976; 1978: esp. 56ff.; 1983d; 1985: 365 – 515; 1991b; 1998: passim, especially the rhetoric of the law; Yacobi, most explicitly in 2005a: 112ff., 2005b. Even so, this pursuit of rhetorical analysis leaves behind the stark orientation to the persuading author, at the expense of the audience to be persuaded. (See note 124 above.)


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zling and unharmonious elements that call for resolution. Not to speak of the altogether missing repertoire of resolution — with the (un)reliability hypothesis among them — and the reader’s constant drawing on it as one moves forward, so that reading becomes a progressive sense-making along multiple lines. Then, in the next generation, the rhetoric of Phelan (2005) shrinks further yet, in that its official object does not even cover Booth’s “Variations of Distance” or, across these variations, the most common and significant possibility of zero-distance, namely, reliability.127 Still, its treatment of unreliability at least includes the focalizer, as well (ibid.: 105 – 28), in lieu of Booth’s reflector. So much for the increasing imbalance discernible in Shen here between included and excluded agents, audiences, problems, relations, forms of coherence. Like any other approach and any other target or domain, however, the rhetorical-communicational one needn’t, fortunately, choose among such unhealthy balances in approaching (un)reliable discourse. It can do incomparably better. Leaving aside existing premises and practices and practitioners from Booth onward, therefore, let us now describe the horizons of this approach in more constructive, or constructivist, programmatic terms: as optimum discourse reconstruction, which we have ourselves always favored and advocated. Instead of narrowing down to this or that drastic extent, the range will then duly widen in both the problems addressed and the settlements made available. Within this wider, thicker, freer rhetorical approach,128 the object of integration can and must in principle encompass every type of “textual incongruity” that lends itself to explanation and every kind of resource that supplies an explanation, in terms of the effects produced by the (implied) author on the reader in the communication process. Therefore, any self-styled rhetorical approach that fails to adopt and apply the functional, generic, existential, figurative, along (or in rivalry) with the perspectival mechanism — all either oriented or joinable to effects — dooms itself to inadequacy as a rhetorical approach. (Within such a framework, as out of it, readers will turn at need even to the genetic mechanism — if only under the pressure of obvious typos or documented textual misadventures — but, for once, not by the rhetorical logic of that framework.) On the other hand, it is true that “Yacobi’s constructivist approach” (by reference to Sternberg 1979a, 1983a on integration) encompasses “textual incongruities in general,” with all the resources (genesis included) that can 127. In fact, Phelan 1996 (204n1, 216), like Shen (2013), exclusively confines Booth’s “distance” to the narrator/author relation. 128. Unless otherwise specified, “rhetorical” or “communicational” will henceforth mean “rhetorical-communicational” and include the “rhetorical-persuasive” branch.


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make sense of them. But the very acknowledgement of the all-encompassing range of difficulties open to multiple (re)construction, perspectival as otherwise, militates against their confinement by Shen to a specific, “actual” type of reader. How can any other (e.g., the “authorial”) type of reader avoid, overlook, or enjoy immunity to them all, or even to all except “the gap between narrator and implied author”? What does this “gap” itself consist in, after all, if not in an inference of unreliability from an assortment of textual difficulties? After all, Shen (2013: §1) herself, after Phelan (2005: 49 – 53), starts with certain allegedly unreliability-signaling dissonances, like undertelling, mistelling, or misregarding; they in fact belong to a much larger variety (including, for example, deferral, mislinkage, contradiction, loss of control) and equally lend themselves to resolution via other mechanisms than unreliability. Along with the few incongruities named in Shen, this larger variety must in principle be open to sensing and sense-making by the implied reader, or authorial audience, associated with the Boothian “rhetorical approach.” How, then, to exclude this implied reader from that necessary variety and the circle of multiple integrators, keeping them for the other, “actual” kind? Further, such exclusion grows increasingly unreasonable as our analysis proceeds. The more we detail the subsumption, and accordingly the enrichment and unshackling, of the “rhetorical” under the constructivist model — as done in the last paragraphs — the sharper the wonder at the attempt to narrow the latter’s scope at the receiving end. Given these whole/part relations, how can the constructivist whole lack any audience supposedly included in the “rhetorical” part, and in it alone, as if that part were earmarked? Why limit, as Shen oddly does, the confrontation and resolution of all these textual incongruities to the least invited, valued, well-defined, and yet most empirical readers, those who actually play the part? Why, specifically, associate unreliability with these empirical, flesh-and-blood readers, as though the appeal to the perspectival mechanism were reserved for them, because “dependent” on their “actual” variant readings “for its very existence” (Shen 2013: §3)? If denied the appeal to this mechanism, how would other (e.g., implied, authorial) readers infer an unreliable narrator (and, of course, reflector or writing informant) where the author signals one for a purpose? Failing an alternative way to reliability judgment — as already demonstrated in 2.4, the negative way, and then constructively — the questions speak for themselves. Perspectivizing discourse is a universal resource, open to all sense-makers. Where and how and why each (or each subgroup) of them turns to it, and to what effect, is another matter: no longer of orienting, operative paradigm but of performance(s) within its wide, protean boundaries and latitudes. As with the perspectival principle, so with the rest. In face of “textual incongruities,” implied readers can and indeed do resort to the various mech-


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anisms, on pain of strangeness, disharmony, incoherence. What Shen (or some earlier partisan) calls “rhetorical” theory, from Booth onward, does not include, far less conceptualize, these mechanisms, least of all as a repertoire of alternative yet often interrelated sense-makings. But, like Shen’s (e.g., Shen and Xu 2007) own, the practice of such theorists in their implied readings demonstrably exhibits (for “rhetorical” hard-liners maybe betrays) clear implementations of this repertoire, under various labels or none. Their performance is better than the theory they preach, correcting it unawares in the process. Not only revealingly and suggestively but foreseeably and unmistakably as well, because inevitably so. Most conspicuous and most relevant here is their turning to the perspectival principle in our sense, as a working hypothesis or construct. (For example, recall how the vague famous definition of (un)reliability in Booth [1961a: 158 – 59] gets operationalized by subsequent paraphrasers, via the projection onto it of the language of incongruity and inference therefrom.) But who can process discourses without reference to function, or figuration, or world-model, or genre, if only narrative, or, however unwelcome, even genesis, any more than without appeal to perspective? Certainly not the rhetoric-minded reader or analyst who acts upon Booth’s idea of implicit signaling behind the narrator’s back. This reader can dispense with such elements and mechanisms even less, if possible, than other-minded ones (e.g., those against authorial communication or for free interpretation), because the author willy-nilly implies them (or, in the case of the genetic last resort, fails to imply a sufficient textual alternative). It is therefore high time for the “rhetorical” as for other approaches to recognize their own silent, better practice of multiple integration and align the theory with the practice, notably the theory of (un)reliability. 3.3.5 (Re)Constructive Modulations: Defining (Un)reliability and Making Reliability Judgments At the same time, Shen (2013: § 3.1.1) misrepresents

“the perspectival principle” in limiting and subordinating its operation to the implied communicational partners.129 It allegedly “ascribes textual incongruities to the narrator’s unreliable observation and evaluation as symptoms of narrator/author discord ” to be “decoded” by the implied reader (ibid.; our emphasis). This is also why Shen (ibid.: §3.1.3) oddly goes on to criticize Yacobi for “shifting” at times from a “constructivist” to a “rhetorical” position, and even takes it for an argument in favor of the latter.130 But the 129. So do some other Boothians: e.g., Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005: 551 in their Glossary, or Shang 2011: 138. 130. So in effect does Ansgar Nu¨nning, though he does not make such an issue of it. He thus repeatedly wonders (e.g., 1997b: 86) that a critical, reader-oriented theorist like Yacobi still


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criticism suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding, related to that of “the perspectival principle,” along with a number of more local or secondary misreadings. These are perhaps not obvious, either. And as they also point ahead to the main stumbling block, let’s quickly deal with them first. For one misreading, look at Shen’s (ibid.) allegation that Yacobi (1981: 119 – 20) attacks “the rhetorical approach for placing unreliability in the narrator and/or the author rather than in the reader’s organizing activity.” This allegation evidently clashes with that made above regarding the perspectival hypothesis: that Yacobi views and resolves “textual incongruities . . . as symptoms of narrator/author discord.” One cannot have it both ways. Moreover, this new allegation is unfounded in turn. Actually, no such stricture upon the “rhetorical” model appears in the pages cited from Yacobi (1981), not even by remote implication. How could they possibly ascribe to Booth and his rhetorical approach a belief in the “unreliability” of “the author” or even avert it from “the narrator”? (Compare also the problems we have actually diagnosed in Booth thus far.) Rather, Yacobi deplores in that segment the fall of “many scholars,” Booth among them, “into automatic linkages between the various features of narrator and narration.” They accordingly produce some “typology of narrative ‘portraits’” (ibid.), or what we and others have called, since Sternberg (1978, 1982a), “package deals” as against the flexible, multiple combinations of “the Proteus Principle.” If anything, Booth is praised there for exploding “one of the most harmful” package deals “about narration,” that associating the representational “showing/telling” dichotomy with a fixed normative plus/minus, good/ bad one. Even so, he elsewhere repeats the customary linkages among narratorial features (ibid.). Thus, “for him too the omniscient narrator, as well as existing outside fictive reality, is invariably reliable” (e.g., Booth 1961a: 221): a threefold bundle of features, to be revisited in section 6 below. At the moment, we need only say this. As the pages from Yacobi (1981) cited by Shen never attack “the rhetorical approach for placing unreliability in the narrator and/or the author,” they obviously cannot serve as a ground for accusing her of “an implicit shift” thereafter from attack to adoption. And in fact, as noted above, it is rather Shen herself who wants to have it both ways. Another misreading involves the difference between the unself-conscious reflector or informant and the self-conscious narrator, as correlated by Yacobi (1981: 122ff.) with that between (self-betraying, receiver-oriented) adheres to the implied author. Then, having officially come to accept that author, Nu¨nning (2005a, 2005b, 2008) silently drops the charge. By a further twist of the irony, Shen 2013: §3.1.4 also misreads into the earlier Nu¨nning a tacit appeal to the implied author/reader.


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“information” and (two-sided, goal-directed) “communication” (Mackay 1972), respectively.131 In the process, needless to say, Yacobi draws the implications of the correlated differences for (un)reliable mediacy in narrative art, by now familiar, we trust. (Recall section 2.2 above, on the informant’s greater vulnerability to self-betrayal, and so forth.) But Shen (2013: §3.1.3) misses the point of the correlation — with its interdisciplinary bearing and novelty, as well as its role in the argument about (re)constructing (un)reliability via the perspectival hypothesis. Instead, Shen isolates the former, informant vs. narrator correlate and hastily comments: “This position is unequivocally rhetorical: the implied reader ‘detects’ unreliability through the textual features encoded by the implied author prior to interpretation,” so that unreliability no longer arises, as it were, from “the reader’s organizing activity” (ibid.). But even if this entire statement were true, so what? Shen just forces an open door, and a door always and necessarily, because definitionally, open at that. Author and reader inevitably enter into the process of explaining, illustrating, let alone fictionalizing “communication” as distinct from “information.” Communication entails a transmitting and receiving end, with a goal-driven transaction between them: one invariably mediated by the discourse, and in fiction, also by a mediating subject, an audience-minded (narrating) and/or unself-conscious (informing) lower-level discourser. In either case, the authorial transmitter silently quotes the intermediate subject for the receiver’s ears or eyes (or, as possible in the cinema, for both). Nor are these defining elements, patterns, and consequences specifically, let alone exclusively Boothian — “unequivocally rhetorical” — but open and widely attached to (fictional) communication models at large: rhetorical-communicational, as we termed them above. If anything, Booth’s (1961a) own original variant would least qualify, because it seeks to erase the very distinction at issue here: that in the mediating self-consciousness, between narrator and reflector or informant (section 2.2 above.) In short, assuming a communication (“rhetorical-communicational”) model, the rest of the discourse affair between the parties would follow: author, audience, and mediator(s), reliable or unreliable, framed by them, all arising by strict entailment from the premise. But then, as just demonstrated, various theorists reject this assumption out of hand, and the entailments with it — in particular the first, most basic one. Some of them notoriously opt instead for the one-sided, reader-liberating extreme: for free (above all, 131. Briefly, “information” is what you (author, narrator, thinking subject) give away to a perceiver (hearer, reader, viewer, mind viewer, eavesdropper); while “communication” is what you give your receiver to understand.


