Something is lost when the writer kills the narrator
The Oral Talesmen Stood in the Open
In the beginning, the narrator was the talesman and the talesman faced his audience and spoke to them. There was no doubt then as to who told them the tale. Talesman and narrator were one and the same.
(Even this, of course, is not wholly true, as we can see by the example Odysseus set when he told Nausicaa and her father lies about both who he was and how he had come to wash up on their shore. There have always been liars for fun and profit both.)
In this time, the tale the talesman told was ‘true.’ (Again, not always. But take it ‘as if’ for now.) He said it had happened. He believed it had happened. If he adorned, added on, made up or overstated, it was only to make his point and impress upon his audience some feature of the tale — as, say, how brave his hero was, how fair his heroine, how great the threat, how base the foe. But this was not to be thought of as ‘untrue’ but rather, as we might say today, ‘poetic license.’
There comes a point in some kinds of tales where these ‘adornments’ grow so great that they take up the whole tale and the audience knows the tale to be ‘fiction’ out and out almost as soon as the talesman opens his mouth. Then they don’t take the tale ‘seriously’ but hear the talesman out for the sheer amusement of his artistry and nought else. Fisherman’s tales, traveler’s tales, fairy tales, are stuff that only the very young can believe are ‘true’ — until the child reaches an age when he learns ‘they were all lies!’ and, deeply hurt, vows never to be fooled again. From then on he may be loth to hear out such tales at all, and will come back to them only when he learns to treat them as idle amusements or as tasty wrappings for more substantial truth hidden within.
But The Writer Can Hide Himself
A great change comes when the talesman turns writer and hides himself behind the page.
At this point he may dissemble all the way. He may claim to be an innocent girl though he is a cynical graybeard. He may pretend to but present a series of letters and diary entries not written by him. He may tell a roman à clef that succeeds in masking, to those not already in the know, the real identities of the actors in his tale. He may tell a memoir of his own life masked as though it befell another man.
He may also tell a more traditional tale, but seek to suppress his own apparent role in telling the tale he is telling, to the point where he hopes to fade from view altogether.
The Lost Narrator
At the very onset of the novel, Richardson wrote Pamela as though it were a series of letters written not by himself but by his actors. This may be the first instance of the suppressed narrator.
Later the Naturalists gave us tales in the vein of scientific, wholly ‘objective’ observations. The conceit here is that the writer merely notes events and objective facts. Though he may not wholly deny his own role, he does seek to remove all his own ‘opinions’ as to the events he narrates. He seeks to describe without praise or condemnation or coloring in any way, as if he were a camera or other scientific recording apparatus.
Then the ‘false memoir’ was set in the first person — I suppose we could call this an extension of the letter-based or epistolary novel told from but one point of view.
Then the false memoir developed into stream-of-consciousness, which may be as far into false subjectivity as the written word can reach — I don’t see an land beyond it.
Head Hopping and the Lost Narrator
The type of narrator who has been dominant for the past half-century or so is the point of view character (or characters) with the narrator himself both suppressed and, where he can’t be suppressed, considered as someone other than the author (the one whose name appears beneath the title).
This in turn has given rise to a new set of artistic rules. Since the subjective, point-of-view character now seems to be narrating each scene, the writer invites his audience to identify with these characters and immerse itself in their experiences. But it feels a shock to see a scene from more than one point of view at once. It is too unlike our experience of life.
And yet when I read tales written down out of an oral tradition, like The Adventures of Amir Hamza, I find no problem at all reading scenes in which the narrator, forthrightly proclaimed as such, tells us what several actors think and feel.
I seem to exist, in the first place, not so close to Hamza and the rest. Because the narrator is openly telling me of these events, I never fall into any character in a way that I see myself as him. I do on the other hand root for Hamza, Amar, and the other heroes of the tales on whose side the narrator himself clearly stands. But this is not the same thing as imagining I am them.
From this we can say that the answer to the question ‘Who are you who tell me this tale?’ shifts the audience in how close they come to the actors of the piece. It is another instance where the writer who admits he is the narrator of his tale can wield greater flexibility and range in how he presents his tale.
This has its strengths, but so does the suppressed narrator.
We must then ask if suppressing the narrator, as a trend or fashion, must inevitably lead to a more-immersive and more-subjective invitation to the audience. Since the ‘strictly objective’ approach of the Naturalists rose to the fore only briefly, to be passed by, it would seem that the answer to this further question must be Yes.
(Composed with pen on paper Saturday, March 15, 2008)
