Unreliable narrators and reflectors in short stories are members of the world being described. They are characters among other characters, distanced from the reader by the same methods we have seen in previous chapters.
A classic example is Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener where the interest rests on the growing suspicion about the reliability of the narrator, the Wall Street lawyer, and on our awareness of a double spectacle: the scene as narrated and the distortion which we suspect has been imposed on the scene.8 This doubt about what is said or perceived by a narrator or reflector who is one of the characters is a constant feature of the classic short story.9
7 However, Etō still considers this process to be mechanical, thinking that recourse to one voice and one mode are automatic guarantees of proximity, whereas obviously the same affective terms can be included in a strategy of irony in Japanese as well as in European languages. Note too, with the same reservations on my part, Aleksandr V. Ognev, who talks about the same “compartment” of Genette’s grille in similar terms, and sees in it a general characteristic of the contemporary short story: “ot avtora, no s tochki zreniya geroya” (“in the author’s voice, but with the point of view of the character”). Aleksandr V. Ognev, O Poetike sovremennogo russkogo rasskaza (Saratov: Izd-vo Saratovskogo universiteta, 1973), p. 214.
8 R. Bruce Bickley clearly shows that Melville shares our point of view and not his narrator’s in his short stories (and not only in Bartleby). R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975).
9 John M. Ellis, for example, points out that in all the short stories he has analysed, the text only gains its full value if the reader recognises the unreliable character of the reflector.
The meaning of a text such as Heinrich von Kleist’s Erdbeben in Chili (Earthquakes in Chile) is created in a kind of stereoscope in which we see at the same time the scene presented by the reflector and his distortion of it. However, undoubtedly because his
10. The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader 157 As we are very near here to what we have seen at length in the previous chapter, I shall give only one example to make clear the neutrality of devices:
Arthur Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl.10 This short story, based entirely on an interior monologue, was written in 1900, a decade or so after Edouard Dujardin’s pioneering use of the device in Les Lauriers sont coupés, and long before James Joyce’s Ulysses. In this instance we are inside the mind of the character: the narrator’s voice is the only one we hear. We should, therefore, be as close as possible to the character, to his “voice”, to his inner truth. In reality, we are no closer than when dialect is used. Gustl is as effectively discredited “from within” as he might be in an external narrative.
This distancing begins from the outset with the young officer’s reflections on music. He is bored at a concert; he mistakes a mass for an oratorio, and admits to failing to recognise any difference between the choir and cabaret singers. Note that the story was published in the Neue Freie Press, one of the favourite newspapers of the Viennese upper middle class, for whom music — originally a means of obtaining social status in the eyes of the aristocracy — had become a widespread passion.11 By presenting the hero, before any other description, as fundamentally incapable of appreciating music, Schnitzler has already effectively “labelled” him as separate from the readers more clearly than any explicit judgement could have done.
But Schnitzler does not stop there. Not only does Gustl have bad taste, not only is he a conceited junior officer who imagines that all women are attracted to him, but he is in total contradiction to his own values. His bragging about duels at the beginning of the story is totally out of keeping with his confusion later that night, and above all his great speeches on honour are ultimately contradicted by his actions. Schnitzler’s ridiculing of the lieutenant is quasi-explicit in the precise contradiction in terms. Right
limited corpus does not allow for generalisation, he does not extract all the consequences of his analyses. John M. Ellis, Narration in the German Novelle: Theory and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
10 Arthur Schnitzler, Plays and Stories, ed. by Egon Schwarz (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 249-79 (hereafter Schwarz). The original German version can be found in Arthur Schnitzler, Das erzählerische Werk (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1981), pp. 207-36 (hereafter Fischer).
11 For more on music as a passion shared by all classes of society in Vienna, see Carl E.
Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980). For more on the story and its use of interior monologue, see Heidi E. Dietz Faletti, “Interior Monologue and the Unheroic Psyche in Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl and Fräulein Else”, in The Image of the Hero in Literature, Media and Society, ed. by Will Wright and Steve Kaplan (Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2004), pp.
522-57.
158 The Classic Short Story
after he is insulted by a baker, Gustl states the need to end his life: “And even if he [the baker] had a stroke tonight, I’d know it […] I’ve got to do it — There’s nothing to it.—”.12 When he learns that the baker in fact died of a stroke, this completely restores his peace of mind, and he can pretend that his honour has not been damaged.
The ending underlines the contradiction even further: one would have thought that the night’s anguish would have transformed the lieutenant, and prompted him to question his somewhat automatic adherence to the code of military behaviour. Yet Gustl experiences no revelation. The story ends with what is going through his mind at the thought of fighting a duel with another man: “Just wait, my boy, I’m in wonderful form… I’ll crush you into mincemeat!”.13 The culinary allusion here reminds us of the baker from earlier in the story, creating the sense of an endless cycle. The “stroke of joy” that overwhelms him is the joy of a brutal mercenary. As was often the case, the objects of this ridicule were quite aware of the distancing at work — the army was outraged by the derision implied in the story and went so far as to demote Schnitzler for writing it.14 In Lieutenant Gustl, we remain completely exterior to the character, even though, technically speaking, we have remained within him: the technical point of view has no automatic bearing on the perspective.15
Before proceeding to the more complex case of the reliable narrator/
reflector, we must note once again that the fantastic short story uses the techniques of the classic short story in a much more complex fashion. In supernatural tales, unreliable narrators/reflectors are an exception; but this exception allows for powerful effects. For example, by choosing for
12 Schwarz, p. 261.
13 Ibid, p. 279. I have modified the translation here (“I’ll knock you to smithereens!”) to be closer to the original: “Dich hau’ ich zu Krenfleisch” — where Krenfleisch is a beef-meat slice to be eaten with horseradish. See Fischer, p. 236.
14 Details of the negative reception of Lieutenant Gustl by the army can be found in Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, Arthur Schnitzler: Leutnant Gustl (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), pp. 42-61.
15 Very much akin to this, to my mind, is Simone de Beauvoir’s use of the diary as a framing device in La Femme rompue. Ray Davison emphasises the surprising distance of this intimate format, and quotes the many passages in which the heroine, Monique Lacombe, reveals her petty bourgeois interests and fears. However, Davison is interested in something else: the means that this gives Beauvoir to recognise the pain of Sartre’s behaviour towards her: “In other words, and paradoxically, because Beauvoir is so distanced in her conscious mind from Monique Lacombe […] she does manage to talk about herself [Beauvoir] more interestingly than when she uses the direct autobiographical mode”. Ray Davison, “Simone de Beauvoir: ‘La Femme rompue’”, in Short French Fiction: Essays on the Short Story in France in the Twentieth Century, ed. by J. E.
Flower (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 71-88 (p. 72).
10. The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader 159 once not to have a reliable reflector, James strengthens the ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw. There is still lively controversy about whether the young English teacher in the story actually sees the two ghosts, and it has often been stressed that the text’s interest lies in this very ambiguity.
The governess’s point of view is not immediately doubted, and it is never openly contradicted by the author; but a whole series of indices prevent her from reaching the status of reliable reflector. As a result, suspense is reinforced, and the entry into a fantastic world becomes more troubling than usual: the reader is constantly invited to question the reality of what is being conveyed. Thus James creates a stereoscope: the scene and the way it is perceived.16