Multiperspectivity in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red Pp

گۆڤارى زانکۆ بۆ زانستە مرۆڤایەتییەکان پاشكۆی بەرگى 02 ژمارە 4 ساڵى 0202 Multiperspectivity in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red pp. (142-149) Niwar A. Obaid Assistant Lecturer in Nawroz University, Duhok, Iraq [email protected] Abstract Multiperspectivity, sometimes also referred to as multiple narrators, is a narrative technique or mode of narration commonly employed in modern and postmodern novels. This innovative literary phenomenon has been of high interest to ingenious writers of 20th and 21st centuries, due to its prodigious deviation in the narrative text. The question of multiple narrators has created several controversies among literary critics as it distinguishes itself from traditional techniques of narration and other narratological concepts. William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying (1930) and Orhan Pamuk in My Name is Red (1998) have employed multiple narrators for discrepant purposes and functions. Both novels are similarly divided into fifty-nine chapters; As I Lay Dying involves fifteen narrators from the Bundren family as well as other villagers. My Name is Red covers twenty-one voices ranging from human to the dead and inanimate objects. The two novels coincidentally share several landscapes regarding the narrative technique and overall structure along with some disparate features, which are analytically discussed in the present paper. This paper attempts to spot the purposes and implications of Faulkner and Pamuk in employing multiple narrators in their novels, As I Lay Dying and My Name is Red, successively, by analyzing multiperspectivity as a narrative technique and its potential effects on the structure of the story as well as on the reader. This is expected to be accomplished through a comparative analysis of both novels by providing adequate evidence and examples from the texts, and by developing a critical argument based on a theoretical framework of some model scholars in the related field, such as Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (2000), Marcus Hartner (2008), which will be a comparative basis for the current study. In conclusion, this article, by closely examining the aforementioned novels, sheds a new light on the rarely acknowledged issue of multiperspectivity. Keywords: Multiperspectivity, Narrative Technique, Novel, Faulkner, Pamuk, As I Lay Dying, My Name is Red. 1. Introduction he literary phenomenon of multiperspectivity has gained meager attention among literary theorists and critics. The few critics who have been preoccupied with the topic T use different terms in their studies for this narrative technique, which complicates the issue all the more. The concept of multiperspectivity has an interdisciplinary relevance in several fields other than literature, such as history, philosophy, art, and science. However, in literature, there are many other narratological concepts that might have a parallel stance or meaning to multiperspectival narration, like Gentte's focalization and Todorov's paradigms of narration. Nevertheless, to discuss multiperspectivity from a historical viewpoint would not fit the paper; therefore, the paper briefly presents some arguments regarding multiperspectivity in terms of meaning and function, followed by the analysis of the two novels. Various explications, classifications and paradigms are presented by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning in their broad study on multiperspectival narration, in addition to Marcus Hartner's valuable contributions to this technique, some of which are discussed in the following section. Nonetheless, the interest and objective of this research is to discover the implications, purposes and functions of using this technique by the two authors, Faulkner and Pamuk, in their outstanding novels. The paper consists of three sections, along with an introduction and a conclusion. The first section covers some significant explanations and controversies on multiperspectivity in reference to a number of model critics. The second and third sections are dedicated to the analyses of the two novels, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Pamuk's My Name is Red, in succession. The fourth section summarizes the findings and analyses of the preceding sections, by way of showing a comparison of the two aforementioned novels in terms of multiperspectivity. 