A narrator who is only half objective
The well that is Bardelys has run dry! He has stopped passing on chapters to his old The Magic Key whilst he works on them.
In the meantime, I ran across the following passage from the old British translation of Fantomas as http://www.munseys.com has provided it. Notice what is odd about the point of view here:
With a mighty clatter and racket Bouzille came down the slope and stopped before old mother Chiquard’s cottage. He arrived in his own equipage, and an extraordinary one it was!
Bouzille was mounted upon a tricycle of prehistoric design, with two large wheels behind and a small steering wheel in front, and a rusty handle-bar from which all the plating was worn off. The solid rubber tyres which once had adorned the machine had worn out long ago, and were now replaced by twine twisted round the felloes of the wheels; this was for ever fraying away and the wheels were fringed with a veritable lace-work of string. Bouzille must have picked up this impossible machine for an old song at some local market, unless perhaps some charitable person gave it to him simply to get rid of it. He styled this tricycle his “engine,” and it was by no means the whole of his equipage. Attached to the tricycle by a stout rope was a kind of wicker perambulator on four wheels, which he called his “sleeping-car,” because he stored away in it all the bits of rag he picked up on his journeys, and also his very primitive bedding and the little piece of waterproof canvas under which he often slept in the open air. Behind the sleeping-car was a third vehicle, the restaurant-car, consisting of an old soap box mounted on four solid wooden wheels, which were fastened to the axles by huge conical bolts; in this he kept his provisions; lumps of bread and fat, bottles and vegetables, all mixed up in agreeable confusion. Bouzille made quite long journeys in this train of his, and was well known throughout the south-west of France. Often did the astonished population see him bent over his tricycle, with his pack on his back, pedalling with extraordinary rapidity down the hills, while the carriages behind him bumped and jumped over the inequalities in the surface of the road until it seemed impossible that they could retain their equilibrium.
This passage occurs about a third into the mystery. Now the arrangement and conveyance of information in a mystery differ from those in all other genres. The mystery is a sort of puzzle, and the narrator plays the part of an onstage magician challenging us to solve the puzzle on the basis of the clues he provides us – and no more.
Therefore the point of view in a mystery must be chosen with care – of course it is always chosen with care, but in a mystery the criteria used will be different from those of all other genres.
The easiest point of view for a mystery is first person. This is also the sliest, since not all narrators are ‘reliable.’ Second easiest is the third person limited: when we know almost everything one single character does (usually it is the detective who is the point of view character). We somehow trust the third person limited as somewhat more ‘reliable’ a witness than the first person, although nobody assumes that Mike Hammer or Dr Watson are lying to us or concealing anything.
What makes first person and third-limited narrators ‘easier’ is that the talesman can report what they know, honestly and fully (as fully as any narrative ever gets) without ‘withholding’ any information from us unfairly. We know what the detective knows, and find it out when he does, and thus we can match wits with him, although we can’t carry out any investigations he does not.
The talesmen of the Fantomas novel take an omniscient third person approach, although this point of view is heavily modified so as to appear as though it is objective.
What we are left with is something like an official report crossed with popular newspaper account of the proceedings: we know something of what is commonly known of the tramp Bouzille, we know what he calls his tricycle and the trailers attached to it, but we don’t know just how he acquired it; the narrator instead offers us a shrewd guess which we must take or leave:
Bouzille must have picked up this impossible machine for an old song at some local market, unless perhaps some charitable person gave it to him simply to get rid of it.
These guesses are crucial to this objective/omniscient point of view in the mystery. Because they are given us to as assumptions or guesses, these bits of information are explicitly provided to us by the talesman as unreliable: maybe it’s true, and maybe not. The Fantomas tale includes both a super-detective, Inspector Juve, and a diabolical super-villain, Fantomas him- (or her-) self, who adopt all manner of disguises and have various assistants and allies. Bouzille might be Juve, he might be Fantomas, he might be in league with either, or he might be the simple-minded country tramp the talesmen say he is. (In fact, the talesmen are careful never to say that so-and-so ‘is’ anyone, rather they simply give us his or her appearance: this is where the objective point of view serves the mystery so well.)
Fantomas is also constructed in such a way that the first-person or limited-third point of view would never be able to cover the events.
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, 19 November 2008)