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author-free) construction, not transactional reconstruction of, say, (un)reliability. Yet even they, unlike Booth, still retain the teller/reflector, narrator/ informant difference in the mediator’s self-consciousness, under this or that guise. So where is the alleged shift of allegiance between approaches in Yacobi, and where the argument against constructivism in Shen? A related misreading befalls Yacobi’s (2005a) “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings,” with Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata as test case. In the eyes of Shen (2013: § 3.1.3), this paper incurs an old-new self-contradiction: now between (right) theory and (wrong) practice, as it were, and already latent in the title itself. As concerns theorizing, Yacobi duly (i.e., for Shen, “rhetorically’) generalizes that “in order to grasp the ‘authorial rhetoric,’ a critic must try to enter the implied reader’s position so as to arrive at the authorial reading. By contrast, in [Yacobi’s] interpretive practice [ brought to bear on The Kreutzer Sonata ] we find ‘divergent readings’ attributable to the differences among actual readers [cited from the work’s eventful history of interpretation] and various contexts” (ibid.) However, we would point out, these two concerns of the 2005a article do not contradict each other at all, but rather form complementary parts of one analysis as a whole, and in line with the paradigm of integration or (re)construction, at that. This precisely because they juxtapose (and where appropriate, “contrast” or otherwise correlate) two very different kinds of receiver. In the order of Shen’s own quotation, first comes “the implied reader,” author-oriented, single-minded, reconstructive by definition; then “actual readers,” with their assorted goals, orientations, interests, backgrounds, competences, mechanisms, hence naturally “ ‘divergent readings,’” or in short, endlessly variable (re)constructive processes and products. What objection can there be to comparing these two kinds of sense-makings, or sense-makers, and in an inquiry into that very topic, too? Still less do the two activities divided by Shen contradict each other as theory vis-a`-vis “interpretive practice.” For Yacobi (2005a) offers both a close interpretive analysis of the Sonata’s “authorial rhetoric” addressed to “the implied reader,” on the one hand, and on the other, a theorizing of the mechanisms open to every reader, whether implied or actual, as well as a case study of those actually and divergently brought to bear on the Sonata in recorded history. Given that the discussion involving either type of reader/ reading combines theoretical and practical analysis — always turning on the integration mechanisms — there cannot be any shift from the one to the other, much less from the appropriate (“rhetorical”) theory to an incongruous (“constructivist”) practice.


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Judging by these three misreadings, it would appear that Shen, a new convert to “the rhetorical approach,” is a little too eager to find fault with the opposite, constructivist side.132 So much for the three preparatory correctives. Now for the main and multiple point where Shen goes wrong. What it involves is not only a typical problem of considerable importance but also another bearing on the crux of (re)construction. So we welcome the opportunity to advance as well as newly elucidate our argument by setting this point right in its multiple aspects. Here, you will recall, the charge of inconsistency assumes its sharpest, broadest, and least implausible form. According to Shen (2013: §3.1.3), Yacobi introduces the perspectival mechanism of unreliability in “actual,” “constructivist,” reader-only terms, but then, knowingly or otherwise, inverts her reference point all the way to the implied authorial one, which she allegedly found wanting before. When “proceed[ing] with the analysis of narratorial unreliability,” Yacobi thus comes to adopt “the methods of the rhetorical approach” in the very handling of the perspectival logic: she now “ascribes textual incongruities to the narrator’s unreliable observation and evaluation as symptoms of narrator/author discord.” Thereby Yacobi is supposed to acknowledge in effect the superiority or even the rightness of the Boothian rhetorical vis-a`-vis the constructivist model (ibid.). And here, especially in the italicized phrase — including the unperceived paradigm-wide unity in variety between the sentence with and without the phrase — lurks what we called Shen’s fundamental misunderstanding. Nor hers alone, moreover, but also, for example, anyone’s who attaches the perspectival mechanism to an (implied) author/audience, or their relation.133 What Shen fails to appreciate are, above all, two related matters of principle: one is a large, paradigm-wide common ground; the other is a difference based on the latitude or modulation within that common paradigm. The first of these overlooked matters of principle has already come into focus earlier in this 3.3 subsection, with appropriate references, especially to Sternberg (1983a, 2012). But since the principle runs against some current labels, dogmas, vested interests, and conceptual habits — which Shen’s objection here typifies — it is worth harking back to at this paradigmatic juncture. To recapitulate, the constructivist model subsumes the “rhetorical”-communicational: it accommodates both an implied and an actual author/reader encounter — with an authorized reconstruction of (un)reliability, or reliability 132. “Only the rhetorical yardstick is valid” (Shen 2013: §3.1.5): a far cry from Shen and Xu 2007, what with the silent change of mind in between. 133. E.g., Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005: 551, Kindt and Mu¨ller 2006: 92, Shang 2011: 138, Marcus 2012: 4.


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judgment, to suit — as well as a one-sided readerly construction at will. In a nutshell, reconstruction amounts to obliquely guided, rule-governed, goaldriven, yet still protean, construction. Hence our longstanding use of “(re) construction,” where possible, to cover both of them for the sake of generality. On this paradigm-wide common ground, an interplay (e.g., movement, reweighting) between the forks (implied/actual, two-/one-sided), however discernible and in need of motivating, would count as one within the (re)construction family: not a shift of ground-cum-allegiance from, say, readercentered constructivism to the incompatible author-centered rhetorism, as Shen believes. All the more so where the interplay arises deliberately, for a good reason. This is why we can ourselves favor the reconstructive model as sensemakers — including perspectival integrators — without detriment to our constructivist orientation and definition. Here, in other words, lurks Shen’s second principled misunderstanding of this crux: a failure to appreciate the variety in unity, unity in variety, between defining (un)reliability and making, driving, arguing particular (kinds of ) reliability judgments. From the start, on the one hand, the definition, or redefinition, of (un)reliability on our part is visibly most inclusive as well as operational. Whatever this (re)definition’s exact phrasing or emphasis, it has always been framed in the sheer constructional, or freely constructivist, terms of the mind’s doings under pressure of incoherence. Among them, in opting for (un)reliability, the mind definitionally refers the trouble to the perspectival mechanism, without any strings attached beyond a reader (hearer, viewer) making sense of (fictional, narrative) discourse by projecting some problem(s) with it onto some (writing, talking, reflecting) subject. Thus, as early as the much cited Yacobi (1981: 119): the “perspectival basis” of (un)reliability “enables us to define it as an inference that explains and eliminates tensions, incongruities, contradictions, and other infelicities the work may show by attributing them to a source of transmission.” Or the shorter way: “perspectival integration attributes [discourse oddities] to the lapses of the mediator,” such as “an unreliable narrator” (Sternberg 2001a: 152). (Re)defining (un)reliability by appeal to this integration mechanism carries, among other strengths, the great advantage of pinpointing the highest common denominator of all reliability judgments formed, or formable, by the most assorted readings, readers, or approaches. It operates in the judges’ minds regardless of whether they know it, and even when they believe otherwise, as alternative definers since Booth may think they do. Here, then, lies the universal of (un)reliability. For judging a mediating subject (narrator, informant, even author outside fiction) unreliable entails having or picking a quarrel with that mediator as such or with the mediated


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discourse or both; while judging a subject (notably including the fictional author) reliable entails transferring any quarrels to some lower, intermediate perspective and/or to some other integration mechanism. Either way, the perspectivizing of one’s uneasiness with the given text into (un)reliability is naturally simpler to do than its theorizing may suggest and hardly in need of expert knowledge. Humans have always invoked it when judging a representation mistaken or mendacious or manipulative, for example, and inversely, truthful after all. If anything, the perspectival mechanism has even increasingly gained in appeal, availability, and literary (followed, decades after, by cinematic) relevance since the advent of Jamesian modernism. In effect, Booth even typically complains, as do other zealots for lucidity, pre- and post-Jamesian, that unreliability has grown all too popular. Anyway, the frequent human-wide recourse to this construct, across myriad variations, remains beyond doubt, and our definition accommodates and explains this fact. On the other hand, readings, readers, groups, and schools have of course shown wide, at times sharp divergence in the application, mindful or otherwise, of this defining operational common ground. The universal of sensemaking as perspectivizing assumes heterogeneous forms in the making of reliability judgments, down to the negative and/or positive judgment made, with its details and implications. Where to apply the perspectival mechanism? To what mediator(s)? Why? How exactly? In rivalry and/or combination with which other mechanisms of integration? And to what effect, including the decision and/or interplay between the poles of reliability and unreliability? The answers have all foreseeably proved to diverge, as well as to meet, in an immense variety of reading contexts throughout history. Foreseeably, we said, not just because integrational (“interpretive”) performances vary by nature. Besides, far more specifically, there is always a gap between defining a textual feature (unit, pattern, category) and bringing the definition to bear upon inevitably protean texts. Even amid agreement about the definition of narrative, say, or of direct, indirect, free indirect discourse as quoting schemas, there is plenty of room left for indeterminacy, and so for disagreement about which discourse reads, or reads best, as what. (See Sternberg 1992, 2008, 2010, 2011, and 1982a, 1982b, 1983c, 1991a, 2001a, 2012: esp. 7, respectively.) It could not be otherwise, seeing that the many-to-many correspondence established by the Proteus Principle (especially between the form and the function of discourse elements) builds ambiguity into all discourse, hence into all readings of it (ibid.). This built-in overall ambiguity likewise separates the definition of (un)reliability as an ever-available perspectival resource — ‘blame the mediator’ — from the making of reliability judgments on particular mediators in particular (con)texts. All the more so


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where the blame can always lie elsewhere, or migrate and transform there, depending on the beholder’s eye. In face of such inherent radical ambiguity and the divergent constructions it generates among reliability judges, what is to be done? In our view, all reading mechanisms are equal but not all readings and, among them, not all perspectival readings. Precisely here we choose to turn from the definitional license to reliability judgment by appeal to the communication model, in the thick, rhetorical-communicational sense progressively outlined in the last two sections. We turn to it (as we do in our readings of particular cases of narrative/narrativity or free indirect discourse) because ours is a functional constructivism. And functional constructivism entails an author communicating with a receiver for a purpose, and a receiver who reconstructs the implied communication, beginning with the authorial purpose.134 Once again, reconstruction amounts to the sense-maker’s obliquely guided, rule-governed, goal-driven construction, and therefore boasts an authorized status. Here also lies the key to the meta-judgment of reliability judgments. Given a communication model, different (re)constructed judgments can be assessed for their relative probability in context, if not always conclusively, then at least to illuminating effect. Evidently, this modulation from defining to judging (un)reliability within the same paradigm is nothing like Shen’s allegation of an inconsistent shift from “constructivism” to “the rhetorical approach”: let alone to Booth’s original version of this approach, which we have distinguished above and which Shen herself zealously advocates. In spite of the enormous and deserved popularity of Booth’s two stimulating coinages — reliable vs. unreliable narrator, implied vs. historical author — his actual approach to them has long dwindled into a minor variant of the communication model. This for even deeper reasons than the shortfalls revealed throughout section 2. Who nowadays conceives of the implied reader as one who is both reduced to the impossible passivity-cum-automatism and raised to the impossible certainty of “decoding” (sic, not inferring, hypothesizing, gap-filling, puzzling out, but decoding) what the implied author has already “encoded” (Shen 2013: passim), so as to produce the single correct (not even likely or likeliest but correct, because alone authorized) reconstruction of (un)reliability, inter alia? Not even many Boothians, if pressed, would endorse, far less apply, this unearthly counsel of perfection as a communicational reality. 134. For more developed accounts, see, for example, the programmatic statements in Sternberg 1983a: 172 – 76, 2011, and 2012: 426 – 40. This outline will also continue to be fleshed out in the following sections, always with special reference to (un)reliability.


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3.3.6 Dangerous Liaisons

Another large question that surprisingly needs to be clarified is how the tools within the sense-making repertoire interrelate. For this reason, we detailed these interrelations earlier in this section. But it would also help to review some of the misunderstandings. Despite our insistence on the basic equality of the mechanisms, some readers have described them as “hierarchical” (Marcus 2012: 3), usually with the functional one at the top. “It is the master principle above the rest,” Mari Hatavara (2012: 170) asserts. This at best overstates the case, since “the rest” cannot possibly include, far less outrank, the genetic principle, non- or antifunctional by nature. What purpose can a typo as such (or, in pre-Gutenberg narrative, a copyist’s error or a missing tablet) serve in the discourse? Or textual variants among manuscripts? Or a censor’s intervention? If anything, they interfere with the text’s proper working. Apart from its anti-functionality, moreover, genesis repairs and explains the discourse in pretextual terms. Still, these hallmarks never justify its automatic ranking below any other mechanism, the way it has fared in the opinion and practice of modern analysts, narratologists included. Oblivious to its distinctive logic and role in making sense of the text — sometimes the best sense or in effect the only tolerable sense — they unreasonably spurn the genetic resource for being “external” to the text.135 Source critics, especially of ancient literature, tend in the opposite direction, with the same unreason: because suspicious of modern “oversubtle” or “anachronistic” readings, for instance. But nor is it reasonable to scale the other mechanisms vis-a`-vis the functional or among themselves. As alternative forms of integration, they remain essentially equal, whatever the priorities or preferences of specific readers, groups, styles of interpretation. Further light will be thrown on this significant issue if we distinguish communicational principle from integrational practice. Within a communication model, the functional (teleo)logic stands highest in principle, because it motivates (determines or, from the receiver’s side, explains) everything else. Inter alia, the work’s (re)constructed genre, figuration, image of existence, perspectival network, and the sense they make, apart or together, all then ultimately serve as means to an end: catharsis, laughter, estrangement, reality effect, dynamics of narrative interest . . . Inversely, whatever has no role to play in the progressive means/end synthesis — the accidentals of genesis, above all — figures as a last resort. Communication, especially between the implied partners, author and reader, stands or falls on a sense of purpose (Sternberg 1979a, 1983a, 2011, 2012).

