Foreign terms
10. The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader
The classic short story makes use of the all participants in the narrative process — author, narrator and reader — to create the characteristic distance between reader and characters. The reader shares with the author the exhilaration of enjoying the spectacle of this distance. In this chapter, the short story will once again show its versatility: it can distance the narrator from the reader, or equally it can create a real proximity to him, only to increase the distance from the other characters. We will first spend some time on the concept of the “reflector”, as described by Henry James, to show its necessity, but also its dangers: structural distinctions are not enough, we have to take into account the whole context, the whole strategy of the text. The reflector does not tell the story — that is the role of the narrator. He is one of the characters, but one privileged by the writer: he is the one who sees, and through whose eyes we see. In great novels, the reflector can be a powerful device to help the reader to enter the fictional world and to get nearer to the characters’ mental universe. But in classic short stories — even in James’s — it is one more variation on the common theme of distancing.
The works of James are, of course, good examples of the use of a reflector.
Hardly any of his stories is an Ich-Erzahlung: we usually have a third-person narrator, but this narrator is not omniscient, and James limits himself to
© Florence Goyet, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0039.10
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what this character knows, hears, sees and, most importantly, feels. It is as if the writer were placing a filter between us and the spectacle. When this filter is, to use James’s words, “the most polished of possible mirrors of the subject”, third person narration does not prevent us from participating in the mental universe of the characters.1 In his critical writings, James developed at length the idea that through a discriminating, intelligent, and sensitive reflector, we would appreciate to the full all the subtleties and beauties of a novel’s universe.2
Although James’s distinction between narrator and reflector is necessary, it is not without danger, especially when — as in the works of the French New Critics — it is viewed as having automatic effects. Gérard Genette defined a complete “grille” by combining the possibilities of
“mode” (reflector) and “voice” (narrator).3 When the narrator is one of the characters, narration is said to be “intradiegetic”; when he is exterior to it,
“extradiegetic”; when the reflector is one of the characters we have “internal focalization”; “external” when he is not. This combination of narration and focalization provides neat divisions, with each “compartment”
representing one particular technical example. The danger, of course, is to assume as Genette and the narratologists did after him, that each of these
“compartments” implies a particular effect. That is, that by using both external focalization and heterodiegetic narration, one would achieve an
“external” viewpoint of the narration; and that by reverting to internal focalization and intradiegetic narration, one would automatically get an
“internal” perspective on the narrative. When we begin to examine specific stories, however, we see to the contrary that each of these compartments is susceptible to a wide variety of uses.
Once our interest lies in the problems of the relationship between reader, author and characters — and we are primarily concerned with how the one regards the other — such mechanical, formal distinctions
1 Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Scribner, 1962), p. 70.
2 The Preface to Princess Cassamassima (ibid, pp. 59-78) in particular, is nearly all dedicated to reflections on the necessity of such “intense perceivers”: “Their emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently charmed perusal, our own very adventure” (p. 70). James never stops repeating that the choice of a fine conscience is essential. He almost always has recourse to a third person, except for a few texts that are among his most bitter publishing failures. See also Anne T. Margolis, Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1985).
3 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 170-75.
10. The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader 155 become secondary. We do need to be able to distinguish between the reflector and the narrator, precisely because the short story will use either one to continue to bring the reader and author together in admiration of the distant spectacle. Without it, the profound architecture of some of the most subtle and best stories cannot be understood. But we cannot take for granted its particular effect in the texts.
Wayne C. Booth has provided a useful tool for analysis in his distinction between “reliable” and “unreliable” narrators.4 Booth’s theory helps us to see that, when it comes to the classic short story, unreliable narrators/
reflectors represent characters; reliable narrators/reflectors never represent characters — but rather represent the reader.5 The reliable narrator is the person whose word we do not doubt a priori; we do not subject his statements, arguments or values to a systematic proof. This does not signify that he is omniscient; simply, that he is in a certain way “transparent”. We do not exert before him our capacity for detecting irony. On the other hand, we distance ourselves from the unreliable narrator’s discourse. At the very least, we take what he says with a grain of salt; and at the extreme, we systematically interpret the opposite of what he says. The factors that make him unreliable are the same as those that distance the other characters. The superiority of this distinction over that between “voice” and “mode” is that we are no longer describing external traits (whether the narrator is one of the characters or not); we are invited to balance the relations between the different actors in the narrative process by taking into account, equally, the entire context.
Another critic will bear witness to the necessity and the danger of these external, formal distinctions. Japanese criticism uses the concept of
“first person disguised as third person” (sanninshō o kasō ichininshō), which corresponds to one of the essential “compartments” of Genette’s grille:
“heterodiegetic narration/internal focalization”. Etō Jun uses this concept to formalise the difference between western and Japanese narration.6 For him, western narration is characterised by the use of the third person and
4 Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp.
57-67.
5 Helmut Bonheim perceives that there can be not only unreliable narrators but also unreliable speakers and thinkers. Bonheim mentions this in relation to detective stories, but the phenomenon seems to me also important in “serious” fiction. See Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), p. 71.
6 Etō Jun, “Nichiōbunka no taishōsei to hitaishōsei”, Bungakkai, 43:1 (1989), 240-52.
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of the past tense, whereas Japanese narration is characterised by the use of the “timeless” and of the first person, either “disguised” or not.
Etō’s argument ignores the fact that western narratives also make use of all the resources of voice and mode. But interestingly enough, he immediately connects this fact of syntax with other rhetorical techniques.
His aim is to show that Japanese is the language of proximity to a character, and he bases his proof on the distortions that an English translation inflicted on a novel by Tanizaki Junichirō. Etō’s contextual analysis is subtle enough to enable him to show that this technique is only one element of a complete tableau: having recourse to the timeless and to an internal focalization is accompanied, for example, by the use of a specifically affective vocabulary (jōigo), which brings the reader into the character’s subjectivity.7