Hate the Lie, Not the Liar?

[X-posted.]

piny at Feministe wants to know “Who’s your favorite unreliable narrator“?  Academic nit-pick I am, I went and added a distinction:

Is listing “postmodern unreliable narrators” cheating? I mean, they’re playing off the assumption that all narrators are inherently unreliable, calling attention to said fact–then trying to trick you into thinking they’re conventionally fallable unreliable narrators, when they’re in fact conventionally unreliable unreliable narrators.

Fascinating topic, but I’d like to add a wrinkle:

Should we differentiate between narrators who know they’re unreliable and are trying to hoodwink their audience (Fight Club) and those who don’t and are being hoodwinked by their author (Lolita)? If so, does that make any difference in how we evaluate the novels? Because it should, I think, influence whether Humbert Humbert is the object of general or general and authorial condemnation; and if it does, those who scorn Nabokov’s “pornographic” novel can be declared, definitively and forevermore, not to “get it.”

That Lolita-leap at the end may be unwarranted.  (I don’t think the covertly diry-minded will ever admit that their minds produce what they find “in the novel.") But the question interests me.  It’s fun, and I need fun–italics and all–as the quarter comes to a close.

Comments

[Kevin Andre Elliott]

What I said over at Piny's:

I was just going to toss Faulkner out there. Benjy is definitely unreliable.

And since my field is poetry, I'm also gonna toss out just about every narrator in The Canterbury Tales.

Should we differentiate between narrators who know they’re unreliable and are trying to hoodwink their audience (Fight Club) and those who don’t and are being hoodwinked by their author (Lolita)?

I think the way to tell if a narrator is unreliable is to ask if it’s a 1st person narrator. If so, he’s unreliable by definition.

I'm inclined to agree with Amanda, but I need to wrinkle further:

How does one handle narrators that don't know they are unreliable and it's also apparent that they author is not trying to hoodwink the narrator? "The Yellow Wallpaper" comes to mind. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with an argument that the narrator is unreliable in this instance. Are there levels of unreliablity? Is there a point where one understands that theoretically a narrator is unreliable, but for interpretive reasons it's absurd to argue that the narrator is unreliable?

Also, what about 3rd person narration? There's always "An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge."

[forgottenboy]

I tend to think that Benjy is not so much unreliable as encoded. For example, once you figure out that the world moves rather than he, it is easy to convert his language into the normal speech of an ambulatory person. He has an unusual and blurred perceptual apparatus, rather than an agenda.

Between Tyler Durden and Humbert Humbert, I see more similarities than differences, though I quite agree that they differ according to their level of self-awareness.

Their most important similarity is as follows: both of them are unreliable [i]in order to be reliable[/i]. The narrator of Fight Club is unreliable about the existence of Tyler Durden, but only insofar as Tyler is presented as a separate person. This makes possible the much more shocking realization that the narrator is capable of being Tyler (instead of merely worshipping him), because [i]he is Tyler[/i]. This raises wonderful questions about the influence of others on our notions of the limits of our identity.

Likewise, the problem with Humbert Humbert is not, as we would expect, that he is sleeping with a little girl. Up to a point, his love affair with her is thrilling, sexy, and sympathetic. (If you don't agree with this, or couldn't possibly agree with this, then I never want to hear you say that the book is beautifully written, because the engine of that lyricism is Lo.) The problem is that the pedophile is a jealous egoist who robs her of a childhood -- but [i]not because he has sex with her![/i] He is reprehensible because he won't let her play with her friends, or listen to her favorite music, or do the other things she wants. The fact that the life she wants is miserable and banal does not make it his to deny.

Thus Nabokov undermines our conventional reaction to pedophilia, only to re-establish it through a critique with much wider implications. Most of us don't fall in love with children. Few of us are as passionate as Humbert, though, and few of us are any better than he at accepting the freedom of the people we love.