135. Sternberg 1985: esp. 7 – 23, 62 – 68; 2001a; 2012.


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It is worth spelling out what this principled hierarchical constant entails regarding (un)reliability. Despite the extraordinary appeal and branching enjoyed by the perspectival mechanism since Jamesian modernism, it cannot possibly rival the large ends that it furthers, motivates, and embodies in the shape of, say, an unreliable narrator. (Or the other way round, those implicit/inferred ends determine the very choice and the performance of the unreliable narrator, to the last detail, as an embodied means.) The ambiguities built into such narration evidently promote the universals of narrative — suspense, curiosity, surprise — all requiring informational gaps and a quest for their closure. In this service of narrativity, perspectival uncertainty joins forces with temporal discontinuity as sources of gaps (Sternberg 1978: 246 – 305; 1981b; 1985: 129ff.; 2009: 480ff.). But the functionality of unreliable perspectivizing can also extend to serving (motivating) other communicative (rhetorical, aesthetic) goals, like indirection, subjectivity as theme, or the sheer play of ambiguity. You may call these the effects of unreliability, but it amounts to the same thing: discourse functions come first in principle. In actual reading practice, however, integrators may choose or happen to behave not like parties to a communication — discourse partners — but like free agents. They may accordingly judge a narrator unreliable because they dislike or distrust him or her, regardless of whether the author, let alone the implied one, constructed and would have them reconstruct this narrator as unreliable, or even as reliable, for a purpose. Instead, the clashes (normative, emotive, epistemic) that those readers or viewers integrate in the process by projecting them onto the narrator arise and find relief (if they resolve themselves) in their minds alone: a limit case of subjective construction, but not at all rare or merely uneducated.136 Scholars are occupationally better than most at camouflaging their dislike or distrust, but the issue sometimes transparently comes down to this, as already in Booth’s (1961a) notorious chapter on the morality of narration. (Echoed in Phelan [2005: 231] on the Nabokov of Lolita, whose “perverse relish” for the pedophilia in the novel betrays an “ethical dark side.”) The official author-orientedness doesn’t always hold out in practice against the reader’s personal desire, or not throughout. It’s hardly ever all or nothing. Moreover, even would-be communicational partners — allying and aligning themselves with some purposeful author figure — do not generally strive or manage or remember all the time to put functionality first. Here and there, instead, some other mechanism(s), not least unreliability, will seem more 136. The same holds for the perceptible absence of such clashes where others would and do experience them. Nu¨nning (e.g., 1999a: 73 – 74) goes so far as to adduce a pedophile who sees nothing wrong with Humbert Humbert the nympholept.


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effective, attractive, immediate, or just more readily available, and at any rate good enough for now. Accounts of narrative that officially endorse the communication model supply plenty of examples of such divergences from its omnipresent functional imperative. You only need to be on the lookout for them. Less sweepingly, Shen (2013: §3.1.1) reports that two of the integration measures, the perspectival and the generic, “go with the functional,” of which each is “a specific case.” If this were true, the fivefold set would lose much of its scope, power, and coherence.137 But the threatened losses don’t appear quite obvious.138 So explaining them will newly illuminate the repertoire and realities of sense-making. Of these two “specific” mechanisms, our main business is, of course, the perspectival one. Besides, the generic mate is arguably more goal-driven, at least by implication, as indicated in Yacobi (1981). For example, if you account for a loose plot by referring the work to comedy, with its permissive action logic, then you may also be implying that the looseness serves a comic end. But this further implication would appear less than strictly necessary or ubiquitous; and the other way round, you may ascribe a function (e.g., narrative interest, difficult reading, oblique telling) to unreliability as well, without tying or annexing the perspectival to the functional mechanism. We will therefore proceed to review the alleged “specific cases” together.139 Were the obligatory, predetermined association that Shen diagnoses genuine, then, what would ensue? The five mechanisms would reduce to three, with two different functional submechanisms of genre and perspective, notably including all reliability judgment, of course. Besides such considerable decrease, the three remaining principles of integration (genetic, existential, functional) would also mix with “specific” types of the functional principle, as if they belonged to the same level of generality.140 Of the three former integrations, moreover, why not annex and subordinate to functionality the existential one as well? After all, readers likewise keep saying that such and such a peculiar feature of the represented world (e.g., coincidence, hard 137. Adding to it the figurative kind, as done above, would not make a principled difference. 138. The less so, perhaps, because these three integration mechanisms were presented above (3.1), and then interrelated (3.2), in constructive terms. 139. Much the same disproof extends to further or other cases among the mechanisms, to some of which we already referred. See also the next note for a large-scale equivalent. 140. Analogous jumps between generality and specificity, integrating forces and their forks, run through Alber 2013. His attempts to present nine “reading strategies” and correlate them with the five mechanisms in Yacobi 1981 therefore lie open to the same objections as appear below. In terms of corpus, though, the range there narrows down to the small minority of “unnatural (post)modern fiction.”


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detail) operates to such and such purpose (surprise, reality effect). Similarly with the metaphorical alternative, or any other mechanism from the immense repertoire given to means/end combinations. Why should they remain free to operate by their own integrational logic, without any necessary reference to some higher end? An arbitrary selection, no doubt. Worst of all, given the mandatory functionalizing of genre and perspective, the integrational set would then also appear arbitrary, because of two kingsize facts about the mechanisms that escape Shen: the commonality and the extent of their ramification. Not only the functional principle of integration but also each of its remaining “autonomous” mates branches out, and not just into a couple but into a host of submechanisms and sub-submechanisms. The existential mechanism thus subdivides into every kind of imaginable world (e.g., realistic, naturalistic, fantastic, science-fictional, pastoral, ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, postmodern . . . ), which further ramifies in turn. One likewise subgroups the genetic into every kind of accident in the work’s creation and transmission (e.g., absentminded writer, error-ridden manuscript, editorial tampering, censorship, misprints . . . ). For that matter, describing the latter, genetic mechanism as one that attributes “oddities and inconsistencies to the author’s production of the text” (Shen 2013: §3.1.1) reduces it to a single phase, or branch, of genesis. It therefore marks the inverse of the alleged subsumption of the generic and the perspectival mechanisms under the functional umbrella.141 As to that subsumption itself, why bring only those two “specific” types or “cases” under the umbrella of goal-directedness? And the missing cases, apart from those already exemplified, include whatever indisputably falls and ramifies under this umbrella itself. By this we mean direct types of functionality, such as the effects produced on the reader by the ostensible incongruities (e.g., dissonance, ambiguity, quest for closure, reality effect, set toward the message, or the narrative universals of suspense, curiosity, and surprise). Moreover, doesn’t even the alleged generic submechanism further subdivide into every conceivable genre (tragedy, comedy, melodrama, satire, grotesque . . . ), each with its own integrational resources? Likewise, the perspectival mechanism, or even more specifically, the hypothesis of unreliability itself, further divides by: . .

its target (e.g., narrator, reflector, diarist, other informant); its trigger (e.g., discrepancy, inconsistency, hyperbole, absence, suppression, redundancy, misrepresentation, misgeneralization, misinference, misevaluation, mispatterning);142

141. But then, the generic one is itself reduced in Shen 2013: §3.1.1 to “conventions of plot.” 142. Cf. the so-called “types of unreliability” in Shen 2013: §1, Phelan 2005a: 49 – 53, to be discussed in section 5 below.


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its cause (e.g., ignorance, incompetence, insanity, trauma, forgetfulness, untruthfulness, design to misdirect or manipulate or shock or trap or instruct or play with the reader); its magnitude (e.g., primary narration as against local quotation); its degree (from mild to sharp irony); its basis or axis (informational, ideological, psychological, aesthetic); its dynamics (temporary vs. permanent, increasing vs. decreasing, suspenseful, surprising, or curiosity-driven); or its motivation (fictional or functional, mimetic or poetic, rhetorical, communicative).

Indeed, this is where, and how, the ramification points to the long overdue typology of (un)reliable discourse. Everything, then, tells against having the alleged generic and perspectival branches of the functional principle singled out for such specification. Shen’s gloss on the typology of sense-making logics turns variables into constants, options into must’s, and so reduces independent to subordinate alternatives. In plain language, both the perspectival and the generic principles of integration can but needn’t strictly “go with the functional.” Instead, readers may, and do, settle all kinds of difficulties in either of the former terms, without necessarily assigning them or their integration any role in the work. Suppose an unusual phenomenon abruptly confronts us, like the apparitions in Macbeth or The Turn of the Screw. We can then refer it to some imagining, deluded, overwrought perspective (e.g., Macbeth, the governess), or to some unrealistic genre (e.g., Elizabethan tragedy, ghost story), or to both; and, with the pressure thus relieved, go on our way rejoicing. Only if able and willing to proceed do we take a second, functional step. Those so minded will then advance from making perspectival and/or generic sense of the troublesome phenomenon to making purposive sense of it and them, it in relation to them. The work’s appeal to the fantasizing perspective (the king’s, the governess’s) will then be motivated in terms of complex psychological effect, for example, and the appeal to the fantastic genre in terms of literary innovation or unsettling experience. So these two newly prove to be autonomous mechanisms, just like the other three, and all of them belong to the same level of generality. Inversely, a systematic, corpus-based, medium-sensitive inquiry into how, where, why these and related general integration principles subdivide is well worth venturing on: a huge task, yet its importance can hardly be exaggerated. 4. Approaches to (Un)Reliability and the Wavering among Them

As we began to show in the preliminaries of section 1 and have proceeded to detail, especially in the section on and around Booth, inconsistency has


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always been a major obstacle to validity and advance in the field — one even worse than its antipole, circularity. It has compromised and undercut not only a large variety of specific points, arguments, analyses, notions, terminologies related to (un)reliable (more exactly, unreliable) discourse. The trouble has also overtaken core issues like definition, line of approach, and what informs or underlies them. On these deeper yet widespread problems, with their corresponding effects, the present section will focus. It will mainly illustrate them from the extensive and influential work of Ansgar Nu¨nning on unreliability and related matters, headed by the equally notorious question of its reference to implied authorship. This will enable us at the same time to develop some principled themes and clashes that ran through the earlier sections of our overview. For Nu¨nning occupies a suggestive position, or rather positions, between “the rhetorical approach,” in the narrow sense distinguished above, and our functional constructivism, guided by the liberating, discourse-wide Proteus Principle. Each of Nu¨nning’s largely overlapping articles on the topic during the 1990s (e.g., 1997b, 1999a, 1999b) betrays the same wavering at the heart of the matter. He constantly and inconsistently shuttles among different, even conflicting approaches to unreliability, especially among the irreconcilables of its subjective, its objective, and its interactive modes of existence: in other words, among the reader-, the text-, and the reader/text-oriented conceptions of it. The only absentee from the mix there is Booth’s author-oriented approach, repeatedly and violently attacked by Nu¨nning, until he reversed himself in this century.143 The mix, however, only grew still thicker, more variegated in and through this change of position. The wavering of the 1990s has not resolved itself but only persisted in comparable, even further shapes or guises, since Nu¨nning’s (2005a, 2008) turnabout in the next decade from denunciation to acceptance of “the implied author” concept. It would seem that he does not know his own mind after this supposed turn, any more than before it, if not less so. Moreover, similar diversity and shuttling often betray themselves elsewhere in the field: not least among scholarly reports (or applications) of and responses to Nu¨nning’s influential work, compounded with an even more general blindness to its waverings and their own. Typically, though amazingly by the criterion of some other theoretical fields, all this instability has almost escaped notice, or even passed for unity. Both followers and critics have picked out from Nu¨nning’s work whatever suited or struck 143. In 4.6 below, even the absence of author-centeredness from the mix and its later reversal will prove to be apparent. But this ultimate complication can wait. (See also notes 144, 146, and 159 below.)


