Narrative Trickery:

Fiction, Truth, and Authorial Subterfuge

Hannah Courtney

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts & Media

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

August 2015 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: COURTNEY

First name: HANNAH Other name/s: ELYSE

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: The Arts & Media Faculty: Arts & Social Sciences

Title: Narrative Trickery: Fiction, Truth, and Authorial Subterfuge

Abstract 350 words maximum:

Readers often have passionate responses (both positive and negative) to books that first manipulate them into believing a seeming ' truth' about the narrative only to later discover that they have been deliberately fooled. In most cases readers are aware of the fictional status of these novels, which will be termed 'trickeries'. Why, then, do readers exhibit such outrage towards changes in a world which is known to be invented? This thesis argues that in the case of trickeries the conventional reading process (which encompasses readerly expectations as set up by the narrative in conference with the reader's knowledge about narrative and fiction) is used against the reader as the means through which they might be manipulated for a variety of purposes. Ongoing contentious debates surrounding certain narratological phenomena have tended to focus on conventional fiction as the basis for extrapolating data in support of various arguments. This study exploring narrative trickeries - the literary aberrations, the marked fiction - provides a new perspective on these debates, and in the process reveals fresh insights into the conventional processes of writing and reading fi ction. This thesis explores how historically-shifting and supposedly dichotomous notions such as

' truth/lies' and 'fiction/nonfiction' inform the current circumstances in whi~h contemporary readers consume literature. It is argued that this context provides the necessary conditions for a great proliferation of contemporary ' trickeries' . In this thesis different types of trickeries are identified and anatomised in order to explore four different narratological phenomena which divide scholarly opinion: the narrative communication model; the storyworld; fictionality; and the paratext. In this pursuit, a narratological analysis is conducted of four contemporary English-language texts: Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth (the unexpected twist); John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (the frustrated-expectations novel); William Goldman's The Princess Bride (the fictional(ised) memoir); and, Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper (the hoax). These analyses of trickeries provide an understanding of not only the textual mechanics at play (and thus the role ofthe author), but also ofreaderly responses, and thus the active, agential role the contemporary reader plays in the holistic process of contemporary fiction.

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1

Abstract

Readers often have passionate responses (both positive and negative) to books that first manipulate them into believing a seeming ‘truth’ about the narrative only to later discover that they have been deliberately fooled. In most cases readers are aware of the fictional status of these novels, which will be termed ‘trickeries’. Why, then, do readers exhibit such outrage towards changes in a world which is known to be invented?

This thesis argues that in the case of trickeries the conventional reading process (which encompasses readerly expectations as set up by the narrative in conference with the reader’s knowledge about narrative and fiction) is used against the reader as the means through which they might be manipulated for a variety of purposes.

Ongoing contentious debates surrounding certain narratological phenomena have tended to focus on conventional fiction as the basis for extrapolating data in support of various arguments. This study exploring narrative trickeries – the literary aberrations, the marked fiction – provides a new perspective on these debates, and in the process reveals fresh insights into the conventional processes of writing and reading fiction. This thesis explores how historically-shifting and supposedly dichotomous notions such as ‘truth/lies’ and ‘fiction/nonfiction’ inform the current circumstances in which contemporary readers consume literature. It is argued that this context provides the necessary conditions for a great proliferation of contemporary ‘trickeries’.

In this thesis different types of trickeries are identified and anatomised in order to explore four different narratological phenomena which divide scholarly opinion: the narrative communication model; the storyworld; fictionality; and the paratext. In this pursuit, a narratological analysis is conducted of four contemporary English-language texts: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (the unexpected twist); John Fowles’ The French 2

Lieutenant’s Woman (the frustrated-expectations novel); William Goldman’s The

Princess Bride (the fictional(ised) memoir); and, Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that

Signed the Paper (the hoax). These analyses of trickeries provide an understanding of not only the textual mechanics at play (and thus the role of the author), but also of readerly responses, and thus the active, agential role the contemporary reader plays in the holistic process of contemporary fiction.

3

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I wish to thank my wonderful family – thank you for your loving emotional support and your financial assistance over the years. Mum and Dad, I cannot begin to tell you how much this has meant to me. I love you very much.

Great thanks go to my supervisor, Paul Dawson, who has tirelessly guided four years of my advanced education with in-depth critical attention and tremendous knowledge. Thanks also for helping me get to St Louis and for introducing me to the international narratology crowd.

To John Attridge, my co-supervisor, thank you for enthusiastically encouraging my studies, and for your great feedback on my writing.

Many thanks to UNSW for being my second home for many years – specifically to the School of Arts and Media and its lecturers who have moulded my tertiary education. I wish to single out the independent readers on my review panel,

Roslyn Jolly and Sigi Jottkandt, for particular thanks. Roslyn, thank you for your insights and inspiration over the years – your ideas have changed the shape of my thesis in a dramatic way, and it is all the better for it. Sigi, thank you for your more recent advice – it was most considered and gratefully received.

This research was made possible by an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship and a UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Faculty Top-up scholarship. Many of the ideas were also explored at an international conference which I attended thanks to the awarding of a UNSW Postgraduate Research Student Support

(PRSS) Scheme Grant. I thank those responsible for these schemes for their support of

Australian research.

4

I wish to acknowledge the lively and enthusiastic annual conferences held by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. I never fail to feel inspired and enriched by the fascinating papers delivered and the great discussions between and after sessions with this incredible bunch of welcoming academics (thanks in particular to

Peter Rabinowitz for his time and encouragement). To this wonderful worldwide community of narratologists, thank you – as I travel halfway around the world to each conference I feel I am coming home to my people.

And finally, Marcus – with all my heart I thank you. You came into my life in the last year of my studies, but you have had a profound impact on me in that time.

Thank you for not just enthusiastically listening to my ideas, but also intelligently engaging with them and helping me develop them. Those walks with you (and Satchi!) did so much to clarify and further my arguments. Thank you for helping me celebrate the small milestones, and reminding me that my work means something. I love you.

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Contents

Originality Statement 1

Abstract 2

Acknowledgements 4

Contents 6

Introduction 10

The Narratological Study of Trickeries 11

Readerly Assumptions I: Fictional Truth 13

Readerly Assumptions II: Conversational Storytelling and The Contract 15

The Communication Model 20

The Storyworld and Making Sense of Narrative 25

Levels of Betrayal: Narrator, Implied Author, Real Author 28

The Reader 36

Temporality of the Reading Process 39

Chapter Outline and Chosen Textual Case-Studies 42

Chapter One

Historical Novelistic Trickery 49

Genre and Categorisation 51

Agatha Christie 59

The English Novel 64

Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson 70

6

Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson 77

Film, the Twentieth Century, and Beyond 81

Chapter Two

The Unexpected Twist and the Narrative Communication Model 84

Narrative Communication: the Model, the Theory, and the Reader 86

Unexpected Twists 91

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan 101

Serena: A Passive Sweet Treat? 106

Clues 109

The Final Chapter 118

Multiple Voices 125

Authorial Audience and Trickery, Narrative Audience and a New

Storyworld 130

Subterfuge and Voice, the Reader and Communication 138

Chapter Three

The Frustrated-Expectations Novel and the Storyworld 141

Possible Worlds, Fictional Worlds, and The Storyworld 142

Plot and Expectations 148

Generic Categorisation 150

Endings and Expectations 154

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles 164

Victorian Storyworld Setup 168

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Fowles’ Narrator: The Unknowing Know-all 178

The Unconventional 194

Victoriana, Storyworlds, and Communication 207

Chapter Four

The Fictional(ised) Memoir and Fictionality 211

Fictionality 214

Memoir 227

Fact and Fiction in ‘Memoir’ 235

The Princess Bride by William Goldman 244

Readerly Reactions – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 248

The Frame Narrative 252

Frame Narrative I: The Introductions 254

Frame Narrative II: The Authorial Intrusions 262

Goldman, the Authorial ‘Ego’, and Fictionality 272

Chapter Five

The Hoax and the Paratext 278

The Paratext 279

Hoaxes: Authorial Intent to Reveal or Deceive 286

The Autobiographical Hoax 289

The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville/Demidenko 297

Authorial/Narrative Voice Conflation 299

The Paratextual Demidenko 311

8

Reader Trajectory 321

Truth, Lies, and the Paratextual Narrative 328

Afterword 332

Bibliography 336

Literature 336

Theory and Criticism 345

9

Introduction

Agatha Christie’s 1926 detective novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, created a stir because its first person character narrator (a doctor, a good man, detective Poirot’s stand-in sidekick, and a seemingly honest narrator) turns out to be the murderer – a murderer who conveniently leaves out the murder from his ‘honest’ narrative account of events. Norma Khouri’s 2003 ‘memoir’, Forbidden Love: A harrowing true story of love and revenge in Jordan, details the so-called ‘honour killing’ of her friend during their time as young women in Jordan. It was revealed as a hoax in a series of Australian newspaper articles – the author’s lies scandalising the press and the public. Ian

McEwan’s 2001 novel, Atonement, contains a dramatic revelation in its final pages which divulges that the seemingly ‘truthful’ account of story events by a third person omniscient narrator is actually an unreliable account by a thoroughly subjective character author who invents much of her tale.

What these three novels, and many others besides, have in common is some sort of trickery carried out on an unsuspecting readership. These books have evoked in their readers a range of strong reactions, from elation (the thrill of being tricked) right through to anger (a feeling of betrayal, of being cheated). They are all fictional in some sense, and so it seems astonishing and intriguing that readers could feel any type of betrayal about stories that are already in essence ‘untrue’. Obviously, such betrayal must come from readerly expectations not met (or indeed, deliberately subverted), and so I have embarked on this research in order to ascertain what expectations and fulfillment thereof occur in the regular process of writing and reading a fictional narrative text, and how this contractual arrangement between producer and consumer can be subverted in cases of trickery. 10

My thesis will address what happens when ‘trickery’ occurs in narrative fiction. That is, what happens when a reader is manipulated into believing a seeming

‘truth’ about a narrative only to later discover that they have been fooled. Books where such manipulation occurs will be labeled ‘trickeries’. The nature of this type of novelistic trickery is such that the revelation often occurs at the last moment – in the final chapter or even outside the text. Such manipulations are only possible because there is a norm to which they do not conform, catching readers by surprise. Readers expect one thing, and are delivered another – whether that be ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’ than they were anticipating. Readers tend to exhibit strong reactions towards such works upon revelation – sometimes even feeling a sense of betrayal or anger towards the text and its author. My object is to look at these deliberate manipulations on the part of creators in order to ascertain what they may show us about the nature of text-based reader betrayal, the role of creative agents in the manipulation of narrative fiction, and the reader’s role in these abnormal reading experiences. I will argue that a successful trickery depends on the engagement of conventional reading practices – practices built on an implicit contract between author and reader regarding narrative ‘truth’. This contract fosters certain readerly expectations which are ratified by conventional fiction, then denied in cases of trickery.

The Narratological Study of Trickeries

Individual novelistic trickeries grouped together constitute a sub-genre. This sub-genre (or simply, genre, since that term can denote any number of ways a text may be categorised – a concept which will be explored further in Chapter One) is useful to examine in its own right, and this underpins the research which constitutes this thesis.

However, it must be remembered that these forms of novels are also the aberrations of

11 literature (the marked fiction) which, when studied, allow us to see conventional literature (the unmarked fiction) in a new light. As Tzvetan Todorov claims in regards to works which ‘disobey’ their genres, “transgression, in order to exist as such, requires a law that will, of course, be transgressed. One could go further: the norm becomes visible – lives – only by its transgressions.”1 Through narrative trickeries, authors manipulate and subsequently expose readerly expectations – expectations formed and supported by conventional fiction which are integral to conventional reading practices.

Through examining the interaction of author, text, and reader in a range of instances of trickery, which by their very nature go against conventional writing and reading processes of narrative fiction, this thesis will expose the very expectations and conventional processes which these trickeries play upon and subvert.

In order to explore the minutiae of how this betrayal of the narrative contract occurs, I will turn to narrative theory. Using narratology for my methodology allows insight into the specific narrative means through which trickery occurs. It is my intention that, using theories from the field, I may not only provide a better understanding of the narrative mechanics of trickeries, but by highlighting these aberrations I may contribute new insights to the narratological debates which largely use conventional fiction for case-study evidence. In this way, my research fills the gap left in the study of four areas of narratological phenomena, into which I intend to integrate knowledge gleaned from the study of trickeries: the narrative communication model; the storyworld; fictionality; and, the paratext.

But first, the readerly assumptions which make trickeries possible must be addressed.

1 Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” New Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 1, Readers and Spectators: Some Views and Reviews (Autumn 1976). p. 160. 12

Readerly Assumptions I: Fictional Truth

The realities of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ do not always have to be mutually exclusive. Susan Lanser declares that “[t]he fiction text may contain a good deal of nonfictional discourse.”2 It might be assumed, then, that the opposite may well also occur: nonfictional texts may contain a good deal of fictional discourse. Indeed, there are many examples of such texts that blur the line between the two macro-genres, some of which will be explored in this thesis (see particularly Chapters Four and Five on the

Fictional(ised) Memoir and the Hoax). This blurring of these generic distinctions – distinctions which most readers hold in their minds as absolute – either passes under the radar of the regular reader, or appears as an affront to them, an unconventional assault on the norms of narrative. The nature of the reaction depends on how obtrusive the blurring is – how flagrantly the rules are flouted and the violation aired.

However, in cases where texts are clearly understood as fiction, feelings of betrayal or a lack of fulfilled expectations occur because assumptions on the part of the reader (as propagated and regulated by the expected norms of conventional narrative fiction) have been violated. Normative readerly assumptions are informed by the notion of fictional truth. This notion dictates that the narrative should conform to its proposed purpose – that there should be a semblance of truth within the world as dictated by the text, and that that world should not abruptly change without just cause. For this reason, readers are willing to suspend disbelief in order to believe that the narrative is more than just mere words – that it forms a ‘truth’ through its story.

2 Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. p. 285. 13

In fact, readers are so invested in believing in the tale that, as James Phelan claims, they have a “default interest in preserving the mimetic”3, even when presented with contradictory evidence. As readers, we simultaneously realise how ridiculous this belief is, as we are well-aware that fiction is invented and thus inherently cannot be absolute truth – indeed, this very understanding of the imitation (falsification) of reality, of truth, is what mimesis relies upon. As Catherine Gallagher notes when discussing our emotional connection with characters we know to be unreal, “[o]ur imagination of characters is, in this sense, absurd, and (perhaps) legitimately embarrassing, but it is also constitutive of the genre [of the novel]”4. We can see this embarrassment brought to the fore when a reader responds negatively to a trickery – examples of which will be examined throughout this thesis.

Michael Riffaterre has commented on what he calls the paradox of truth in fiction, insisting that such ‘truth’ relies not on a perceived link to reality (the traditional view of verisimilitude), but on conformity with the rules of genre. He states that fiction’s “very name declares its artificiality, and yet it must somehow be true to hold the interest of its readers, to tell them about experiences at once imaginary and relevant to their own lives.”5 Riffaterre maintains, “[w]ords may lie yet still tell a truth if the rules are followed.”6 He explains that truth is a “linguistic phenomenon”7, as it rests on the alignment of text with its genre. That is, if a work of fiction conforms to the rules

(the grammar) of that genre, then it has achieved truth. Riffaterre is at pains to point out

3 Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. p. 26. 4 Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” In Franco Moretti (ed.). The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. p. 352. 5 Riffaterre, Michael. Fictional Truth. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. p. xii. 6 Riffaterre, p. xiii. 7 Riffaterre, p. xiv. 14 that this is truth in fiction, and not the accuracy of the depiction of reality contained within the narrative. He explains:

The only reason that the phrase “fictional truth” is not an oxymoron, as

“fictitious truth” would be, is that fiction is a genre whereas lies are not. Being

a genre, it rests on conventions, of which the first and perhaps only one is that

fiction specifically, but not always explicitly, excludes the intention to

deceive. A novel always contains signs whose function is to remind readers

that the tale they are being told is imaginary.8

The idea of fiction as a genre complete with conventions that govern it is a pertinent one. This, I believe, is where the notion of fictional truth comes from. Truth here does not concern facts – readers do not expect a fictional work to be absolutely factual.

Rather, they expect the work to conform to narrative truth. There is an inherent paradox in reading narrative fiction: we as readers know logically that we are reading various degrees of untruths (whether it be simple narrator subjectivity or full-blown fantasy fiction); however, to engage and digest (to make words into narrative as we read) we need to believe, submit, allow ourselves to be told a story. In order to do this successfully, we must trust that the author will deliver on the basis of narrative truth.

This trust brings me to the second readerly assumption.

Readerly Assumptions II: Conversational Storytelling and The Contract

What theories of fictional truth tell us is that readers do something extraordinary: they willingly invest in a text, in a story, even though they know it to be

8 Riffaterre, p. 1. 15 false. They believe the unbelievable. The nature of this investment is possible because of a certain unstated contractual arrangement that occurs (and is ever-present) between the reader and the text/its author. Normative readerly assumptions are informed by this narrative ‘contract’. The steadfast, commonly-accepted (though never explicitly stated) rules of this contract are vital to the regular processing of narrative fiction.

Most contractual theories of narrative are informed by H. P. Grice’s conversational theory concerning conversational implicatures and the maxims he develops for the principle of cooperation.9 These maxims are of Quantity (give as much information as is needed but no more), Quality (give truthful information, and do not give information “for which you lack evidence”), Relation (“Be relevant”), and Manner

(do not be ambiguous or obscure, but rather be brief and to the point).10 Grice elucidates his theory concerning the contracts made between participants of conversation, and the violations that may occur to halt conversation. Although this is a solid foundational linguistic theory, it is important to remember that the written word is not conversation, however similar or closely aligned it may at times appear, and so the theory may not apply to narrative fiction in exactly the same way. However, there is no doubting

Grice’s impact on the models narrative theorists have developed for explaining how we naturalise fiction, particularly in terms of narrative fiction contract theory, and so an understanding of Grice is vital to a study which relies on these contractual theories.

Mary Louise Pratt’s Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse is the seminal work in regards to framing the study of literature in terms of natural language.

Seeking to draw together the theories and findings of linguistics and literary theory,

Pratt extends speech act theory into the literary world. She counters the idea that

9 Grice, H.P. “Logic and Conversation”. In P. Cole. and J. Morgan (eds.). Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Arts. New York: Academic Press, 1975. pp. 41-58. 10 Grice, pp. 45-46. 16

Gricean theories cannot apply to literature because literature is not conversation, claiming instead that the points at which Grice’s method seems not to account for literature (usually in terms of the maxim of Quality) are the same points at which it sometimes apparently fails to account for some real world speech – this apparent failure not actually being a failure at all but rather a variation. She therefore claims that written narratives fall under the same principles as do spoken narratives in real world scenarios

(for example, within conversation), and so are best understood in terms of implicatures.

Pratt maintains that a certain contract exists between reader and author thanks to the fact that literature is simply “a speech context”11 which comes with its own expectations.

She claims:

Given his knowledge of how literature works come into being, the reader is

entitled to assume, among other things, that he and the writer are in agreement

about the “purpose of the exchange”; that the writer was aware of the

appropriateness conditions for the literary speech situation and for the genre he

has selected; that he believes this version of the text successfully accomplishes

his purpose and is “worth it” to us; and that at least some readers agree with

him, notably the publishers, and perhaps the professor who assigned the book

or the friend who recommended it.12

The author must work in accordance with these expectations (or deliberately flout them, and Pratt notes that “rule-breaking can be the point of the utterance”13). In addition to the general literary contract, the reader is also informed by assumptions about generic

11 Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977. p. 86. 12 Pratt, p. 173. 13 Pratt, p. 211. 17 conventions, and “can be expected to decode the work according to those assumptions unless they are overtly invited or required to do otherwise.”14 Pratt therefore insists that the implicit contract between author and reader exists because literature works in the same way as natural language such as conversation, and is thus governed by the same rules.

Michael Kearns builds on Pratt’s application of Grice for the basis of his rhetorical understanding of narrative, using the “strong-contextualist position” of speech act theory as his foundation.15 Kearns claims that “[r]eaders do what they do, in response to an author’s actions embodied in the text, in order to preserve the principles of relevance, which dictate that within this particular situational context, cognitive effect is supposed to involve interpretation based on codes, rules, and the ur- conventions of narrative.”16 (Ur-conventions being “the basic expectations governing how an audience will process... a text”, such as expectations regarding progression, or a possible world within the text.17) Like Pratt, then, Kearns uses speech act theory as the basis for his understanding of the narrative contract. However, I cannot agree that fiction is simply one variation of speech (which implies that the latter is the norm to which the former is the exception). Whilst Pratt and Kearns are incredibly persuasive in their arguments, I believe we must see literature not as a variation, but as its own kind of communicative act, one vastly different to the conversational acts of natural language. Therefore, while the idea of an implicit contract is important to my comprehension of narrative fiction, my understanding of the contract does not extend directly out of speech act theories.

14 Pratt, p. 204. Original emphasis. 15 Kearns, Michael. Rhetorical Narratology. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. p. 10. 16 Kearns, p. 80. 17 Kearns, p. 2. 18

Ross Chambers has acknowledged the transactional nature of narrative, pointing out that such a contract involves two parties accepting the roles of storyteller or hearer – vital roles “without which a story cannot exist”18. Narrative, then, is not simply a transference of information from one party to another, but a process whereby one party seduces another into relinquishing control. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Chambers claims that in acquiring the reader’s interest through seduction, the author also relinquishes absolute authority, demonstrating the push and pull between participants of the contract. Crucially, Chambers points out that this contract involves “an understanding between the participants in the exchange as to the purposes served by the narrative function, its ‘point.’…[and] it is this contractual agreement as to point that assigns meaningfulness to the discourse.”19 Narrative, then, must have a point, and this point is implicitly understood by all parties in conventional works.

In order to easily slip into the role of ‘hearer’ under the contract, we as readers must agree to trust a tale to be told and therefore must believe in a version of its ‘truth’ in regards to its point. Importantly, in order to make this paradox work for us (that is,

‘believing’ in what we know to be unreal), we must suppress or ignore this contradictory knowledge. On the other side of the equation, authors can use this trust to manipulate. Readers react strongly against a violation of this trust – a violation of the implicit agreement – because such a deliberate manipulation exposes our belief in the truth of what we know to be ‘untruthful’. Of course, the betrayal runs deeper than a feeling of slight humiliation – the author has deliberately breached the transactional contract where the storyteller and hearer agreed to the universal rules concerning what

Chambers terms the ‘point’ of the narrative. My research relies upon an understanding

18 Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. p. 22. 19 Chambers, p. 8. 19 of these contract theories in order to explore what occurs when the contract is breached and therefore to show how trickeries work by setting up readerly expectations in conventional fiction.

These two interwoven readerly assumptions – an expectation of narrative truth as based on an implicitly understood contract between author and reader through the text – lay the foundations for trickery. Throughout this thesis I will be using the study of trickeries to explore specific narratological phenomena. Although each chapter will focus on a specific area of narratological study, there are some theoretical areas which will inform all of my chapters to come, and which therefore require a brief discussion here – namely, narrative communication, the different agents of betrayal, the reader, and narrative temporality.

The Communication Model

Narrative theories of communication provide us with ways of understanding the flow of information that occurs in the dual process of creating and interpreting written narrative. Breaches in the narrative contract can be better understood in terms of the communication model, because the model identifies various agents to whom blame can be (and is) attributed, and the targets of information. Interestingly, it is also derived from conversational protocols, so it is important to look at it from the perspective of contract theory. Although many models have been proposed, the foundational communication model of narrative is that of Seymour Chatman’s, which has long been applauded, argued with and amended. Chatman’s flow chart reads:

20

Narrative text

Real Author- -›Implied Author→(Narrator)→(Narratee)→Implied Reader- -›Real Reader20

Although most theorists agree that Chatman’s communication model is an important and influential work, some have taken issue with the terms used within the diagram, and its simple one-way flow of direction. Harry Shaw points out that theorists come at

Chatman’s communication model from two different angles, therefore producing different conclusions: the information angle (those who look at the diagram as a flow of information between the various figures) or the rhetoric angle (those who focus more on the content and strategies of telling, imagining “what effects and purposes the teller wishes to achieve”21). Shaw claims that these different angles give the terms in the diagram different meanings. He tells us, “[t]he real author and the narrator harmonize with both the information and the rhetoric views of the diagram. The implied author fits only the rhetoric view.”22 Herein lies the problem: with different angles, or outlooks, different theorists give the same terms different meanings, and so read Chatman’s simple chart in vastly different ways.

The right-hand-side of the flow chart details the receivers: the narratee, implied reader, and real reader. These are the target audiences for each of the creators (real author targets real reader; implied author targets implied reader; narrator targets narratee). In this sense, Chatman’s flowchart views receivers (and hence readers) from the perspective of the creators of fiction/narration – as targets, not as independent agents that bring as much to the process of narrative as the left-hand-side agents. While

20 Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978. p. 151. 21 Shaw, Harry E. “Why Won’t Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized.” In James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. p. 300. 22 Shaw, “Why Won’t Our Terms Stay Put?”, p. 301. 21 valuable terms when talking about the targets of information sent, the narratee and implied reader do not necessarily equate to readerly positions. A reader may step into these roles, but does not necessarily. Thus when referring to readers I will be utilising

Peter J. Rabinowitz’s more reader-centric model of actual, authorial, narrative, and ideal narrative audiences.23 In Chapter Two I will demonstrate why trickeries necessitate the combination of the two models.

Rabinowitz’s audience model, first outlined in his aptly titled essay, “Truth in

Fiction”, contains at least four audiences that the readership of a fictional novel can be a part of. There is, of course, the “actual audience” – this actual readership is comprised of many actual individuals and so cannot be predicted or homogenized.24 In addition there are three more audience groups: the “authorial audience”, a “specific hypothetical audience” posited by the author, the characteristics of which, Rabinowitz tells us, “we must, as we read, come to share, in some measure… if we are to understand the text”25; the “narrative audience”, for whom the narrator writes, and so “we must therefore do more than join… [the] authorial audience; we must at the same time pretend to be a member of the imaginary narrative audience for which… [the] narrator is writing”26; and finally, the “ideal narrative audience”, the audience the narrator wishes s/he was writing for, an audience which believes and agrees with everything s/he says.27 Given the ‘actual audience’ is comprised of the unique subjectivity of every reader, it is difficult to study. The ideal narrative audience is, I believe, an entity the reader may or may not need to engage, so may not apply in all cases (for example, in cases where there is no need for the narrative audience to be skeptical of the narration, and so makes

23 Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn 1977). pp. 121-141. 24 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 126. 25 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 126. 26 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 127. 27 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 134. 22 the need for an ideal narrative audience redundant). In this study, then, it is the narrative and authorial audiences with which I am primarily concerned, given it is the tension between the two – believing and unbelieving – that produces the paradox in the expectation of fictional truth.

