The Secret Life of Stories
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Chapter three
Self-Awareness
Literary texts have any number of ways of marking their awareness of themselves as literary texts. Some are cloying; some are trivial; some are merely cute. Some involve explicitly metafictional engagements with the fictionality of fiction, as in the closing passage of Beckett’s Molloy, echoing and complicating the opening passage of the novella’s second section: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (176). Some involve more subtle, implicit meditations on the degree of readerly self-consciousness necessary for reading, as in Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa is likened to Maxwell’s Demon, sorting through information as she makes her way through the text, or as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Naval Treaty,” in which Holmes explains that the difficulty of the case stemmed from its surfeit of evidence, so that the detective had to serve as a kind of information-sorting demon: “What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant. Of all the facts which were presented to us we had to pick just those which we deemed to be essential, and then piece them together in their order so as to reconstruct this very remarkable chain of events” (467–68). Of this passage Peter Brooks writes, “Here we have a clear ars poetica, of the detective and the novelist, and of the plotting of the narrative as an example of the mental operation described by Wallace Stevens as ‘The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice’” (29). If indeed Brooks is right, and I believe he is, then all detective fiction serves in one way or another as an implicit commentary on the operations of reading fiction; and if we introduce into a detective fiction a detective with an intellectual disability that serves him well, like the obsessive-compulsive Adrian Monk (the central figure of USA Network’s Monk, the acclaimed series that ran from 2002 to 2009), then we confront the intriguing possibility that for some implicit meditations on the operations of reading fiction, certain kinds of intellectual disability render one a more capable reader of certain genres of fiction. The dynamic is especially lively in detective fiction, since detective fiction is almost always recursive, rewarding those characters in the narrative who are the most capable readers of detective fiction.
This is a possibility to which I will return in discussing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is, among other things, a metafictional commentary on the implicitly metafictional nature of detective fiction, and on (obviously) the relation of intellectual disability to narrative; for now, to broaden the terrain before us, I’d like to start this chapter by returning to the genre of young adult fiction—this time, the first installment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, The Golden Compass. The passage is focalized through Pullman’s heroine, eleven-year-old Lyra Belacqua:
With every second that went past, with every sentence she spoke, she felt a little strength flowing back. And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely, lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her. She had to be careful not to say anything obviously impossible; she had to be vague in some places and invent plausible details in others; she had to be an artist, in short. (246)
I call attention to this passage partly because it provides readers with a young-adult version of Odysseus—Lyra is a character whose talent for fabulation matches, and in a way inspires, the narrative she inhabits—and partly because Pullman is so clearly messing with us here. Let us review: Lyra has to be careful not to say anything obviously impossible; she needs to mix vagueness with plausibility. She has to be a realist narrator, within her fictional frame of reference. Readers familiar with the His Dark Materials trilogy will know that Pullman draws on the “multiple universes” hypothesis, in which an infinite series of possible universes inhabits the very fabric of spacetime, in order to set his Lyra on an Earth very like our own, where Lyra can gambol and frolic about the colleges of Oxford, except for the fact that in Lyra’s Earth, the Reformation never happened; the Republic of Texas is a sovereign nation; zeppelins constitute the most technologically advanced means of transport; and the landscape is populated by witches, talking armored bears, and the animal “daemons” who are the literal embodiment of each human being’s soul. As you may have gathered from the excerpt quoted above, Lyra’s universe also includes a device called an “alethiometer,” a kind of Heideggerian compass that discloses the truth, which Lyra is particularly adept at reading. You could say that Pullman has a lot of cheek, cautioning his heroine against saying anything obviously impossible in a world of wildly speculative fiction. But then, you could say that Pullman is being an artist, in short.
But Lyra, like Odysseus, is a very clever character. One gets the sense, in her epic journey and in his, that either of them could seize control of the narrative on the grounds that they are the most inventive and capable storytellers around: indeed, since much of Homer’s and Pullman’s task consists of conveying their brilliant, fanciful, yet ultimately plausible lies to us, why don’t we just cut out the middleman and listen to Odysseus and Lyra directly? It is a preposterous question: these are not real people. They never existed, except on the page. Their cleverness is but an artifact of the cleverness of their creators; they are surrogates for their creators, just as detectives are surrogates for both authors and readers in their genre. But what are they doing in, or to, their narratives?