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them, as if these assorted, discordant parts represented the whole, and a coherent whole at that. 4.1. (Un)Reliability in the Beholder’s Eye: The Pedophile among Reliability Judges of Humbert

Of the main drives in unpeaceful coexistence there, the subjectivist readerorientation is by far the best-known. Thus, for Nu¨nning, “the yardstick of unreliability cannot be the implied author but only the concrete reader” (Schmid 2010: 60). Or, in the words of Phelan (2005: 43), Nu¨nning adopts “a constructivist epistemology,” whereby “the structural whole . . . can vary from reader to reader.” Or, “attributing unreliability is,” in his view, “solely a function of reader reception” (Olson 2003: 97). Or, according to Pettersson (2005: 70 – 71), Nu¨nning’s “theory primarily concentrates on the receptive end of literary communication (the reader and the critic).”144 Such a categorical but partial or one-sided report might indeed find support in local, easily extractable formulations to this effect. There you can see why a student of Nu¨nning, among others, describes his work as “taking up the line of argument” originated in the “groundbreaking” Yacobi (1981) and its follow-ups (Laass 2008: 25 – 26 or Shang 2011: 138). Nu¨nning (1999a: 69) thus approvingly cites or echoes Yacobi’s fundamental redefinition of (un)reliability as a matter of the reader’s construction and problem-solving, via a perspectival hypothesis: The postulation of an unreliable narrator can be understood as a mechanism of integration (Yacobi 1981: 119) in that it resolves whatever textual contradictions or discrepancy between the textual data and the reader’s world-knowledge there may have been and leads to a synthesis at a higher level. In calling the source from which the utterances emanate an unreliable narrator, the critic not only makes peculiar features readily intelligible but s/he also specifies how the text as a whole should be read. In the pragmatic context provided by frame theory, unreliable narration can be explained as “an interpretive procedure” (Yacobi 1981: 121). (Nu¨nning 1999a: 69)

Like others before and after him, Nu¨nning (1999a: 69n23) even dubs Yacobi a fellow cognitivist or pragmaticist, because she has approached unreliability “ ‘as an inference that explains and eliminates tensions, incongruities, con144. Similarly, for example, Heyd 2006: 218, Hansen 2007: 227, 239 – 40. Pettersson’s is the least “reliable” of all these otherwise convergent partial statements, because its careless phrasing verges on misrepresentation in the mindful expert’s eye. “The receptive end,” a fortiori “literary communication,” entails an authorial transmitting end, which Nu¨nning vocally, tirelessly, and notoriously rejects prior to 2005a. Likewise with Phelan’s (2005: 43) statement that Nu¨nning proposes some shifts “in the narratological communication model”: the same counterfactual entailment arises. Even so, the Nu¨nning papers at issue are so generally unstable that Pettersson and Phelan could locate in them a justification of sorts, as will emerge below (4.6).


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tradictions and other infelicities the work may show by attributing them to a source of transmission’ (Yacobi 1981: 119).” And his ensuing summary — or at least the mind-centered part of it — runs accordingly: “The construction of an unreliable narrator can be seen as an interpretative strategy by which the reader naturalizes textual inconsistencies that might otherwise remain unassimilable” (Nu¨nning 1999a: 69n23). On a still wider front, Nu¨nning (ibid.: 60) cites verbatim the opening set of “questions raised by Yacobi (1981: 113),” all deemed by him “crucial” to the subject. “Are reliability and unreliability,” Yacobi asks, “value-judgments or descriptions? Data or conjectures? Gradable or ungradable contrasts? Autonomous features or products of fixed combinations of other features?” And along with different, impossibly composite, two- or three-minded answers that Nu¨nning gives to these questions — on which more next — at least one or perhaps two decisive answers echo Yacobi’s emphasis, there or elsewhere, on the essentially free construction of (un)reliable perspective in the reading. “Reliability and unreliability,” he asserts, “are value-judgments rather than mere descriptions” — as highlighted by our very term “reliability judgment” — and “they are neither autonomous features nor products of fixed combinations of other features but rather arbitrary and very curious mixtures of heterogeneous ingredients” (Nu¨nning 1999a: 60). “Arbitrary”? Though quite right in principle — since readers needn’t even justify or explain their option for perspectival sense-making in face of difficulties — this unlimited, unaccountable readerly choice may well sound extreme. Yet Nu¨nning goes on “to put it bluntly” and, to some, outrageously. “A pederast would not find anything wrong with Nabokov’s Lolita; a male chauvinist fetishist who gets his kicks out of making love to dummies is unlikely” to distance himself from “the mad monologist in Ian McEwan’s ‘Dead as They Come’” (ibid.: 61; also Nu¨nning 1999b: 73 – 74; 2005a: 97).145 And, he might have added, vice versa: as when a zealous atheist reading Paradise Lost or a Bonapartist hero-worshiper encountering War and Peace finds the respective authorial narrators unreliable. Elsewhere, Nu¨nning formulates this readerly license in more general terms. On the highest level of generality, “a structure is not by its nature inherent in a literary text; rather the structurality is construed by the perceiv145. It’s easy to understand why Phillips (2009: 62) mistakes this permissive statement for a criticism of “the purely subjective” response, and why Antor 2001: 34n10 objects that pedophiles “never could or should be the standard for an evaluation of Humbert.” The misreadings culminate in the inverse view of Hansen 2007: 237 – 38: he takes Nu¨nning to mean that a pedophile is “automatically . . . unreliable,” and so to fall into Booth-like moralism, stock response, and, along with Phillips, narrating/experiencing mixture, or automatic inference from the character’s self to the narrator’s.


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ing human consciousness” (Nu¨nning 1997a: 115). At a lower level, the case of “an unreliable narrator” involves a “discrepancy” between the narrator’s “value system and intentions” and the “norms and state of knowledge of the reader . . . and his own concept of normality” (ibid.: 107): a more focused but still perceiver-based generalization. For example, Nu¨nning is not content to describe the reader’s activity as resolution and the like. Nor, regrettably, does he adopt our terminology of unreliable narration (or reflection) as a distinctive, perspectival logic of sense-making, gap-filling, hypothesizing, or quest for integration. His favorite idiom, instead, goes so far as to attribute to the reader the “projection,” sometimes even the “invention” of an unreliable narrator (e.g., Nu¨nning 1999a: 59 – 61 passim, 1999b: 64, 2008: 30, 67). Along another, diachronic axis, such “projection” or “invention” is also considered historically variable (e.g., 2005a: 98 – 99). Though more general, all these formulations are yet no less extremely subjective than the cases of the pedophile and the fetishist as licensed reliability judges. Beyond shock value, further, this claim about their judgment ostensibly makes good internal sense, in that the unlimited scope of reading also follows here from an overt doctrinal premise complementary to sheer reader-mindedness. By this we mean the fact that Nu¨nning (especially 1997a, but also 1997b, 1999a, 1999b) dismisses the concept of implied author out of hand.146 And if no implied author, then no implied reader or authorial audience, either, and so no normative confinement of the narrative’s “proper” receiving side to those born or molded or self-fashioned in the author’s image, hence alone enjoying interpretive authority. On the contrary, though Nu¨nning doesn’t quite spell out this implication, his idea of audience widens to the point of encompassing the endless diversity of actual, flesh-and-blood readers that make up humankind. Such diversity would include pedophiles, along with dogmatists, ignoramuses, careless auditors, semi-literates, resisters, poststructuralists, and the rest of the lot that the adherents of implied communication would deem misreaders if not counterreaders: unreliable judges of (un)reliability, as it were, among other sense-making (“interpretive”) roles. By the logic of the orientation to the reader, insofar as Nu¨nning adopts and practices it, one cannot therefore reasonably saddle him with any such normative idea of misreaders, counterreaders, over- and under-readers, any more than with appropriate, privileged readers, the way Olson (2003: 99) does. She even goes so far as to have Nu¨nning universalize the former inferior 146. On this point, implied authorship, Nu¨nning (e.g., 1997b: 86) for once explicitly diverges even from Yacobi (1981). This divergence is born of misunderstanding, as already pointed out in 3.3 above, regarding Shen (2013); it also goes, as will appear, with a convergence on this issue in practice and eventually in theory too (see 4.6 below). But it nonetheless remains significant in this context of unlimited permissiveness.


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group. His “model assumes,” according to her, “the limited validity of subjective reader response.”147 However, as we already put it, the “subjective,” reader-oriented model entails a basic shift of ground: from interpretive privilege and disprivilege alike to interpretive license, encompassing all comers. Reliability judgments thereby grow liberated, for good or ill. Once implied authorship and hence readership have been denied, Nu¨nning style, whenever any of these humanity-wide readers (hearers, viewers) finds fault with any narration, it definitionally counts as unreliable in the perspectival framework of that reading. If “every reading is limited and situational,” then, it does not at all follow that “every reader is potentially unreliable,” as Olson (2003: 98) would conclude, but that every narrator is so. 4.2. The Reader Mixed-up with Other Reference Points

Even if true as far as it goes, however, this description does not nearly encompass the whole truth of the case. One must therefore beware of categorical summaries like that describing Nu¨nning as a true follower of Yacobi’s “line of argument” (Laass 2008: 26; also Shang 2011: 138), or the claim that “Nu¨nning recognizes” that unreliability lies in the beholder’s eye, so that “every reading is limited and situational” (Olson 2003: 98), or disapprovingly, “to give the reader the full responsibility is to go to [an] extreme” (Hansen 2007: 240), or other reports of Nu¨nning to this effect, likewise already cited (e.g., Schmid 2010: 60). Though doubtless based on some parallel statements of his own, like those also just cited in 4.1, all these generalizations are seriously misleading. They cover only part of the theoretical picture of unreliability found there — not even the main part, or an adequate part, at that — and mistake it for the whole. Going by them, you would think that this call for a new approach ends here, with the turn from author to reader, as if it genuinely followed the radical constructivist, sense-making program cited or echoed in Nu¨nning’s various articles of the 1990s. Instead, each of these articles goes on to contradict this radical approach, along two related lines, neither of them perceived by Nu¨nning or pointed out since. For one thing, he attacks different views and practices that he should in reason embrace, at the very least tolerate, because they are actually subsumed and licensed by this approach, or otherwise compatible with it. A major and recurrent object of attack are the standard “realist theories of unreliable narration,” founded on “by now doubtful notions of objectivity and truth” (Nu¨nning 1999b: 64, 72).148 Thus, “the orthodox concept of the 147. Further, she contrasts this alleged general invalidation, or disprivileging, with the selective privileging in Booth’s framework, which “gives authority to the implied author” and correspondingly to the implied reader. See also note 124 above. 148. Repeated in Nu¨nning 1997a: 94, 1999a: 62 – 64, 2008: 41 – 42, 47. See also the next note.


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unreliable narrator” allegedly suffers from outdated presuppositions: “that an objective view of the world, of others, and of oneself can be attained” or, following Wall (1994: 37), that “an authoritative version of events” can in principle be established or reconstructed (Nu¨nning 1999b: 72). Likewise, he deplores the fact that this prevalent misconception rests on “what Yacobi (1981: 119) has aptly called ‘a quasi-human model of a narrator’ ” as well as of the implied author (Nu¨nning 1999b: 72). These attacks are themselves questionable. One can easily disprove the supposed existence, generality, absoluteness, or invalidity of the presuppositions Nu¨nning attacks by confronting them with the actual narrative and/or narratological record. It is easier still to point out that the quarrels with realism, referentiality, or quasi-humanity run dead against Nu¨nning’s constant appeal to Jonathan Culler’s “naturalization” (e.g., ibid.: 63, 64, 70, 71, 75 – 77).149 But the point here lies not so much in the vulnerability of these antirealisms as in their inconsistency with the reader’s (or elsewhere, hearer’s, beholder’s, perceiving subject’s) empowerment. From this viewpoint, suppose for the sake of argument that the prevalent concept of unreliability did in fact exhibit realistic biases (“presuppositions”). So what? If the pedophile and the fetishist pass muster, qualifying for judges, then why not the realist? Given that unreliable telling arises from the reader’s subjective projection, or even outright invention, wouldn’t generating it through lifelike inference count as moderate, if anything? By the same a fortiori argument, we can dispose of Nu¨nning’s objections to various other ways and means whereby theorists or common readers ascribe unreliability to the narrator. These include his cavils at “imposing” on the text “preexisting conceptual models” and value schemes, or at “a liberal humanist view of literature,” or at favored commonsensical, “psychological, moral, and linguistic norms” of behavior and its reading, or at the very idea of “deviation from some norm or other,” beginning with the approach to unreliability as deviant from the overall default value (zero-point) “taken to be unmarked ‘reliability’ ” (1999b: 71 – 73). Again, as with “realism,” Nu¨nning (ibid.: 74ff.) goes on to adopt explicitly, often verbatim, most of these norms and schemes that he has just attacked. 149. Some claims even refute themselves, like the one again cited from Wall (1994: 37): since many works of the late twentieth century “challenge realist notions of truth and objectivity,” we should “re-think entirely our notion that unreliable narrators give an inaccurate version of events and that our task is to figure out ‘what really happened’” (Nu¨nning 1999b: 79 – 80, 81). This proposal reduces itself to absurdity, of course, if only because it would eliminate unreliability along with, or in the guise of, realism. It also eliminates narrativity itself and the very comprehensibility of the finished narrative, resulting in what Sternberg (1998) calls “narrativicide.”