Rabinowitz suggests that, in the case of fiction, the knowledge that we are reading something both true and untrue is necessary to the reading process. He claims that as real readers we step into the role of the authorial audience in order to appreciate the technical achievements of the text (for example, the thematic resonances), and in doing so know that the text is fiction – it is untrue. However, Rabinowitz suggests we must also step into the role of the narrative audience – as someone who, for example, believes that rabbits really do run around with pocket watches exclaiming how late they are. The authorial audience cannot believe this, the narrative audience must, and so in engaging with fiction Rabinowitz tells us it is necessary that we simultaneously believe in both the truth and the untruth of what we are reading in order to both invest in the story and appreciate the greater technical and authorial accomplishments of the work.

Such a contradiction is vital for the narrative fiction reading process. I would suggest that, as rational beings, this contradiction sometimes disturbs contemporary readers – that we would prefer not to consciously think about our suspension of disbelief, and that when it is brought to our attention without our permission, it can be quite confronting.

The important aspect of Rabinowitz’s theory for my purposes comes from his suggestion that a single reader must carry out multiple roles during reading. Calling this process ‘joining audiences’, then, is problematic, for two reasons. First, it implies it is an act which puts ultimate agency in the hands of the author (the narrative and authorial audiences being set, mythical targets with which a reader might align). Rabinowitz states as much when he says that “[t]he notion of the authorial audience is clearly tied to

23 authorial intention”28. His clarification that he sees intention “as a matter of social convention rather than of individual psychology”, merely leads me to my second problem. This second issue is that an ‘audience’ implies there is a group of metaphorical readers out there which the reader sets out to join in the pursuit of aligning interests.

Indeed, Rabinowitz states that his perspective allows him “to treat the reader’s attempt to read as the author intended… as the joining of a particular social/interpretive community”29. Even the joining of the narrative audience is seen as pretending to be “a member of the imaginary narrative audience for which the narrator is writing.”30

Rabinowitz’s stress on the social aspect of these audiences is one I wish to avoid since I believe it shifts agency away from the reader – I wish instead to focus on the work carried out by the reader in these ‘roles’.

As such, I wish to stress that this carrying out of multiple roles is a conglomerate of cognitive functions the reader performs during reading (which is, I believe, one of the most important aspects of Rabinowitz’s argument). Rather than joining audiences, then, in my application of the theory the reader is carrying out different functions simultaneously. All readers carry out both main functions (authorial and narrative) during reading, even though some books require of the reader more work in one functional area than the other. Importantly, these are simultaneous functions – they are not temporally mutually exclusive for the reader (the reader does not swap between one audience position and another). Thus an actual reader adopts an authorial audience position and a narrative audience position “at the same time”31 by carrying out the functions of both simultaneously. This explains why we as readers can appreciate

28 Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987. p. 22. 29 Rabinowitz, Before Reading, p. 22. 30 Rabinowitz, Before Reading, p. 95. 31 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 125. 24 writing style (authorial audience) while worrying about how a character might escape a troublesome situation (narrative audience).

Although Rabinowitz believes these functions are caught up with the reader’s opting to join hypothetical audience groups designed or targeted by the author and narrator, I believe these vital and omnipresent functions are carried out by the reader in total disregard of the intentions of author and narrator. We believe in the story, and we are critical of the text, and it is this tension-producing aspect of Rabinowitz’s theory which I wish to utilise throughout this thesis, while letting go of other aspects that are less useful to my research – namely, the idea of authorial and narratorial intent in regards to hypothetical audience groups. Despite the potential confusion caused by the term ‘audience’, Rabinowitz’s theory remains prevalent in narratological discourse and so to dispose of the term would be to invite even more confusion. Thus I will be using the terms ‘authorial audience’ and ‘narrative audience’ to denote my understanding of the dual functions the reader performs, rather than the joining of social audience groups

– a slight, but important, difference.

The Storyworld and Making Sense of Narrative

The job of the narrative audience (in my understanding of the term) is to believe wholeheartedly in the events, characters, and thus the world of the story as dictated by the text. In some cases of trickery, it is the rules of the storyworld (as set up by that very text) that are violated, producing a breach in the contract by denying the narrative audience what it craves. David Herman explores the theory of the storyworld – that is, the world constructed by the reader from the story events and discourse, not limited to the action, but also including all elements of story context extraneous to the

25 storyline. Herman favours the term ‘storyworld’ over the term ‘story’ because he believes:

… storyworld better captures what might be called the ecology of narrative

interpretation. In trying to make sense of a narrative, interpreters attempt to

reconstruct not just what happened – who did what to or with whom, for how

long, how often and in what order – but also the surrounding context or

environment embedding existents, their attributes, and the actions and events

in which they are more or less centrally involved… [T]his surrounding

environment, which is always perspectivally filtered…, is not just temporally

but spatiotemporally structured, although classical treatments of story tend to

emphasize sequence over space.32

Herman explains that readers have a compulsion to create these storyworlds – indeed, he implies that they cannot read and understand narrative without doing so, that it is an inherent part of the reading process. The theory of storyworlds or fictional worlds thus rests on the premise that readers must, and do, mentally create entire fictional worlds when they read – worlds which are sparked by the content of the story. Many theorists have debated how this storyworld is formed, and its level of completeness – these debates will be explored in Chapter Three.

There have been many other hypotheses about the processes that readers undertake when formulating an understanding of the text’s world. Lanser explains the fictional speech act, whereby the reader must construct the world and characters based on “fictional propositions” found in text. These propositions cannot contradict one

32 Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. pp. 13-14. 26 another, unless the genre is absurdist (that is, unless the genre rules allow it).33 Jonathan

Culler describes the process of naturalization, whereby readers make sense of inconsistencies within a text by relating it to real world understanding. When confronted with the strange or unexpected, a reader will naturalize this oddity to fit what they know of the world (for example, a character acting strangely is naturalized as mad) rather than seeing it as a true oddity – it is thus normalised within the storyworld. Culler claims this is a vital part of the processing of narrative.34 Monika Fludernik builds on Culler, coining the term narrativization for “a reading strategy that naturalizes texts by recourse to narrative schemata”.35 Fludernik outlines the dynamic process that occurs whereby the reader makes causal connections between discreet textual elements in order to formulate a narrative. She claims this comes about because the reader holds a single

“macro-frame” to which the text must conform – that of narrativity. When a text is inconsistent, a reader will “cast about for ways and means of recuperating these texts as narratives, motivated by the generic markers that go with the book.”36 Genre, then, aids the reader in making difficult elements align with the whole to formulate a consistent narrative. Manfred Jahn has worked on frame theory, claiming that readers use frames to attempt to interpret and understand narrative. Jahn explains that a frame is a cognitive model selected and used in the reading process. This frame is continuously put to the test by data, and “the analysis of the data depends to a considerable extent on the current frame.”37 Jahn maintains that we do not discard the current frame prematurely due to exceptions – the frame “tries to protect itself, and it tries to maximise its scope”.38 This

33 Lanser, pp. 290-291. 34 Culler, Jonathan. “Convention and Naturalization.” In Stucturalist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1975. pp. 131-160. 35 Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. p. 25. 36 Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, p. 25. 37 Jahn, Manfred. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology”. Poetics Today, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter 1997). p. 448. 38 Jahn, “Frames, Preferences”, p. 457. 27 may well explain why readers continue to believe that a story should ‘be’ a certain way, even when evidence to the contrary presents itself (for example, a fictional text read as autobiography).

What can be synthesised from these theories is that there is a generally- acknowledged agreement on the readerly need to believe in the ‘truth’ of a narrative that the reader rationally understands to be fictional – to invest in that world, and to follow the rules of that world as set out by the text. It is necessary for readers (specifically, the narrative audience position readers adopt) to believe in a storyworld in order to process fiction successfully. I will therefore be working under the assumption that readers are active agents that engage in a number of processes during communication, including that of storyworld formation.

Levels of Betrayal: Narrator, Implied Author, Real Author

Although the author can be found to be ultimately responsible for everything that constitutes their text – both inside and outside of it – the breach in the narrative contract can actually occur on different levels of the text, as carried out by different narrative agents. These agents are the narrator, the implied author and the real author.

The level of the breach (that is, where it is carried out and by whom) plays a large part in how that breach is received, how it makes the reader feel, and therefore how the novel is judged. In order to look at these three narrative agents and their processes, I must engage with theories surrounding their agency. For the narrator, this involves theories of unreliability; for the implied author, this involves theories on whether the implied author, in fact, exists, and what its role and impact may be; for the real author, this involves looking at the paratext and its impact on the narrative itself.

28

To begin, let us look at trickery performed by a narrator. Wayne C. Booth first coined the term ‘unreliable narrator’ for a narrator whose views are in disharmony with the norms and values of the implied author, as detected by the reader through the process of irony.39 Phelan has built on and slightly changed this definition, outlining the

“six kinds of unreliability: misreporting, misreading, misevaluating – or what I will call misregarding – and underreporting, underreading, and underregarding.”40 My research will focus on the more deliberate forms of unreliability – on underreporting, underreading and underregarding. Some narrators declare upfront that they lie; some character-narrators are so overtly biased that we read their version of events with a grain of salt; these both display a form of honesty in their open declarations of their unreliability, and I am not concerned with these forms of ‘honest’ unreliability. Rather,

I wish to look at narrators who deliberately deceive their audience, and do so by concealing their dishonesty or unreliability until late in the narrative.

Of course, what I am referring to here is the type of unreliable narrator that

Greta Olson has termed ‘untrustworthy’, as opposed to the unreliable narrator who is merely ‘fallible’. Untrustworthy narrators tend to deliberately deceive their narratee, as opposed to ‘accidentally’ doing so through bias or lack of knowledge. Olson tells us the two different types of unreliable narrators elicit different readerly responses; she claims,

“[w]hen narrators are untrustworthy, their accounts have to be altered in order to make sense of their discrepancies. Fallible narrators by contrast make individual mistakes or leave open informational gaps that need to be filled in. Untrustworthy narrators meet with our skepticism about their characters, whereas fallible narrators are more likely to

39 Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. pp. 158-159. 40 Phelan, Living to Tell About It, p. 51. 29 be excused for their failures to deliver on the informational goods.”41 I am focusing on those narrators who cannot be excused – those that should evoke our skepticism.

However, in the narratives I am addressing, these unreliable narrators are so untrustworthy that they conceal their blatant dishonesty until late in the narrative – denying us our scepticism and therefore cheating us out of the opportunity to mentally amend their accounts as they are delivered. I will be drawing specifically on Olson’s definitions when discussing the unreliability of the narrators who set out to trick or manipulate through their narration.

Second, then, is the implied author – the most slippery of the three creative agents. The narrator and real author are both often readily identifiable, but it is what goes on in between (if anything) that is difficult to concretely locate. Lanser asserts that there is an “extrafictional voice”, which is “an authorial presence, traditionally overlooked, that is situated within the text itself.”42 Lanser posits this voice as “the most direct textual counterpart for the historical author”43; everything that goes into the text’s construction is directly attributed to this extrafictional entity who, Lanser tells us, comes to be conflated with the author. As readers, we thus attribute responsibility for the text to the extrafictional voice – a similar position to that held by the implied author. I believe the implied author (although more difficult to textually or realistically locate than the narrator or real author) is a valid category of creative agent, and one necessary when thinking of the organising force behind a text – an agent that allows us to avoid conflating the values or views of the text with the real author.

The debate has mainly hinged on whether or not the category of the implied author is necessary. Gérard Genette has made his “basically negative” views on the

41 Olson, Greta. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 2003). p. 104-5. 42 Lanser, p. 8. 43 Lanser, p. 122. 30 subject quite clear.44 He concedes that the concept of the implied author could be allowed if it were to mean simply the “idea of the author” as created by the text.

However, Genette clarifies his position when he explains that “if one wants to establish this idea of the author as a ‘narrative agent,’ I don’t go along, maintaining always that agents should not be multiplied unnecessarily – and this one, as such, seems to me unnecessary.”45 Genette stresses there is a teller (the narrator) and a writer (author), and the implied author is thus superfluous as an active agent. I concede that the narrator and real author are easier to locate in terms of concrete subjectivities (especially when it comes to textual or biographical evidence for their existences). However, I would caution against using the relative lack of ease as reason to eliminate the concept of the implied author. There is definite value in the implied author as a concept – as the organiser of the text, and thus as an active agent – without resorting to a conflation of this agent with the real author, who cannot, I believe, be located in text. I define the implied author as a presence overseeing the structure and style of the work – the editor – who may sometimes be responsible for certain textual elements which cannot be attributed to a narrator. Just as the narrator is not a real being but rather a construction of the real author, so too, I believe, is the implied author. Despite their fictional statuses, both are distinct agents within the world of the text, holding more or less different positions with different responsibilities to those of the real author.

Phelan is just one critic who has defended the implied author. He redefines the implied author as “a streamlined version of the real author, an actual or purported subject of the real author’s capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other

44 Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. (Trans. Jane E. Lewin.) New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. p. 147. 45 Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, p. 148. 31 properties that play an active role in the construction of the particular text.”46 Phelan suggests the implied author is, in fact, a human agent, and suggests that this agent actually exists outside of the text.47 I disagree with this assertion, pointing to a difference between Phelan’s and my own definition of an implied author – I believe that the implied author can only be found inside the text, as a construction carried out by the real author. There may certainly be a projected self presented to the public outside of the text that is different from the real author, but this must be called something different

(the fake author? the public author?). Although the two may potentially conflate (as, indeed, the real author may at times conflate with the implied author, and even with the narrator in certain texts such as autobiography), they do not always conflate, and so we must retain the distinct entity of the implied author as organiser of the text, as found within the text.

Brian Richardson claims there are cases in which the implied author is useful, and cases where it is not – that is, not all texts involve an implied author, though many do. As such, he states “the implied author is a coherent and useful [concept]... for a wide range of critical practices, and there is no need to discard this concept”.48 Richardson provides literary examples where the implied author (or even implied authors) is necessary (for example, hoaxes; books written under pseudonyms; books written by several authors; books that have a particular iconic authorial style – “Here’s another

Agatha Christie – You’ll love it!”49), and examples where the implied author seems not to even be present, and so is not necessary as a concept (for example, “formulaic”50 works without clear, individual authorial voices such as ‘bad’ serial romances or

46 Phelan, Living to Tell About It, p. 45. Original emphasis. 47 Phelan, Living to Tell About It, p. 47. 48 Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. p. 121. 49 Richardson, p. 122. 50 Richardson, p. 121. 32 pornography; works where the authorial voice matters less than the message, such as satire; or when the work clearly reflects the public figure of the real author, and so an

“intermediary figure”51 is less needed). I agree with Richardson that there are certain texts which demand an interpretation that includes an implied author. Certain trickeries

I will be analysing are performed at the level of the implied author – that is, not solely by the real author outside the text (who, of course, is responsible for all narrative trickeries), nor by the narrator within the text, but moreso within the organisational arena of the text. The study of trickeries thus demands the notion of an implied author as an in-text organiser – less as a comparison with the real author, and more as an intermediary agent in and of itself.

Although academic readers are well aware of the implied author, regular readers are usually not aware of this category. As a result, the regular reader often blames the real author for the agency of the implied author – for these readers, the two are conflated, with the real author cancelling out the need for another agent. Just because some readers are not aware of the implied author does not mean that this agent and its specific responsibilities do not exist. As analogy, a reader might also be unaware of the concept of a narrator, and so view clearly fictional narration as the words of the real author. This does not mean the narrator and its specific roles and responsibilities – its agency – does not exist. Rather, the narrator does exist, but the blame is placed elsewhere, producing a rather different reading experience from that experienced by a reader who notes the difference between narrator and author. This same process can be replicated with readers who are unaware of the implied author. However, I believe when trickery is carried out in the realm of the implied author (inside the text), as opposed to the realm of the real author (outside of the text), then the reading experience – the

51 Richardson, p. 121. 33 reaction to such trickery – is quite different. Readers can sense the difference in location and so react differently, even if they do not understand why. My hypothesis here is that the reaction to implied authorial trickery is often positive, whereas the reaction to real authorial trickery is often negative. We must then assume that the implied author is a definitive category, separate to the real author, and able to evoke a different readerly response.

Finally, trickery as carried out solely by the real author is perhaps the most reviled by readers, and through this thesis I will attempt to ascertain why this is so.

These cases usually involve a blurring of fiction and nonfiction. Henrik Skov Nielsen claims that “readers do, in fact, react very differently depending on whether they think they are reading fiction or not.”52 Readers thus interpret the same text in very different, specific ways as guided by whether they believe it to be fiction or nonfiction. This belief thus becomes more important than any textual cues. Many writers have made autobiographical claims about their works, only to be exposed later as hoaxers – that is, their works are revealed as partly or entirely fictional. These authors manipulate the reader based on the latter’s inherent belief in the truth of the work – a belief based on genre. Lanser explains that “[f]or the reader the main difference between fiction and nonfiction is the way the text will be integrated into his or her understanding of the world.”53 As such, if a reader integrates a fictional text as nonfiction, there is going to be a dramatic jarring of understanding when the truth is revealed, and probably a substantial negative reaction towards the author.

Since much of the real author’s trickery may be carried out persuasively outside of the book, it is important to consider the paratext. Throughout this thesis I will

52 Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration.” In J. Alber and M. Fludernik (eds.). Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. p. 280. 53 Lanser, p. 286. 34 be utilising Genette’s terms – paratext, peritext, and epitext. Genette terms all information relating to a narrative, but outside of that narrative, the paratext.54 Within the paratext, he names two fields of data – the peritext and the epitext – clarifying that

“paratext = peritext + epitext.”55 Genette explains that “[w]ithin the same volume [as the narrative] are such elements as the title or the preface and sometimes elements inserted into the interstices of the text, such as chapter titles or certain notes”56, and that these constitute the peritext. Genette defines the epitext as “[t]he distanced elements… all those messages that, at least originally, are located outside the book, generally with the help of the media (interviews, conversations) or under cover of private communications (letters, diaries, and others).”57 I believe the epitext is particularly pertinent to real authorial trickery, which occurs outside of the text, and yet elements of the peritext can also be utilised to deceive the reader. Gerald Graff has defined what he terms the ‘secondary text’ as the world that accompanies the primary text: somewhat akin to Genette’s paratext, including not just, for example, prefaces or dust jackets, but also authorial performances and interviews, reviews, scholarly criticism, media and advertising, rumours and so on.58 This secondary- or paratext adds to the readerly feeling of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of the primary text itself in novels that assert an air of autobiography. The interpretive culture (especially the epitext) is what perpetuates the great majority of hoaxes. Graff declares that “the secondary text often so delimits the agendas of reading that it becomes hard finally to distinguish it from the primary text”59.

The conflation of these two texts results in many unhappy readers blaming the primary

54 Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge and New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1997. 55 Genette, Paratexts, p. 5. 56 Genette, Paratexts, p. 5. 57 Genette, Paratexts, p. 5. 58 Graff, Gerald. “Narrative and the Unofficial Interpretive Culture.” In J. Phelan (ed.). Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. pp. 3-11. 59 Graff, p. 5. 35 text for the contents of the paratext. Of course, hoaxers can abuse this paratext/primary text conflation – adding to the former to manipulate the reception of the latter; I will explore these particular trickeries in Chapter Five, the study of which will shed more light on the nature of the paratext.

The Reader

Studying readers brings with it the problem of plurality of response as a result of unique, individual subjectivities. We cannot create a homogenous grouping of every individual reader into the same, seemingly unified-in-thought category, and yet there are some responses which occur almost across the board, and so demand a group study.

Shaw is just one of many literary theorists who have been troubled by the idea of a homogenous readership, where an author can supposedly elicit a certain response in all readers using a certain textual technique. In response, Shaw suggests that readers can join any number of audience groups, and an author merely makes it possible for the reader to do this.60 However valid this may be, it does not aid in studying audience responses, as it implies it is possible that any reader may have any response. Phelan teases out and differentiates the “flesh-and-blood or actual reader” from the “authorial audience”61 (much akin to Chatman’s real and ideal readers). Although Phelan uses

Rabinowitz’s term, this authorial audience is distinct in definition to my use of the term.

Throughout this thesis I will be employing the term ‘authorial audience’ to refer to my application of a certain part of Rabinowitz’s theory – that is, the readerly process which can analyse and interpret style, techniques, and meaning, as opposed to the narrative audience and ideal narrative audience positions, and as only one part of the reader’s

60 Shaw, Harry E. “Making Readers.” Narrative, Vol. 15, No. 2 (May 2007). pp. 207-221. 61 Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. p. 4. 36 entire mental processes. Any time ‘authorial audience’ is used to denote a different meaning, this will be pointed out in text. Phelan’s distinction allows an authorial audience response (which is the response aimed for by the author), leaving the flesh- and-blood reader to have their own individual response layered on top of that (often involving ethical judgments). I believe a more fruitful distinction would allow for the study of reader response (a homogenous base-level response facilitated by the skilful manipulation of a readership by an author) while also taking into account the probability of individual interpretive differences.

Simply separating out a base-level response from most readers for study is not enough, as this group itself contains large subgroups who read quite differently from one another. Paul Dawson has identified three such subgroups of readership for which textual responses are available for study: “the literary establishment, in the form of reviews and feature articles; academia, in the form of scholarly essays and monographs; and the general public, in the form of letters, blogs, online forums, and customer reviews.”62 These are three distinct categories of textual evidence in three very different forms of media, and yet I believe the type of reading that is carried out by those belonging to the literary establishment can either fall into a more general reading type

(largely carried out by readers from the general public) or into an academic, or competent reading type (carried out by academics, plus certain textually-attuned general public readers). Thus I believe there are two distinct reading processes, or groups: one I will label the regular reader (this is the un-academically-minded reader), and the other

(following Culler’s term)63 I will label the competent reader (this is the highly-aware reader). I wish to stress that this is not an elitist distinction – I do not privilege one

62 Dawson, Paul. “Real Authors and Real Readers: Omniscient Narration and a Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Winter 2012). p. 105. 63 Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1975. 37 reading type over the other. Rather, I wish to simply acknowledge that there are two major reading types: the reading type of one who simply picks up a book to be entertained and who is not on the lookout for narrative techniques (one who is not, to borrow a psychological term, ‘primed’ to pick up on specific authorial techniques and their effects); and the reading type of one who is, by the very nature of their primed mind, hyper-aware of these techniques and their consequences. These reading types are important to acknowledge, as they produce vastly different reading experiences. Thus, we cannot simply have one homogenous audience response to fiction – there are two main types from three social groups (on top of which individual responses from the flesh-and-blood readers are layered).

Acknowledging the split in reading groups is particularly important for my study of narrative trickeries, where the ‘point’ is the trick – a point which can, in fact, be erased if too much readerly knowledge is accumulated. Usually we would understand a competent reader as one who is aware of everything that the text is achieving. However, this would involve knowing a trick is occurring, and so this version of a competent reader would miss the point of the novel by virtue of having access to too much information. The ideal reader for a trickery is thus, somewhat obviously, one who can be tricked, and thus one who is led through manipulation down the correct path in order to be tricked, and in turn feels the full benefit (or brunt) of such trickery. As such, I do not wish to engage with the idea of the ideal reader as being one who knows and understands all that is happening within the text. My competent reader merely picks up textual techniques – whether that leads them to guess at the trickery or not. This is important when considering the alternative reader – the regular reader – who tends not to be consciously aware of textual techniques and their effects (even if they are aware of them subconsciously). On this basis I will conduct an integrated study of the effects of

38 trickeries on both the regular reader and the competent reader. Responses from both groups will be incorporated into the analysis of each case-study.

How to study actual readers is a question that has yet to be adequately and universally answered within academia. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon have attempted to bridge the gap between psychology and narratology with their research area, psychonarratology.64 Using laboratory-based psychological experiments that garner empirical evidence combined with the narratological study of literature,

Bortolussi and Dixon have attempted to provide what many reader-response theorists had not previously managed to provide – a scientific, evidence-based, study of the human mind to back up narrative/reader-response theories. Unfortunately, as Dawson points out, such psychological experiments result in the ‘wrong’ type of reading (for our aims) being examined, as this type of empirical research “does not study real readers so much as lab-rat readers.”65 In the same vein, using oneself as the lab-rat by observing one’s own reading practices produces similarly skewed data – results that are centred, as

Dawson points out, on a single, academic point of view rather than a broader reader study. As such, I will incorporate a broad study of the physical record of public discourse: “the literary establishment... academia... and the general public”66. These avenues of readerly feedback have informed my hypotheses regarding readerly response to trickeries, and will be used as evidence throughout this thesis.

Temporality of the Reading Process

My research pivots on the notion of temporality – that something changes in the course of reading (or following reading), and so the first readerly state of being,

64 Bortolussi, Marisa and Dixon, Peter. Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 65 Dawson, “Real Authors and Real Readers”, p. 103. 66 Dawson, “Real Authors and Real Readers”, p. 105. 39 knowledge and understanding is far from the latter such state. In the 1980s, Chambers and Peter Brooks both challenged the static nature of structuralist narratology via poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. Chambers refers to the temporality of the reading process as a process of active seduction, whereby information is constantly supplied by the author to the reader as a means of enticement, who is then seduced into giving permission for this process to occur – conferring authority on the author to tell a story – and so more information is, in turn, provided.67 This is a cyclical process, and one that occurs constantly throughout the exchange of narrative – throughout the temporal process of reading. Peter Brooks claims that plot, as the “design and intention of narrative… develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and progression.”68 That is, the governing force of narrative is one that evolves and progresses, changing over the course of that narrative. He points to Genette’s idea that narrative depends on being read in spatial sequence, but resists the latter’s conclusion that narrative thus “metonymically ‘borrows’ a temporality from the time of its reading: what he calls a ‘pseudo-time’ of the text.”69 Brooks resists the cautious simplicity of this conclusion, claiming instead that reading literally takes time, and so that time is part of our understanding of the narrative. Brooks talks of the “anticipation of retrospection” which drives our reading of a work – while we read, we anticipate an ending which will make sense of the present (and thus cast it as past).70 Thus, he emphasises the need to include an understanding of the temporally dynamic nature of plot in the study of narratology:

67 Chambers. 68 Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. p. xi. 69 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 20. 70 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 23. 40

If I emphasize plotting even more than plot, it is because the participle best

suggests the dynamic aspect of narrative that most interests me: that which

moves us forward as readers of the narrative text, that which makes us – like

the heroes of the text often, and certainly like their authors – want and need

plotting, seeking through the narrative text as it unfurls before us a

precipitation of shape and meaning, some simulacrum of understanding of

how meaning can be construed over and through time.71

This desire that Brooks refers to, not only of characters and authors, but also of readers, to make sense of the narrative as it unfolds is very apt to the study of trickeries. In these works the sense or meaning that readers desire and find as the text move forward is abruptly turned on its head at the moment of revelation, and so new understandings must be made late in the narrative course.