Perhaps they are there to instruct and delight. Or, to take the more recent answer offered by Lisa Zunshine in Why We Read Fiction, they are there to engage our ability to entertain the possibility that other people might have false beliefs, and our ability to imagine that other people might be lying. I’ll get back to Zunshine’s work later in this chapter, but for now I simply want to put forward the fairly uncontroversial proposition that it can indeed be delightful and instructive to watch a good liar at work, and that fictional texts have been making use of this insight from The Odyssey to The Confidence-Man to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and House of Games. There is much to be gained, cognitively, from inhabiting or intuiting the minds of Odysseus and Lyra Belacqua, and perhaps the delight is all the greater for the possibility of contemplating their relation to the fictional universes they inhabit, which are full of weird things you don’t see every day, like one-eyed giants and enchantresses and daemons and talking armored bears. But as every competent reader knows, those weird things are indices that we are in fictional worlds; they serve as reminders that we are reading fiction and not history, even though the Trojan War really happened and the hypothesis of multiple universes is as plausible as anything else in the wacky world of cosmology and astrophysics. In Zunshine’s terms, these textual oddities allow our metarepresentational capacities to supply the narrative with a “source tag” whereby we attribute the narrative to a source (Homer, Philip Pullman) rather than take it simply as fact. That is, we do not source-tag the claim that the sun rises in the East, regardless of who first told us about this, because we quickly learn that we do not need to take the claim under advisement. Whereas when someone tells us a story about an alethiometer, we ask ourselves whether our interlocutor might be making things up, and we attribute the story solely to him or her.
I will return to the question of source-tagging when I take up Don Quixote; first, I need to address the more general question of the relation of characters-who-narrate to the narratives they inhabit. It turns out that the problem of the “unreliable narrator”—to which Zunshine devotes a great deal of attention, and which involves our readerly capacities for source-tagging—is actually relatively simple, compared to the question of how to compare Lyra’s or Odysseus’s capacities for narrative fabulation with those of Benjy or Lennie. Wayne Booth touches lightly on this question in The Rhetoric of Fiction, but only to distinguish capable narrators from those “not fully qualified” to take on the job:
The range of human types that have been dramatized as narrators is almo
st as great as the range of other fictional characters—one must say “almost” because there are some characters who are not fully qualified to narrate or “reflect” a story (Faulkner can use the idiot for part of his novel only because the other three parts exist to set off and clarify the idiot’s jumble). (152)
There is no need now to revisit the question of whether “the idiot’s jumble” is merely a jumble, or whether the idiot is just an idiot, or whether Benjy’s narrative really requires the prosthesis of the other three parts; we have already established Benjy’s capacities as a conscious narrator, however limited they might be. For the purposes of this chapter, it suffices to acknowledge that—as we saw with Michael K—those who cannot represent themselves must be represented, and that—as we saw in The Woman Warrior—intellectually disabled characters can “haunt” all narrative by serving as examples of humans who cannot fully account for themselves.
It is in this sense that such characters are not “fully qualified” to serve as narrators, but I think there is much to be gained by seeing them on a spectrum with skilled fabulists such as Lyra and Odysseus. Not only does this allow readers to apprehend the ways all narratives comment, implicitly or explicitly, on their own operations; it also allows us to better understand what is at stake when characters who are “not fully qualified” to narrate become central to their own narrative. There are two options here: such characters can try to narrate their own stories, or they can be the subjects of stories narrated by others. Under the latter heading, take “poor Stevie” from Conrad’s Secret Agent. Stevie’s fate is horrible: he is blown to bits while on a mission he cannot begin to comprehend, dispatched by his brother-in-law, Verloc, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in a staged act of terrorism that will (as Verloc’s embassy contact and superior, Mr. Vladimir, hopes) be blamed on anarchists and lead to a national-security clampdown in England. Admittedly, Stevie’s failure to understand his role in the narrative is not necessarily attributable to his intellectual disability; the plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory was designed by Mr. Vladimir to be misread by everyone, and only the perspicacity of the Assistant Commissioner manages to pierce the veil of deception and discern that “the London anarchists had nothing to do with this” (90), whereas Chief Inspector Head remains determined to follow the only plot line he can discern, the one that leads (wrongly) to the London anarchist Michaelis. But Stevie’s violent death is tragic and pathetic nonetheless, not least because Verloc finds him so easy to dupe (even if he does not intend for Stevie to be killed—the boy trips and falls, setting off the explosion prematurely), and because, after his death, Verloc treats Stevie’s life as being of so little value. His wife, Winnie, stunned and outraged beyond words, kills her husband for his insouciance, then attempts to run away with the anarchist Comrade Ossipon, who robs and defrauds her; she commits suicide on the way to France.