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What underlies this reversal from attack to adoption, it would appear, is the curious belief that explicitness makes all the difference, to the point of transforming a don’t into a do. Laying bare and articulating the “implicit and unacknowledged” presuppositions of earlier theory renders them acceptable, somehow, no matter how “questionable” or “unwarranted” they were deemed earlier (ibid.: e.g., 71). What’s more, once grown “explicit and clarified,” these hidden norms and schemes come to provide nothing less than “the key for reconceptualizing unreliability” (ibid.). Inversely, being left tacit disqualifies them, regardless, as ipso facto “vague and ill-defined.” But even this odd reversal of attitude pales beside the incongruity of the attack on these norms and models with the approval of readerly license, projection, inventiveness. Funnily, what he enlists against all such normative assumptions brought to the text is none other than the idiosyncratic couple who actually legitimate them a fortiori: the “pederast” untroubled by Lolita and the “male chauvinist fetishist” (ibid.: 73 – 74). Now for the second and even more serious difficulty with the apparent turn toward constructivism. The fact that Nu¨nning proceeds to adopt and advocate what he earlier kept criticizing belongs to a still larger fact of inconsistency among conceptions of unreliability, as well as within any (or every) single one. This officially, at times defiantly, reader-oriented line — taking the forms we traced — coexists in Nu¨nning with other lines that run not across but against it. “Other lines” in the plural, mind you, since these alternatives themselves differ from one another, and as irreconcilably so as they all do from the pure reader-based conception and judgment of unreliability. The basic unresolvable inconsistency thus deepens as well as multiplies. Compare, for example, the flaunted legitimation of idiosyncratic judges of unreliability, such as the “pederast” or the “male chauvinist fetishist,” with the statements that flank it: The information on which the projection of an unreliable narrator is based derives at least as much from within the mind of the beholder as from textual data. To put it quite bluntly: A pederast would not find anything wrong with Nabokov’s Lolita; a male chauvinist fetishist who gets his kicks out of making love to dummies is unlikely to detect any distance between his norms and those of the mad monologist in Ian McEwan’s “Dead as they come.” . . . In other words: whether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of the implied author but between the distance that separates the narrator’s view of the world from the reader’s or critic’s world-model and standards of normalcy. (Nu¨nning 1999a: 61; also 1999b: 73 – 74, 2005a: 97)


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The sequence of argument moves here from one generality (“The information . . . ”) to some particular extreme cases (“To put it . . . ”) to another generality (“In other words . . . ”): let’s call these for short (a), (b), and (c).150 Less evidently, as less wittingly, this (a) – (c) sequence deploys three mutually exclusive conceptions of unreliability that incur principled non sequiturs: (a) A reliability judgment arises “at least as much” from mental “information” (presumably including mental forces and structures) “as from textual data.” Finding a narrator unreliable therefore depends on a combination of the receiver’s mind and his (or its) encounter with the text — on an interactive affair, in brief. (b) Next, the pedophile and the fetishist instances are said to offer “blunt” illustrations of (a). But they actually contradict (a) by monopolizing and maximizing the dependence on the individual reader, or mind, however strange, even offensive, this judge and judgment may look to others.151 In face of these subjective extremes, inversely, the statement that finding a narrator unreliable “derives at least as much from within the mind of the beholder as from textual data” is a wild overstatement of the text’s role and share in the finding.152 What’s more, the alleged cooperation of “textual data” in the judgment — no matter what their share — turns the (over)statement into a sheer untruth, running against the very cases supposed to demonstrate it; and vice versa, of course, since contradictoriness is a two-way relation. So the opening interactive generality and the particulars that follow upon it exclude each other. For what the particulars exemplify is the supreme reign 150. These do not include the lapse into further approaches, to be discussed later in this section and describable as regressions. Thus Nu¨nning’s occasional throwbacks to traditionalism, particularly to the “objectivist” association of unreliability with a personal character-trait or sketch. Thereby, for example, unreliable narration suddenly comes to involve “first-person speakers” with “perceptions, egotistic personalities, and problematic value-systems” (Nu¨nning 1999b: 78). Other throwbacks include the circular definition of unreliable telling as giving “cause for mistrust,” already cited, or treating unreliability as “a property” of the narrator (Neumann and Nu¨nning 2011: 98), to which we’ll return. Still another “regression,” otherwise incongruous, was mentioned in our preliminary remarks. It consists in Nu¨nning’s (2005a) eventual acceptance of the long-denounced “implied author” and with it, in theory, of the author-oriented model. 151. Shen (2013: §3.2.3) conflates (a) and (b) under “the constructivist/cognitivist approach,” typically so, no doubt. 152. This overstatement recurs in Nu¨nning 2005a: 95, 98; 2008: 40. Similarly exaggerated in the light of (b) is, for example, Nu¨nning’s (1997b: 95) claim that identifying an unreliable narrator “does not depend solely or even primarily on the reader’s intuition or ability of ‘reading between the lines,’ as Chatman and others want us to believe.” Chatman never goes to this extreme, in fact, so that Nu¨nning actually rejects and abandons his own call for readerly license.


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of the individual beholding “mind” — regardless of how sick, alien, idiosyncratic — without any appeal to and engagement with and anchorage in, let alone control of, any “textual data” whatever.153 As though to double the mutual exclusion — if possible — (a) and (b) also correlate with a judgment of unreliability and with its diametric opposite, respectively. While (a) involves “the projection of an unreliable narrator,” (b) switches poles: the child molester views Humbert, and the male fetishist the dummy lover, as reliable (though Nu¨nning keeps turning to circumlocutions instead, “would not find anything wrong with . . . is unlikely to detect any distance between . . . ”). So the jump to (b) is not a matter of putting (a) “quite bluntly” in all that concerns the judgment’s outcome, negative or positive, any more than concerning its rationale, interactive or subjective. Further, in this double inversion — from (a)’s interactive and negative reliability judgment to (b)’s subjective and positive reliability judgment — each of the opposed doublets makes sense by itself. And as devil’s advocates, let us explain how and why. On the one hand, a negative judgment, that is, unreliability, may indeed look like a reading that calls for “textual data” to trigger, maintain, validate it, especially by way of disharmony within the text that readers “project” onto the narrator. And Nu¨nning duly elaborates on such troublesome yet projectible data (e.g., clues, signals, models) in what follows. On the other hand, a positive judgment — reliability — apparently dispenses with triggers, signals, and the like, because it consists in the absence of disharmony: the text doesn’t betray or leave any problem, as it were, for readers to project onto the narrating perspective.154 Small wonder Nu¨nning opts here for the circumlocutory “not find anything wrong with . . . ” the discourse in the case of a reliable discourser. Either doublet of features, then, makes good sense on its own, to the gain of its self-containment. (So the devil’s advocacy perorates.) But this sense and gain only redouble the theory’s loss. For the multiple inconsistency between the two subtheories (a) and (b) renders the whole all the 153. The same jump between incompatible conceptions recurs, for example, in Nu¨nning 2005a: 94 – 95, only with the run-together alternatives more clearly articulated. First, again, interactivity: “Some theorists (e.g., Yacobi 1981, 1987, 2001, Nu¨nning 1998, 1999) have located unreliability in the interaction of text and reader.” The very next sentence, however, again jumps to the subjective, sheer readerly orientation, under the guise, or illusion, of continuity: “Indeed, they have argued that unreliability is not so much a character trait of a narrator as it is an interpretive strategy of the reader,” who “tries to resolve ambiguities and textual inconsistencies by projecting an unreliable narrator as an integrative hermeneutic device.” And so, again underlining the variability, even possibly the eccentricity of such integration, “the reader or critic accounts for whatever incongruity he or she may have detected” (ibid.). 154. If only (to be more exact, in line with section 3) because any conceivable problem resolves itself in terms of other integration mechanisms, thus keeping the narrator reliable.


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more incoherent. Within this incoherence, moreover, (b)’s orientation to the reader, shockingly embodied in the pervert’s positive judgment of Humbert or the dummy lover, is not even the dominant fork, if only because Nu¨nning’s approach is geared to unreliability, as usual since the 1970s. The dominance rather falls to the text/reader interplay of (a), so that Nu¨nning’s main line runs equidistant between Booth’s and ours. But how does (c) come into this picture? In view of the opening disjunction “unreliable or not,” the new paragraph (c) may appear designed to cover (a) and (b) together in a fresh wording. As (b) shows itself nothing like a “blunter” version of (a), however, nor does (c) put what has gone before “In other words.” How could it, given the mutual exclusiveness of the foregoing, interactive (a) and reader-oriented (b), as we already established? But nor, moreover, does the new paragraph (c) reformulate either of these incompatibles alone; and so it parallels neither of them. An attentive comparison of it with the two incompatibles will bring out why not. Unlike (a), briefly, (c) does not feature any “textual data”: even “the narrator’s view of the world” is a global and work-length inference, rather than a hard local datum. This absence of hard textual data in (c) grows still more conspicuous, and with it the discontinuity from (a), considering that (a) involves “the projection of an unreliable narrator” and therefore, as just explained, requires such data (e.g., signals) to project him in and through “the mind”: above all, that of (a)’s interactive reader. Unlike (b), again, (c) does not just equally concern the disjunct “unreliable.” Its judgment, negative or positive, is also uniquely supposed to turn on both the relations (narrator/ reader) and the relativity (more/less) entailed by “distance”: contrast the reader’s finding in (b) nothing “wrong” (or, for that matter, something wrong) with the discourse, regardless of anyone else and any gradation. Accordingly, (c) has its peculiarities and, what’s more, its self-contained discreteness in turn, to the further irreparable loss of the whole account’s coherence. 4.3. Tissues of Incompatibility: A Brief Comparison

To get another measure of this overall incoherence, compare the definition(s) of “unreliable narrator” in Prince’s (2003 [1987]: 101) Dictionary of Narratology:155 [x] A narrator whose norms and behavior are not in accordance with the implied author’s norms, [y] a narrator whose values (tastes, judgments, moral sense) 155. Also comparable is the threefold definitional inconsistency lurking in another miniature — two sentences of Culler 1997 — and brought to light in section 1 above, as a preliminary example.


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diverge from those of the implied author’s, [z] a narrator the reliability of whose account is undermined by various features of that account. (Our addition of [x], [y], [z])

Nu¨nning himself (1999a: 55, 1999b: 65, 2005a: 91; 2008: 33) repeatedly brushes aside this “definition of the concept” as “an unholy mixture of vagueness and tautology.” Whether vague or not, however, Prince’s definition is anything but tautologous, since it branches out into no fewer than three different accounts of unreliability. We marked them with [x], [y], [z]. If anything, their relation is much closer to the pole opposed to tautology, namely, the antipole of diversity, culminating in incompatibility. Indeed, there emerges a striking likeness to the above (a) – (c) passage from Nu¨nning, in all but the particular claims (doctrines, theories, approaches) encapsulated and oddly juxtaposed by the respective trios. Briefly, [x] echoes Booth’s (1961a: 159) classic and unoperational definition, complete with its mysterious reference to narratorial “acting” (here, “behavior”) as well as to speech and, of course, to the implied author’s “norms” as the standard for both. On the other hand, like most conceptions since, [y] drops “behavior,” while detailing “norms” into “values (tastes, judgments, moral sense).” The two, (x) and (y), accordingly differ as variants of Booth: the one a little odd, the other ordinary throughout; the one less inclusive because more faithful and demanding, the other vice versa. However, [z] clashes with both, since the narrator is made unreliable there by (unspecified) textual “features” that objectively undermine his “account,” without any reference to the implied author. (Nor to the reader, except that the receiving side, never mind operation, is already left out by [x] and [y].) Apart from the particular ill-sorted definitions of unreliability that are run together in these short excerpts, [x] – [z] doubtless parallel the incongruous (a) – (c).156 But then, juxtaposing divergent concepts is one thing for a glossary or dictionary — its normal job — and quite another for a scholarly argument. 4.4. The Interactive, Text/Reader Orientation

Outside such local manifestations of divergence, though, Nu¨nning’s interactional (a) is the chief alternative to the reader-centered (b); and also a quantitative superior by far, in that it looms much larger in Nu¨nning’s various articles on the topic. Inconsistently with (b), this alternative approach shifts or extends the ground for reliability judgment to reader/text interplay, so as to balance (and thus hopefully control) the unlimited play of the reader’s mind, 156. The parallel grows still closer, because, as will emerge in section 4.5, even the objectivist, sheer data-based (z) finds an equivalent in Nu¨nning. For now, recall the “throwbacks” cited in note 150 above.