Following after Chambers and Brooks, Phelan reorients discussions of plot via his extension of the Chicago School of literary criticism (an early to mid twentieth century critical movement which, following Aristotle, emphasised plot, character, and genre). Phelan points out that “[n]arrative form… is experienced through the temporal process of reading and responding to narrative.”72 He talks of the scholarly need to pay attention to the progression of narrative experience – that is, a study of “the synthesis of both the textual dynamics that govern the movement of narrative from beginning through middle to end and the readerly dynamics… that both follow from and influence those textual dynamics.”73 I believe this temporality is crucial to the study of the shift that occurs between beginning a novel with certain expectations, and ending it

71 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 35. 72 Phelan, Experiencing Fiction, p. 3. 73 Phelan, Experiencing Fiction, p. 3. 41 understanding that a breach has occurred in the contract; to be more specific, dual studies (not only of the shift in the text, but also of the subsequent shift in the reader) must be carried out in order to fully grasp the temporal dynamics of trickeries.

The very nature of a trickery is that one is enticed into believing one thing, only to have that misplaced belief revealed later as false – an active process. As such, these theories of temporality are crucial to my research – I will be studying the dynamic process of narrative fiction in trickeries rather than viewing the texts as fixed artefacts.

This temporal study necessitates acknowledging and examining the viewpoints of three different temporal categories of reader – the early first reader (unknowing) versus the late first reader (post-revelation), versus the second reader (aware throughout the entire shift). These readers will also be complicated by the competent reader and the regular reader – social reading groups which can and do belong to all three temporal reading groups – and will be supported by evidence from general, professional, and academic readerships.

Chapter Outline and Chosen Textual Case-Studies

Over the following chapters I will be utilising a number of novels that I have identified as fictional narratives in which trickeries occur. Although trickery occurs across a range of narrative forms (most noticeably, it occurs frequently in film), I have chosen to limit my study to novels since I believe the generic form is intrinsically important to the type of trickery carried out. To study all forms is beyond the scope of this thesis, though further research into trickeries may explore these areas. The novel, being one of the most influential, well-known, and highly-consumed literary forms, allows for the study of a range of literature that appeals to many different types of reader. Being so prevalent a form in contemporary society, the ‘rules’ of the genre are

42 well-known, and so the expectations are clear. These solid expectations also allow for a great array of literary trickery across many sub-genres, which my wide-ranging source material attempts to capture.

Each chapter will draw on a number of different novels, but will focus most heavily on a single novel as a case-study example of a certain type of trickery. I will be using these case-studies to inform and add to current academic debates concerning narratological phenomena. To study all readers at all times would be too broad a scope for this thesis, and as such the focus of my study will be directed towards the contemporary reader – the reader whose reactions are most clearly and widely documented in textual evidence (reviews, blogs, and so on). Where possible I will be drawing on reviews and blog entries by regular readers found on their own individual sites, or on sites maintained by groups formed of like-minded individuals (for example, a fantasy/science-fiction fan site). I will also draw reviews from sites such as

Goodreads, which allow users to rate books they have read, with the option to provide a brief written review. The current systems of feedback through the internet, which provide immediacy as well as egalitarianism, allow us a unique avenue of access through which to study readerly reactions to the trickeries of today – access which is unprecedented in literary history. In a correlatory manner, my textual case-studies will be drawn from contemporary fiction, as these are the novels that have had the most potential to shock the contemporary reader due to the very nature of their newness.

However, I will at times reflect on examples of trickeries from past eras in order to consider whether anything has changed for text or reader in the interim. The chosen narrative examples have been drawn from the Western stream of English language literature, particularly from the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and

Australia. These works have also been chosen to illustrate the range and breadth of

43 fictional ‘types’ across which trickeries occur – spanning not just genre divides, but also the divide between supposed ‘high’ and ‘low’ brow literary forms. Trickeries occur in all fictional genres, and they are no less complex for appearing in popular fiction than highly-acclaimed literary works. These case-studies make clear that trickeries are aberrations that occur across all novelistic forms.

Chapter One will explore instances of trickery throughout the history of the

English novel, and will specifically deal with historical notions of fictional truth and honesty. It will explore the history of trickery in regards to certain kinds of implicit contracts between readers and authors, and the reaction to violations of readerly expectations in different eras. Specifically, it will establish the importance of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in forming the main conventions by which contemporary readers still read fiction. In regards to these centuries, the idea of a certain kind of contract between writer and reader will be outlined, touching on such notable examples as Daniel Defoe’s lack of overt authorial intrusion into his own works (thanks largely to first person narration) resulting in some confusion over how they were to be read, Henry Fielding’s practice of writing addresses to his reader in which he clearly outlined how his works were to be read, and Henry James’ attack on Anthony Trollope over the latter’s supposed breaking of the contract between author and reader by overtly signaling the fictionality of his works. This first chapter will touch on the issue of genre throughout history (and therefore on strict generic rules), referring to Agatha Christie’s

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the strict genre-specific fictional pact was broken.

It will also look at the intense human need for books to be categorised – categorisation which has led to specific readerly expectations, as encouraged by the clearly-labeled shelves of contemporary booksellers. This chapter will assert that trickery is not a new phenomenon, though it will argue that the strict categorisation and overt paratextual

44 environment for the novels of today has led to the ease of manipulation of readerly expectations prior to reading, and so has opened up the late twentieth and early twenty- first century reader to a proliferation of trickeries.

Following this opening chapter, my detailed study of contemporary trickeries will begin. Chapter Two will look at novels with an unexpected twist, and will explore the current inadequacy of the original narrative communication model. These novels are pieces of fiction in which there is no apparent mystery – the readership is therefore not on guard for any sort of revelation and the twist is thus completely unexpected. It will be argued that, to the reader, the unexpected twist is a seeming additional element to an apparently otherwise fairly complete work. Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth will be used as the case-study in order to explore how it is that such a twist can be so unexpected, as well as what happens for both reader and text when the twist is revealed (and thus the nature of the trickery is unveiled). I will assert that documented readerly reactions to these forms of trickeries do not seem to comply with the readerly positions outlined in the narrative communication model. Rather, I will argue that the readerly positions within the existing model (Narratee, Implied Reader, and Real Reader) are the fabricated ‘targets’ of their corresponding narrative agents (Narrator, Implied Author,

Real Author), and that while readers may choose to step into these targeted roles, they do not always do so. The narrative communication model is thus rather an information model, and that to be a true communication model the traditional ‘receiving’ roles must be replaced with active agents. I will argue that Rabinowitz’s authorial and narrative audiences are the roles all readers adopt, and so should be assimilated into the model.

Such an amendment to this seminal model will mean an acknowledgement of the true active, agential roles readers play when they engage with fiction, as is revealed by the readerly reactions to unexpected twists.

45

Chapter Three will explore fictional novels where readerly expectations are dramatically denied satisfaction through frustrated expectations. These conventions are frequently based on genre, but are also largely based on the more all-encompassing rules of reading fictional narrative – specifically, the novel. These novels and their authors seem to be aware of, and use, readerly expectations in order to deliberately flout or deny them, and this chapter will explore the conditions and preconceptions that exist which allow this manipulation to take place. John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s

Woman will be the case-study for this type of trickery. Unlike the Unexpected Twist which has an additional expected element, it will be argued that novels belonging to this type of trickery are lacking an expected element. Theories of story- and possible worlds will be explored in this chapter. Specifically, it will be argued that the conventional readerly creation of, and engagement with, the storyworld from an infinite number of possible worlds creates certain expectations for the work as based on conventions of both the novel, and of genre. It will be argued that it is in fact generic storyworlds which are engaged when reading. Such storyworlds work to auto-fill detail which the author need not then explicitly state, but which nonetheless comes to formulate readerly expectations about the work. Generic storyworld formulation, then, is integral to the communication process.

Chapter Four will be devoted to the fictional, or fictionalised, memoir, and to notions of fictionality. Fictional(ised) memoirs are novels which are in whole or in part memoir, yet contain elements – great or small – of fictionalisation. This genre contains a variety of different types, and is a peculiar form of trickery, because the trickery is not always overtly obscured, but sometimes laid bare for the reader from the start (the reader thus becoming complicit in the trick). I will be assessing how forms that lay bare the trickery still manage to carry it out, with the reader most often going along as a

46 willing participant. The case-study novel analysed in this chapter will be William

Goldman’s The Princess Bride, and the study will be used to explore and highlight our understanding of fictionality. In this chapter I will argue that fictionality markers are only consciously acknowledged by the reader when they are foreign for that reader in that narrative setting, and it is this strangeness that reminds the reader that they are reading a fictionalised work. Rather than a result of any unambiguous textual features, then, fictionality is a symptom of a reader’s feeling that the narrative contract in regards to ‘truth’ (whether factual or narrative truth) has been breached.

Chapter Five will explore the hoax – arguably the most outrage-inducing betrayal of the reader in its maliciousness of intent – and the strong relationship this genre has with the paratext. The case-study for this chapter will be Helen Demidenko’s

The Hand that Signed the Paper. This is a curious hoax, as the Author’s Note within the novel asserts the work as a piece of fiction, yet this was offset at the time of publication by the fact that the author performed a false ethnic heritage in real life, presumably to lend her novel an air of autobiography without overtly asserting itself as such. The furor over the case provides interesting insights into the strong aspects of belief and trust that are involved in the process of reading. I will utilise theories of the paratext in order to decipher what this ‘secondary text’ means to the reader – what part it plays in informing

(and deciding) initial readerly expectations. I will argue that the often violent reactions of manipulated readers towards hoax revelations can be explained by the fact that readers feel betrayed because the paratext, which is vital in informing readerly expectations because it is trusted implicitly, is misleading in hoax cases. The extreme reactions to this form of trickery prove the trusting, believing nature of the reader, and how great an impact the paratext can have on the text itself. This chapter will build on the premise that the paratext is not simply a supporting arena which surrounds (and sits

47 outside of) the text, but instead is integral to the contemporary reading process. I will argue that the paratext is itself a temporally progressive narrative, and in the case of the hoax, it actually supersedes the text itself, becoming the primary narrative.

To start, then, let us go back through the rich history of narrative trickery to see what heritage the authors of today’s trickeries are building upon.

48

Chapter One:

Historical Novelistic Trickery

Narrative trickery is not a new phenomenon, though the strict generic categorisation and overt paratextual environment of the novels of today have led to the ease of manipulation of readerly expectations prior to reading, and so has opened up the later twentieth and early twenty-first century reader to a proliferation of trickeries. In this chapter I will explore what historical circumstances have led to such contemporary expectations. An analysis of every facet of trickery throughout the entire history of the novel is beyond the scope of this chapter; rather, I will reflect here upon some pertinent examples of literary movements and particular novels drawn from over the course of that history – examples which demonstrate how trickery has been set against expectations over time. This will not be a history, or even an overview, of the novel, but rather an exploration of some important historical moments taken from that history which inform the current circumstances for the contemporary novel.

It is the advent of specific genres (and their particular rules and codes) which gives rise to readerly expectations. Generic classification is simply the natural result of the human cognitive need for categorisation, and the novel as a genre in its own right emerged out of authorial attempts to establish it in relation to other forms – that is, as separate from other literary categories. This chapter will argue that with the genre of the novel came certain generic expectations which have varied over the development of the form. Literary communication between the author and reader is founded on expectations of honesty and novelistic truth; I will argue that the novel’s historical relationship with

49 truth has been an uneasy one, but it is this rocky history which has helped to inform the expectations held today.

Publishers and those who run both shopfront and online bookstores today seem to believe they are running something of a biological system of species classification for their customers. Not only do we have the potentially-dubious and yet generally-accepted fiction/nonfiction divide, we also have the value judgment labels of the ‘quality’

“Literature” versus the ‘low-brow’ “Fiction” (as though it is possible for all works to belong exclusively to one group or the other). We have Teen Fiction and Children’s

Literature, both opposed to the norm of the unqualified (‘adult’) Literature/Fiction. We have Crime Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and (thanks largely to the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy in the early 2000s and the plethora of copycat offshoots it spawned) the Paranormal – sometimes even subtitled Paranormal

Romance or Paranormal Teen Fiction. While presenting a problem for the worker who must categorise each text under only one heading during a literary era that is marked by its literary transgressions over such boundaries, this categorisation is presumably performed in the service of aiding readers in finding the ‘sort’ of books they like (which will, of course, result in enhanced sales). Genre is clearly how contemporary readers are trained to shop. No doubt this produces pleasure for the reader who has a favourite genre. However, it also produces a large body of readers who have very set, single- genre-specific expectations about the books they buy before they even open the front covers to read. This classification system forms the immediate paratextual environment for contemporary novels, and in recent decades has thus ‘taught’ readers how to interpret, how to judge – how to read.

And yet generic classification is nothing new – it is a derivative of natural human cognitive processing, and so has been around since very early in literary history.

50

This categorisation is a shortcut for both author and reader, and in most cases aides the act of narrative communication. However, such expectations, grounded in implicit indicators, can also leave the reader much more open to the manipulation of a trickery.

Genre and Categorisation

While the current mainstream understanding of genre is of fixed groups of texts, all exhibiting common elements which allow them to be grouped, scholarly genre theory has long accepted the limitations of such fixed groupings. Innovative authors, after all, constantly create texts which bridge genre boundaries, these works often belonging to multiple classificatory groups (and, as such, exhibiting elements of each of those groups). Nevertheless, the concept of genre as a definitional tool, as a way to aid interpretation, persists, and so scholars have deemed it of paramount importance to address what this means for texts, readers, and authors. Fredric Jameson claims that

“[g]enres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.”1 While individual texts may flow over generic divides, and thus genres may be difficult to absolutely define, genre theorists believe it is important to continue to discuss such definitions and their inherent difficulties. This is because writers employ genre in order to engage a specific set of directions for the reader in terms of how a text should be read and understood – as Jameson states, genre forms part of the implicit literary contract.

Joseph Farrell points out that current genre theory is based in classical criticism, which sees itself grounded in absolutes. He explains:

1 Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. p. 92. 51

Plato takes it for granted that different individuals will work in genres suited to

their respective characters... [while] Aristotle classifies genres by the kinds of

actions that they represent, but... this in itself is not the primary consideration;

for the choice to represent this or that kind of action will be a function of the

poet’s own character.2

For these ancient critics, Farrell maintains, genre is fixed and determined by authorial character – “[a]ncient theorists and critics do not recognize generic ambiguity as an issue... [They do not] regard genre itself as a slippery or even problematic concept.”3

However, Farrell points to a disparity between ancient theory and practice, demonstrating that there was far more generic ambiguity in the literature of the time than the theory would have us believe. He illustrates this point by examining the case of

Old Comedy (represented mainly by the plays of Aristophanes), which he claims contains many traces of tragedy: “Old Comedy defined itself in some measure as ‘not- tragedy,’ but did so by taking advantage of its pronounced formal and institutional similarities to tragedy.”4 Farrell claims that the circumstances of performance, the play structures, and the “generic self-consciousness” of the poets all demonstrate the strong connection to tragedy found within these comedies.5 Despite the far more complex and

“sophisticated” theory implied within those fictional works, then, Farrell contends that our foregrounding of the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the like has created a warped view of the history of genre: “It is... the explicitly theoretical tradition, exclusively I would say, that has played a role in our modern histories of genre theory.”6 Genre, then,

2 Farrell, Joseph. “Classical Genre in Theory and Practice.” New Literary History, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer 2003). p. 384. 3 Farrell, p. 386. 4 Farrell, p. 389. 5 Farrell, p. 389. 6 Farrell, pp. 402-403. 52 has never been clear cut, even in ancient times. However, this does not change the fact that readers still read with genre at least subconsciously guiding their interpretation (and as such, authors also write with genres in mind). No matter how flexible and boundary- crossing authors may be, the boundaries must still exist, at least theoretically, to be breached, and so theory must reflect this.

Thomas G. Pavel notes what he sees as the problematic tendency of scholars to attempt to define all genres by identifiable formal features, simply because some genres

(such as the sonnet) may be defined in this way. He argues that, while some genres are only defined by their formal features, others are grouped by less structurally-identifiable elements. As such, Pavel claims, it is fruitless to attempt to define all texts within some genres by a single formal trait. To attempt to explain why this search for feature lists is pointless, Pavel outlines what he sees as the three main genre types:

The vocabulary of literary genres... includes “content” terms that are shared

with our moral and existential vocabulary (“tragedy,” “comedy”), terms of art

that have a simple formal definition (for example, “sonnet”), and terms of art

that refer to what I called “extratextual properties”7 and therefore require from

their users a certain level of hermeneutic dexterity (“fiction,” and, as we will

see in a moment, “novel”).8

Only the second generic type can be identified by certain features which must exist for a text to belong to that genre. Pavel’s groupings allow us to see the numerous ways in

7 Pavel talks of “extratextual properties” earlier in his article. Discussing Wolfgang Hildesheim’s Marbot, he states: “Its fictionality is an extratextual feature, as it were, a spiritual property, if one speaks the idiom of the nineteenth-century Geistesgeschichte, a cultural function, if one prefers contemporary sociological terminology.” Pavel, Thomas G. “Literary Genres as Norms and Good Habits.” New Literary History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Spring 2003). p. 205. 8 Pavel, “Literary Genres”, p. 205. 53 which texts may be generically defined. Importantly, texts may belong to more than one genre type, and so this complexity must be considered when analysing readerly responses based on expectations created by these different genres.

In exploring the history of the rise of the novel and its myriad generic forms,

Pavel demonstrates that it is, in fact, the aims of the authors which push the boundaries of genre, with new aims leading to new techniques and thus new styles of text. Pavel believes that this explains the instability of genre boundaries, and that our scholarly concern over how to generically define works may be relaxed when we consider this prioritisation of aims over form. Techniques common to certain genres then become

“norms” rather than “obligatory rules of behavior”9, and so while we may see these techniques as common to a given genre, they need not define it:

To see genre as a set of good recipes, or good habits of the trade, oriented

towards the achievement of definite artistic goals makes the instability of

generic categories less puzzling and less threatening. Genres other than strictly

formal ones are unstable and flexible because the goals pursued by writers with

their help vary, as do the ways of achieving these goals.10

However, this apt recipe ingredient metaphor does not explain how it is that we as readers implicitly ‘know’ which genres a novel belongs to. While Pavel acknowledges this interpretive awareness (as a direct result of compositional awareness by the author),

I seek to explore just how it is that we are aware (and what happens when that awareness is used as a tool to enable trickery). Genre, then, while elastic and in many

9 Pavel, “Literary Genres”, p. 209. 10 Pavel, “Literary Genres”, p. 210. 54 ways indefinable in terms of absolutes, is nevertheless a key tool in the act of narrative communication.

Authorial intention obviously aids genre alignment, but it is also context which plays a defining role. John Frow defines genre as:

… a historically specific pattern of organisation of semiotic material along a

number of dimensions in a specific medium and in relation to particular types

of situational constraints which help shape this pattern. Genre in turn acts as a

constraint upon – that is, a structuring and shaping of – meaning and value at

the level of text for certain strategic ends; it produces effects of truth and

authority that are specific to it, and projects a ‘world’ that is generically

specific.11

Genre is then a textual pattern which results in specific ends. The historical specificity

Frow refers to is vitally important – genre definitions shift, they have different boundaries in different historical eras. Tzvetan Todorov claims that “[g]enres, like any other institution, reveal the constitutive traits of the society to which they belong”12 and thus are historically specific. Anis S. Bawarshi points out that genres are “dynamic discursive formations”13 – they are not fixed classifications, but can grow and change depending on different historical times and the literature produced in these times.

Indeed, Frow tells us that “all texts are strongly shaped by their relation to one or more

11 Frow, John. Genre. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. p. 73. 12 Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” New Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 1, Readers and Spectators: Some Views and Reviews (Autumn 1976). p. 163. 13 Bawarshi, Anis S. Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003. p. 7. 55 genres, which in turn they may modify.”14 So genre not only defines a text, but that text helps define genre within that historically specific locale.

Frow comments on the necessity of generic assumptions for the reading process. He argues genre is “a framework for processing information and for allowing us to move between knowledge given directly in a text and other sets of knowledge that are relevant to understanding it.”15 Genre is a shortcut, if you will – a way for readers to

‘fill in the blanks’ between and around textual cues. This process is relied upon by writers just as much as readers – an author cannot ever write an entire world, cannot ever explicitly explain every complexity of meaning, and so s/he relies upon the generic assumptions of the readership to fill in the gaps. To read well, Frow extrapolates, “we cannot but attend to those embedded assumptions and understandings which are structured by the frameworks of genre and from which we work inferentially to the full range of textual meaning.”16 Genre is thus crucial in guiding the complex workings of the reading process.

Nevertheless, texts can be difficult to classify – they may make use of a range of different assumptions from different genres. This lack of easy classification (of which our contemporary bookstores would have us remain ignorant) is why many genre theorists reject the equation of genre classification with biological classification. While invoking that very equation, Ralph Cohen proves the metaphor of biological classification does not perfectly fit the role of genre when he claims, “[b]ecause a genre can be as small as an aphorism or as large as literature, it can function as a part and as a whole, as species and as genus.”17 In a sense, then, genre is at once the combination of every form of classification system, and no single form of classification in isolation. A

14 Frow, p. 1. 15 Frow, p. 80. 16 Frow, p. 101. 17 Cohen, Ralph. “Introduction: Notes Toward a Generic Reconstitution of Literary Study.” New Literary History, Vol. 34, No, 3 (Summer 2003). p. xvi. 56 literary work may thus be classified in any number of ways, and so classification is not fixed or precise – it is multi-faceted. Paul Hernandi claims that “criticism by genres has very little in common with the botanist’s or zoologist’s unequivocal classification of species.”18 Frow also objects to this metaphor, for three reasons: genres can change whereas species cannot (in literature there is no “genetic continuity”19); a member of a biological genus cannot cross-breed with a member of a different genus, but genres are often combined; and in biology the individual exemplifies the group, but in literature the text modifies the group.20 I would object to the absoluteness of this last of Frow’s reasons – I believe the very surprise of a trickery demonstrates its nonconformity, its exception within the group, which it does not modify. A trickery does not modify the group until a critical mass is reached – until then, the exceptional individual remains an aberration (and thus retains the ability to trick us). Once a form does modify the group, it ceases to be an exception to the rule, and so cannot effectively work as a trickery, since this form relies on frustrating expectations which were formed by genre.

Of course, while biological classification is an easy, if misguided, metaphor to make, genre classification in literature actually has its roots in an omnipresent human psychological process called ‘categorisation’. From the field of psychology, Gordon

Allport states that “[t]he human mind must think with the aid of categories… Once formed, categories are the basis for normal prejudgment. We cannot possibly avoid this process. Orderly living depends upon it.”21 Jerome S. Bruner et al. stress the crucial nature of this process, stating that although we are capable of seeing complex differences (in making minute distinctions between things that are slightly different),

18 Hernandi, Paul. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972. p. 4. 19 Frow, p. 53. 20 Frow, pp. 52-53. 21 Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, Palo Alto and London: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954. p. 20. 57 were we to do this constantly, “we would soon be overwhelmed by the complexity of our environment.”22 Edward E. Smith and Douglas L. Medin explain that ‘concepts’ are crucial to our communication, since if we had to mentally name every individual entity we saw, our language systems would be “staggeringly complex and communication virtually impossible.”23 Smith and Medin expand on this notion of concepts:

Concepts… give our world stability. They capture the notion that many objects

or events are alike in some important respects, and hence can be thought about

and responded to in ways we have already mastered. Concepts also allow us to

go beyond the information given; for once we have assigned an entity to a class

on the basis of its perceptible attributes, we can then infer some of its

nonperceptible attributes.24

Genres, then, are the conceptual systems by which readers interpret texts – readers make use of genre in order to decipher and make meaning from narratives. The text gives the reader information (perceptible attributes) which allows a genre to be inferred, and so leads the reader to make inferences about the nonperceptible attributes of the narrative – the unspecified information which the author wishes to invoke by engaging a specific genre. In this way, genre becomes a shorthand for complex communication between author and reader about categorised ‘types’.

To demonstrate the importance of generic categorisation I wish to turn briefly to a historical textual example which uses such processes ‘against’ the reader in order to facilitate the process of trickery.

22 Bruner, Jerome S., Goodnow, Jacqueline J., and Austin, George A. A Study of Thinking. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1956. p. 1. 23 Smith, Edward E., and Medin, Douglas L. Categories and Concepts. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1981. p. 1. 24 Smith and Medin, p. 1. 58

Agatha Christie

Authors of late nineteenth and early twentieth century detective fiction used the readerly preoccupation with genre delineation in order to establish strict rules to which their novels would conform – not just the purification of the “narrow world of impossibly eccentric Oxbridge colleges, improbably quaint little English villages, that hermetic world of cruise ships, the Blue trains, and week-ends at country houses” to which Michael Holquist refers25, but also the structure of the works. The large output from detective novelists such as Agatha Christie helped to firmly establish and solidify a reader-expected fictional ‘norm’ which this particular author then used as the basis through which to manipulate her audience. Christie uses one of her detective novels to trick through subversion of the very genre rules she, through the course of her vast career, props up and relies upon. This particular novel – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

– deserves a mention because it is a particularly significant example of trickery from the early twentieth century occurring within a genre tightly bound by strict rules of operation.