142 Supplementary Issue Vol.20, No.4, 2016 گۆڤارى زانکۆ بۆ زانستە مرۆڤایەتییەکان پاشكۆی بەرگى 02 ژمارە 4 ساڵى 0202 2. MULTIPERSPECTIVITY: THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE OF CONTROVERSY There is a lack of consensus on the definition, classification, terminology and nature of multiperspectival narration, due to the fact that there are few studies in the relevant field despite its common usage in the modern and postmodern novels. What's more, rarely have literary critics paid adequate attention to this indispensable literary phenomenon, except for some German scholars who have fairly contributed to it along with some other recent dissertations by some researchers. Therefore, the controversial issues over this technique are still ongoing, some of which are briefly debated in this section. From a historical perspective, multiperspectivity is not a recent phenomenon. Early examples can be found in Plato‘s Symposium, the Old Norse Edda (13th century), Chaucer‘s ―Parliament of Fowls‖ (1381-82). Yet, pre-modern forms of multiperspective narration remain quite few, and often achieve "primarily rhetorical functions" (Hartner, 2008a). In the 19th century, the phenomenon becomes more prevalent and diversified, as an increasing number of writers employ a range of strategies of multiperspectival narration in their works, such as David Mitchel, John Green, George, R. R. Martin, and many others. Hence, a number of modern and postmodern writers have followed the trend and have featured this form of narration in their novels. The occurrence of multiperspectivity is actually theoretically associated with the philosophy of perspectivism, which was developed by Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset. It seems to be primarily appropriate "to stage perceptual relativism and skepticism towards knowledge and reality" (Hartner, 2008a). In this framework, critics have struggled to distinguish the main types of the technique and their contradictory "epistemological and semantic" inferences (Hartner, 2008a). In their prominent study, which has become groundwork for many researchers, Vera and Ansgar Nünning define multiperspectivity as a form of narrative transmission in which an event, a subject, a character etc. is presented from a minimum of two or more individual viewpoints (Zsoldos, 2008). Multiperspectivity, compared to other narratological concepts, is a relatively equivocal term, and it is problematic to classify some works under multiperspectival narration. Therefore, to avoid theoretical confusions around the concept, Vera and Ansgar Nünning propose some queries to be taken into account while judging whether a narrative can be categorized as a multiperspectival narrative. In their view, multiperspectivity can be demonstrated in a narrative text only when a number of accounts of the same events, or of the same phenomenon happening at the story level, are offered. A multiperspectivally presented event or subject becomes especially important when there are inconsistencies and disparities in the judgment or evaluation of the multiply displayed incidents, characters, places, truths, subjects or Weltanschauungs, to the degree that the synthesis of discrete perspectives cannot be made (Zsoldos, 2008). This also creates an unreliable narrator, whom the reader is unable to trust. Overall, the versions of each event by various narrators need to be considered and observed from different angles in order to reach an authentic conclusion. Correspondingly, Hartner (2008a) argues that, based on the common uses of the technique, multiperspectivity can be defined as a "basic aspect of narration or a mode of storytelling" wherein multiple and often different viewpoints are used to present and evaluate a story and its realm. In this framework, Hartner further claims that the arrangement of perspectives in multiperspective narratives possibly will accomplish a range of different tasks effectively. Typically, though, they foreground the "perceptually, epistemologically or ideologically restricted nature of individual perspectives" (Hartner, 2008a), besides grabbing attention to numerous kinds of discrepancies and resemblances between the viewpoints presented in the text. In this fashion, multiperspectivity frequently serves to portray the relative character of personal viewpoints or perspectivity in general. 143 Supplementary Issue Vol.20, No.4, 2016 گۆڤارى زانکۆ بۆ زانستە مرۆڤایەتییەکان پاشكۆی بەرگى 02 ژمارە 4 ساڵى 0202 This distinctive technique is often used in narratives about investigation of a crime or a mystery. The key to the puzzle has to be found by the reader, who has to make sense of different witness accounts before any prejudgments. This structure, furthermore, tacitly suggests that "the only authentic approach to the problem of reality is one which allows multiple perspectives to be heard in debate with each other" (Schonfield, 2009:140). As a result, Multiperspectivity, as Hartner (2008b) maintains, typically highlights some sort of "tension" or "dissonance" that arises from the clash of the presented perspectives. Likewise, Mullan remarkably states that one drive of the novel has often been to demonstrate how the "truth about human behavior" can hinge on one's viewpoint (Mullan, 2006:56). Thus, the use of multiple perspectives

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