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however it operates and wherever it leads in any particular case. It is as if, taken aback by his own momentary venture into “radical” constructivism — that of Yacobi’s definition, in the spirit of our Tel Aviv poetics — he looks for the safety and relative objectivity found in a middle way.157 Nu¨nning accordingly alternates divergent theories even in a compass so small as the passage just discussed or, you will recall, the set of “crucial” questions about (un) reliability with which Yacobi (1981) opens. Facing the binary choice, “Are reliability and unreliability value-judgments or descriptions?,” he opts for the value-laden, readerly, subjective pole, as a constructivist does or would. But in answer to the next question, “Data or conjectures?,” he opts for neither of the principled choices, the textual or the readerly, offering instead a both/ and: “The concept of the unreliable narrator is based on both textual data and the critic’s conjectures” (Nu¨nning 1999a: 60 or 1997a: 107).158 Nor, let us emphasize again, does this (a) – (b) collocation and oscillation represent a local or one-off slip. On the contrary, the problem with (a) – (b) as an incongruous twinning of alternatives recurs, in a somewhat less drastic variation, within (a) itself. There, the extremes supposedly co-occur and interact, rather than alternate. Yet, the hopeless tension between sheer reader-centeredness (so that even a “pederast” enjoys free interpretive, even inventive license, complete with reliability judgment) and both-textand-reader-centeredness (with its nostalgia for objectivity, ideally consensus) finds an analogue within the latter twofold, which occupies the bulk of Nu¨nning’s articles on the topic, early or late.159 Reconsider the so-called interactive twofold (a). How can everything depend on the individual reader or mind, conjecturing at will, and yet equally depend on the shared text, especially as a set of “data” to which all readers have by nature access and commitment? These two dependency relations, with their respective scales of power and importance, cannot coexist, or not peacefully, let alone nicely cooperate and dovetail in the making of reliability 157. Compare the retreat of a self-styled constructivist like Fludernik in, for example, “not every text can be read as unreliable narration” (2001: 709). On this point, suggestively, even a hardline author-oriented exponent of a single right (“implied”) reading like Booth (1961a: 311ff.) or ideological analysts like the feminist Case (1999) stand nearer to genuine constructivism in at least recognizing the opposite as a fact, however unwelcome. Thus Case (ibid.: 210n2) on “the possibility of reading every seemingly artless narrator as artful,” for instance. 158. Unsurprisingly, various reports of Nu¨nning’s orientation oscillate to match. According to Fludernik (2005: 50), for example, Nu¨nning “explicitly declares his narratological oeuvre an effort in constructivism,” but, a few lines down, his work abruptly turns into an attempt “to steer a middle course between the textual analysis of signals helping the reader to recognize unreliability and the reader’s active construction of an unreliable narrator by way of interpretative strategy.” See also the previous note. 159. Including Nu¨nning 2005a, 2008, where he reverses himself on the question of the implied author, from attack to endorsement. See 4.6 below.


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judgments. Least of all can they so interact failing a reference point (notably the implied author, spurned here) by appeal to which any conflict is decidable when the two supposed interagents pull different ways: for and against reliability, above all. To test this argument, here is a thought experiment. Suppose a reader is morally certain that the governess in The Turn of the Screw tells the truth about the ghosts that haunt her, but a growing body of counterevidence emerges along the narrative to suggest that the truth is realistic or psychological rather than objectively factual, with the narrator both grasped and judged to suit. Even if somehow resolved to negative effect, is this clash resolvable in principle on a reader-and-text basis or only on that of a reader-or-text disjunction, if at all? The latter, one must conclude, to the undercutting of the so-called interactive model as presented by Nu¨nning, without reference to the spurned author.160 As we already argued against the wishful appeal to “constraint,” no evenhanded interactivity can impose itself on a determined or, more generally, “liberated” reader. Yet Nu¨nning keeps aspiring to such (authorless) coordinated interaction: above all, between the subject’s mental schemes and the object’s verbal signals (clues, pointers, markers) of unreliability. Following Harker (1989) on the interactive model, he correlates these two domains, the subjective vs. the objective, with the extratextual vs. the textual, the conceptually driven vs. the data-driven, the top-down and the bottom-up polarities, respectively. At the subjective, concept- or schema-driven, top-down pole of the interaction, we encounter here various ready-made “conceptual frameworks,” all “previously existing in the mind of the reader” (Nu¨nning 1999b: 74), who approaches the text equipped with them and brings them to bear on it. These frameworks ascend to definitional importance in Nu¨nning’s articles (e.g., ibid.: 70) and receive a proportionate specification. Here he reintroduces in explicit form the assortment of so-called implicit and unacknowledged presuppositions that supposedly vitiate earlier theories. As you will recall, they lie in silent premises and preferences concerning mimesis, realism, truth, objectivity, quasi-humanity, world-models, common sense, verisimilitude, “psychological, moral, and linguistic norms” or normalcy, reliability as default value, and deviations therefrom. Bringing all these to the surface allegedly makes them not just acceptable but a key to “reconceptualizing unreliability.” 160. If not resolvable at all, or not resolved by that reader, there would ensue a permanent ambiguity, not only between the alternatives in the narrative but also within the supposedly joint interactive basis.


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So rehabilitated, as it were, these familiar, traditional schemata are now ranged under two headings, “everyday and literary.” The former supposed keys to unreliability include: † † † † †

general world-knowledge, historical world-model or cultural codes, explicit theories of personality or implicit models of psychological coherence and human behavior, knowledge of the social, moral, or linguistic norms relevant for the period in which a text was written and published (cf. Yacobi 1987), the reader’s or critic’s psychological disposition, and system of norms and values. (Nu¨nning 1999b: 76)

The second group includes: † † † † †

general literary conventions . . . , conventions and models of literary genres, intertextual frames of reference . . . , stereotyped models of character such as the picaro, the miles gloriosus, the trickster, and last but not least the structure and norms established by the respective work itself. (Ibid.: 77)

What with their familiarity, we needn’t go further into these lists or instances of schemata (nor indeed does the list maker). But where and why they fall short is worth pointing out. For now, let us quickly draw attention to some conspicuous absences. As Nu¨nning repeatedly invokes Culler’s (1975: 131 – 60) “naturalization,” one would expect him to incorporate the entire set of naturalizing modes presented there, with the appropriate adjustments to unreliability. The “literary” half, especially, would thereby gain significant aids to coherence, like parody, with its exaggerating yet reliable parodist.161 Even more perceptibly, indeed surprisingly absent, for a self-styled “cognitive” reconceptualization, are the variety of schemata that so multiply and predominate in the cognitive sciences. The research done on narrative there particularly abounds in such mental models — structures of knowledge that we bring to the text — from the lowly “script” to “thematic” and “explanation” patterns. (See Sternberg 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2009 for an overview of cognitivist work on narrative.) The disregard for the various schemes offered by the chosen discipline, and as relevant as those assembled here from other sources, is not easy to understand. 161. On what “naturalization” offers and lacks, see Sternberg 1983a: 163 – 65, 2012: 405 – 11.


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But most perceptibly and regrettably absent, given their direct bearing on (un)reliability, are the mechanisms of integration in Yacobi (e.g., 1981 and section 3 above), taken as a set.162 Nu¨nning fails to reckon with these mechanisms as such, though he himself (1999b: 77n10) indicates their “direct relevance to the problem [of narrational unreliability].” And the consequences of their neglect, unlike those of the omissions mentioned earlier, go far beyond any particular holes left in the two collections of schemata. But these larger difficulties, operational and principled, are naturally best traced in the light of the interactive model as a whole. With this in view, it is important to realize the nature (role, status, orientation) of the conceptual frameworks, the “everyday” and the “literary” alike, within this model. For better or worse, they are all subjective, as well as mental, schematic, imported to narrative from without, and top-down in application to it, reliability judgment included. Nu¨nning (1999b: 70, 71, 73, 76) himself describes them as “subjectively tinged,” “difficult to establish and agree upon,” dependent on “the reader’s or critic’s psychological disposition, and system of norms and values,” hence “open to challenge” (cf. the judgment “relativist” in Pettersson 2005: 68).163 Unlike most of the original schemas in both cognitivism and poetics — where these two lists supposedly come from — there is nothing universalist or regular or even moderately intersubjective about Nu¨nning’s borrowed mental structures, far less their top-down application by users. As such, these conceptual patterns in fact not only correspond to the readeroriented model but equally belong to it and might have been listed in relation 162. Each of Nu¨nning’s two lists cited above acknowledges one mechanism of them, in isolation from the rest. 163. This is why the “last but not least” schematic resource, “the structure and norms established by the . . . work itself,” oddly diverges from the rest, being inherent to the text and therefore objective. Another strange, exceptional divergence is that “narrators who violate agreed-upon moral and ethical norms . . . are generally taken to be unreliable” (Nu¨nning 2005b: 496), rather than subject to diverse, even opposed judgments. But these two statements are only local self-contradictions, which also contradict each other at that; and so both prove the rule of variability in the application of neutral (“cognitive”) schemas. On the whole, Nu¨nning does not, therefore, “supplement constructivism with a cognitive approach to understanding narrative,” as Phelan (2005: 43) asserts. Both of these orientations are in Nu¨nning readercentered (“subjectively tinged”), and so not mutually supplementary at all but overlapping or coextensive. Instead, Nu¨nning replaces “constructivism with a cognitive approach” joined to “textual signals” for objective balance. Even so, the objectivity is ascribed by him to the signals, not to the cognitive schematism that Korthals-Altes (2014: 150 – 51), for example, overassociates with them and misdescribes as a bid for “a more scientific procedure.” Hansen (2007: 236, 239) likewise misdescribes it as a bid for “a shared value-set for all readers,” while complaining that Nu¨nning “unfortunately” leaves out “the textual level where the unreliability is established”: an inversion of the facts regarding both components of the interactive approach. All such misreadings only render the confusion worse.


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to it, instead or as well.164 Obviously, Nu¨nning’s two lists of schemas are available even to the most idiosyncratic readers and widely used in practice. Who approaches texts without some knowledge of world and convention, for example, let alone without one’s own “psychological” and “normative” tendencies? (If anything, the repertoire of schemata on which individual readers draw extends much further, as we observed, than Nu¨nning’s conspicuously hole-ridden lists. Just think of basic aids to sense-making like the cognitivist’s “script” or “problem-solving” and our mechanisms of integration.) At the same time, the “conceptual frameworks” gain objective support — or the appearance thereof — now officially and in the form of the textual, data-driven “signals” or “clues” or “markers.” The other pole of Nu¨nning’s interactive twofold accordingly involves an alleged movement “towards a systematic account of clues to unreliable narration” (1997b: 95ff.). As the conceptual schemes allegedly did before, the clues now supply the “key” to “the complex problems” at issue” and, above all, to “why a reader will say that a narrator is mad or unreliable.” What textual and contextual signals suggest to the reader that the narrator’s reliability may be suspect? What standards allow the critic to recognize an unreliable narrator when he or she sees one? In short: How does one detect the narrator’s unreliability? (Ibid.: 95)

The “broad range” of these “definable” or “identifiable clues” is largely composed of what we have described as triggers to the play of mechanisms, perspectival and otherwise, namely: textual incoherences (conflicts, discrepancies, discontinuities, ambiguities, or most inclusively, gaps) of all kinds.165 They manifest themselves in clashes between different utterances of the narrator, between “utterances and actions,” between “story and discourse,” between the narrator’s “representation” and “interpretation” of events (ibid.: 96). Related “clues to unreliability” include the narrator’s “stylistic peculiarities” and “violation of linguistic norms,” or “verbal tics and habits” ( Wall 1994: 19). Also, postulating “a close link” between the discourser’s “subjectivity” and the “effect” of unreliability, Nu¨nning (1997b: 97) adopts for the purpose “the virtually exhaustive account” of the former given in Fludernik (1993a: 227 – 79). Such “indications of unreliability” consist, for example, in the frequency of “speaker-oriented” and “addressee-oriented” expressions, in syntactic abnormalities (e.g., “incomplete sentences, interjections . . . ”), or in perceptible lexical choices (e.g., emotive wording). 164. Hence also the self-descriptive phrase “a reader-centered and cognitive approach” (Nu¨nning 2005b: 496). 165. The “clues” or “signals” are most detailed in Nu¨nning 1997b: 95 – 99, with summaries in 1999a: 64 – 65, 1999b: 74, 2005a: 102 – 4; also Olson 2003: 97 – 98; Heyd 2006: 237 – 40.