Christie was a prolific writer of detective fiction, churning out over 80 stories between 1920 and 197326. However, one of these novels stands out from the crowd –

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in 1926, features an extra, unexpected layer of trickery for the reader: the narrator, and temporary sidekick to the detective, turns out to have been the murderer. This is an early example of a mystery with an unexpected

25 Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations (Autumn 1971). p. 146. 26 Christie’s first published novel was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which concerned a case solved by private detective Hercule Poirot. The last novel Christie wrote – Postern of Fate – was published in 1973. Two novels that had been penned many decades before their dates of publication were published after this – Curtain in 1975 and Sleeping Murder in 1976, which concerned the last cases of recurring detectives Poirot and Miss Marple, respectively. 59 twist27, and really exemplifies both the subgenre, and the thrill such a twist can provide for its readership. However, it was not universally accepted by detective mystery fans at the time of publication. Verda Evans documents the reaction to the novel by some readers, explaining that “[w]hen Agatha Christie wrote The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in

1926, she was attacked on both sides of the Atlantic for flouting the rule of playing fair with the reader.”28 Noting that Christie survived these critical attacks and continued to publish successfully for decades, Evans states that there were still those willing to use

Roger Ackroyd as ammunition in their attack on the genre as a whole, and those who pointed to its constant appearances in popular culture as a sign that it was a work worthy of praise:

Nineteen years later, Edmund Wilson wrote a devastating attack on mysteries

called “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” that appeared in the New

Yorker, January 20, 1945.

Apparently somebody cared because [Jacques] Barzun in his 1971

publication [A Catalogue of Crime] lists “Roger Ackroyd” as a technical term

used to denote the variation used by Agatha Christie in the book of that

name...29

Clearly, Christie’s work divided both regular readers and critics alike, but it is this division itself which points to the impact the work had on those who read it.

Christie’s trick works because it directly contravenes the expectations of readers of her works, and detective fiction in general. In 1928 detective fiction novelist

27 See Chapter Two for more on the Unexpected Twist. 28 Evans, Verda. “The Mystery as Mind-Stretcher.” The English Journal, Vol. 61, No. 4 (April 1972). p. 502. 29 Evans, p. 502. 60

S. S. Van Dine (a pseudonym for Willard Huntington Wright) published “Twenty rules for writing detective stories” in the American Magazine.30 Van Dine claims that “for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them.”31 He goes on to list these ‘rules’, each of which presumably cannot be broken in ‘good’ detective fiction. Interestingly, he goes even further for three of his rules, claiming that a breach in one of these areas constitutes a major breach for the reader – a trickery. These are rules 2, 4, and 18:

2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those

played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

…

4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn

out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a

bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It’s false pretenses.

…

18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a

suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to

hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.32

Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks two of the three rules that Van Dine seems to stress the most through their impact on the reader. Christie breaks rule 2 by allowing Dr. Sheppard, the murderer and narrator of the tale, to deceive his narratee

30 Van Dine, S. S. “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” On Gaslight. http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/vandine.htm. Accessed 9th September 2013. 31 Van Dine. 32 Van Dine. 61

(and by extension, the reader) through his incomplete narrative. This Van Dine views as a ‘willful trick’ and a ‘deception placed on the reader’. Christie also breaks rule 4 by having Dr. Sheppard adopt the position of detective Poirot’s sidekick for the duration of the novel – he aids Poirot in investigation, and so can be seen as one of the investigators of the case. The only truly reader-offending rule not broken is that of rule 18 – the death is indeed murder, rather than accident or suicide. Roger Ackroyd is often referred to as one of the great Christie mysteries – perhaps it is this failure to breach the entire trio of

‘unbreachable’ rules which is the key to Christie delightfully tricking, rather than incensing, all of her readers? Perhaps it is simply that a great novel in breach of these rules as a one-off – an exception to the rule – is revered.

Christie’s Roger Ackroyd follows an investigation by the fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. It is a brilliant example of the narrator performing trickery on the narratee (and thus, by extension in this case, the reader). The story is narrated in the first person by Dr. James Sheppard, who in the absence of Poirot’s regular sidekick

Hastings, steps into this role. We witness the events leading up to the murder of Roger

Ackroyd – friend to Dr. Sheppard – and the subsequent investigation by Poirot. It is revealed in the last two chapters of the novel that Dr. Sheppard was in fact the murderer, and that he has left out the actual murder from his narrative. Kathleen Wall argues that it is not simply the murderous narrator, Dr. Sheppard, who has deceived the reader. She maintains, “[s]urely there is a point of collusion here, a point on which the

‘norms and values’ of author and narrator are in sync: it is clever and deceptive to give the narration to the murderer. They collude, as it were, to create the most effective means of rendering the story.”33 This may, indeed, be why many readers railed against

Christie at the time of the book’s release – it is ultimately the author who is responsible

33 Wall, Kathleen. “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter 1994). p. 21. 62 for the deceptive manipulation of the character she has created. However, I would argue that this charge against the author would have very little power had Christie not been working in the field of detective fiction – a field which she helped to form and maintain, and a field which almost blanketly adheres to strict generic conventions. It is the strict generic boundaries of this form of mystery which allow the reader to direct such scorn towards the author who violates them.

Some have chosen to question the ‘blame’ we place on the murderous narrator, arguing instead that it is Christie’s manipulation which is ultimately on trial. In assessing the narrative for unreliability, Tamar Yacobi claims,

… the question of Dr. Sheppard’s (un)reliability as a narrator is not reducible

either to his being the murderer or to his long suppression of the fact. In

retrospect, with his two offenses sprung on us together, we enchain rather than

equate and compound them. Although Sheppard is doubtless a criminal as an

agent, how will the same ethical judgment fit the narrating-I, who decides to

finish the tale, after all, and confess the crime hitherto suppressed from the

record? He could, instead, destroy the document, or persist in denying his guilt.

The confession – located, moreover, at the expected, conventional point, near

the end of the detective sujet – complicates our judgment of his telling. The

blame for unfair (unreliable?) play, if any, falls more on Christie than on

Sheppard.34

While I question whether many readers would finish the novel with such a forgiving attitude towards the murderous narrator (I, myself, cannot see his final act of confession

34 Yacobi, Tamar. “Interart Narrative: (Un)Reliability and Ekphrasis.” Poetics Today, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter 2000). p. 715. 63 in the dying pages of the novel as true atonement for a hitherto duplicitous narrative of concealment), Yacobi’s point concerning the fault falling at Christie’s door is one we must take seriously. For readers did (and may still do) blame Christie for a violation of the code of detective mystery – a form with which she conforms in almost every one of her multitude of novels. Christie’s early twentieth century trickery involved the subversion of strict internal genre ‘rules’. Genre-induced readerly expectations concerning novelistic truth and honesty were violated, and so many readers felt violated themselves because the fictional communication pact had been dishonoured.

Roger Ackroyd is a clear violation of the genre code of detective fiction, but what of the broader genre of the novel itself? Trickery occurs across all genres to this day, so the macro genre of the novel, and its historical instances of trickery, must briefly be turned to.

The English Novel

The novel as a genre has had a complicated history in terms of narrative communication, and we can see this through isolating various moments in novelistic history where authors have manipulated or confused readers based on the latter’s expectations in regards to literary convention. The first few centuries during which the

English novel came into being reveal much about that form as a genre in and of itself, and also its relation to fictional truth. Catherine Gallagher argues against the commonly- perceived (though not universal) notion that the idea of ‘fiction’ as we know it pre- existed ‘the novel’, claiming instead that they came about simultaneously.35 She suggests that the etymology of the word ‘fiction’ can tell us much about how the meaning of the word changed at the time the novel was developing:

35 Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” In Franco Moretti (ed.). The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. pp. 336-363. 64

From its common use to denote, “that which is fashioned or framed; a device, a

fabric, ... whether for the purpose of deception of otherwise”... or “something

that is imaginatively invented,” a new usage came into existence at the turn of

the seventeenth century: “The species of literature which is concerned with the

narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters;

fictitious composition.” As this sense of the word gained greater currency,

mainly in the eighteenth century, an earlier frequent meaning of “deceit,

dissimulation, pretense” became obsolete.36

Fiction, she explains, came to be seen not simply as deceit, but as a specific form (the novel) that could be told apart from “both fact and... deception.”37 Gallagher tells us that the terms ‘fiction’ and ‘the novel’ became inextricably linked in this period, and yet also outlines the curious tendency of “at least two centuries” of novelists to “hide [... their works’] fictionality behind verisimilitude or realism, insisting on certain kinds of referentiality and even making extensive truth claims.”38 So while the novel became inextricably linked with fiction (with invention), the form of fiction (that is, the novel), was working to seemingly hide its invention: “[t]he novel, in short, is said both to have discovered and to have obscured fiction.”39

Michael McKeon traces the early to mid twentieth century musings on the rise of the novel by four key theorists: Georg Lukács, José Ortega y Gasset, Mikhail M.

Bakhtin, and Ian Watt. In comparing these theorists’ thoughts on the novel, McKeon

36 Gallagher, p. 338. 37 Gallagher, p. 338. 38 Gallagher, p. 337. 39 Gallagher, p. 337. 65 stresses the importance of the historical climate to the rise of the novel, and thus to genre:

The study of genre is both a theoretical and an historical enterprise that

conceives literary categories in their contingency... [G]enres have a temporal

and spatial existence that defines the scope of their identity... [G]enres are

formal structures that have an historical existence in the sense that they come

into being, flourish, and decay, waxing and waning in complex relationship to

other historical phenomena.40

McKeon criticises structuralism, poststructuralism, and narratology for focusing too much on the novel in isolation at the expense of its historical context. He points to this focus as the reason behind a stress on genre as taxonomic law rather than mutating hermeneutic guidelines in flux: “...the customary pre-modern experience of genre as a flexible and enabling condition of discursive practice has been overbalanced and obscured by the modern suspicion that genre is a grid or ‘Law’ imposed, on writer and reader alike, from without.”41 Exploring key moments in novelistic history where genre was defined in various, differing ways allows us to see the changing expectations of truth and honesty in communication between author and reader through the form, the genre, of the novel.

It is crucial, then, that we assess how novelistic truth has been viewed differently in different eras. Nicholas D. Paige asserts that through the late seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries “novelists presented themselves as mere editors,

40 McKeon, Michael. “Watt’s Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 2-3 (January-April 2000). p. 253. 41 McKeon, p. 276. 66 and their inventions as real documents or reports.”42 Paige notes that this “pretence of literal truth” may baffle the contemporary reader, but our reading style where “the real- world existence of the characters we read about matters not a bit” would also have baffled these historical readers.43 We must, then, understand that historical readers (and thus authors) understood the relationship of fiction to truth in quite a different fashion to our own understanding of such matters. Expectations concerning literary honesty might thus have been vastly different. Paige outlines “three historical regimes of literary invention”.44 The first, which “can be understood through the lens of Aristotle’s

Poetics”45, can be crudely essentialised from Paige’s more lengthy description as

‘poetry combined with history makes for a good plot’. The second, beginning around

1670 and ending around the turn of the nineteenth century, saw novelists “pretend to offer their readers real documents ripped straight from history”, which Paige calls the pseudofactual, following Barbara Foley’s term.46 Foley explains that the pseudofactual novel, which came to prominence in the eighteenth century, involves an implicit contract between author and reader which asks readers “to accept the text’s characters and situations as invented... [and, a]t the same time... to approach the text as if it were a nonfictional text – a memoir, a confession, a group of letters.”47 Readers of this type of novel were thus expected to pretend the work was real. The third regime, Paige claims, saw novelists demand of readers that they “accept the writer’s inventions as a kind of model of reality” rather than simply pretend a novel was true.48 Paige’s triptych of regimes allows us to conceive of differing understandings of novelistic truth over the

42 Paige, Nicholas D. Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. p. ix. 43 Paige, p. x. 44 Paige, p. x. 45 Paige, p. x. 46 Paige, p. x. 47 Foley, Barbara. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986. p. 107. 48 Paige, p. x. 67 course of the development of the novel – understandings which in turn influenced the nature of literature being produced.

Indeed, the novel as a genre has had a complicated relationship with truth, and this may, indeed, stem from its fraught beginnings as a mix of fact and fiction. Lennard

J. Davis dismisses the commonly assumed notion that the novel is descended from the romance, insisting, rather, that it developed out of a news tradition. News in the sixteenth century was not as we know it today – there was “no real distinction [made] between what we would call fact and fiction… fictional tales seem to be considered newes as readily as would an account of a sea battle or a foreign war.”49 What was important was the interpretive truth of the story, not its factual status. Davis explains that the new printed news ballads (which followed the advent of print) embodied newness, recorded “that which was novel – that is, to be a ‘novel.’”50 The terms “novel, newes, and new… [were] used interchangeably”51 for this form – a form that comfortably combined both fact and fiction, both truth and untruth. For the sixteenth century English person, truth did not necessarily mean fact, as such inhabitants sought greater meaning (such as the hand of God) in each life event.52 For these people fact mattered less than the interpretation, and so words could be true without being factual.

The seventeenth century saw a surge in prose news, and yet “the news/novels discourse remained as ambivalent toward fact and fiction as it had been in the previous century.”53 Davis charts the course of news as it became ideological, and so the hand of the law stepped in “to diffuse the politicizing of news/novels, which then created the conditions for a definition of fact and fiction in which the former could be repressed and

49 Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. p. 51. 50 Davis, Lennard J., p. 48. 51 Davis, Lennard J., p. 48. 52 Davis, Lennard J., p. 69. 53 Davis, Lennard J., p. 74. 68 the latter more or less ignored.”54 Suddenly, it was possible to see fact and fiction as separate entities – but it would be long before such definitions were generally agreed upon. The revision of the Stamp Act in 1724 meant that the tax it enforced now applied to content (news) as opposed to printed paper size, and this meant the task of the law was to define taxable ‘news’ against untaxable “novels, histories, and biographies”55.

Davis argues a by-product of such law reforms (including those of libel) was to produce novelists.

The novel was thus formed as a reaction against other forms – it was defined by what it was not. Davis claims the English “distinguished between novel and romance by noting that novels were not made up or based on remote history, but were true.”56

Thus novels were at once removed from the realm of fact for fear of libel and occupied the realm of ‘truth’ to differentiate them from romances. The upshot of the distance from the romance enforced by novelists on their creations was that they tended to rely upon first person accounts of a life – often a notorious life, such as that of a prostitute, a criminal. This, of course, extended out of the novel’s news ballad heritage, a form equally preoccupied with current people and events likely to interest the masses.

It is important to consider the difference with which the English people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed notions of fact and fiction as compared to our own understanding of it. Prior to the eighteenth century, genre was not defined by fact or fiction, and so readers did not read with expectations regarding truth in mind – but that was to change during the rocky course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thanks to the unique efforts of new novelists.

54 Davis, Lennard J., p. 83. 55 Davis, Lennard J., p. 97. 56 Davis, Lennard J., p. 104. 69

Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson

Daniel Defoe, writing in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and Henry

Fielding, writing in the mid-1700s, represent two important contrasting writing styles for the early novel. Defoe encouraged his readers to believe in the text as true, whereas

Fielding littered his texts with constant reminders that readers were reading fiction. And yet both Defoe and Fielding rely on the form of biography to tell their fictional tales.

Davis states that “Defoe is the single writer who is usually pointed to as the originator of the novel in England”57, yet his works “seem still plainly to bear the marks of their intimate connection with the news/novels discourse.”58 These authors were breaking new ground, presumably often unaware how exactly they were doing so since there was no established language for these new forms.

Defoe followed the ‘truth’ model supplied by the news quite closely. His

Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), for example, demonstrate a style in which a prominent aspect is the relative degree of authorial effacement within the narrative – the author standing back to let the characters relay their own tales. The frontispieces for both texts contain no mention of Defoe, and it is in this peritextual position that the fiction of the texts actually begins; both frontispieces contain fairly detailed summaries of the protagonists’ life tales, and it is claimed that Moll’s life story is “Written from her own MEMORANDUMS”59, while Robinson’s is “Written by

Himself.”60 Both novels are written in the first person in the style of a memoir, and neither contain overt authorial intrusions. Neither novel is divided into chapters, thus removing one of the most common structural elements of that time that would indicate a text is a novel, and in so doing also removing the opportunity of providing detailed

57 Davis, Lennard J., p. 154. 58 Davis, Lennard J., p. 155. 59 Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Frontispiece. 60 Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 1. 70 episodic authorial pre-commentary through long chapter titles.61 The incredibly short half-page authorial preface to Robinson Crusoe continues the fiction introduced by the frontispiece by referring to the author as “the Editor of this Account”62, as though he is not the creator, but merely the facilitator. This ‘Editor’ tells the reader that he “believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it”63, thus squarely establishing the rigorous dichotomy of fact (history) and fiction (stories), upon which this text claims to reside (ironically since it is, of course, fiction). One might think that the fantastical adventures contained within Robinson’s account would go some way to counteracting these paratextual claims by throwing doubt into the equation, but nevertheless it is striking how far Defoe goes in encouraging the ‘reality’ of his narrative through absenting himself from the text. Of course, authorial effacement was not the defining feature of fact-based writing – history and biography frequently used the third person – but in removing such interference from the characters’ accounts, the author seems to stress the first person account as the truest form of primary source report.

Indeed, Defoe seems to bank on his readers believing in the tale as ‘true’.

Gallagher goes so far as to claim that “[w]hen Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719... he certainly intended to deceive the public, and he succeeded.”64 This semblance of reality in a fictional narrative – a potentially confusing prospect for

Defoe’s contemporary readers – would have only been reinforced when, in a sequel to

Robinson Crusoe, titled Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Robinson himself takes over the preface, arguing against those who claimed the first novel and its characters were fictional (the fact that this was

61 For example, those contained in romances such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote. 62 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 1. 63 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 1. 64 Gallagher, p. 339. 71 even asserted by critics proves there was need for a debate because of confusion caused by the blurring of fact and fiction). He declares “in perfect and sound Mind and

Memory” that he wrote the novel – that it is “Historical” and the detractors’ claims are

“Invention scandalous in Design, and false in Fact.”65 This preface reiterates numerous times that the novel is “all historical and true in Fact”, that it “is all Literally true”66.

Defoe clearly either took great joy in stoking the fires of the debate surrounding his works, or viewed truth, fact, and fiction in the same blurred, indistinct fashion as his contemporaries. Gallagher explains that when pressed, Defoe “still insisted on the historical accuracy of his tale but then, inconsistently alleged that each incident in the

‘imaginary’ story alluded to an episode in a ‘real Story’... He accordingly clung to particularity of reference, even as he shifted the grounds of his claim from literal truth to allegorical allusion.”67 Facts, then, could not be easily done away with in Defoe’s fiction – the illusion of reality was an integral part of his novelistic endeavours.

Defoe’s Moll Flanders follows the same path – the comparatively longer authorial preface tells us this is a “private history to be taken for Genuine”68 as opposed to the “Novels and Romances”69 with which Defoe tells us the world is swept up. This preface informs us that names have been concealed, language has been altered from the original account, and some parts have been omitted, all for the sake of modesty. This implies there was a much more “leud”70 original account by Moll which has undergone some tasteful editing. The author stresses the ‘reality’ of the text, claiming it ends before Moll’s death because “nobody can write their own Life to the full End of it,

65 Defoe, Daniel. “Appendix 1: Frontispiece and Preface to Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. (1720)” In Robinson Crusoe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 265. 66 Defoe, Serious Reflections, p. 256. 67 Gallagher, p. 339. 68 Defoe, Moll Flanders, p. 1. 69 Defoe, Moll Flanders, p. 1. 70 Defoe, Moll Flanders, p. 1. 72 unless they can write it after they are dead”71. This apparently premature ending encourages the idea that we are reading fact by virtue of a disassociation from literary convention (the romantic tradition of a third person narration which can tell of a character’s death). The novel ends after Moll’s account with the line, “Written in the

Year 1683”72, which is just less than forty years prior to Defoe’s publication date – a feasible timeframe for such an account to be found and edited, while still remaining relevant to its readership. Defoe thus seriously invests in minimising his overt presence in his texts whilst textually insisting on his stories’ accuracies, the combination of which serves to encourage readerly belief in the stories as ‘truth’ which in turn brought about confusion in his contemporary audience.

Davis charts the course of Defoe’s career, over which the author slowly formed and solidified his understanding of truth in fiction from “asserting flatly that his work was true”, through numerous combinations of fact and fiction, finally settling on “his text as a retelling, based on fact, but perhaps dubious fact at that.”73 One senses that

Defoe was just as confused as his critics and the general eighteenth century population on how to talk about the nature of his novels. Nevertheless, throughout his career he pushed the nature of the novel from truth to ‘truth’ through fiction, and so he was instrumental in clarifying the expectations of novelistic truth for the genre.

Henry Fielding, on the other hand, engaged in a style that was almost the opposite. Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) both employ heavy stylistic techniques which alert the reader to the hand of the author, and thus to the fact that they are reading fiction. The frontispieces for both books declare their fictionality. That of

Joseph Andrews claims the novel is “Written in Imitation of The Manner of Cervantes,

71 Defoe, Moll Flanders, p. 5. 72 Defoe, Moll Flanders, p. 343. 73 Davis, Lennard J., p. 166. 73

Author of Don Quixote”74 – written, not edited, in the style of a famous author of romantic fiction. That of Tom Jones even goes so far as to name the author: “By

HENRY FIELDING, Esq.”75 Fielding signs his name to a four page personal dedication at the beginning of the latter work – asserting his ownership of the words even while employing that curious truth-laced word which Defoe also used in describing the tale to come: a “history”76. Both novels are detailed in third person, distancing the text from the seeming ‘truthful’ authority of a first person account, and moving it a step closer towards a fictional narrative. Both are split into a multitude of short chapters, and the contents pages of both form long lists of chapter titles. These titles encourage the viewing of events as episodes, they allow the author to guide the reader as to the content or knowledge to be imparted in each chapter, and thus they allow an overt, controlling authorial presence.

This presence is extended in both novels through the constant addresses to

“[t]he reader”77 and even the “candid reader”78. Chapter 1 of Tom Jones forestalls the commencement of the story – Fielding using this first chapter to instead provide “a bill of fare which all persons may peruse at their first entrance into the house” thereby giving them the necessary information to decide whether to stay and read on or go to other pursuits.79 The narrator goes on to say, “we... shall prefix not only a general bill of fare to our whole entertainment, but shall likewise give the reader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in this and the ensuing volumes.”80 He claims

“HUMAN NATURE” is the “provision”81, or theme, of the novel, and that it will get

74 Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. London and New York: Penguin Group, 2012, p. xi. 75 Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. p. 1. 76 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 5. 77 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, p. 6. 78 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 6. 79 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 29. 80 Fielding, Tom Jones, pp. 29-30. 81 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 30. 74 much spicier and more appetising as the novel goes along. These confidential addresses to the reader set out in no uncertain terms what they are about to read and how they should read it – and the authorial presence in the form of the narrator is there to guide them every step of the way. Fielding’s work is thus a large step away from Defoe’s practise, in the direction of certainty and clarity – of fictional categorisation for the reader.

This clarity of fictional purpose, rather than the subterfuge of pretending reality, defined the movement of the novel in the early part of the century. Gallagher explains the large leap in the understanding of the form between the times of Defoe

(1720: “Defoe insisted that Robinson Crusoe was a real individual”) and Fielding

(1742: “Fielding urged... that his characters were not representations of actual specific people”).82 She claims that “it is on the basis of this overt and articulated understanding that the novel may be said to have discovered fiction”, and points out that later in the century even disclaimers in the style of Fielding’s were unnecessary, since the public were by then well versed in how to read stories about characters who were understood as imaginary without any “singular, specific referents in the world.”83 As the nineteenth century progressed, then, so too did the understanding that ‘truth’ did not necessitate the existence of ‘fact’, and that the novel could represent larger truths without insisting that its narrative was biographical reality.

Yet many writers continued to cling to the illusory link between their novelistic fiction and reality. Samuel Richardson exemplifies this sentiment in a letter written in

1748 to William Warburton. The letter concerns the naming of Richardson as ‘author’ rather than ‘editor’ in Warburton’s preface to the third volume of Richardson’s

Clarissa:

82 Gallagher, p. 344. 83 Gallagher, p. 344. 75

Will you, good Sir, allow me to mention, that I could wish that the Air of

Genuineness had been kept up, tho’ I want not the letters to be thought

genuine; only so far kept up, I mean, as that they should not prefatically be

owned not to be genuine: and this for fear of weakening their Influence where

any of them are aimed to be exemplary; as well as to avoid hurting that kind of

Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho’ we know it to

be Fiction.84

Richardson wishes nothing to get in the way of the reader’s being lulled into pretending the work is nonfiction, even as they know at heart that it is not. Paige argues that we must remember Richardson came from a different historical era than our own, and so rather than viewing the author’s letter simply as a statement concerning readerly suspension of disbelief (as we today assume the comments to mean), Paige maintains that Richardson meant something slightly different. He claims that the avoidance of the term ‘author’ in favour of the term ‘editor’ would have aided Richardson in bringing his work closer to reality – that is, the closer the fiction (in Paige’s terms, the lie) was to reality, the better. Paige’s insistence that we not place our own retrospective view of history over the events of this time is a pertinent warning – we must not see the authors of this time as progressing in a linear fashion towards the idealised goal of the fictional novel as we understand it today. Rather, we must understand these experiments as simply that – experiments within a field which played with notions of truth and honesty in various fashions through various literary forms. However, through these various experiments we can infer that readerly expectations concerning notions of novelistic

84 Richardson, Samuel. Quoted in Paige, pp. 9-10. 76 truth and authorial honesty were not as dichotomous and demanding as they may be today.

Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson

This to-ing and fro-ing between declaration of artificiality and encouraging belief in the ‘truth’ of the storyworld would not be left to rest – it continued well into the late nineteenth century. In his classic 1884 essay, “The Art of Fiction”, Henry James took Anthony Trollope to task for seeming to apologise to his readers for having written fiction rather than fact. James claims it is an unfortunate view of his contemporaries that fiction ought to apologise for being “make believe”85, that it should “renounce the pretension of attempting really to represent life.”86 On the contrary, James asserts that, like a painting, “[t]he only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”87 He likens the job of the novelist to that of the historian – “as the picture is reality, so the novel is history.”88 James berates Trollope for foregrounding the creative process – for in a sense apologising for it being ‘merely’ made-up, rather than ‘factual’:

Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which

must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I

was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his

want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside,

he concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are only “making

believe.” He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and

85 James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. p. 856. 86 James, “The Art of Fiction”, p. 856. 87 James, “The Art of Fiction”, p. 856. 88 James, “The Art of Fiction”, p. 856. 77

that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal

of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime; it is what I mean by

the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it

would have shocked me in [historians] Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the

novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth... than the historian, and in

doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing-room.89

James’ claim is that by overtly signaling the fictionality of his works, and in doing so in such an apologetic manner, Trollope is belittling the whole field of work, and so he is breaking the code of conduct for the novelist. In not taking the artform seriously,

Trollope asks his readers to also not take it seriously (or expects that they will not), and thus (James argues) with one blow wipes out the potential power of his work, and the potential readerly experience (greatly muted now that the reader does not believe in the

‘truth’ of the work with anywhere near the conviction James would like).

