Abstract
It is widely held in theories of narrative that all works of literary narrative fiction include a narrator who fictionally tells the story. However, it is also granted that the personal qualities of a narrator may be more or less radically effaced. Recently, philosophers and film theorists have debated whether movies similarly involve implicit audio-visual narrators. Those who answer affirmatively allow that these cinematic narrators will be radically effaced. Their opponents deny that audio-visual narrators figure in the ontology of movies at all, and many have argued that the ‘effaced’ literary narrator is an illusion as well. In this paper, I attempt to sort out the central issues that arise in these debates, defending the existence of effaced narrators in both literature and film.
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Notes
Among the writers defending various versions of this Imagined Seeing Thesis are Kendall Walton, Jerrold Levinson, and myself. Reference to relevant works is given below. (Up to this point, I have been careful to state the debate in terms that acknowledge that movies generally involve the presentation of both sights and sounds, but in the rest of the paper I will talk mostly about ‘showing’ and ‘visual presentation’ in the cinema. My aim, in doing so, is to keep the formulations in the text from becoming even more complicated than they are. I hope that the qualifications that would be required to accommodate the dimension of sound in films are reasonably clear.)
For a useful overview of a number of the theoretical options here, see Gaut (2004, pp. 230–253)
See various of the essays in Chatman (1990).
I develop this point more fully in “Le Grand Imagier Steps Out.” In the reprinted version, see pp. 187–188.
In fact, the general class of literary narrations for which any of these theorists deny a narrator is significantly unclear. Kania is even uneasy about making the claim about the Hemingway stories that are often portrayed as having no narrator. This lack of clarity will not affect the discussion that follows. However, Kania’s objection to effaced narrators is interesting. Many writers on the topic seem to grant that works whose narration is substantially effaced do contain genuine implicit narration and seem also to allow that this may presuppose the existence of a minimal narrating agency. However, they maintain that this effaced agency is too ‘minimal’ to merit invoking a substantial concept of ‘narrator.’ Disputes of this ilk, in my opinion, tend to be pretty empty. In contrast, Kania stops at the first step: he denies that the works in question involve fictional narration at all.
Kania mentions John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a possible but decidedly unclear instance. I agree that the question of whether the narrator is to be identified with Fowles is simply too tough to call.
Of course, it is possible for someone to hold that the actual Nixon is not the narrator of The Public Burning, but rather that the narrator is a purely fictional character, derived from the actual Nixon, and called by the same name in the novel. I am no more sympathetic to this kind of counterpart theory in connection with fiction than I am in connection with the theory of modality. For that matter, neither is Kania. See p. 52 of his article.
It may be that it is most reasonable to suppose, in these implicit cases, that it is fictional in normal, legitimate games of make believe, performed while reading the novels in question, that the actual author is recounting the narrative events but false that this is fictional in the works themselves. In fact, this is the position that seems most plausible to me, but I won’t try to adjudicate the aptness of this refinement.
Walton (1990).
Levinson (1996). Kania discusses this argument at some length.
Of course, it is possible for me to tell you (to report to you) that it is fictional in The Heart of the Matter that P and Q and so on. In one sense then, I’m explicitly telling you the story of The Heart of the Matter as fictional. But, this certainly is not the sense in which Kania thinks that Greene told the story as fictional. In writing the text, he was making it fictional in his novel that P and Q and not asserting that these propositions are fictional in the story.
Mimesis as Make Believe, pp. 368–372.
I’m assuming here that the hypothetically altered versions of the Uncle Remus stories will leave it clear that Uncle Remus is fictionally inventing his fables for an audience of children.
In fact, the concept of ‘storytelling narrators’ merits more careful scrutiny. Suppose we grant that Thackeray is the fictionalized narrator of Vanity Fair. It is possible that the narration should be described in the following way. In most of the narration, the narrator fictionally recounts as actual the history of Becky Sharpe and her adventures. However, in certain passages, Thackeray actually asserts certain claims about his role as author and about his adjacent activity of fictionally recounting the narrative events. He switches, so to speak, from fictional to actual assertion. Consider, for comparison, Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris. In most of the narration of this work, the narrator (Hugo himself we will suppose) fictionally recounts the strange romance of Quasimodo and Esmeralda. But, in writing the novel, Hugo was concerned to give an accurate account of the layout of medieval Paris and its architecture, and he intended his audience to recognize that he was doing this. So, it seems that we can rightly take it that, in the relevant passages, the narrator (Hugo) is actually asserting that, e.g. certain parts of Paris had such and such a character. If this is correct, why shouldn’t it be the case that the author/narrator of Vanity Fair intermittently includes actual statements about what he is doing in fictionally telling his made-up story?
Gaut seems to have in mind something like Walton’s Principle of Reality and/or the Principle of Mutual Belief as the basis of these inferences. See Mimesis as Make Believe, pp. 144–169.
Middlemarch may be another case in which it is reasonable to take the narrator to be the actual author, George Eliot, despite the fact that the narration does not explicitly say that this is so. If we do accept this identification, then it is fictional in the work that George Eliot has improbably extensive knowledge of her characters and their story world. But then, it is clearly silly to wonder about how fictionally it has come to be that George Eliot acquired her more than human knowledge. However, see fn. 5 above.
Mimesis as Make Believe, pp. 174–175.
In fact, this statement of the Imagined Seeing Thesis is adequate (if it is adequate at all) only for those shots that purport to offer an ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ view of the fictional situation on screen. How the thesis should be qualified and emended to cover the various ways in which a shot may be presented as subjectively inflected (in optical POV shots, for instance) is itself a subject of considerable complexity. I have tried to carry this enterprise somewhat further in Wilson (2006). This volume of JAAC was reprinted as Smith and Wartenberg (2006).
Since this formulation is very terse, let me offer a simple type of example of what I mean. At the beginning of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) we are presented with a shot of the characters, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin), seen through a window in a hotel room. Earlier in the shot, we have seen the words.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
followed by a further specification of time
FRIDAY, DECEMBER THE ELEVENTH TWO THIRTY PM
In my opinion, we imagine ourselves seeing the illicit lovers in the hotel room, but we do not imagine ourselves also as having seen the letters of these inscriptions floating around outside the hotel. Rather, as minimally competent viewers, we imagine seeing Miriam and Sam in the window in virtue of our imagining ourselves seeing a motion-picture-like shot taken of the illicit lovers and the hotel—a shot on which the place and time identifying captions have been inscribed.
References
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Chatman, S. (1990). Coming to terms: The rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gaut, B. (2004). The philosophy of the movies: Cinematic narration. In P. Kivy (Ed.), The blackwell guide to aesthetics (pp. 230–253). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Kania, A. (2005). Against the ubiquity of fictional narrators. The Jounal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63(1), 47–54.
Levinson, J. (1996). Film music and narrative agency. In D. Bordwell & N. Carroll (Eds.), Post theory: Reconstructing film theory (p. 251). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as make believe: On the foundations of the representational arts. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to many of the participants at the 2005 Oberlin Colloquium, especially to my commentator Tom Wartenberg. I also received helpful suggestions and criticisms from Noel Carroll, Greg Currie, Andrew Kania, Amy Mullin, and Katherine Thompson-Jones. I am also greatly indebted to Ed Branigan and Jerry Levinson for insightful and encouraging comments on an earlier draft.
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Wilson, G.M. Elusive narrators in literature and film. Philos Stud 135, 73–88 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9096-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9096-x