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Compositionally, analogous tensions exhibit themselves in “multiperspectival accounts of the same events” (ibid.: 97 – 98): what Sternberg (1985: 365 – 440) terms “repetition structure,” from local divergences among characters’ versions to the work-length ones in Rashomon or the multipart Alexandria Quartet.166 Further signals can be so diverse as the text’s overt questioning of the narrator’s reliability and paratexts like titles or afterwords (Nabokov’s to Lolita, for example).167 Needless to say by now, these are all strictly context-dependent and may well go with reliable or ambiguous narration. This overabundance of signals only betrays a fear of interpretive license and seeks insurance against it in objective anchorage, as it were. What a far cry from legitimating the reliability judgment of the pederast or the fetishist. Moreover, the reader’s own judgment no longer even counts as the leading force vis-a`-vis the “structural” or “semantic” elements “of the textbase,” but comes down to a factor that needs “taking into account” within the interactive model. This anxious wish for objective insurance, or anchorage, newly disables therefore any reader-oriented “reconceptualization,” which would follow or supplement that originated decades before in Yacobi (1981) and its larger constructivist framework. The same wish also brings us to the next subsection, where we will find it running to the extreme of yet another self-contained and irreconcilable approach. 4.5. Objectivism: Miniature and Large-Scale Reflexes (Expressions, Giveaways)

The tangled picture revealed so far does not yet exhaust the approaches to unreliability, as to (un)reliability and discourse in general, which are usefully yet unhappily represented by Nu¨nning. Usefully, because the disentangling, specification, and comparison of approaches are a major goal of our review, especially in the opening sections. Yet unhappily so, of course, since Nu¨nning himself keeps shifting among mutually exclusive approaches; nor has this instability even been exhibited yet at its most drastic. Elsewhere, Nu¨nning sometimes runs to the extreme diametrically opposed to the reader-centered, or subject-oriented, namely, sheer objectivism, as though unreliability were all in the text: a mediator’s negative feature visible to all comers who have eyes to see. Such objectivism, or formalism, therefore violently jars against 166. Including the cinematic adaptations and equivalents: see Shaham 2010, 2013. 167. Elsewhere, other or yet further signals have been proposed. Thus Rasley (2008: 5) concentrates on “excess” (of sincerity, casualness, emphasis, information). Signals may also appear under other names, more dignified or determinate. Here belong the supposed “types” of unreliable narrator in Riggan 1981 and Phelan 2005: 49 – 53: for instance, the madman and the underteller, respectively.


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both of the approaches traced and compared thus far, with the violence ranging from “mere” incompatibility to flat contradiction, and the shuttling among the three radicalized accordingly. William Nelles (2011: 109) is perhaps alone in calling Nu¨nning’s “a strictly text-centered approach.”168 One wonders why he finds it so, despite the salience, the allure, and indeed the frequency of other labels, especially the antipolar one, “reader-centered.” However that may be, “strictly” would rule out the multifold alternatives already traced and still to come. This fatal wavering betrays itself in a diversity of ways, some more extensive or recurrent or transparent, some less. But all go to develop our running analysis and argument. They show further how deep the problem goes, with its implications; how revealing the fact that it (along with its assorted analogues elsewhere) has generally been missed so long; and how to avoid both obstacles to advance, starting from their recognition as such. In more positive terms, advance starts here with distinguishing among the lines of approach that crisscross in Nu¨nning: the constructivist, down to subjectivism, the interactive, and now the objectivist (or formalist). In bringing to light the reflexes of this newest arrival and complication, objectivism, we will proceed from miniature to large-scale and from more to less covert giveaways.169 (1) What most revealingly encapsulates the wavering between the extremes of objectivism (formalism, essentialism, reification, all on the text’s surface) and subject-dependence (projecting, inventing, relativizing, all in the beholder’s mind) is the shift in the conception of unreliability between a given and an inference: a character trait of the mediator (narrator, reflector) and a perspectival construct designed by us readers to make sense of the narrative at the mediator’s expense. Needless to say by now, here lies the heart of the matter, along with the core difference between the problematic traditional approaches and the constructivist turn. Recall the questions with which Yacobi (1981: 113) opens. “Are reliability and unreliability . . . data or conjectures . . . ? Autonomous features or products of fixed combinations of other features?” We already cited an answer recurrent in Nu¨nning (e.g., 1999a: 60), one so reader-oriented as to flaunt its accommodation of the pedophile subject. “They are neither autonomous features nor products of fixed 168. Contrast, for example, how Olson 2003: 97 describes his approach: “Narrator unreliability is not a stable objective quality but a function of reader reception. . . . Hence unreliability is a strategy for reading texts rather than a text-immanent phenomenon.” 169. Within a single-minded objectivist approach, the same reflexes would count not as giveaways, or self-betrayals, but as expressions of that approach, whether deliberate or otherwise. For some cases in point, see note 171 below.


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combinations of other features but rather arbitrary and very curious mixtures of heterogeneous ingredients.” But then, he also repeatedly gives the opposite answer, one befitting a zealous objective textualist or formalist. For example, the narrator’s reliability “is compromised” by “limited knowledge, emotional involvement . . . and questionable norms. . . . As these features indicate, unreliable narration” is “a property” of narrators, especially “homodiegetic ones” ( Neumann and Nu¨nning 2011: 98; also Nu¨nning 1997a: 84, 1999b: 78 – 79).170 Moreover, this common property allegedly branches out, in that narrators subgroup according to the character-trait that makes them unreliable. The types include the madman, the hypocrite, the pervert, the liar, the trickster (ibid.: 99, after Riggan 1981). “ No autonomous feature” turns into an essentialism that reifies the feature and its multiple forks.171 (2) Among the miniature reflexes (expressions or, here, giveaways) of objectivism, another one has a particular methodological as well as theoretical significance. Nu¨nning repeatedly, and rightly, stresses the need to uncover and make explicit the silent assumptions or what he calls “the presuppositional framework,” all “unacknowledged,” on which “theories of unreliable narration have hitherto been based” (1999a: 61ff., 1999b: 71, 2005a: 95 – 96, 2008: 41ff.). Such metacriticism is doubtless essentially welcome and indeed overdue. But, like charity, it should begin at home. Nu¨nning would do well to direct the same critical look at his own argument. So our foregoing analysis has 170. As typically, the extremes meet next: “Unreliability is not only a character-trait of a narrator but also an interpretive strategy of the reader” (Neumann and Nu¨nning 2011: 99). As if this mixture were not baffling enough, it is credited to “Yacobi 1981, 1987, 2001” as well as to “Nu¨nning 1998, 1999.” 171. See also note 150 above and the discussion of Olson (2003) as “operationalizer” in section 2.4. The same traditional objectification resurges elsewhere, often against another or even the official line, premise, analysis within the approach concerned. See examples in points (2) – (5) that come next. With a disciplinary twist, such an approach also manifests itself in Bortolussi and Dixon (2003: 38ff.) on the “objectivity” of “textual features,” including those related to unreliability. That the authors build on cognitive science and entitle their book Psychonarratology only sharpens the oddity of their describing such features as “objective, precise, stable” (ibid.) rather than as mental constructs born of the reading or viewing process, trial and error included. Likewise, for instance, recall section 3.3.3 on the anchorage of unreliability in the narrator’s discourse or qualities on their own, and 3.3.5 on its zealous Boothian fixture in communication by Shen (2013). Shen (ibid.: §1) also textualizes unreliability into “a feature of narratorial discourse,” then proceeds to subgroup it into, or by, lower-level textual givens: misreporting, underreporting, and other supposed manifest breaches of due narratorial performance. So already does Phelan (2005: 49 – 53), from whom this objectivist subgrouping (“typology”) derives, against the professed “rhetorical” approach. And so does whoever else adopts this package deal of unreliable narration with formal types of deviance in narrating, comparable to Nu¨nning’s “signals.” (Details in section 5, on Axes of [Un]reliability.)


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progressively shown from the outset. His own “presuppositional framework” would equally benefit from such self-criticism — not least when this framework underlies his sharp and extensive critique of his predecessors in the field. It is therefore fitting to start with Nu¨nning’s typical obliviousness to his own presuppositioning in the most rigorous sense of the term. In this rigorous sense, the term includes the workings of factivity, which have a large relevance to (un)reliable discourse. The classic work on factivity (including verbs like know, realize, recognize, discover, ignore, forget, regret ) as a type of presupposition is Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1971). According to them, the use of a factive element (e.g., verb) in the main clause commits the speaker to the truth of the object, that-clause. For example, saying “I knew [rather than believed, supposed, or inferred] that she had given the right answer” commits me to the rightness of her answer, which “knew” presupposes. Inversely, having made this statement, I cannot logically go on to deny the rightness of her answer, whereas I could deny it with impunity if I had used, instead, the nonpresuppositional reporting verbs of thought quotation: “I believed . . . ” or “I supposed . . . ” or the equally but otherwise noncommittal “I thought I knew . . . ” Sternberg (2001a), on “Factives and Perspectives,” surveys and redefines the phenomenon in perspectival terms, (un)reliability notably involved. So reconceived, therefore, it has a direct bearing on the present overview. For now, though, we will focus on its metacritical objectivist bearing. Nu¨nning, among others, in effect associates unreliability with factive verbs, like “know” or “recognize,” which definitionally presuppose and so objectify it: they brand the narrator mentioned (“known,” “recognized”) in the sentence as unreliable within the world and the discourse world concerned, by force of presupposition. “Definitionally,” because, as presuppositions, those factive verbs commit the speaker (here, the scholar) who opts for them to the factuality of their verbal object, that is, to the truth of the statement made about the unreliable narrator in the object (“that . . . ”) clause or to the existence of the direct object in a simple sentence. The factive associated with unreliability then establishes unreliability as a fact; the grammatical object denotes an objective reality of or concerning unreliable narration, in terms of the utterance at issue. Consider, for example, Nu¨nning’s interest in “how readers know an unreliable narrator when they see one” (1997a: 86, 95, 1999a: 58, 1999b: 69, 2008: 38; our emphasis) or in “standards [that] allow the critic to recognize an unreliable narrator when he or she sees one” (1997a:


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95, 1999a: 54, 1999b: 65, 2005a: 94, 101, 104, 2008: 33, 52; our emphasis). The emphases we added to the operative verbs should help to bring out the silent workings of their factivity. So should a comparison with subjective, reader-oriented, noncommittal, because nonpresuppositional, variants like “everyone seems to know what an unreliable narrator is” or “the standards” by which “critics think they recognize an unreliable narrator when they see one” (Nu¨nning 1999a: 53, 60, 1999b: 81; our emphasis). To make doubly sure, though, here is what they bring out. When you speak about knowing or recognizing something (e.g., an unreliable narrator) on sight, you necessarily (ipso facto) take it for an existent, rather than an imagined or hypothetical or constructed thing. Knowledge or recognition of unreliability therefore stands opposed to its “projection” or “invention” elsewhere in Nu¨nning, and the diametric contrast encapsulates that between the text- and the reader-oriented approaches, between sheer objectivism and free interpretive license. Similarly with your “identification of an unreliable narrator” (Nu¨nning 1997b: 102), or with your asking “how readers detect unreliability” (ibid.: 90, 95, 101, 2005a: 101, 103, 2008: 52), or with your utterance of the factivized statement that certain linguistic features “play an important role in detecting the narrator’s unreliability” (Nu¨nning 2005a: 103), or with your using a near-synonym in reference to “a specific method for discerning much unreliable narration” (ibid.: 93), or with “the ultimate guidelines for deciding whether a novel is judged to be reliable or not” (ibid.: 105).172 Inversely, saying “I knew [or recognized or detected, or discerned, etc.] the narrator’s unreliability, only he proved reliable” threatens what is said with fundamental inconsistency — collapse of meaning — just like “I knew she had given the right answer, but she hadn’t [she actually forgot it, got it wrong, and the like]” or “I recognized his wife at the party, only he wasn’t married.” For all of these statements factivize 172. Compare “the reader recognizes the [narrator’s] specific unreliability” in de Bruyn 2008: 209, 211, who in principle endorses a “reader-oriented approach,” obviously incompatible with such factivity. Or the inconsistency between the alleged quickness of readers “to recognize a narrator’s unreliability” and the surrounding talk about the narration’s “ambiguity” and its uneasy settlement (Schauber and Spolsky 1986: 33 – 34). Or among philosophers, “we have become skilled at recognizing unreliable narrators,” in Currie 1995a: 19, who otherwise demands “complex” inference for unreliability. Similarly, Walsh 1997: 505 (also, e.g., Hansen 2007: 238) considers how “we are to identify unreliable narration.” And Phillips (2009) proposes a text-based “model for the detection of unreliability” yet concludes that the issue becomes “ultimately impossible to determine” in American Psycho. Just a few of the many and often selfbetraying analogous examples of commitment to factivity, hence to objectivism. Likewise with the forms of commitment discussed in the sequel.