In direct response to James’ argument, Robert Louis Stevenson disagrees with the former’s insistence that art competes with life, claiming “[n]o art is true in this sense: none can ‘compete with life’: not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting”90. Clearly, whether or not novels could or should either accurately (and without apology) represent or merely allude to sections of life was in contention between the major novelists of the nineteenth century.

However, like James, Stevenson values immersion in the text, claiming “[t]he luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the

89 James, “The Art of Fiction”, pp. 856-857. 90 Stevenson, Robert Louis. “A Humble Remonstrance.” In Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth (eds.). Victorian Criticism of the Novel. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. p. 216. 78 volume laid aside.”91 Interestingly, this assertion by Stevenson came in reaction to

James’ claim that the latter missed the opportunity of arguing with the author while reading Stevenson’s Treasure Island. James clearly had complex attitudes towards authorial intrusions, and we can see from the variety of attitudes displayed in Trollope,

Stevenson, and James, that there was no consensus during the era. Through James’ commentary concerning his own enthusiastic effacement of the authorial voice we can see his movement towards the illusion of fictional ‘reality’ – towards fiction which encouraged the reader to suspend disbelief, to believe as if it were true, even as they knew the work to be construction. This is quite distinct from simply not being concerned with whether something is true or not, and makes his ideas distinct again from those of an era when truth and falsity were not anywhere near as dichotomous.

Yet James did not pioneer this viewpoint – Samuel Richardson in 1748 demonstrates a similar sentiment in his letter to Warburton concerning the reference to

Richardson as ‘author’ rather than ‘editor’. And yet we may see a difference between

James and Richardson if we take Paige’s point concerning Richardson’s statement as an anxiety about attempting to get his fiction (his lie) as close to reality as possible, and by extension, to borrow some of the glory of that more ‘pure’, more ‘real’, truth. James would have argued that there is no sense in even this very hidden form of prioritisation of reality over fiction – to James, fiction should be reality, and so it is no less worthy.

We see here, then, a development towards formal realism, which Ian Watt defines as:

… the narrative embodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted

very literally, but which is implicit in the novel form in general: the premise, or

primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human

91 Stevenson, “Humble Remonstrance”, p. 218. 79

experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such

details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars

of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a

more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary

forms.92

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, saw the development of understanding of the novel away from the muddy terrain of narrative where fiction and fact blended easily and unquestioned, where fiction pretended to actually be true, and towards greater clarity between those distinct realms through the means of realism – fiction began to demonstrate authentic human experience even as it did not pretend to be true.

The blurring of nonfictional forms (such as life writing) and fictional forms

(such as the novel) began to become more of a deliberate, conscious action for writers as the nineteenth century progressed and rolled over into the twentieth century. Max

Saunders discusses the genre of “Autobiografiction”93, a form which emerged prior to the modernist era, whereby writers blurred the distinction between fiction and autobiography. This autobiographical form, he claims, was used to create the aura of

‘realness’ or ‘authenticity’ in a fictional narrative. Saunders asserts that the modernists

(he defines the movement as beginning in the 1870s) became preoccupied with reacting against this blurring:

... rather than seeing Modernism as a reaction against Romantic poetry and

Victorian biographical criticism, we should perhaps see it instead (or as well)

92 Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. p. 32. 93 Saunders, Max. “Autobiografiction: Experimental Life-Writing from the Turn of the Century to Modernism.” Literature Compass, Vol. 6, No. 5 (2009). p. 1042. 80

as a reaction to this explosion of autobiografiction. It seemed to have become

so widespread, that Modernists needed to negate it in order to clear space for

their own experiments. ‘Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the

imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously’, as Virginia

Woolf put it in 1927, before going on to write one of her own most

autobiografictional works, Orlando, the following year.94

Modernists, then, were preoccupied with asserting the need for division, whilst simultaneously using this division to enhance their own blurring of boundaries. After all, as Saunders points out, many of the modernist works engaging with autobiographical forms (such as Orlando) are actually “parodying it, playing formal games with it” rather than seeking its banishment from fiction and the novel.95 In modernist texts such as Orlando, then, we can see authors taking advantage of the increasing ‘clarity’ of generic divides in order to manipulate their audiences through the combination of different forms.

Film, the Twentieth Century, and Beyond

From its advent in the early twentieth century onwards, the prolific nature of the short film – a form in which the final twist is a common trope – could be said to have had a not insignificant impact on the frequency of trickeries in the written form throughout the same period. In the same vein, the commonality of trickery occurrences in feature-length films has captured the general imagination. Filmic trickeries are so mainstream that they occur even in major blockbusters – screenwriter and director M.

Night Shyamalan brought the subgenre to the attention of the masses in 1999 with

94 Saunders, “Autobiografiction”, p. 1052. 95 Saunders, “Autobiografiction”, p. 1052. 81 possibly the most well-known piece of film trickery, The Sixth Sense; critically- and publicly-applauded screenwriter and director Christopher Nolan has become famed for the device thanks to his repetitive use of trickery, as demonstrated in films such as The

Prestige (2006)96 and Inception (2010). It may well be that the popularity of trickeries in film has kept the device alive and well in written literature. Then again, it may be that the creators working within this relatively new medium are simply exploring what literary authors have been playing with for an age. What we can say is that there is a definite correlation: trickeries are being used to manipulate and shock contemporary audiences both in film and in literature. The fact that trickeries are occurring across the borderlines of media points to the fact that the device is alive and well, that it appeals to lovers of narrative whatever their chosen medium, and that trickeries still manage to shock because the majority of narratives in both forms conform to the norm and so allow trickeries their status as aberrations. The life of the form also demonstrates that audience expectations concerning honesty and novelistic truth are still an intrinsic part of the act of narrative communication.

Tracing narrative trickeries through the twentieth century lies beyond the scope of this thesis – the following four chapters will instead explore examples from contemporary literature (those occurring in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). Nevertheless, the basic literary and readerly preoccupations with authorial honesty and narrative truth, as explored throughout this chapter, continue to shape contemporary narrative trickeries. There is nothing new in the trickery – authors have been baiting and fooling their readers across the millennia. How, then, do trickeries still

96 Nolan’s The Prestige was adapted for screen from the Christopher Priest novel of the same name which also contains trickery, though the final revelation occurs much earlier in the novel. Nolan delays revelation of the final trick to the last moments of the film, fostering an even greater tension in his viewer than that of the reader of Priest’s work. Nolan also adds to Priest’s final revelation – having his magician not only clone himself (as in Priest), but also repeatedly drown his original in order to let the clone live – a harrowing enhancement of a shocking revelation. 82 manage to fool us? This question, I believe, brings us to the crux of how they work. The mandatory requirement for their existence seems to be simply the overabundance of works that do not trick. Trickeries rely on their status as aberrations from the norm – the audience must not suspect the trick, and therefore must be expecting not to be tricked.

The reader must expect the norm. The fact that the technique is still in operation today proves it has been, and is still, very successful. Trickeries still work because we as readers still expect the norm. It must be concluded, then, that our regular reading process relies on a lack of skepticism, a faith and trust in the narrative and its creator, in order to operate fluidly and successfully. It relies overall on an expectation that the author will conform, and that they will be honest in doing so. The subgenre of the trickery relies on fundamental human reading processes, and it is the interaction between creator, text, and these reading processes that I will explore in the following chapters.

Let me start, then, with potentially one of the most rewarding forms of trickery: the unexpected twist.

83

Chapter 2:

The Unexpected Twist and the Narrative

Communication Model

Barring the hoax, the unexpected twist is perhaps the most common and memorable of all trickeries. Unlike the hoax, it is generally intended by the author as a positive development in the narrative – the author of the unexpected twist means to reveal the trickery, and so it can be assumed that s/he hopes the readership will find it valuable and worthwhile. Works which contain an unexpected twist generally do not hold any apparent mystery – the readership is therefore unlikely to be on guard for any sort of revelation, and so the twist is completely unexpected. This twist is an additional unexpected element for the fictional narrative, unlike narratives which frustrate expectations through lacking an expected element, which will be discussed in Chapter

Three.

The fact that we can refer to an ‘additional’ element in a novel implies this type of trickery goes beyond what we expect. After all, a novel is whole and complete in itself – it never actually lacks, or has additional, elements, and so to say it does is something of a misnomer. What it indicates to say this, then, is that our expectations for the text (based on reading experience and thus knowledge of genre conventions) have either not been fulfilled, or have been over-filled. The latter is true for the unexpected twist, and the fact that this twist surprises us not only points to the marked fiction (the trickery), but also reveals the nature of the unmarked fiction (that large body of work that gave us our expectations – the norm). The unexpected twist thus shocks us not because the revelation is necessarily shocking, but because something has been added to 84 the plot where it ‘need not have been’. Novels that involve an unexpected twist would usually survive successfully without the additional ramifications brought about by the trickery, were they to be tied up conventionally in the style of the narrative thus far – they are usually almost whole novels in one style, and only late in each piece is this continuity disturbed. In most cases, the story is just concluding when the unexpected twist is sprung upon us, the surprise necessitating additional processing which must be conducted in order to reinterpret what we thought we knew about what came previously in the text.

In this chapter I will demonstrate how such an additional unexpected element works upon the text as a whole, and what the reader must do if s/he wishes to accept and incorporate it into an overall, coherent understanding of the novel (that is, to make sense of the novel). I will take Ian McEwan’s 2012 novel Sweet Tooth as a case-study – a recent example of the unexpected twist, the trickery of which has far-reaching ramifications for the text as a whole, and thus invokes wide-ranging reader responses. It is an interesting case-study, as this is not the first of McEwan’s novels to have invoked the unexpected twist, and thus there is a curious conflicting pull between expectations formed in relation to conventional texts, as well as those formed in relation to his reputation as a writer (and here I will draw on Wayne C. Booth’s definition of the

“career-author” as the agential being “who persists from work to work, a composite of the implied authors of all his or her works.”1). In this novel the unexpected twist is engaged in order to challenge our understanding of perspective through narration, to question readerly assumptions concerning narrative truth, and to make a statement about the political nature of subsuming and attempting to write another’s voice.

1 Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. p. 431. 85

My theoretical work in this chapter will be twofold: first, to demonstrate that the study of trickeries demands an amendment to the narrative communication model by more accurately representing the agential role of readers; and second (and most importantly), to explore the plural processes which occur simultaneously in a reader’s mind as they make sense of fiction – processes which are in tension with one another by nature of their mutual exclusivity, but which nonetheless must occur in tandem if the act of narrative communication begun by author, through means of the text, is to be completed. McEwan’s novel demands the active participation of the reader, and so analysing the novel through this theoretical lens allows for a deeper understanding of the technical achievement of this author in utilising the processes involved in narrative communication.

Narrative Communication: the Model, the Theory, and the Reader

Seymour Chatman’s seminal work, Story and Discourse, contains one of the most influential diagrams in the study of narratology: the narrative communication model. It reads, from left to right:

Narrative text

Real Author- -›Implied Author→(Narrator)→(Narratee)→Implied Reader- -›Real Reader2

Chatman focuses on the text, but if we are to consider the notion of communication, we must shift from this text centric view. The arrows in the model all flow one way – from the creators to the receivers – and that has sparked much debate. Like many, I believe the arrows should flow both ways, because the creators and receivers of fiction are both

2 Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978. p. 151. 86 agents with active, rather than passive roles. However, it is the definitions of the three agents on the right that I would question: the Narratee, the Implied Reader, and the Real

Reader. Granted, they are very valuable terms when looking at the process of fiction from the perspective of the creators. The Real Author targets the Real Reader, the

Implied Author targets the Implied Reader, and the Narrator targets the Narratee. These are fictional targets because the creators, for the most part, cannot know their receivers.

They invent their audience. And this, of course, is Chatman’s point. However, rather than a communication model, I would posit that Chatman’s flowchart – intact with its arrows flowing only in one direction – is rather an information model. While communication requires two equal, contributing parties, this model instead serves perfectly to represent the creators and their targets.

What, then, of the reader? We must understand the process a reader goes through in their conventional reading method – their temporal interaction with the text – in order to label the complex roles of the reader. Looking at the communication model in a reader-centric manner, the passive roles would have to be replaced in order to graphically acknowledge the active agential roles (in regards to the construction of meaning) the reader takes on during reading. The reader may choose to adopt the position of the Narratee or the Implied Reader. Conversely, they may not. Theorists such as James Phelan have grappled with how to study the reader when it is clear that each individual reader reads in a slightly (or greatly) different manner, and so responses to a text cannot be homogenised. Phelan suggests separating the “flesh-and-blood or actual reader” from the “authorial audience”3 – a distinction which allows for the study of the intended authorial audience response, on top of which is layered an individual flesh-and-blood response. Although noted in my Introduction, for the sake of clarity it is

3 Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. p. 4. 87 worth noting again here that Phelan’s ‘authorial audience’ differs in definition from the way I am employing it – Phelan uses it to refer to the ideal audience response for which the author aims, and the reader can reasonably be expected to have in reaction to the text, whereas I use the term in a slightly different way. It is my purpose in this chapter to more closely assess the processes all readers undertake while reading – that is, the intricate processes of a homogenous response across most, if not all readers. For this I will be breaking down this homogenous response into its component functions, and for this I will look to Peter J. Rabinowitz’s theory on audiences.

Rabinowitz posits that the real reader (the actual audience) always adopts multiple audience positions: the authorial audience, the narrative audience, and the ideal narrative audience.4 As outlined in my Introduction, I see these not as social audiences, but rather as simultaneous readerly functions, or processes. In this way I am taking

Rabinowitz’s theory of the split audience focus of the real reader (the way a reader can, and must, adopt several positions) and slightly manipulating it so that these audience groupings are seen instead simply as functions carried out within the reader’s brain.

This subtly shifts the focus from the reader as a target for information (an ‘audience’) to the reader as an active player with specific agential duties to carry out in the communication process. This understanding I believe more accurately reflects

Rabinowitz’s emphasis on the complex role the reader plays in order to complete the process of communication during narrative fiction. In order to include the actual processes carried out by the reader during communication (to make the one-way flow of information into a true communication model), I would suggest replacing the right hand side of the diagram with the Real Reader, under which the different active functions might be acknowledged. While further research beyond the scope of this study may

4 Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn 1977). pp. 121-141. 88 reveal that the reader in fact carries out myriad distinct, often conflicting, but vital, roles, the two functions I would isolate here for immediate inclusion in the communication model would be the Authorial Audience Process and the Narrative

Audience Process.

Whilst not downplaying the importance of the ideal narrative audience and any other processes the reader might carry out during the interpretation of a text, I believe the narrative and authorial audience functions perform the large bulk of the reading workload. These two functions are in tension in the most extreme way, and this tension shows us the complex, almost paradoxical tasks a reader must complete in the conventional reading process. A reader of fiction must believe and invest in the story and characters, whilst simultaneously being aware of the text as artifice, as creation.

One part of the reader’s mind engages in the narrative audience position. This is the part of us that barracks for the heroine, worries about the hero, sneers at the villain, and enjoys the landscape. The narrative audience function formulates what David Herman refers to as the storyworld in relation to textual cues, and holds fast to this solid world and its inhabitants5 (the storyworld will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three).

The second process the reader carries out – analytical interpretation – is performed by the authorial audience function. The role of this function is to interpret metaphors, understand grand themes, comprehend the structure of the novel, and observe and judge the writing style and skill of the author. The narrative audience function, by its very preoccupation with the fictional elements of the text as ‘truth’ is unconcerned with the author’s existence – it cannot acknowledge the author if it is to carry out its duties properly. The authorial audience function, however, must be hyper-aware of the author, because it falls to this position to interpret and judge the skill of the creation. A reader

5 Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. p. 14. 89 must carry out both processes simultaneously in order to successfully read fiction. The job of the author in conventional fiction is to create a coherent text which allows the reader to carry out these processes smoothly, and so the reader expects that coherent text.

The proof of these expectations comes in the narrative form of trickeries.

Novels that involve substantial withheld narrative twists force the reader to actively acknowledge the author’s presence during the process of reading, and so to dramatically foreground the authorial audience function at the expense of the narrative audience function. Trickeries allow the author to actively interact in the temporal reading process, as activated by the reader – they are a Jack-in-the-box waiting for the reader to unwittingly release them. This can provide a thrill within the authorial audience function, as this part of the reader is always aware of the skill (or otherwise) of the author. However, this creates a problem for storyworld immersion, as the narrative audience is flummoxed by unexpected change in the stability of the ‘facts’ of the storyworld. This can result in a complex set of reactions within the reader, and I believe explains the very passionate feelings of real readers towards the trickery, and thus towards the text. Such trickeries are unexpected and unsought, but not always unwanted. Like a stage magician performing an illusion for a captivated and willingly- fooled audience, an author can ‘get away with’ a trickery if it is performed skillfully and intended for the greater satisfaction of the reader. Such trickeries are aberrations, and through them we can not only understand conventional fiction from the perspective of creators, but also garner a much better understanding of the complex processes performed by the reader during the temporal act of reading fiction.

90

Unexpected Twists

The unexpected twist comes in many different variations. Missing story elements, genre switches, revelation of surprising narrator subjectivity – this subgenre is prolific not just in its quantity of novels, but also in its means of trickery. In Lionel

Shriver’s 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, a missing story element is revealed in the last few chapters which notably alters our understanding of events and characters.

Shriver’s novel is in epistolary form, the letters of which are written by a woman, Eva, to her husband, Franklin, detailing events within their family timeline, and focusing specifically upon Eva’s suspicion of the potential evil nature of their son, Kevin, as evidenced by events she witnessed throughout his childhood. Throughout the novel the narrator presents as a strange woman, a ‘bad mother’ who is potentially paranoid in her willingness to conclude the worst about her own son, Kevin, whom she believes is a psychopathic murderer. The last few chapters reveal with certainty not only that Kevin committed a massacre at his high school with chilling intelligent forethought, but that he also killed his father and sister, Celia, on the same day. This information also reveals the trickery – we learn that this hounded and bitter mother is correct in her conclusions, but more importantly we learn she has been writing to her dead husband as a form of self- administered therapy after-the-fact, rather than the assumed divorced or estranged husband. Throughout the novel Shriver takes pains to lead us into believing that Eva and Franklin are merely separated by using language that may be interpreted multiple ways. On page one of the novel (in the second sentence of the first letter) Eva writes to

Franklin, “[b]ut since we’ve been separated…”,6 and following on from this initial set- up we are delivered almost an entire novel filled with little comments that suggest

Franklin is absent because of their marital woes, not because of his death. Later in the

6 Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk About Kevin. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2006. p. 1. 91 text, Eva recounts a fight she had with Franklin in which they discussed their imminent divorce:

“At least custody is a no-brainer, isn’t it?” you added sourly. “And

doesn’t that say it all.”

At the time, of course, we had no way of knowing that you would keep

Celia, too.7

The implication of Franklin’s line of dialogue is that Eva’s love of their daughter Celia, and her skepticism in relation to the nature of their son, Kevin – a skepticism not shared by doting father, Franklin – would result in Franklin taking custody of Kevin, and Eva taking custody of Celia in the event of their divorce. The revelation of trickery at the end of the novel makes clear to us that the comment Eva makes here regarding custody

(which on a first read implies Franklin and Celia are alive, and that he has custody of the children) is in fact a euphemism for the fact that both husband and daughter died together and so Celia is now in Franklin’s ‘custody’ beyond the grave. Shriver keeps her readers in the dark about the husband’s mortality for as long as possible in order to enhance the harrowing impact of the horrific ending. This previously undisclosed fact alters our understanding of the intent of the letters we have read, and enhances our sympathy for the woman with whom we previously had limited empathy. Here, a key plot point (a key story element) is kept hidden until the moment of revelation, and yet the fact that we are surprised by the revelation indicates how well it was concealed – we did not wonder about it because there was no ‘gap’.

7 Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin, p. 407. 92

The narratee of Shriver’s novel is the husband, and the narrator (not writing for our benefit, but her own) is not withholding information – she knows he is dead, and therefore has no need to say it. It is therefore the implied author (the organiser of the text and hence the regulator of information) who withholds the information from us in order to give the story the added impact of a revelatory ending. Importantly, we are not the narratee, nor do we ever assume the role, as it is clearly taken. However, our narrative audience function believes in the story and its characters (including an alive, estranged husband). The revelation of trickery means our narrative audience must amend its storyworld understanding. This new understanding means our authorial audience now has work to do in reinterpreting the meaning of events with the knowledge of this additional element. The revelation of trickery does not change events, but it does change our understanding of them, and gives us new empathy for the narrator: we are shocked at Kevin’s action and ‘evil’ cunning, and we now feel guilty for having judged Eva harshly.

Other unexpected twists involve a delayed genre switch which alters the apparent rules of the storyworld, rather than its content. The revelation of Chuck

Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club comes relatively early for an unexpected twist – approximately three quarters of the way through the novel, rather than in the final pages.

This allows the reader to adjust to the twist, and engage in the ‘new’ story. Here the genre shift is relatively slight – realism shifts into an almost science fiction-esque storyworld when the protagonist narrator (who believes himself an insomniac) suddenly discovers that his friend Tyler is in fact his alter ego who awakens when he sleeps. This is a Jekyll and Hyde story, except that Jekyll does not find out that he is Hyde until late in the piece – and (just like in Stevenson’s novel) neither does the reader. This shift causes us to reassess everything we thought we knew about two separate characters

93 interacting, as well as each of their interactions with girlfriend Marla and with the members of the Fight Club. We were led to believe (just like the protagonist) that there were two people, but all the other characters (Marla, members of the fight club) have in fact always known the protagonist and Tyler as the same person. Furthermore, they believe them both to be Tyler, rather than the narrator persona (who is never named).

Thus, Tyler at once absorbs and erases the protagonist’s identity. Palahniuk uses the limitations imposed by simultaneous narration in order to suddenly increase the stakes when the hidden story element is revealed. We cannot be told in advance of the single entity comprised of ‘two’ characters because our narrator does not yet know. Technical restrictions thus do not allow for early revelation since the narrator is the sole teller of the story and there is no, as Brian Richardson terms it, “unnatural” narration.8 Thus, within the realms of the established style of the novel, early revelation by the implied author or real author is not possible – his hands are tied in relation to the trickery unless they wish to break the boundaries of the textual rules as already established. This means that rather than feeling betrayed at having to adopt a new storyworld, we do it along with our narrator. The early temporal revelation thus allows a camaraderie to develop as we ‘cope’ with the change alongside the narrator.

By contrast, the genre shift in Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi comes very late in the piece, in the habitual spatio-temporal realm of the unexpected twist revelation. The novel tells the adventure story of Pi Patel, a boy who survives the sinking of a ship containing his family and the animal inhabitants of their zoo. He coexists in a lifeboat for several months with a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker, a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, a rat, cockroaches and flies – all of whom (except Pi and

8 In this instance, the specific type of unnatural narration – as opposed to that which mimics the real- world, or natural, possibilities – would be telling that which extends beyond the narrator’s possible knowledge. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. 94

Richard Parker) are killed or die – before being washed ashore in Mexico. The revelatory ending questions this series of events when Patel (from a position of retrospect within the storyworld) puts forward a second potential substitute story where there were no animal lifeboat inhabitants, but rather the human counterparts of these metaphoric animals: a dying sailor, a murderous cook, Patel’s killed mother, and himself in the role of the tiger. Patel never reveals which story is the ‘true’ or ‘right’ one

– the reader is left to decide. If the reader favours the genre switch to realism, then the second is considered more likely; if the reader favours the drama and adventure of the heightened, romantic, almost (though not quite) fantastical genre, then the more mundane realist alternative is rejected in favour of the original. The late revelation opens up the possibility for a genre switch but leaves the final decision to the reader.

The revelation that we may have just unnecessarily adopted a far-fetched narrative audience position, when unbeknownst to us a much more ‘realistic’ one existed as a possibility all along – one much more closely aligned with our authorial audience position which views the animal story as extremely fantastical and unlikely, and thus not as great a leap of faith – can come as a negative shock. The extremely late temporal revelation seems to imply that Martel knew how much time readers would need to immerse themselves in this romantic storyworld and to trust that it would remain solid.

After such an elongated length of text in which faith is affirmed by met expectations, and the fact that the late alternative realist story is so disappointing (it changes many of the events and characters we had grown to love), it is no wonder that the author has chosen not to simply quash the first alternative, but instead to leave the choice open for readers to make themselves. The shock of the revelation is thus softened by providing readers with a semblance of agency.

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Other unexpected twists play with the notion of narration and subjectivity. Erin

Morgenstern’s 2011 fantasy novel The Night Circus and Ian McEwan’s 2001 realist novel Atonement each contain a revelation in the final pages which divulges the fact that the seemingly ‘truthful’ and reliable account of story events by a third person omniscient narrator is actually an account by a character within the tale. This destabilises the contents of the entire novel prior to the revelation, and forces us to readjust our understanding of each tale not as a true account, but as a subjective account with all the human weaknesses that this entails (forgetfulness, biased arguments, and so on). Upon disclosure, we learn that each novel contains what seems to be a (previously hidden) paraleptic narrator. Gérard Genette claims paralepsis occurs when “alterations” or “isolated infractions” occur within a text, whereby a narrator gives “more

[information] than is authorized in principle in the code of focalization governing the whole.”9 Paraleptic narrators thus in isolated instances take on some of the traits of omniscient narration. Phelan claims that cases of paralepsis are instances of “disclosure functions” trumping “narrator functions”.10 Narrator functions exist in the realm of the narrator telling the narratee information “constrained by the narrative situation”; disclosure functions take hold when the narrator “unwittingly reports information of all kinds to the authorial audience (the narrator does not know that an authorial audience exists)”.11 Thus when disclosure functions trump narrator functions, the author exerts a subtle hand over the narrator, allowing them to reveal more information than they should know in order to inform the reader of that presumably necessary information. In certain instances it is indeed the case that the author is simply attempting to inform the reader of certain aspects of the storyworld that cannot be reported by a constrained

9 Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. (Trans. Jane E. Lewin.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. p. 195. 10 Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. p. 12. 11 Phelan, Living to Tell About It, p. 23. 96 narrator. However, I believe in these two novelistic cases it is the intention of the narrator to report beyond regular human means – that is, it is in fact the narrator who is intentionally reporting improbable or impossible knowledge, rather than the author guiding the hand of the narrator without their knowledge.

