Story Collections and Character-Narrators

Considering the talesmanship of assemblies of tales, narrators who are characters in the tale, and single tales told by more than one narrator

The Unreliable Narrators

This past weekend, I started reading Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (in the current www.gutenberg.org text). Here’s an example of talesmanship far advanced over the simple model I proposed yesterday, which I based on how I imagine the first tales were told, around the fire in the dark at day’s end. Collins pretends that his novel is a collection of papers and accounts written by several of the characters of the novel as each one writes down his recollection of the events in a different part of the overall story.

This is a variation on the “epistolary” tale, or the novel consisting of a series of letters. As The Moonstone is said to be a mystery, I presume that Collins adopts this device in order to leave us readers at tale’s end mystified, and unable to state for certain what actually happened. All we are able to say is that each of these characters wrote his recollections to the best of his abilities and prejudices. And with the first “recollector” Collins takes great pains, and several pages, establishing from the start that the character has flaws himself and is not entirely reliable, a far cry from the omniscient, masterful “narrator” that was common in the late 19th century when Collins wrote The Moonstone.

We could trace this device of the multiple narrators back to Chaucer, mentioning along the way the Decamerone, Pentamerone, and Heptamerone, with this one difference, that those works describe gatherings of people, each of whom is called upon to tell a tale to the group. The Moonstone and other epistolary novels, including Dracula by Bram Stoker, each tell one story through many narrators.

Around the Fireplace at the Caravanserai

In fact, the circumstances described in The Canterbury Tales come close to those I imagined for the first talesmen. We get a glimpse into the way people entertained one another before all entertainment was commercialized and the current effort came under way to draw a sharp line between the paid professional “artists” and the rest of us who are the paying “audience.”

At each stop along the way, or each day when the group of nobles fleeing the plague (in the Decamerone) got together, they were expected to entertain one another, and so each member of the group was called upon to tell a tale. The tales are traditional and invented, and though some of the narrators may pretend that the events are true in that they happened to the narrator or someone he knew, the truth seems to be that all the tales had been handed down along the way, some for centuries, embellished and renovated with each new generation of listeners and with each new land where the tales were told.

Seeking Instruction and Enlightenment

The Moonstone doesn’t serve very well to instruct us about the circumstances of the basic art of talesmanship. With the first true “narrator” (following the letter introduced as historical evidence, setting up the nature of the curse which will follow the stolen diamond) Collins emphasizes the fictional narrator as much as the events he is supposed to be telling. More so in fact, as Franklin explicitly begins his story over three times, and his first several pages any decent editor would surely have struck out — except that Collins wants to fix firmly in our minds that “Franklin” is not “Collins” and that we should bear in mind “Franklin” and his shortcomings and biases as much as the substance of what he claims to recollect.

Chaucer also wanted to characterize his pilgrims by the tales they chose, and the way they told them, as he wanted to entertain us by the tales themselves. Chaucer also wrote verse, whose artificiality further removes The Canterbury Tales from the natural way an oral talesman would set forth his tale.

So I’m thinking that the Decamerone might be a good source to read to gain enlightenment into how the first talesmen might have set about their business.

Caveat

One thing we have to keep in mind when considering written tales in the light of the first talesmen. An oral telling of a tale can be as much a performance, as much theater, as a tale plain and simple. And so the oral storyteller can resort to devices that can’t translate to the page and words alone.

(First posted Monday, 14 January 2008)