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what is or turns out objectively false, maybe fancied (i.e., subjective), yet at any rate counterfactual. These absurdities of factivizing the counterfactual again reflect in miniature how Nu¨nning violently joins together the corresponding incompatible theories, thus “reconceptualizing” unreliable narration to impossible effect. He combines these incompatibles at the price of internal discord regarding unreliability’s very mode of existence — in the text? in the mind? — hence its determination or construction. (3) Speaking of “determination,” this noun or the cognate verb likewise perforce invest the ensuing object with a factual status, and again regardless of their user’s awareness of it. They accordingly operate here as another miniature giveaway of objectivism (e.g., Nu¨nning 1997b: 101; 1999b: 66, 70; 2005a: 91 – 93, 95, 98; 2008: 33). “To determine something,” that is, carries for the something determined (e.g., a narrator reliable or otherwise) much the same factive-like implications of objective existence in the text and the text’s world. Take, for example, Nu¨nning’s reference to the pointers one needs in order “to determine a narrator’s unreliability” (1997b: 101; 2005a: 98) or those that do not “provide a reliable basis for determining a narrator’s unreliability” (1999b: 66; 2005a: 91). Similarly with the languages of “featuring” or “displaying” or “establishing” or “resolving,” whose (un) reliable object assumes textual being as such, visible to all comers, or safely inferable by them from the respective verbs. Thus, Wuthering Heights “features two unreliable narrators” (1997b: 92); other texts “exhibit” or “display features of narrational unreliability” (1999b: 75, 2005b: 495); or “the establishment of a reading” (2005a: 97); or, more generally, the “notion of unreliability presupposes some sort of standard for establishing whether or not the facts or the interpretations provided by a narrator may be held suspect” (1999b: 71).173 Nu¨nning even variously drives the objectification of unreliable narrating and narrator to the limit of a reified form in the text or even on its surface. He thus goes so far as to call the two “a formal response to broader cultural developments” and to place them among the novel’s 173. Here are some analogous giveaways to Nu¨nning’s objectifying establish: Hansen 2007: 239, 241, Korthals-Altes 2014: 148, 151. Similar analogues can be adduced to Nu¨nning’s detect, discern, decide, determine, feature, display, exhibit, resolve, and so forth. A miniature example of an objectivist/inferential contradiction in terms would be “the detection of unreliability belongs to intention attribution” (Korthals-Altes 2015:61). Or Fludernik 2005:50 on steering “a middle course between the textual analysis of signals helping the reader to recognize unreliability, and the reader’s active construction of an unreliable narrator by way of interpretative strategy.”


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“formal properties” (1997a: 94 – 95). He also reifies them into a tool available to the storyteller: to the novelist, for example, and, in all but name, the implied author. Consider objectifying nouns like “the technique known as unreliable narration” (2005a: 105; 2008: 58): not, or no longer, anything projectible by readers, and hypothetical to match — far less invented at will — but a textual device, pattern, resource, component, “just like other narrative techniques” (1997a: 94).174 In short, unreliability does not count here as a “technique” of reading, like our perspectival and other mechanisms; it counts still less so than as a product of reading. Nor, strictly, does it make here even a technique of narrating, because narrators do not as a rule choose to be deemed unreliable, only to render others so: among the voices and views they themselves quote. (Motivated exceptions to the rule can be found in Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution” and John le Carre´’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.) The choice of “unreliable narration” rather belongs to a participant at a higher level, who silently creates and controls it for a purpose, including how and why the narrator betrays it. By this chain of reasoning, then, such narration would count as a “technique” of narrative- and narrator-making: of storytelling, of authoring, in effect.175 (4) Opposed ideas of unreliability are immediately collocated or juxtaposed, even within a single phrase or sentence. In the most astonishing example, the unreliable narrator is defined as one whose perspective clashes with the value scheme “of the whole text or that of the reader” (Nu¨nning 1999a: 59; 1999b: 69). The definitional context, the miniature scale, the bareness of the disjunction, and the recurrence of the sentence: all join forces to maximize the astonishment produced by the free interchange of dichotomous theories, “text” OR “reader.”176 A complementary yet more oblique example would be Nu¨nning’s claim that his “reconceptualization” or “radical reorientation” lies in 174. But then, Nu¨nning’s idea of textuality, or textualization, is hardly well-defined or even stable. Hence, for example, this self-refuting statement: “The concept of the implied author is quite problematic because it creates the illusion that it is a purely textual phenomenon (Nu¨nning 2005a: 91; see also ibid.: 92 on the implied author as a “guise” for “talking about textual phenomena”). If “implied,” how can the author be deemed “a purely textual phenomenon,” that is, a given rather than a construct? Who, therefore, would fall into this “illusion”? Unfortunately, a fuzzy idea of textuality is not quite a rare, idiosyncratic exception. 175. Shen (2013: §2) indeed explicitly (and, in context, less irreconcilably) objectivizes it into “a rhetorical device” that is “encoded by the author.” 176. Their conjunction elsewhere (e.g., “the whole text as well as the reader” [1997a: 107]) is not much better: it encapsulates the “interactive” model, discussed in 4.4 above.


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describing “how texts that display features of unreliable narration are read” (Nu¨nning 1999a: 60, 75, 1999b: 70, 2008: 39). Here lurks in miniature another self-contradiction. Does the text display those features, as in (3) above, or does the reader construct (produce, even freely contrive, or, inversely, dispense with) them? If displayed in the text, what need is there for a reading of these features, let alone for its analysis? Registering them would suffice. What does unreliability hinge on, the features or the reading? (Not, mind you, “their reading,” which presumes that the features are there to be read, and so merges into the former, objectivist, self-contradicted option.) The given sentence, however, forces instead another illogical both/and: it disables any choice, much less the choice in favor of the “reading” alternative, which alone would justify the declared “radical reorientation” or “reconceptualization” in Nu¨nning. (5) Crucial and cumulative, (1) – (4) are yet small and distributed giveaways of Nu¨nning’s drive toward a secure, univocal, purely objective conception and manifestation and recognition of unreliability. These pinpoint verbal giveaways, however, find a continuous and largescale equivalent, one all the more bizarre since it remains as blissfully unwitting of what it entails and how it clashes with other lines driven pell-mell by the argument. This equivalent they find lurks in Nu¨nning’s (1997b: 90 – 95) turn from synchronic analysis to outlining “the history of the unreliable narrator in British fiction.” As such, of course, this historical outline no longer deals with readerly inferences, projections, constructs, ambiguities, let alone free inventions, but, supposedly, with matters of fact about unreliability in diachronic movement.177 So, indeed, Nu¨nning unrolls it. He thus confidently affirms that this history starts “at the end of the eighteenth century,” but not with Defoe’s narrators, in spite of their “faulty” memories or “inconsistent” accounts, nor with Richardson’s correspondents, despite their “subjective . . . cognition,” nor with Smollett’s letter-writers, for all their “idiosyncrasies.” Though these tellers have all been judged unreliable by many readers — as a multitude of others before and since have been on such grounds — Nu¨nning presumes to know better. He instead traces the rise of the “full-fledged unreliable narrator” to the relatively obscure Castle Rackrent (1800) by Maria Edgeworth. 177. Or the other way round, as Richard Aczel (2001: 614) nicely puts it: “If a narrator’s unreliability is a reader’s construct, the history of unreliable narration can only ever be a history of readings, and not a chronology of texts.”


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Nu¨nning omits to explain why Thady’s “quirky,” inconsistent, cognitively subjective tale counts as unreliable, while the above parallels and precedents don’t, yet he insists that such is the historical case. This, needless to say, amounts to objectivism par excellence — even more dogmatic or less empirical than most — and the rest of the diachronic outline plays variations on it all along. Inversely, this stands opposed to Nu¨nning’s (e.g., 2005a: 98 – 99) idea of the diachronic axis as a relativizing force: to the receiver-oriented claim that our ‘projection’ or ‘invention’ of unreliable narrators keep changing along history. Moreover, like (1) – (3), this polarizes with Nu¨nning’s (e.g., 1999b: 67, 2005a: 92, 2008: 35) repeated attack on “only one correct interpretation”: here, he even aspires to a single correct interpretation on the historical as well as the textual axis. No modalizing “perhaps” or “probably” qualifies the categorical statements, with the certainty they bespeak about the features and the fortunes of unreliability.178 4.6. How the Implied Author and Author-Centeredness (Re)Enter by the Backstairs

Among these three incompatible approaches, as we said, the interactive, textand-reader-oriented one looms largest in Nu¨nning of the 1990s. Most of its problems have already been exposed above, but it’s now time to add the most hidden and disruptive of them all. Such interactive both/and not only precludes the reader-oriented reconceptualization often cited or declared by Nu¨nning and attributed to him by others. (See 4.1 above.) When professing interactivity, Nu¨nning thereby shifts from the latter orientation’s constructivist, interpretive, permissive, authorless model of discourse all the way to the communicative antipole, and so back to the implied author, who has been officially and vocally ruled out of discoursive existence, except as a “phantom.” Nu¨nning never acknowledges this fatal switch of model and would probably deny it — as would his followers — but in vain. Once the narrator’s unreliability comes to depend on the reader interacting with the text, the dependence involves here an author producing a text to communicate with the reader behind the narrator’s back (e.g., by way of distancing, or ironic, signals).179 178. Aczel (2001: 613 – 14), instead, starts by describing Nu¨nning’s as a “diachronic approach to the phenomenon of ‘unreliable narration,’” typical of “postclassical narratology’s preclassical historical turn,” but then incompatibly redescribes it as “constructivist,” whereby unreliability shifts “from text-immanent features to the perceptions of the reader.” 179. This is also why the following view does not fit the communicative model, pace Harry Shaw (2005: 301): when we judge “the narrator’s reliability” in response “to all kinds of objective cues” found “in the narration,” we “can simply note and assess them, without having to concoct a special agent [i.e., an implied author] from which they proceed” for a purpose.


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“Text” simply (and conventionally, if here unwittingly) doubles as a metonymy for its author.180 In fact, the “interactive model” that Nu¨nning takes for “cognitive” widely runs in cognitivism to an author as third participant, one who, moreover, not only initiates but governs the reader/text interaction (see Sternberg 2003a: e.g., 308 – 9 and below). Apart from manifesting itself in his privileged discipline, this unspoken entailment of an authorial communicator even breaks surface occasionally in his own articles. Especially ironic is the insistence that “the unacknowledged presuppositions about the communicative structure of unreliable narration need to be made explicit” (Nu¨nning 1999b: 62). In fiction, “communicative structure” entails an author, of course, and, according to a minority view, even entails the author only, who doubles as narrator. “Unacknowledged presuppositions” indeed, and so they have remained in Nu¨nning ever since, on this decisive front.181 Even when the assumption of authorial presence and control breaks surface more openly in Nu¨nning’s account, he fails to recognize it for what it is. This happens most incongruously in his “history of unreliable narration.” Recall our unanswered query about it: Why does idiosyncratic, inconsistent, epistemically faulty telling count as unreliable (and as the rise of unreliability proper) in Maria Edgeworth’s Thady Quirk but not in Moll Flanders, Pamela, or Humphrey Clinker before him? The only visible answer takes the form of an appeal to the author’s intention, as Nu¨nning (1997b: 91) unequivocally reconstructs it. “Defoe, Richardson, and Smollet, like most other eighteenthcentury novelists, sought to establish, rather than undermine, their narrators’ reliability.” Again, is unreliable narration still the exception in the nineteenth century (e.g., Nelly and Lockwood in Wuthering Heights)? This question is determined and examined by appeal to the same high authority. “Most Victorian novelists proceeded from the assumption that an objective view of the world, of others, and of oneself can be attained” (ibid.: 92), as can presumably be an objective judgment of their narrator, like the one claimed here by Nu¨nning the literary historian. Booth would doubtless applaud the consistent view of the author as reference point (if not necessarily the specific applications). Even so, one wonders about the alleged exceptional cases. Given that “Wuthering Heights seriously undermines the prevalent assumption” about the feasibility of objective judgment, how can Nu¨nning tell with such certainty that, or at least where, Nelly and Lockwood go wrong? Similarly, on a 180. In addition, Nu¨nning resorts to “one of the most common sleight of hand methods of making the implied author disappear,” in having an “extraordinarily competent” implied reader perform the authorial functions (Nelles 2011: 112). 181. But not in him alone: see, for example, note 144 above.


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