Ruediger Heinze explains that in most cases of paralepsis, the reader chooses to “naturalize” these omniscient disclosures12, preferring, as Phelan claims, to preserve the mimetic rather than questioning and taking exception to the unnatural nature of these narrators knowing more than they should.13 That is, the reader attempts to find a way to understand how the narrator knows more than is possible (for example, they may attribute unnatural knowledge to the possibility of its having been learnt in the years between experiencing and narrating instances). Heinze splits instances of paraleptic first person narration into five groups: illusory, humorous, mnemonic, global, and local. He dismisses the first three types because they are forms of paralepsis which can be easily naturalised: there is no violation in illusory paralepsis because the source of knowledge is later revealed, and so the paralepsis is merely an illusion; humorous paralepsis

“acknowledges its own impossibility” and is thus marked as unreliability; and the unusual clarity of memory in mnemonic paralepsis is hard to distinguish from the usual clarity of first-person narrators who can “remember pages and pages of dialogue verbatim and the distinction between what is credible or not is thus mainly based on readers’ habituation to narrative trends”.14 Global paralepsis occurs when a natural world “is situated within a non-natural impossible frame” (such as narrating the real world from beyond the grave), and local paralepsis “is situated within a natural world but, nevertheless, is assumed by a first-person narrator in a style that suggests

12 Heinze, Ruediger. “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First Person Narrative Fiction.” Narrative, Vol. 16, No. 3 (October 2008). p. 283. 13 Phelan, Living to Tell About It, p. 26. 14 Heinze, pp. 285-286. 97 epistemological sincerity”15. Global and local paralepsis are the most difficult for readers to naturalise, and often require of the reader a complete overhaul of their understanding of the text. In the cases of these two novels, the supposed paralepses are only revealed in the final pages, requiring of the reader a very late rethink.

Paul Dawson takes issue with the idea of paralepsis, claiming it is built on a

“mimetic bias”16. He argues instead for a different rhetorical function in contemporary first person narrative fiction, maintaining that “writing fiction is a natural act of communication, and this is the model first-person narrators invoke when performing omniscience in the act of narration.”17 Thus rather than mimicking memoir or autobiography, these narrators are simply employing techniques of fiction in the telling of the story – here, Dawson explains, omniscient narration is an extension of David

Herman’s hypothetical focalization.18 While it is possible that some narrators do adopt this model (fiction rather than life writing), I would argue that in most cases the rhetorical strategy employed by such first person narrators is that of ‘telling a story’ in which they were involved, rather than mimicking either fictional or nonfictional writing.

This sits somewhere between reporting events (historic, factual, only telling what ones knows), and writing fiction (inventing a story about characters). First person narrators are involved with the storyworld in some way, shape, or form – they thus occupy space within that world and unless otherwise specified, their knowledge is assumed to be limited. Telling a story about their world is not writing fiction – it is telling a story based on ‘real events’. This means that a mix of fact and invention might be involved –

15 Heinze, p. 286. 16 Dawson, Paul. “Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration.” The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-first Century Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. p. 204. 17 Dawson, “Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration”, p. 201. 18 Dawson, “Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration”, p. 207. 98 but it does not mean that first person narrators can know all (and readers are often rightly sceptical when such narrators claim to know more than they should).

Dawson finds problematic Heinze at once defining paralepsis, then excluding the majority of cases as not really paralepsis. This scepticism seems academically correct, but we cannot dismiss the readerly reactions which underpin Heinze’s theory – that readers do see many of these instances as lacking in narrative truth. The problem here, then, is a tension between how the reader actually reads, and the academic delineation between what is actually paralepsis (local, global) and what is not

(naturalisable). After all readers often do question how a narrator might know something which the reader believes they cannot know – even in instances which can be naturalised (supposed non-paralepsis). We must acknowledge that the knowledge is seen as unnatural, even if it is not academically so, and so the term remains useful for understanding textual communication.

Although similar in nature, the revelations contained within The Night Circus and Atonement have different degrees of impact on each narrative. We learn very late in

The Night Circus that Widget, a fairly minor character in the story, is actually the author. Widget’s seeming unreliability (he is born midway through the tale, and is not present for many of the scenes) is mitigated by the fact that he has a power that allows him to ‘see’ or ‘read’ people (their pasts, their stories), and so it is presented as unlikely that he has made up the story – rather, it is implied that he has simply put the tale together from all of his ‘readings’. In this way, the reader is provided with a simple way to naturalise the seeming paralepsis. The character’s powers thus allow the reader to see the paralepsis as illusory, and so the revelation in The Night Circus is a pleasant surprise or twist that does not drastically alter what has gone before it.

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Ian McEwan seems to be a master of the unexpected twist, with not just

Atonement, but also Sweet Tooth containing this form of trickery. Unlike Morgenstern’s and Moody’s novels, the revelation in Atonement has a drastic impact on the rest of the text. In the last part of the four part novel, the third person omniscient tale is suddenly revealed as an account by a character from within the tale, and so the first three parts might suddenly be seen as involving local paralepsis. I say ‘might’, because there is another possibility: instead of paralepsis, this impossible knowledge might simply be seen as a manifestation of that character’s unreliability. Briony is not present for much of what she has penned (nor can she read minds), and so we know she has invented whole sections of text. In addition, she has very personal, pointed reasons for manipulating her tale, and it is through understanding these personal objectives that the reader manages to naturalise the seeming paralepsis in large part as unreliability: the first of Briony’s objectives is to write a good story (she is a successful author, and pride shapes her workmanship – we are reading her novel as much as her account), and the second is to attempt to atone for her past sins by rewriting the tale to give it a happier ending. This clear manipulative bias leaves us grasping at straws, unsure what can be taken as ‘fact’, what can be understood as complete fabrication, and what falls somewhere in between.

Through this unexpected twist, McEwan destabilises the ‘truth’ of the created storyworld, but does not provide us with a solid alternative, leaving us to flounder as we search for the ‘correct’ storyworld from the many that have now opened up as possibilities. Our focus thus shifts from events to the way the story is told – to the psychology of the teller (Briony), and consequently to the nature of ‘truth’ and memory, especially through the written word. The destabilisation that occurs as a result of the revelation of trickery thus forces us to refocus our energies on our authorial audience

100 function – on the interpretation and understanding of a novel about a writer penned by that character author, and the way subjectivity changes the way we see and understand events. Dawson argues that “[t]he metafictional game being played here involves the

‘omniscient’ author, McEwan, displacing his novelistic privilege of invention onto a character-narrator”19. Dawson points out that Briony authors the first three parts of the novel, and in doing so, “the narrating Briony is enacting the experiencing Briony’s desire for the unnatural or impossible knowledge of omniscience.”20 This is the novel which really stands out to me as the exemplifier of Dawson’s novel-mimicking theory.

Briony is a writer writing a novel, and so mimicking omniscience (we see this intention in her commitment to writing in the third person). However, she is also a character in the tale, and as readers we cannot help but question whether what she has told us has been true – we cannot help but see her as potentially unreliable because of her vested interest in a certain telling of the tale.

Eleven years and four novels (and a libretto) later, McEwan has repeated the trickery, but with a slightly different slant. Through its unexpected twist, Sweet Tooth also questions the natures of fiction, narrative, and truth, but its devices and results are slightly different from those of Atonement.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

The first twenty-one chapters of Ian McEwan’s 2012 novel, Sweet Tooth, make up a straightforward narrative about a woman, Serena Frome, in Cold War Britain (the narrative is mainly preoccupied with the year of 1973) who joins the lowly ranks of

MI5, and is assigned as a temporary field agent in order to ‘enlist’ Tom Haley, a young

19 Dawson, “Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration”, p. 208. 20 Dawson, “Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration”, pp. 208-209. 101 writer with a promising political track record, into the ranks of propaganda writers without his knowledge by giving him a grant of money to write what he sees fit. The story is apparently narrated by Serena from “almost forty years”21 after the main events it details. Serena thus narrates from around 2012 – the year McEwan’s book was published, which encourages the fiction that Serena’s story is only just being ‘released’ after a lockdown on government secrets of many years. These chapters detail her love affair with Tom, and her increasing feeling of discomfort at having to tell lies to her lover in order to conceal her government identity and the operation she is acting under, codenamed “Sweet Tooth”22. Eventually, a reporter discovers the facts about Serena’s subterfuge and the role of MI5 in Tom’s stellar career rise, and so publishes a story exposing these facts. Serena, expecting a confrontation, travels to see Tom, but instead finds his apartment empty. On his kitchen table she sees “a parcel done up with brown paper and string, and, lying on top of it, a white envelope with my name on it in his writing.”23 She then sits down to read the letter, and this is where her narration abruptly terminates. These twenty-one chapters are told in a conventional style by a character narrator who is detailing significant life events from her past in the form of a memoir.

Chapter twenty-two – the final chapter in the novel – turns everything that has come before it on its head. It consists of a long letter from Tom to Serena, written in

1973 – the letter Serena sits down at the kitchen table to read. This letter contains a number of bombshells for both Serena and the reader. Tom tells Serena he knows of her job, her assignment, and hence her lies, has known all of this for some time, and so has been lying to her in return. He tells her he has used their love affair and her deceit as the content of his latest novel, and that rather than just documenting events from his

21 McEwan, Ian. Sweet Tooth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. p. 1. 22 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 97. 23 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 300. 102 perspective, he has chosen to write the novel from Serena’s perspective. He tells her the brown paper package under the letter contains the manuscript for this novel, and that he would like her to read it. He points out that both their careers have been ruined by the newspaper article, and that the media fuss will take time to die down, but that they are so entwined in each other’s lives now (and he loves her too much) to let one another go.

Tom makes a double proposal to Serena:

What I’m working my way towards is a declaration of love and a marriage

proposal. Didn’t you once confide to me your old-fashioned view that this was

how a novel should end, with a ‘Marry me’? With your permission I’d like to

publish one day this book on the kitchen table. It’s hardly an apologia, more an

indictment of us both, which would surely bind us further. But there are

obstacles. We wouldn’t want you or [Serena’s friend and MI5 colleague]

Shirley or even [MI5 colleague] Mr Greatorex to languish behind bars at Her

Majesty’s leisure, so we’ll have to wait until well into the twenty-first century

to be clear of the Official Secrets Act.24

Tom tells Serena that these decades will allow time for her to correct any mistakes in the novel, and for him to make amendments of which she approves. He tells her that if she does not accept the joint proposal, the manuscript she reads is the only copy and she may dispose of it (and hence it will never be published), but that “[i]f you still love me and your answer is yes, then our collaboration begins and this letter, with your consent, will be Sweet Tooth’s final chapter. / Dearest Serena, it’s up to you.”25 Thus ends the

24 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 319. 25 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 320. 103 novel, and the implication is of course that Serena has said yes to both proposals because we are reading what appears to be Tom’s finished novel.

The revelations contained in the letter are presumably shocking for Serena, and certainly so for the reader, however the ramifications of the fact that Tom has chosen to write the novel from Serena’s perspective have an added ironic weight for the reader: the reader suddenly realises that everything they have just read has not been what it appeared at face value, but rather an entire work penned by Tom (and thus, Serena’s supposed recollection of events, and even her subjectivity, has been fabricated).

Everything we have known so far has suddenly lost its foundations – we cannot know how much is ‘truth’ and how much invented, we cannot know if the subjectivity is a true representation of ‘real’ Serena or fabricated, we cannot know anything for sure about the first twenty-one chapters. The nature of both fiction, and writing in general, are thrown suddenly into the spotlight: the reader is starkly reminded of the danger of believing the written word, of placing trust in another to tell a ‘truthful’ tale without tricks; the stability of the known is sorely and fundamentally destabilised, and we are left to speculate about which parts we now wish to believe. In addition, this unexpected destabilisation throws our attention onto Tom, and specifically onto his act of writing for Serena. The unexpected twist thus acutely focuses our attention on the political nature of silencing another’s voice and choosing to write for them – occurring in the final pages of the novel (a spatio-temporal site of importance), this message becomes the message of the novel.

The resulting individual readerly reactions to this revelation range quite substantially. Professional reviewers and ‘regular’ readers alike share this variation in reaction, though research into such reviews and comments in online forums indicates more of a range in the extreme positive and negative endpoints of the scale within the

104 regular readership (professional reviewers, by contrast, tend by and large to have a positive reaction to the trickery, though this reaction is by no means universal). Regular reader Elaine G and blogger Mark Stevens represent this range in feeling towards Sweet

Tooth: the former feels she as a reader was “soundly mocked” by the trickery, and met the revelation with “a yawn, a ‘really?’, a sigh of disappointment”26, while the latter loves the trickery, claiming “[t]he ending is one of the best stories-within-a-story endings I’ve read in a book in a long time. Neat, deft, sure. Tidy.”27 The unexpected twist of this novel is clearly divisive, but the fact that the individual readerly reactions are by no means universally negative proves that, at least for some, McEwan is deemed to have handled the technical elements of the trickery with some semblance of skill.

The paraleptic knowledge here is quite different from that of Atonement, and must be considered in light of levels and frames. Let us first consider the inner level consisting of Tom’s novel: it contains a first person narrator who knows no more than she should. Even Tom’s letter at the end is narrated by himself without paralepsis.

However, the inner story does contain an implied author (Tom) who allows his fictional narrator more knowledge than he himself owns. Authors of fiction cannot technically be considered paraleptic, since all that is to be known about the fictional creation exists with the author’s head (s/he knows all). Therefore the implied author of Tom’s novel

(the inner story) only becomes paraleptic in light of the outer frame story – McEwan’s novel – in which both Tom and Serena are characters. To confuse the matter, the final chapter (Tom’s letter) implies all we read as McEwan’s novel is in fact also Tom’s complete novel – there are not additions in McEwan’s frame (including the letter) that do not exist in Tom’s work. Thus it is Tom himself, in his own letter, who reveals his

26 Elaine G. Reader reviews on page: “Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.” On Goodreads. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13562049-sweet-tooth?auto_login_attempted=true. Accessed 25th March 2013. 27 Stevens, Mark. “Ian McEwan – “Sweet Tooth”.” On Don’t Need a Diagram. 16th March 2013. http://markhstevens.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/ian-mcewan-sweet-tooth/. Accessed 25th March 2013. 105 agency to the reader, and thus his paralepsis as an author/implied author. That paralepsis is naturalised when we learn of his research before writing the tale from Serena’s perspective, and as we deduce that he has guessed the rest. He thus becomes an implied author whose part-illusory, part-local paralepsis is naturalised as unreliability. Tom’s highly vested interest in the tale in which he plays a large part removes the opportunity of us seeing him as merely mimicking the omniscience of fiction – his writing what he cannot know becomes a highly political act of writing for another.

Serena: A Passive Sweet Treat?

The title of Sweet Tooth tells us much about the portrayal of Serena within both

Tom’s and McEwan’s novels. Although peritextual (it is outside of McEwan’s narrative discourse, but within the physical book), it is also simultaneously textual (Tom, a character in the narrative, names his novel – the novel we read – “Sweet Tooth”). This dual peritextual/textual role of the title only becomes apparent on revelation of the trickery, which immediately puts the words we have read within an extra level of embeddedness we had not known existed: McEwan’s title and narrative suddenly becomes Tom’s title and narrative, as occurring within the fictional world (textual), outside of which McEwan’s (identical) narrative and peritextual title exist. The title thus becomes embroiled in the multi-layered ownership of words. The thoughts of professional reviewer, Julie Myerson, prove that this multi-layered effect can be quite exciting for the reader upon discovery of the trickery: “[t]his is a great big beautiful

Russian doll of a novel, and its construction – deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate – is a huge part of its pleasure”28.

28 Myerson, Julie. “Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan – review.” On The Guardian. 2nd September 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/02/sweet-tooth-ian-mcewan-review. Accessed 25th March 2013. 106

Having a sweet tooth is to have a weakness, a frivolous predilection for indulgence, for the things that give pleasure over the things that are good for us. The

“sweet tooth” of the title can be taken to indicate and reflect upon a number of different facets of the story. The most apparent is that Tom has named his novel (and so McEwan names his) after the codename of the operation that Serena undertakes. However, it would be safe to assume that Operation Sweet Tooth is more than a random codename for McEwan, and it can be assumed to hold similar significance for Tom and the other characters within the story. The sweet treat of the story is Serena, while the sweet tooth is held by a range of men who fall for her throughout the novel – most pointedly, Tom.

The first of Serena’s boyfriends focused upon – Jeremy Mott – falls for her beauty, making “tender and considerate”29 love to her despite never reaching orgasm because

(so the novel tells us) he is homosexual. Serena’s first great love affair is with a married man named Tony Canning. Much older than her, Tony takes on the dual role of father/tutor, coaching her education and priming her for a job at MI5. Serena’s MI5 colleague Max Greatorex is taken in by her looks and forms a fantasy concerning the two of them, culminating in him breaking off his engagement to another woman and, when rejected by Serena, violating the secrecy act by vengefully revealing to Tom the nature of Serena’s undercover operation.

And then there is Tom, the great lover of the novel (a narcissistic portrayal, considering he actually pens the piece) who falls for Serena (and the money she brings him – another sweet tooth weakness) at their first meeting. These men have sweet teeth, and so they have ‘no choice’ but to abandon their senses at the sight of Serena. As

McEwan’s literary creations in a novel titled “Sweet Tooth”, they are bound to their fate of falling for Serena. These avid admirers thus free the (seeming) narrator (we might

29 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 10. 107 call her Old Serena in order to differentiate her from the experiencing character, Young

Serena), from having to vainly confirm and repeatedly press upon us her own exceptional youthful beauty. This lack of overt vanity is important to establish in contrast to Tom’s narcissism as revealed in his letter to Serena (the book’s final chapter). We must like Serena in order to forgive her her subterfuge against Tom and empathise with her throughout the novel, so that we do not simply jump onto Tom’s revenge bandwagon at the conclusion of the novel. McEwan needs our relationship with both characters to be within the neutral to positive realm so that we wish them well in the end and believe in the possibility of their happy ending. As such, it is imperative that we do not dislike Serena as ‘she’ tells her tale. In order for us to like her, she must conform to the Western ideal: she must not use her beauty as a weapon, but rather unwittingly possess it. As such, it is left to the men of the novel to tell us of her captivating allure through their actions.

Serena seems to be something of a passive agent here: she is something to be consumed, and this passivity is vital in retaining her character’s relative innocence.

Whether or not Serena, as a ‘real’ character, is in fact passive is irrelevant – what is important is that Tom, in writing his tale, subtly paints her so. On revelation of Serena’s subterfuge, Tom is hurt, embarrassed and upset, but the ‘unhealthiness’ of indulging his sweet tooth and eating his sweet treat is not going to kill him. This allows for the traditional narrative ‘happy ending’ (an implied wedding) after Tom vengefully seeks to even the score with Serena through the writing of the novel we read. Of course, Tom has penned everything we read, including the title “Sweet Tooth”, and so we cannot help but presume that, like McEwan, as a writer steeped in the knowledge of literary metaphor and allusion, he too is aware of the connotations of naming his novel after the operation – a last, seemingly petty dig at the beautiful woman who betrayed him.

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Clues

McEwan’s avid readers would be intimately familiar with the ‘trick’ in

Atonement, whereby the seeming third person omniscient narrator of the tale is suddenly revealed in the last part of the novel as a creation of one of the central characters within the story. An author’s oeuvre tends to produce a reputation for the kinds of works we might expect from them – Wayne C. Booth’s concept of the “career-author” as the agential being “who persists from work to work, a composite of the implied authors of all his or her works.”30 Sebastian Groes tells us that McEwan had a reputation in his early career (which has now somewhat faded) formed by works that explored

“grotesque and disturbing themes” – “the early work earned him the illustrious nickname ‘Ian Macabre’.”31 Since then, and up to the publication of Atonement, the

McEwan career-author reputation expanded as the author changed his style to conventional realist fiction without the overwhelming macabre elements. Pre-

Atonement, then, McEwan was only known for a variety of conventional fictional styles.

One of his most famous works, Atonement gave McEwan the new reputation of a writer who is open to using the devices involved in trickery, and it is this knowledge that his readers bring with them to Sweet Tooth. The fact that this is the second time McEwan has used the unexpected twist in his novels means that this reputation has now been solidified – his career-author is not only one who writes realist (and often macabre) conventional fiction, but also one who engages on occasion with trickery. Regular reader, Liv, says she was disappointed that McEwan pulled “the same plot strings” as those within Atonement, in delivering “another one of McEwan’s the-book-you’re-

30 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 431. 31 Groes, Sebastian. “A Cartography of the Contemporary: Mapping Newness in the Work of Ian McEwan.” In S. Groes (ed.) Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. p. 1. 109 reading-was-actually-written-in-the-story twists”32; another commenter, clarissadesward, feels the ending was a “cheap trick”, and that it “left a taste in my mouth which was far from sweet... As for the narrative gimmickry, he’s done this trick before as we know, and much more successfully on that occasion” and that she left the book “feeling empty, and cheated, and wondering what was the point of it all”33. These less-than-glowing comments prove that trickeries are viewed as out of the ordinary forms – tricks that (for some readers) can only be pulled off once due to their marked abnormality. It could fairly safely be assumed that had McEwan written another one of his conventional realist novels, Liv and clarissadesward would probably not have viewed it as “gimmickry” that had been done before, but rather judged it on its other merits, as conventional, unmarked fiction. The career-author, therefore, can be multiple and varied – persisting from work to work it cannot be avoided or nullified. As such, if an author was to choose to exclusively write novels with unexpected twists, they would risk their novels becoming failures – the career-author reputation would encourage readers to always search out the unexpected element of each new novel, and so such elements would cease to become unexpected. McEwan has surprised his readership twice now with unexpected twists (twice is clearly too many times for some readers) – it remains to be seen if he can successfully pull off such marked fiction again without alienating his readership.

Atonement and Sweet Tooth do, however, differ in the implementation of their similar trickeries. As opposed to an objective narrator being revealed as the creation of a

32 Liv. Comment on: Dunham, Lacey N. “Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan.” On Full Stop. 11th January 2013. http://www.full-stop.net/2013/01/11/reviews/lacey-n-dunham/sweet-tooth-ian-mcewan/. Accessed 25th March 2013. 33 clarissadesward. Comment on: “Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.” On The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/fiction/9780224097376/sweet- tooth?commentpage=1#comment- 18068046%20and%20here%20http://cphowe.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/review-of-sweet-tooth-by-ian- mcewan/. Accessed 25th March 2013. 110 biased character, in Sweet Tooth we have a character narrator who is revealed as invented by another character within the story. One novel transforms from objective to subjective (our readerly trust turns to wary skepticism), another from subjective to a different type of subjective (we are already wary, knowing we are reading a subjective account, and yet the ground still shifts dramatically under our feet concerning what we

‘know’ because we have been assuming the wrong type of subjectivity). We can look at the two novels as developments along the same lines to different endpoints. Although in both instances a certain unimagined perspective is suddenly laced over the text, Sweet

Tooth goes a step further than its predecessor: on the point of revelation we must mentally remove the subjective viewpoint of the seeming character narrator – strip the events of their subjective narration – before we can mentally layer on the subjective perspective of a different character from the story and therefore understand the placement and purpose of the telling of story events from their perspective.

There are a few clues scattered throughout Sweet Tooth that all may not be as it seems. For readers familiar with McEwan’s Atonement, these clues alluding to the trickery may be more obvious than to those readers with no knowledge of the author’s track record. In any case, none of these clues declares outright to the first-time Sweet

Tooth reader the specific type of trickery that is occurring – rather, they simply may make the reader alert to the possibility that some sort of trickery is taking place. In a way, McEwan has left a mystery trail for his fans – their Atonement-conditioned minds may be alerted when they read the clues, yet they are not given specifics (nothing is

‘absent’ or ‘missing’ from the narrative) and so they spend the rest of the novel trying to work out what sort of trickery will be revealed (if indeed there is one at all). This makes the work a detective novel for his regular readers – not in the story sense (they are not trying to work out how the events conspire), but rather in the narrative discourse sense

111

(they know the author’s tricky way with words and so attempt to unravel the mystery behind how he is crafting his tale – how he is using the narrative to try and fool them once again). It is McEwan we are skeptical of as a potential trickster (rather than any of his characters) and so the mystery – the detective work – is all occurring on the level of narrative discourse. The fact that this novel looks for the most part like his conventional fiction means that, despite the heavy hints pointing towards trickery, we are unsure which side (conventional or trickster) of the McEwan career-author we are getting here, until the final revelation.

Early on in the novel (in chapter five) McEwan establishes Serena, his central character and narrator, in opposition to himself by setting Serena against the very characteristics that define much of his own work. Although she heartily consumes novels, she does not have high literary tastes, and any such taste she acquires throughout her life is handed down to her: “I had finally managed to absorb a degree of taste or snobbery from Cambridge, or from Tony.”34 Yet this ‘degree of taste’ is tempered by her natural predilections – she admits to craving straightforward texts that reflect life, especially that of her own:

I suppose I would not have been satisfied until I had in my hands a novel

about a girl in a Camden bedsit who occupied a lowly position in MI5 and was

without a man.

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my

readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of

frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a

measure, I could gauge the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent

34 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 65. 112

to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was

fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding

social documentary. I wasn’t impressed by those writers (they were spread

between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of

the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even

themselves were pure inventions and that there was a difference between

fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway.

Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. I was a born

empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate

should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to

whatever they had made up. So, no tricky haggling over the limits of their art,

no showing disloyalty to the reader by appearing to cross and recross in

disguise the borders of the imaginary. No room in the books I liked for the

double agent.35

McEwan here is using Serena and her tastes as a means through which to casually mention fiction that plays outside the general field – that from a particular historical moment: postmodern metafiction from the 1960s and 1970s. This is fiction which refers to itself as fiction (reminding the reader of the nature of writing), that which transgresses boundaries, that which is fluid, unstable, or full of tricks. McEwan thus uses Serena to put trickery on the radar – to set off alarm bells for readers familiar with

Atonement, and to subtly place the idea inside the minds of his new readers so it can be retrieved later when the trickery is revealed. Of course, there is a certain irony in

Serena’s wish to see herself in a book, when that is just what her older self is making

35 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, pp. 65-66. 113 happen (what we are reading). The irony extends further on a second reading when we know Tom is writing a book about her from ‘her own’ (projected ‘future’ self) perspective. Not only can Serena see ‘herself’ in this book, but we see a novel about

Serena, narrated by ‘Serena’, all of which is ventriloquised by another. This irony, produced by the distance between narrator and author, is only brought into being by delayed disclosure.

