random notes from not quite all over

I am here posting the first half of one of my two typically self-indulgent essays, the remainder of which will remain mercifully offline:

Problems of Narration

Every undergraduate English major knows the device of the unreliable narrator. It has just come up in passing in an NYRB review of John Le Carré's The Mission Song, which coincidentally is one of the many books I have been meaning to get round to commenting on since last October.

The reviewer compliments Le Carré on the leap into the dark it must have been to entrust his story to a first-person narration by a distinctly unreliable narrator, a biracial Congolese interpreter who is given to "lame jokes, alternating bouts of preening and self-castigation, and recurring episodes of poor judgment."

Gosh, sure doesn't sound like somebody whose stories I would want to believe. But that balance between belief and disbelief is the whole point of...oh, heck, y'all know that already, though an alarming number of people do not.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, these fifty or so years ago, decided that the omniscient narrator could only be God and since the world was godless, Robbe-Grillet and all other practitioners of the nouveau roman had to write fiction that was simply unreliable (and frequently unreadable), it never having occurred to him that the English novel had already solved his theoretical problem.

I am, as you know, interested in how we tell our own stories, which have the added problem of trying to make sense of what we think has happened to us, rather than the luxury of being a god creating a world ex nihilo and then creating a fictitious character to tell the tale in his or her own unreliable voice.

There have, of course, been novels devoted to this issue; my favorite many years ago was Michel Butor's Passing Time (I won't pretend I read it as L'emploi du temps, for I could not have then, or now for that matter). The narrator, you will recall, is writing diary entries about his year abroad living in England, only since he started late, his perceptions of the recent past continue to be altered by present event, and he reaches the time for his departure from England long before his story told to himself ever catches up.)

I recall I was interested in Le Carré's novel precisely because the narrator was from such an in-between situation culturally. I noticed in yesterday's NY Times that it has recently been proposed that the solution to the doldrums in which French literature finds itself (I shall avoid the obvious cheap joke that I seem to have set up) is for France to acknowledge that Francophone writing from the ex-colonies (or from the DOM-TOM, I would add) is frequently more vivid, inventive, and insightful than fiction from the metropole, and that just as English literature has benefited from acknowledging Commonwealth writing as part of the great tradition, French literature would benefit from not categorizing Francophone writing by its country of origin.

I cite this by way of repeating my assertion that there are benefits to growing up cognizant of a global cultural mainstream, but immersed in the often annoying ways of one or another slipstream of world culture.

The disadvantages may outweigh the advantages, as in the case of Le Carré's narrator. Nevertheless.

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