Clearly, The Secret Agent is a narrative with intellectual disability as its motive, and could have been discussed in these terms in chapter 1; for once Winnie has stabbed her husband to death, the narrative reveals, in an extended reverie, that protecting Stevie has been Winnie’s lifelong mission, going back to her childhood and her violently abusive father:
She remembered brushing the boy’s hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared creature by another creature nearly as small but not quite so badly scared; she had the vision of the blows intercepted (often with her own head), of a door held desperately shut against a man’s rage (not for very long); of a poker flung once (not very far), which stilled that particular storm into the dumb and awful silence which follows a thunder-clap. And all these scenes of violence came and went accompanied by the unrefined noise of deep vociferations proceeding from a man wounded in his paternal pride, declaring himself obviously accursed since one of his kids was a “slobbering idjut and the other a wicked she-devil.” (200)
As in Life and Times of Michael K, The Sound and the Fury, and Martian Time-Slip, the initial plot premise (the Greenwich Observatory, the decline of the Compsons, the need to bring Anna K to her place of birth, the plan for the F.D.R. Mountains) is supplanted, or at least challenged, by talk of genocide, as the anarchist Professor closes the novel with a profoundly delusional eliminationist rant:
“Do you understand, Ossipon? The root of all evil! They are our sinister masters—the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have the power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon? First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame—and so on. Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.” (247)
The delusional part of this rant, of course, lies in the Professor’s conviction that the weak are the masters, when in fact, at his point in history and for the next few decades, they are the objects of various eugenicist agendas carried out by the real masters of society, one branch of which eventually decided that they constituted a master race. It was surely a bit too heavy-handed of Conrad to underscore the point by making the Professor a “bespectacled, dingy little man” (62), dwarfish in stature, “no taller than the seated Ossipon” (74). The Professor promotes a vision of the world in which, despite his delusions, he will not become an übermensch; he will be fodder. Needless to say, the greater fool he. But the focal point of the plot remains Stevie.
As has been evident throughout this book, my analytical categories are not hermetically sealed; disability-as-motive in The Woman Warrior eventually leaks into disability-and-self-awareness, and the formal experiments in Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip are not only examples of textual self-awareness and alternate modes of rendering temporality, but also (indirectly, but ultimately) referable to the novel’s plot. Any narrative that deploys intellectual disability as a means of exploring narrative time can also use intellectual disability as motive—and may even do so self-reflexively. The Secret Agent is all about motive; the reason I have saved the novel for my discussion of self-awareness, however, stems from a single passage that follows Winnie Verloc’s memory of protecting Stevie from their father:
It was a crushing memory, an exhausting vision of countless breakfast trays carried up and down innumerable stairs, of endless haggling over pence, of the endless drudgery of sweeping, dusting, cleaning, from basement to attics; while the impotent mother, staggering on swollen legs, cooked in a grimy kitchen, and poor Stevie, the unconscious presiding genius of all their toil, blacked the gentlemen’s boots in the scullery. (200; my emphasis)
All we know about Stevie’s cognitive capacities is that he has a visceral horror of cruelty (to people or to animals), and that he is capable of perceiving that this is a “bad world for poor people” (146). Left to himself, he draws endless circles on paper; we will see a version of this behavior later on in Foe, with Friday’s drawings of eerie walking eyes, a similar device by which an enigmatic character with an unspecified intellectual disability offers cryptic, mute commentary on his surroundings. But the idea that Stevie is the “unconscious presiding genius” goes well beyond the immediate invocation of his sister’s and mother’s ceaseless and underappreciated toil; though the term “genius,” as applied to Stevie, is perhaps as heavy-handed as Conrad’s rendering of the Professor (despite the term’s otherwise benign overtones of Stevie as genius loci), it is possible to say that Stevie is in fact the unconscious presiding genius of the entire novel, as Lyra and Odysseus are the conscious presiding geniuses of their narratives.
Now we have come to wide and open terrain, the ground I hoped to reach by juxtaposing Stevie to Odysseus and Lyra Belacqua. For the question of what a character knows about the narrative she or he inhabits is by no means limited to characters with intellectual disabilities: it is the foundation of narrative irony,
as central to Oedipus Rex as to The Speed of Dark. In the former, the question of whether Oedipus understands the narrative he inhabits is nothing less than the central question of the play; it is so fundamental to the structure of the plot that it is impossible to imagine anyone—even on the play’s opening night, with a nervous Sophocles watching in the wings—thinking, “I hope we find out who killed Laius and brought this plague upon Thebes” (spoiler alert: it was Oedipus all along!). But the narrative irony is much harder to pull off when the character with an intellectual disability is one of those “not fully qualified” narrators; with Benjy Compson, the narrative’s experiments with temporality take precedence (on my reading) over the question of what he knows about the narrative he is in, though certainly that question cannot and should not be ignored altogether. By contrast, as I mentioned briefly in the introduction, the narrative of Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark turns almost exclusively on what Lou Arrendale knows and can know. Unfortunately, the question of whether Lou, an adult with autism, understands what is happening at his workplace (and to his life) proves so difficult to handle that Moon has to resort to episodic “breaks” narrated by a traditionally omniscient narrator, focalized through neurotypical characters (Tom and Pete Aldrin) who have none of Lou’s limitations. Lou works at a bioinformatics firm that employs people with autism for their pattern recognition abilities; they are known as Section A, and the firm offers extensive facilities (including a gym with trampolines) to accommodate their special needs. Gene Crenshaw is a manager who wants to get rid of all these allegedly expensive accommodations and subject the members of Section A to experimental treatments that will cure their autism. But since Lou doesn’t know about any of that, another more expository level of narrative is provided from the perspective of his coworker Pete Aldrin, who does.1