In the above quote, Serena also echoes the thoughts of another McEwan protagonist, Henry Perowne from 2005 novel, Saturday, who is set up as an empirical, unliterary character – a scientist who, unlike his poet daughter and father-in-law, does not understand the intricacies of literature. McEwan jests at Perowne’s views (and, to a certain extent, himself as a writer of such fiction) when Perowne dismisses magical realist novels as “irksome confections”36. The character condemns one particular novel in which a “visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him”37 – a key plot episode in McEwan’s The Child in Time, and a humourous reference McEwan must have been sure his regular readers would understand. Perowne and Serena are not despicable or even unlikeable as characters – both are good people with many pleasant characteristics with which the reader can empathise. McEwan is not being cruel in his treatment of those who do not like his writing style, but rather is simply setting them apart from himself, and therefore apart from his regular readers, and possibly a large majority of his new readers. Serena hates the type of fiction McEwan has previously written, and so McEwan is subtly reminding us what sort of a writer he can be and therefore what we might expect from him in this novel.

36 McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Vintage Books, 2006. p. 67. 37 McEwan, Saturday, p. 67. 114

Three chapters later (chapter eight) Serena is reading one of Tom Haley’s short stories, and comments to us that “[w]riters owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.”38 This owing, this duty, of writers towards their readers is echoed many times throughout the novel in Serena’s thoughts. In conversation with Tom over their literary tastes, Serena is again contrasted not just with McEwan, but also with Tom (whom we must remember, is later revealed as the writer of the whole tale):

Without leaving the chair he stretched forward and picked up John Fowles’s

The Magus and said he admired parts of that, as well as all of The Collector

and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I

knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the

page without tricks.39

Liking or not liking tricks (such as the multiple endings presented in The French

Lieutenant’s Woman) is just one point concerning literature on which Tom and Serena differ – these two sentences are wedged amongst their other disagreements. Embedding this one disagreement among many, McEwan has once again thrown in a reference to trickery without stressing it too heavily, or drawing too much attention to it. In addition to simply signalling trickery, McEwan is setting Serena apart from Tom in literary taste.

This becomes laced with significance when we learn Tom has ‘written’ Serena, and so presumably has either given her these thoughts and opinions, or chosen to stress those the ‘real’ story character possessed. These thoughts oppose not simply Tom’s own style of writing, but the writing McEwan chooses to employ in telling her story – a writing style which by necessity (Tom tells us) uses tricks ‘to recreate life on the page’. Again,

38 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 105. 39 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 184. 115 this difference of taste seems to be a vengeful dig at his lover. The fact that he has found it necessary to integrate these opinions into his narrative says much about his psychology, both in regards to Serena, and in terms of his own priorities as a writer (that is, writing seems to matter more to him than his relationship).

The biggest clue to the trickery comes in chapter fifteen (of twenty-two), following which there are no further references to trickery prior to the bombshell revelation of the final chapter. Serena is reading another of Tom’s short stories and takes issue with it. The story is “narrated by a talking ape prone to anxious reflections about his lover, a writer struggling with her second novel”40 after a successful first. On the last page of this short story Serena finds out that what she has just read was the writer-lover’s second story and that the ape is an invention. Serena’s negative reaction

(and McEwan’s most pointed clue) is detailed as follows:

No. And no again. Not that. Beyond the strained and ludicrous matter of cross-

species sex, I instinctively distrusted this kind of fictional trick. I wanted to feel

the ground beneath my feet. There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with

the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world

or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim. The

invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a

contract founded on mutual trust.41

McEwan is here not only giving us his most pointed reference to trickery, but he is also telling his reader that he is aware of the nature of trickery, and therefore its ramifications. Even if an avid McEwan reader had not by this stage cottoned-on with

40 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 193. 41 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 193. 116 the aid of these clues to the idea that trickery may be occurring in this novel, she or he would still be aware that this speech applies retrospectively to his treatment of narrative in Atonement. McEwan is telling us he is aware that there is a contract between reader and writer, that many readers feel it must be fulfilled (and feel cheated when it is not), and that fiction requires trust from the reader to be placed in the hands of the writer.

Moreso, McEwan is telling us that fictional tricks require all of this to take place for them to have their intended effect. He is pointing to the regular reading process, making us aware of it ourselves, and therefore aware of what we are engaging with (and risking) when we read fiction.

It is interesting that McEwan has chosen to deliver his clues through the mouthpiece of Serena, one whose tastes obviously clash with his own. The fact that the narrating Serena is a creation of Tom – a writer who, like McEwan, employs the types of tricks that Serena despises – adds another layer of irony through the connection between McEwan and his author creation. We, as readers of McEwan’s novel, cannot know if the experiencing Serena (the ‘real’ Serena) actually feels this way about tricks, or if Tom has merely set her up as a devil’s advocate for his own style. After all, Tom- as-writer actually performs the same trick as McEwan by choosing to place his revelatory letter as the final chapter to his book, thus revealing his own agency to his own (fictional) readership. I believe McEwan uses Serena in this fashion as a means through which to subtly sneak clues into his text without being too obvious or straightforward. By creating a devil’s advocate in his ‘narrator’, he allows her aversions to become the avenue through which to plant his warnings for the reader.

This paradox of McEwan acknowledging the duties of the author to the reader in a book where he flouts this contract is significant. He seems to be agreeing that the storyworld cannot dissolve on authorial whim, as occurs in the ape story. The fact that

117 this story description closely resembles one of McEwan’s own early-career short stories

(“Reflections of a Kept Ape” from his 1978 collection, In Between the Sheets42) may indicate that McEwan is here acknowledging his earlier youthful, narcissistic carelessness (like Tom, in his youth he was also full of his own importance as a writer,

McEwan seems to say). The difference between what Tom and McEwan do in employing the trickery in Sweet Tooth pivots on the subjects of the tale: where McEwan plays with fictional characters, Tom plays with real people of his world, including a person very close to him. Tom’s youthful narcissistic trickery contrasts with McEwan’s more considerate trickery – McEwan seeming to tell his reader that they are in safe, mature, understanding hands (rather than flippant, passionate, arrogant ones). Through

Serena, McEwan pays homage to his more delicate readers’ sensibilities – telling them they (like beautiful, funny, smart, and appealing Serena) are justified in their feelings.

While Tom emerges from his portrayal of Serena’s tastes sounding like he feels himself superior in intelligent opinion, McEwan emerges looking like an author aware of the delicate bundle of readers’ hopes and expectations that he holds in his hands. This care becomes vital in determining how we judge the author as opposed to the author- character (Tom) when the trickery is revealed.

The Final Chapter

The final chapter is where the trickery (and thus the unexpected additional element) is revealed. McEwan has littered this chapter with comments that Tom makes about altering specific narrative events of his novel which have the effect of destabilising our solid knowledge of the storyworld. The first such comment comes when Tom refers to having had sex with Serena on Brighton beach: “Then, a few hours

42 McEwan, Ian. In Between the Sheets. London: Cape, 1978. 118 later, Brighton beach – strictly, Hove, which doesn’t chime romantically, despite the half-rhyme with love.”43 Tom is here caught up with his own invention; he is talking to

Serena in this letter, there is no reason to refer to Brighton rather than Hove, and yet he has been swept away with the changed location. The change is minor – only a suburb away – and yet Tom’s invention is a very deliberate tactic on the part of McEwan.

McEwan could have chosen to allow the couple their sexual dalliance in Brighton, and yet he chose to have the ‘real’ story event occur in Hove, the narrative retelling recentred in Brighton, and the letter to expose the alteration of truth. This exposure of invention, of playing with the ‘real’ events, alerts the reader to the idea that all may not have been told truthfully – if this has been changed, the reader is prompted to wonder, what else may have been modified? This is a minor alteration, and yet vital for

McEwan’s novel as a means to enhance the destabilisation process after the revelation of the novel’s authorship. This is an inessential ‘addition’ to the already fairly complete narrative, and thus a clear indicator that we did not expect this minor, irrelevant detail to change. Our expectations based on the norms of conventional fiction were that we were being told ‘the truth’, and thus this revelation comes as unexpected.

A few pages later, Tom stresses the importance of invention in the creation of his novel. He explains the gap in knowledge which he had to imaginatively fill in order to create his novel:

But why trouble you with details of my research? First, to let you know

I took this matter seriously. Second, to be clear, that above all it was you who

were my principal source. There was, of course, everything that I saw for

myself. And then the small cast [of Serena’s friends and family] among whom

43 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 310. 119

I wandered in January. That leaves an island of experience, an important

fraction of the whole, that was you alone, you with your thoughts, and

sometimes you invisible to yourself. On this terrain, I’ve been obliged to

extrapolate or invent.

Here’s an example.44

Tom is here stressing he is a serious author, with serious aims. He impresses upon

Serena that as much as possible he has stuck to the letter of truth – using all of the facts available to him to reconstruct Serena’s experience. This stressing of the use of facts and truth in a novel by an author of fiction seems to be Tom’s way of showing Serena that he has not ‘used’ her, but rather has shown respect in his appropriation of her experience. The example following the above quote refers to their first meeting, and

Serena’s journey through Tom’s university to get there. He refers in the letter to the

“curl on your lips… a sneer”45, neither of which is related in the novel event we read, yet both are implied through the access we are provided to Serena’s snobbish thoughts as she walks through the university grounds brimming with distaste for her surroundings and its inhabitants:

… I swanked along the paved approach to the main entrance through the

student crowds, disdainful of the boys – I regarded them as boys – shaggily

dressed out of army surplus stores, and even more so of the girls with their long

plain centre-parted hair, no make-up and cheesecloth skirts. Some students

were barefoot, in sympathy, I assumed, with peasants of the undeveloped

world. The very word ‘campus’ seemed to me a frivolous import from the

44 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 314. 45 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 315. 120

USA… I felt dismissive of the idea of a new university. For the first time in my

life I was proud of my Cambridge and Newnham connection. How could a

serious university be new? And how could anyone resist me in my confection

of red, white and black, intolerably scissoring my way towards the porters’

desk, where I intended to ask directions?46

Tom claims this was one of the few story events which he had to invent, yet clarifies this by telling Serena it was not wild fancy which drove the narrative telling – rather,

“[i]t was an informed guess, an extrapolation.”47 Tom is carefully stressing his research, his accuracy, and hence his credibility – his ability to accurately embody Serena’s experience. Importantly, his stress on research is a deliberate implicit request for the reader to view his work not as invented fiction, but as a fairly accurate retelling – to assume narrative truth in his reporting. And yet just a few pages earlier he has expressly told us that he changed a location (a fact he can be certain of, as he was there) from one place to another purely because the second sounded more romantic. We must clearly take Tom’s ‘documentation’ with a grain of salt, as we are aware he is an author of fiction writing a novel (probably with an agenda), not an objective historian writing a historical document. Here McEwan is again playing Tom’s earnestness off against his writerly whimsy in order to once again destabilise our certainty of the ‘real’ events and interpretations of what we have read.

Tom’s letter again and again reveals the gap between real events and his invention. He reminds Serena:

46 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 136. 47 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 315. 121

After our Wheeler’s lunch we made love. You fell asleep and I worked on,

typing and revising the recent hours. When I came into the bedroom in the

early evening to wake you and make love to you again, you whispered as you

took my cock in your hand and brought me into you, ‘You’re amazing.’ I hope

you won’t mind. I’ve included that.48

Compare this (presumably) ‘accurate’ retelling of events to the version that appears earlier in the novel:

With this thought I fell asleep, as so often before to the sound of his typing.

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option. I slept deeply, without dreams. At

some point in the early evening he came back quietly into the bedroom, slipped

in beside me and made love to me again. He was amazing.

Subtly different, to be sure, but different nonetheless. Note Tom’s stress in the letter version on Serena taking his penis in her hand, on her agency in the sexual act, on her telling him he is amazing. Note in the novel version from ‘Serena’s’ perspective, the lack of any reference to the penis, the active role now being solely Tom’s rather than

Serena’s (“he… made love to me”), and the absence of dialogue concerning Tom being amazing – replaced with a retrospective reflection on Tom’s role in the event. These are small changes, but changes nonetheless (given more stress than other minor changes by the sexual content and language). We cannot be sure who has made the changes – whether it was Tom in his imaginative role as an author getting inside Serena’s head

(and thereby increasing his own sexual reputation), or whether it was Serena after the

48 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 316. 122 fact, but before publishing. Importantly, Tom’s mentioning it in the letter stresses the event’s importance to him through repetition within the novel, indicating that it was probably he who tinkered with the telling. Either way, this relegating of Serena to the passive role is important to note, especially in the context of the last chapter: the abrupt silencing of ‘her’ voice, replaced by Tom’s intrusion, and the complete obliteration of

‘her’ persona through the revelation that her voice as we knew it never actually existed

– rather, it was ventriloquised by Tom. This unexpected element comes in addition to an already ‘complete’ narrative world. It is used here to subtly imply how Tom may have shifted ‘actual’ events in his telling, and therefore to suggest he has an implicit wish to regain power over Serena through the means of writing.

The letter reveals that in accepting the book Serena has a right to approve (or disapprove) of it, and even to have a hand in shaping the narrative retelling of certain events should they fail to meet her satisfaction. McEwan makes this clear in Tom’s invitation for Serena to have editing rights:

With your permission I’d like to publish one day this book on the kitchen

table… A few decades is time enough for you to correct my presumptions on

your solitude, to tell me about the rest of your secret work and what really

happened between you and Max, and time to insert those paddings of the

backward glance: in those days, back then, these were the years of… Or how

about, ‘Now that the mirror tells a different story, I can say it and get it out of

the way. I really was pretty.’ Too cruel? No need to worry, I’ll add nothing

without your say-so. We won’t be rushing into print.49

49 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p.319. 123

An attentive reader knows that these retrospective sentences about being pretty – sentences that this excerpt indicates are not included in Tom’s original novel – are in fact included in what we have read. In chapter one, the quote is included verbatim, but goes further, adding “[m]ore than that. As Jeremy once wrote in a rare effusive letter, I was ‘actually rather gorgeous’.”50 McEwan here asks us to infer that Serena has not only approved of the retrospective remark, but that she has also approved of an enhancement of it, suggesting to us she has had a hand in the novel. However, how much influence we cannot be certain – importantly, it is a quote from a man which reveals the extent of her beauty, not a narcissistic comment by ‘her narrating self’, thus reducing her agency even if she does seemingly approve of the amendment.

Unexpectedly for the reader, the beginning of this final chapter marks the abrupt end to ‘Serena’s’ narration and so, also, to ‘her’ voice and perspective – ‘she’ is never allowed the right of reply to the revelations that occur in the final chapter. Her voice breaks off at the end of chapter twenty-one and we never again hear from her – a character we had grown to know, understand and empathise with. This may rationally be expected given the content of the final chapter, where Tom effectively reveals that the Serena we had come to know was invented – as a narrator, she was a figment of

Tom’s writerly imagination. With this revelation comes the disappearance of the narrating Serena behind a puff of smoke – she was never really there, just a magician’s trick, and now that she has been revealed as less than a ghost, she cannot logically return as narrator. And yet this chasm is still felt – this character narrator, however fictive, is not allowed to finish her own story. Her voice is cut short by the puppeteer who created her before our trusting eyes. Tom’s is the narrative voice – one we have never before heard – that ends the story, and so it is he who claims the story as his own,

50 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p.14. 124 quashing Serena’s existence, twisting the tale on its head so she becomes merely a part of his story, rather than he being merely a part of hers.

It is always the last word of an argument that has the highest status, that is the most sought after – the final word usually tells us who has ‘won’ by silencing the other.

The final word of a narrative is all the more important – it is here that we expect conclusions to be made, where threads of theme are tied up and laced with significance.

The character that owns this final word thus gains the final power of authority. The fact that Tom cannot even allow a fictional voice (ventriloquised by himself) of ‘Serena’ to end the novel, but instead replaces it with his own clear voice, says much about his vengeful feelings and his narcissism, despite his apparent love for Serena demonstrated through his marriage proposal. He is wounded by her subterfuge, and although he claims he is not simply exerting his ‘right’ to vengeance, that rather he is attempting to write a worthy novel from her perspective, he cannot allow even a figment of her to retain authority in the end. In the letter, Tom tells Serena that his letter will be the final chapter of the novel, and so it is – his word is the final word; they cannot both have the final word together, rather he asserts his presence, his dominance, his revenge for her having fooled him by cancelling out ‘her’ voice and replacing it with his own. This is

Tom’s final act of vengeful dominance over the woman who dared hurt him, and it is only through the revelation of the trickery that this hidden story element unexpectedly comes to the fore, lacing the traditional ‘happy’ ending with a sinister undertone.

Multiple Voices

Sweet Tooth is an exercise in varying voices, and it is the unexpected twist that really allows McEwan to explore this technical aspect of the narrative. Genette discusses the intricacies and varied uses of the narratological term ‘voice’, which can

125 involve a range of narrative subjects: “the subject here being not only the person who carries out or submits to the action, but also the person (the same one or another) who reports it, and, if need be, all those people who participate, even though passively, in this narrating activity.”51 My understanding of voice refers not simply to the vocal style of a given character, but rather (like Genette) their agency in narrating a tale. While it is clear that narrators thus have a ‘voice’ in their own narrative, I believe focalised characters may also have a voice if that voice is allowed to penetrate another’s narration

– if we not only see through their perspective (point of view, focalisation), but we also see events understood and interpreted through their consciousness by virtue of this interpretation infiltrating the narrative discourse. Voice is about who owns the telling of a certain story – the agency voice brings is thus always political.

At its heart, Sweet Tooth is a tale about attempting to see events from the angle of another, and the complications this imposes. This, of course, is the business of any novelist, and yet McEwan’s process of attempting to write from another’s point of view is in this novel brought to the fore and highlighted by Tom’s almost identical process. It is a novel about writing because it is a novel about a writer writing a novel which we in turn read. Thus McEwan’s words are Tom’s words are McEwan’s words. The two authors – real and fictional – become inextricably linked, and so as we analyse those of the latter, we cannot help but reflect on those of the former. After all, we read both simultaneously – the narrative audience reads Tom’s while the authorial audience reads

McEwan’s.

This simultaneous dual authorship is complicated enough before we consider that Tom attempts to write the voice not of a fictional invention, but of a ‘real’ person he knows. This brings us back to the notion of fictional truth and the referential status of

51 Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 213. 126 the proper name. Tom attempts to replicate the experiences and thoughts not just of the

Serena he knows (experiencing Serena), but also of a temporally-projected Serena who narrates from her future (our present). Matt Ridley states that “[t]he novelist’s privilege, according to Ian McEwan, it to step inside the consciousness of others, and to lead the reader there like a psychological Virgil… He uses fiction to understand the mind and to explore human nature”52. In having Tom explore and attempt to replicate the mind of

Serena, McEwan is replicating and laying bare for the reader his own process of stepping ‘inside the consciousness of others’ at the same time as exploring the conflicting ‘human nature’ of Tom as author and vengeful lover. Tom is writing using the voice of narrating Serena, a narrator who not only tells of events from her own temporally-enabled position of hindsight, but also attempts to replicate events from the perspective, or point of view, of her younger self (experiencing Serena). To complicate the scenario even further, the reader learns all of this in reverse – first they get to know experiencing and narrating Serena, and only with the trickery revelation do they discover Tom’s agency in inventing Serena’s voice, and thus draw the parallels between

Tom and McEwan.

This is a novel which benefits from trickery by nature of the device abruptly drawing our attention to the exploration of voice contained therein. Were the unexpected element not delivered at the end in ‘twist’ form – were the letter excluded or placed at the beginning, and were Serena’s narrative concluded rather than abruptly interrupted – we would not have finished reading the novel musing on the political nature (and pitfalls) of assuming the voice of others. Who speaks for whom (or rather, who should or is allowed to speak for whom) becomes a much higher stakes question

52 Ridley, Matt. “Foreword: Ian McEwan and the Rational Mind.” In S. Groes (ed.). Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. pp. vii-viii. 127 when we have grown attached to the chimera of a character who actually might have spoken for herself (she and Tom exist in the same storyworld, and so are equally capable of speaking for themselves). The fact that Tom takes it upon himself to write a woman’s voice without her knowledge in order to advance his career is a conceit few feminist-minded readers would be able to overlook. It is the abrupt nature of the revelation of trickery that adds to our shock over Tom’s narcissistic exercise.

Tom appears to be textually generous with Serena’s personal history prior to their meeting, giving over a large chunk of the start of the book to this time in her life.

Tom’s name is not mentioned until page 93 of the 320 pages of text; he does not even appear as an individual until page 139. This seems incredibly generous – as though Tom the author is portraying himself as a mere character in Serena’s tale. However, despite

Tom’s late physical appearance in the novel, he ensures his presence is felt well before we meet him – building up something of a mythology around himself so that when we, with experiencing Serena, finally do meet the “slight figure who rose from his desk, slightly stooped”53, we already know much about him, and specifically, about his appeal.

Tom introduces himself to his reader through his point of pride: his writing. He has Serena read several of his short stories, and some of his political writings, but she does not merely read them in her own time (within a narrative ellipsis) – we go along for the ride. Serena summarises the plotlines of the short stories in detail and includes her responses to them along the way, but it is the generous quoting that reveals Tom’s interest. These quoted sections are clearly demarcated from the summaries by the use of italics. The first story, “This is love”54, concerning a vicar is detailed over nine pages.

The second, a seemingly untitled story about a man and his mannequin lover takes place

53 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 139. 54 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 108. 128 over eight pages only nine pages after the vicar story. Tom’s political writings are summarised on page 138, a mere fourteen pages after the mannequin story and only a page before we meet Tom. Ten pages later comes the twelve page description of

“Pawnography”55, a story about a wife who is a thief. Therein follows a relatively large section of text devoid of Tom’s stories (over thirty pages) before we receive an extremely short description – only a few sentences, and devoid of quotes from Tom’s writing – of the seemingly untitled ape story that so frustrates Serena, on page 193. On the very next page we hear her description of Tom’s first novel (a piece that “amazed me before I started reading”56) – the post-apocalyptic story entitled “From the Somerset

Levels”57 which is detailed over three pages. Twelve pages later Serena reads the last short story entitled “Probably Adultery”58, which is detailed over three pages. Following this we hear mention of Tom’s latest novel a few times, but we do not again hear quotes from his works (this is his secret novel, which is revealed at the end as the first draft of the novel we have just read, and which Serena is not allowed to read until after our novel concludes).

All in all, five short stories, one novel, another novel alluded to, and several political writings are detailed, taking up over 37 pages of this 320 page novel – that is, almost 12% of Serena’s supposed memoir. (If we then take into account the nearly 20 pages that the final letter takes up, this percentage shifts upwards to almost 18% of the entire novel.) That is an incredible length of text dedicated within the ‘memoir’ of one character to the works of one author, when we know Serena reads many novels extremely quickly, and so would be consuming far more than just his works (no other author’s works are delivered in any more meaningful way than a cursory reference).

55 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 160. 56 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 193. 57 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 194. 58 McEwan, Sweet Tooth, p. 208. 129

Clearly, Tom is not content merely to write Serena’s story, but feels compelled to pack it with even more of his own writing, his own voice. Tom believes he is technically proficient enough to write Serena’s voice – her story, her point of view, her memoir.

The inclusion of his own stories (including direct quotes) is the icing on the cake in terms of an egotistical author overtly inserting his own persona into the work he insists is ostensibly about Serena’s voice.

Clearly, Tom’s exercise in exploring another’s voice carries with it the pitfalls of human nature. He is heavily invested in this story – he features as a main character, and he tells it from his deceitful lover’s perspective. He is also hurt, jaded, and filled with feelings of vengeance against Serena, which presumably cloud his ability to selflessly see events through her eyes and thus with her interpretation and understanding. On the other hand, he is also a dedicated young writer who believes this exercise may produce a great novel, and so takes it seriously. Note, however, his objective here: to produce a novel, not a historical account. We cannot presume that he does not invoke the techniques and devices of fiction in order to make the story more dramatic or poetic (indeed, he tells us he does as much in changing “Hove” to “Brighton

Beach”). And yet we cannot excuse these fabrications under the banner of fiction, since he clearly has a vested interest in the way a story concerning him should be told. Tom’s writing exercise alone carries with it the weight of many complex objectives, tensions, and human foibles, before we even begin to consider the paratextual frame of

McEwan’s writing.

Authorial Audience and Trickery, Narrative Audience and a New Storyworld

The establishment of Rabinowitz’s audience understandings for the readership of Sweet Tooth is at first not complicated at all. Initially there is not all that much

130 difference between the basic understandings of the audience functions – the actual audience is presumed to be much like the authorial audience, who has a fair grasp of recent Western history, the reader only has to believe in a storyworld where the entirely- feasible characters and their entirely-feasible events actually occurred to activate the narrative audience, and the reader does not then have much more work to do to activate the ideal narrative audience function, due to a kindly, level-headed, humorous, seemingly-unbiased, and most of all trustworthy narrator. This is the initial set-up for

McEwan’s novel – storyworlds and audience functions are easily activated, and they remain rock solid for the majority of the novel.

However, these audience functions are thrown into chaos when the trickery is revealed in the last chapter of the novel. The authorial audience function must now incorporate an understanding of the trickery subgenre. This audience function may now appreciate McEwan’s manipulation of language, text, and reader as ‘skilful’. If the reader has read McEwan’s other books (including the trickery in Atonement), the authorial audience may incorporate the author’s recent history of trickery. It is important to note that this appreciation occurs solely on the level of authorial audience because such a literary benefit can be appreciated only by the function which acknowledges the author. As soon as we delve into the narrative and ideal narrative audience functions, the author is lost (banished) from audience consciousness and so, even when the author intrudes into this realm, there can be no appreciation of McEwan on these audience levels (even if these functions can appreciate Tom’s trickery).

Trickery throws the narrative audience function into utter chaos. Gone is the surety of a storyworld in which exist Tom, Serena, and their clear, joint tale. The reader must adjust to a new storyworld, but complications occur because too many storyworlds open up as options; only one can be picked in order for equilibrium within the reader to

131 resume, yet that reader cannot know which is the ‘right’ one, and so is flummoxed by the options. The simplest storyworld would be one where Old Serena actually did write her own memoir (which is abruptly cut off for some unexplained reason), that Tom really did write a note to Young Serena, and that the reference to Tom’s letter ending the novel he wrote in Serena’s voice is purely coincidental to the inclusion of the two documents side by side in that order. The problems thrown up by the trickery would be, in Rabinowitz’s words, “external to the world of the novel” for this narrative audience understanding.59 That is, the narrative audience would not care about the trickery because it would not be trickery at all; nothing in the storyworld in which this readerly function believed has changed – the same characters and events still exist, the same narrator still exists for the majority of the novel (only to be followed by Tom’s narration through his note in the final chapter). This storyworld is plausible; however, it is extremely problematic and unlikely because it makes for a very dull and strangely constructed book – one with no trickery, without a complete ending by a still-existing but strangely absent narrator – and can therefore be seen as a misreading. Most readers,

I believe, will reject this possible storyworld, and so look towards one where the problems are instead internal to the world of the story in order to make sense of the trickery.

There are at least three other possible storyworlds (and potentially many more) created by the unexpected twist which acknowledge that the trickery has a transformative effect on the novel:

a) All characters and story elements remain absolutely true, but the narrative voice

of Old Serena was invented and written by Tom.

59 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 138. 132

b) The narrative voice of Old Serena was invented and written by Tom (with

editorial approval by the real Serena), plus all story elements and characters are

thrown into doubt, but more or less believed as approximately accurate.

c) The narrative voice of Old Serena was invented and written by Tom, plus

everything (all characters and story) were completely fabricated by Tom, and

this narrative audience can only be sure of his existence as a writer (the narrative

audience believes there was no Serena or Operation Sweet Tooth – it was all just

a story written by Tom the author).

The reader of McEwan’s novel is intentionally left in an unsure state – where once the storyworld was stable, we are suddenly provided with multiple possible storyworlds and we cannot be sure which is the only ‘right’ one. The narrative audience process has been stripped of its teller (the narrating Serena) and provided with another – an implicit fictional author (Tom) who oversees the work (though Tom never directly addresses us as Old Serena did). We finish the novel wondering ‘what really happened’, which is a direct result of our inability to know which is the definitive storyworld when our ultimate wish is to be certain of the ‘correct’ world. We are troubled by the author’s problematising of this seemingly natural step of reading fiction. Online commenter RH

Walters reveals that “the twist made my heart drop out of the story”, because he felt a reluctance to reassess the novel following the storyworld-altering revelation: “I don’t want to begin again from another perspective”60. This comment points to the expectation readers have that their investment will be rewarded by met expectations, and such expectations do not include unexpected twists that dissolve the known storyworld. Some readers find this twist thrilling, but clearly RH Walters is one for whom the work involved in recalculating a new storyworld is just too much. Online

60 RH Walters. Reader review on page: “Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.” On Goodreads. 133 commenter Teresa admits she felt a “thrill” at the revelation of trickery, but tells us she

“can’t decide if this book is annoying, clever, or both”61. For all readers, the narrative audience function is flummoxed; however, the authorial audience function can be delighted at the textual manipulation, and it is these conflicting feelings from the two most contrasting functions that create turbulence in the reader.

At the same time as we scramble to establish a definitive storyworld and so focus our attention on this area, the trickery draws our attention in the opposite direction, towards the artifice of storyworlds and hence of what we read, to the artifice of all narrative (to our ‘silliness’ in wanting to believe as the narrative audience need do), to the textual creator of the artifice (Tom), and hence the paratextual creator of the artifice (McEwan), the one who is absent from the narrative audience processing. Ergo, while the narrative audience scrambles to decide on a new storyworld, the author is forefront of our authorial audience functioning. The narrative audience struggle to amend the storyworld makes the reader more aware of the gap between the processes of that audience and those of the authorial audience, and therefore more aware, as

Rabinowitz claims, “of the novel as art, as construct.”62 In his analysis of another problematic text, Nabakov’s Pale Fire, Rabinowitz claims that this awareness makes it difficult for many readers to be moved by the book. I would argue that this is not the case for Sweet Tooth – for Pale Fire, the problems occur right throughout the text, whereas in Sweet Tooth they only occur right at the end. Thus in reading McEwan’s novel we have more time to invest in the story and characters, and so we are not as willing to give up that connection come the trickery. We have invested and we must make sense of the trickery to satisfy this investment. We lose narrating Serena, and we mourn that loss of a familiar persona. We also lose something of experiencing Serena

61 Teresa. Reader review on page: “Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.” On Goodreads. 62 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 139. 134

(‘knowing’ she has been penned by another rather than herself). We mourn these losses when Tom interrupts the text with his letter. Several readers have commented online on the effect the book had of making them think about it long after they had finished reading – Kim tells us “[m]ore than a day after finishing the audiobook, I’m still thinking about the writing and the characters.”63 The fact that we think about this novel long after we have finished reading it – still trying to complete a definitive narrative audience understanding so we can know what really happened – proves that we have invested in it, we are moved by it, and this trickery is very troubling.

We should not, however, neglect the significance of the shift in ideal narrative audience processes as having an important impact on our narrative audience choices. As mentioned, the ideal narrative audience understanding is at first much akin to that of the narrative audience. This understanding disappears with the extinction of the initial narrator (Old Serena). It is replaced by an understanding that is much further from the narrative audience storyworld choices than the previous gap between the two audience positions: one who believes Tom is a gifted writer who is absolutely justified in what he does (writing Serena’s voice for her) and deserves a happy ending. Rabinowitz points out that the “distance between the narrative audience and the ideal narrative audience tends to lie along an axis of ethics or interpretation.”64 While the ideal narrative audience agrees absolutely with the narrator, the narrative audience is free to judge the narrator. With the sudden distancing between the two audience positions that occurs as a result of the revelation of trickery comes a fair amount of judgment of Tom – it creates some form of ill-will towards him, especially given we now know Serena’s praise of his writing (which we had initially taken as her actual opinion, freely given) may have actually been his invention. The fact that his intrusion takes the form of the unexpected

63 Kim. Reader review on page: “Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.” On Goodreads. 64 Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction”, p. 135. 135 twist – the unexpected and unnecessary element – adds to the lack of welcome some readers may feel towards Tom. Whilst not all readers will finish the novel hating Tom, I believe this distancing cannot help but create some negative feelings towards the character that (by delaying revelation of his authorship to the last moment), seems to swan in, quash a narrator we knew and loved, play havoc with our understanding of a character we had sided with from the beginning, and roughly insert himself (and his ego) in their place (not just in the textual temporal present, but also retrospectively for all we have read). This judgment no doubt has an impact on which storyworld we lean towards, but in no way can it indicate beyond doubt the ‘correct choice’. If anything, our frustration at being refused an obvious storyworld is compounded by any negative judgment of Tom we may conduct. However, the nature of trickery – that of the manipulation of text and reader, of the written word – draws our attention to its artifice

(both Tom’s artifice, and the artifice required by McEwan in Tom’s creation) and so we are pushed and pulled between our desire to believe in one story truth (the narrative audience) and our appreciation of the artifice of the author (authorial audience).

It is the nature of trickery – the author’s intrusion into the place from which s/he is banished (the realm the narrative audience inhabits) – that is particularly shocking and even potentially abhorrent. This is why narrative trickery that impacts upon and/or changes the elements of the storyworld of the narrative is a particularly risky option for an author. If not pulled off with skill and ultimate reward for the actual audience, then the author will end up completely alienating his/her readership.

Ironically, the reward for the reader in Sweet Tooth seems to be the very thing that could be rather upsetting – that is, the multiple possible storyworlds and thus potential narrative audience understandings. On the whole, rather than this choice baffling and alienating us, we are intrigued by just how many possibilities have opened up by the

136 revelation of one single trick. We are invited to become a part of the story, to choose

(while the decisive making of that choice is ultimately delayed, deflected, problemetised). The craft of the story teller is at work here, where we see a simple technical device resulting in far-reaching ramifications, opening up room for many possible interpretations. We do not forget that the author has brazenly and openly manipulated the realm he should not be obvious within (that assessed by the narrative audience) – but most of us do ultimately forgive McEwan because the effect seems worthwhile (it delivers a ‘good book’).

Newspaper reviewer Scott Stossel comes to the crux of the conflicting feelings evoked by the unexpected twist when he says “[t]he reader’s response (or at least this reader’s response) to the trick was a mixture of awe at the author’s cleverness and chagrin at having been so egregiously manipulated. Is McEwan merely playing devilish games at our expense? But the novel’s emotional and intellectual satisfactions outweigh its frustrations.”65 Online blogger Lacey N. Dunham claims that McEwan sets up the trickery with such skill and lack of malice that we forgive him his manipulation:

“[w]hen the big reveal happens, I’m willing to accept McEwan’s tricks because of his careful, earlier staging down to the minute detail”, and points out that “McEwan takes advantage of that grey space [the possibilities of the artistic imagination and, in tandem, the reader’s willingness to get lost in the writer’s created world] – though thankfully not of the reader”66. So although the trickery throws us into turmoil, many readers do deem it to be ‘worth it’. A simple narrative whose main theme is literal subterfuge (spying and deceit) becomes a tale where subterfuge is embedded within the narrative itself. Just as

Tom and Serena fool and deceive each other, McEwan fools and deceives us, leaving us

65 Stossel, Scott. ““Sweet Tooth” by Ian McEwan.” On The Boston Globe. 8th December 2012. http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2012/12/08/review-sweet-tooth-ian- mcewan/gGlEarjDcDvhBfY0jsOPSN/story.html. Accessed 25th March 2013. 66 Dunham, Lacey N. “Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan.” On Full Stop. 137 ultimately unsure about how things ‘really’ sit. Through the trickery carried out

‘against’ us, we become intricately and actively involved in McEwan’s work of art, forcing our dual, conflicting narrative and authorial audience processes (as well as the ideal narrative audience process) to work even harder in order to complete the act of communication.

Subterfuge and Voice, the Reader and Communication

It is the temporal process of reading that McEwan relies upon for the success of his trickery. We, as readers, must at first invest in events and characters (especially experiencing and narrating Serenas) as though the novel was a conventional work. The solid, unchanging storyworld allows our narrative audience function to complete this task easily. As reading time progresses, our met expectations deepen our trust that the author will deliver on the promises of the book. It is only through our deep empathy with Serena and our trust in the author that the trickery revelation can at once be so shocking and also keep us reading to the end. Our narrative audience demands to know what happened to Serena, while our authorial audience suddenly has work to do in reinterpreting all events and characters through this new screen of understanding. This additional, unexpected element suddenly lays bare the complexity of perspective involved in the tale, allowing us to reframe what we thought was a simple, straightforward narrative as one of many new narrative possibilities. Through the use of trickery in Sweet Tooth – specifically that of the unexpected twist – McEwan manages to remove a solid storyworld and thus throw our storyworld-seeking narrative audience into unsettled chaos, make our authorial audience suddenly embark upon extra work in order to make sense of the novel, cast doubt onto the solid traits of a known character

(experiencing and narrating Serena), reveal the narcissism and complex objectives of

138 another (Tom), and draw light on the challenges inherent in writing perspective in the process of creating narrative fiction. The unexpected twist suddenly and acutely draws our focus to the subterfuge carried out by Tom – his politically-loaded act of subsuming and writing another’s voice.

All of which is achieved by the late addition of an element which is unexpected for the norm-conditioned reading mind. The unexpected twist destabilises us – having a potentially far-reaching impact on our reading experience and thus our feelings towards the novel in which it is employed – precisely because it contains an additional element, something that would not occur in conventional fictional forms. By the very nature of the unexpected twist, the unexpected element is always intended to be revealed in-text, and so the author of such a form uses our expectations not against us, but instead in the hope of providing a narrative with an extra level of interpretation, and so (hopefully) an extra layer of intellectual enjoyment. After all, as competent readers we are aware of the rare convention of trickeries, so once revealed, we use this knowledge to make sense of the work – knowledge of trickeries thus then informs our reactions.

Such trickeries require the conventional reading process in order to shock. The fact that they do shock us proves the conventional reading process exists. They are aberrations – their authors manipulate us by using our expectations against us. As readers, our narrative audience function needs a solid storyworld. The trickery involved with the unexpected twist problematises the easy functioning of this part of our processing, while simultaneously providing thought-provoking work for the authorial audience function which accepts the author’s presence and skill. The tension within us – that between our grasping narrative audience and our thrilled authorial audience – produces our strong readerly reactions. How skillful our authorial audience deems the trickery (and how much this outweighs our angst-ridden narrative audience emotions)

139 dictates whether our reaction is strongly positive or negative. Trickeries such as the unexpected twist tell us much about the active roles and duties required of the reader during the communication process of fictional narrative. An amendment to the narrative communication model in order to acknowledge the agential roles of the reader is warranted. However, more importantly, we must understand that the conventional readerly engagement with the text requires a range of simultaneous, often paradoxical processes – mental functions which allow narrative communication to be completed, and which are severely taxed in cases of unexpected twists.

I will now turn to novels which frustrate readerly expectations in order to more closely examine the crucial importance of storyworld construction (the process carried out by the narrative audience) during the act of communication.

140

Chapter 3:

The Frustrated-Expectations Novel and the Storyworld

Some authors deliberately or inadvertently invoke a specific genre in their works only to later deny the expectations reasonably created by that genre, as based on convention. This comes as a surprise because the reader expects certain narrative elements as based on generic convention, only to have these remain unfulfilled.

Different from the unexpected twist, which contains an additional unexpected element, this type of trickery instead fails to fulfill the promise of genre by lacking an expected element. Later in this chapter I will explore one such novel in detail: John Fowles’ 1969 work, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. This novel is a curious example of the subgenre since it not only denies the reader a single, resolute ending, but also contains generic frustrations in other locations throughout the novel. Fowles first invokes and ratifies a strong storyworld, then places explicit textual warnings throughout the narrative which would presumably clue in a competent reader in regards to its impending genre denial.

In fact, surprised reader responses reveal these signs are largely ignored, proving the overwhelming power of the initially-invoked genre.

In this chapter I will argue that novels which frustrate readerly expectations, especially in regards to the ending of a novel, can be clearly understood in relation to storyworld theory. My focus shifts away from storyworlds as constructed solely in relation to the text or real world, and concentrates instead on the role of genre. Various generic (and thus stereotypical) storyworld schemas exist in the reader’s mind based on their experiences with other texts (both literature and visual media); as the reader makes a generic classification of the text (either before or during the first stages of reading),

141 the corresponding generic storyworld is applied to the text like a template and subtly tweaked as needed in response to textual cues. It is these generic storyworlds and their associated ‘rules’ that form many of the expectations held by the reader – expectations which can be manipulated or even denied by a cunning (or ignorant) author. I will argue that cases of novelistic fiction in which readerly expectations are flouted explicitly demonstrate why we must refocus on the relationship between genre and storyworld construction. Similar to the impact of Wayne C. Booth’s career-author1, the generic storyworld plays a major role in how a reader interprets and interacts with a novel, and helps to explain how it is that, even with numerous textual clues, the author may still carry out a trickery by frustrating readerly expectations. Thus I argue that in order to understand the act of narrative communication, we must look to the generic storyworld as an integral means by which an author conveys a plethora of unstated information.

Possible Worlds, Fictional Worlds, and The Storyworld

The concept of the storyworld has developed through a number of stages. From its beginnings in the philosophy of possible worlds, the concept was then applied to literary works in the form of fictional worlds – various literary scholars supplying differing hypotheses concerning how these literary worlds are constructed (two notable influences were speech act theory and mimesis). Although most scholars today would reject both these theories as inadequate in regards to fully explaining the concept (many positioning their theories now in relation to semantics), the exact nature of ‘the storyworld’ of narrative fiction continues to be a contentious subject of rich debate.

Possible worlds theory describes the notion of there being infinite possible worlds in addition to the actual world. As the theory was applied to literature, it was

1 Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. p. 431. 142 tweaked to accommodate the clearly exceptional nature of fictional texts in comparison with the real world and all its potential substitutes. Lubomír Doležel maintains that

“[p]ossible worlds do not await discovery in some remote or transcendent depository but are constructed by the creative activities of human minds and hands.”2 To extend this notion from philosophy to literature, Doležel postulates that “[f]ictional worlds of literature are a specific kind of possible worlds. They are artifacts produced by textual poiesis and preserved and circulating in the medium of fictional texts.”3 Fictional worlds, then, are constructions of human minds just as possible worlds are, but with one exception – the fictional world is both dictated by, and recorded in, the text. In support of this notion, Marie-Laure Ryan states, “the semantic domain projected by the literary text is a non-actual possible world or an alternative possible world”4. Ruth Ronan explains this development from possible worlds to fictional worlds:

Although possible worlds talk marks the birth of a new type of discourse on

fictionality within the literary discipline, fictional worlds, unlike possible

worlds, manifest a world-model based on the notion of parallelism rather than

ramification. Possible worlds are based on a logic of ramification determining

the range of possibilities that emerge from an actual state of affairs; fictional

worlds are based on a logic of parallelism that guarantees their autonomy in

relation to the actual world.5

2 Doležel, Lubomír. “Possible Worlds of Fiction and History.” New Literary History, Vol. 29, No. 4, Critics without Schools? (Autumn 1998). p. 787. 3 Doležel, “Possible Worlds”, p. 787. 4 Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction.” Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn 1991). p. 553. 5 Ronen, Ruth. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. p. 8. 143

That is, fictional worlds are alternative worlds as created by the fictional text, and are completely independent of the actual world. Rather than relating what might have been

(as applies to possible worlds), fictional worlds relate “what did occur and what could have occurred in fiction.”6 This independence of the fictional world from the actual world is the foundation of Ronen’s argument that the mimetic view of fictional worlds

(that they are created based on, and rely directly upon the actual world) is outdated – the fictional world forms autonomously from the real world, and has a different function, so the mimetic approach cannot be justified.7

This rejection of mimesis is echoed by Thomas G. Pavel, who claims that

“while it is right to see mimesis as essential for understanding what fiction is, it is nevertheless wrong to see mimesis as adequate for understanding what fiction does.”8

Agreeing with both Dorrit Cohn and Doležel, who “both argue against the reduction of fiction to imitation”9 and so in turn reject mimesis as the complete explanation for fictional worlds, Pavel also rejects the closely-linked speech act theory approach to fictional worlds. He argues that this theory is fundamentally flawed, since it is applied to literature simply because literature is comprised of language, but narrative fiction cannot but fail the speech act tests, since it has a different aim to that of speech acts occurring in the actual world and often includes acts that never occur in the real world.

Pavel explains that the conclusion of speech act theory is that narrative fiction is merely imitating real world acts – it has a purely mimetic function. This is a theory Dorrit Cohn counterclaims, stating that the major exception to the rule (the fact that fiction often narrates “life as experienced in the privacy of a character’s consciousness”10) is

6 Ronen, p. 9. 7 Ronen, pp. 96-107. 8 Pavel, Thomas G. “Fiction and Imitation.” Poetics Today, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall 2000). p. 521. 9 Pavel, “Fiction and Imitation”, p. 524. 10 Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. p. 23. 144 disregarded by these theorists, and so the theory cannot hold as adequate. As an alternative to these approaches, Pavel posits another option, which “sees fictional worlds as alternative worlds, and fictional statements as referring to states of affairs that occur in such alternative worlds.”11 Fictional worlds, then, are worlds as inferred by fictional narratives, which are creatively formulated in the minds of both author and reader. These fictional worlds retain their integrity, as distinct from, and independent of, the actual, or real, world. The storyworld is thus the world created by an individual text

– the fictional world that is specific to that text, but related in a parallel way to other fictional worlds, and the actual world.

In my Introduction I outlined David Herman’s theory that readers are compelled, as part of the reading process, to construct the storyworld, which is a

“spatiotemporally structured” environment in which are embedded the characters and their story12 (see Readerly Assumptions I: Fictional Truth). Most scholars would agree that readers construct such worlds during the reading process, but there is some disagreement over the way these storyworlds are formed, and their completeness.

Richard Walsh takes issue with the idea of an entire constructed world, addressing the problem of incompleteness, which he says “is a problem for fictional worlds theory because the text of a fiction cannot be expected to fully specify a world, nor even provide a sufficient basis for comprehensive inferential process.”13 This problem of incompleteness could be addressed by possible-worlds theory, which essentially claims that the gaps left by the text are filled with the reader’s reality. Marie-Laure Ryan describes the theory of possible-worlds, whereby readers construct their own version of

11 Pavel, “Fiction and Imitation”, p. 528. 12 Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. pp. 13-14. 13 Walsh, Richard. “The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality.” In James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. p. 153. 145 the ‘truth’ of the ‘actual world’. She explains that possible-worlds theory rests on the principle of minimal departure:

... the principle states that when readers construct fictional worlds, they fill in

the gaps... in the text by assuming the similarity of the fictional world to their

own experiential reality. This model can only be overruled by the text itself;

thus, if a text mentions a blue deer, the reader will imagine an animal that

resembles her idea of real deer in all respects other than the colour. The

statement ‘deer have four legs’ will be true of this fictional world, but the

statement ‘deer have a single horn, and it is made of pearl’ will be false,

unless specified by the text.14

Importantly, Ryan claims there are any number of possible-worlds that stem from this actual world. She also comments on the tendency of postmodernist works to manipulate the readerly reliance on this ‘truth’. Walsh argues against the principle of minimal departure, maintaining that it cannot tell us about every specific element of the storyworld – for example, does a unique character (who does not exist in the real world and so has no reality-double from which to be duplicated) have a liver? Walsh claims such information is irrelevant, and so argues for the principle of relevance, whereby only information relevant to the discourse should be provided or inferred. Specifically, he claims this comes in the form of relevance to the reader: “The horizon of the reader’s encounter with a fiction is determined, not by what it is possible to infer, but by what is worth inferring: the reader will not pursue inferential reasoning beyond the point at

14 Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Possible-worlds theory.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Archived on Journal Archives of Steven H. Cullinane. http://www.log24.com/log05/saved/050822- PossWorlds.html. Accessed 26th February 2011. 146 which it ceases to seem relevant to the particulars of the narrative, in a specific context of interpretation.”15 This is clearly a contentious field without consensus.

In this chapter I wish to shift the focus away from storyworlds as constructed solely in relation to either specific textual descriptions, or to the real world, and concentrate instead on the role of genre. I must stress here that I am not suggesting readers do not draw on real-world knowledge or cognitive schema when constructing storyworlds (this information is in fact very pertinent to the construction of all storyworlds), nor that textual information is irrelevant (it is vital to the detail of the storyworld), but rather that these avenues of information do not constitute the most important or far-reaching elements of storyworld formation. Various generic (and thus stereotypical) storyworld schemas exist in the reader’s mind based on their experiences with other texts (both literature and visual media); as the reader makes a generic classification of the text, the corresponding generic storyworld is applied to that text and subtly tweaked as needed in response to textual cues. Here I am applying Monika

Fludernik’s third level of cognitive framing from her account of narrativization.

Fludernik points to genres as “large-scale cognitive frames” which are acquired through literary exposure. These generic models, she claims, “decisively influence… [the audience’s] reading experience.”16 I am zoning in specifically on the storyworlds aligned with genre. It is these generic storyworlds and their associated ‘rules’ that form many of the expectations held by the reader – the author using the generic schema to invoke myriad, complex associated data without having to spell this information out in- text. Of course, this sounds much like the principle of minimal departure – the only seeming difference being that details are auto-filled by a generic storyworld rather than the actual world. However, this is not entirely accurate – rather than background

15 Walsh, “Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality”, p. 154. 16 Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. p. 32. 147 information (that deemed ‘irrelevant’, in Walsh’s terms) exactly mimicking an entire world, it is more a hazy swathe of fuzzy information – a vague, limited (and thus potentially incomplete) world which brings with it certain expectations. Vague because it is irrelevant (until focused upon), limited because it relies on a reader’s interactions with other narratives in that genre (unlike our interaction with the actual world, which is complete, our exposure to generic narratives is relatively limited). Thus my theory brings together certain principles of both minimal departure and relevance, by uniting them through the missing element of genre.

Plot and Expectations

There is a difference between what I will term readerly expectations and readerly wishes. The former are based on experience – familiarity with conventional narrative practice which allows the reader to predict based on probability; the latter are simply the desire for a certain eventuality based on personal, subjective preferences.

There are any number of reasons why individual readers may have their wishes denied, and it is not the domain of this chapter to explore these since they so clearly fall within the largely immeasurable realm of personal, individual, unique subjectivity. In this chapter I will be exploring the more common, shared objections that occur in most readers towards authorial refusals to conform to expectations as formed by literary practice and ratified by the author often through book-long textual cues. These denied expectations can occur anywhere in a novel, though due to the time taken to solidify expectations, these breaches most frequently manifest near the end of the text.

Many theorists have outlined the drive of readers as they read through a text towards the ending. In his seminal work, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode talks of the human obsession with endings, which manifests itself, he claims, in a great

148 variety of fictions. Kermode argues that novels work towards the end from the very outset, and it is the end which is both foreshadowed by the content of the beginning and middle, and also paradoxically forces selection and organisation of the material of these earlier sections. Kermode claims that “[a]ll… plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning.”17 It is the end, then, that drives the reader forward through the work as they search for that final ‘coming together’ – that section which will make sense of the whole. Kermode maintains that “[a]ll plots have something in common with prophecy, for they must appear to educe from the prime matter of the situation the forms of a future.”18 The plot thus becomes the means by which the reader navigates their way through a text towards the end. Kermode claims that a novel could never just be a series of unrelated events, no matter what the authorial intention, since it is not in the nature of readers to do anything but find connections between events or sequences in their path towards the end: “the making of a novel is partly the achievement of readers as well as writers, and readers would constantly attempt to supply the very connections that the writer’s programme suppresses.”19 The reader, then, is spurred on towards the end, the final meaning-making point, by means of making connections between plot elements. There is thus a constant drive through the novel to reach the penultimate moment, both spatio-temporally, and in terms of significance of the work as a whole.

Peter Brooks in his influential work, Reading for the Plot, outlines what he terms ‘plotting’ as “that which moves us forward as readers of the narrative text, that which makes us – like the heroes of the text often, and certainly like their authors – want and need plotting, seeking through the narrative text as it unfurls before us a

17 Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. p. 46. 18 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, p. 83. 19 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, p. 139. 149 precipitation of shape and meaning, some simulacrum of understanding of how meaning can be construed over and through time.”20 Plotting throughout the text seems, then, to drive readers towards the ending – towards the point at which the narrative will be expected to tie up themes and storylines in order to provide overall meaning for the text.

In this way the ending almost becomes synonymous with the ‘meaning’ or ‘message’ – the point of the narrative (and I am very aware here of my use of the word ‘point’, a word which is loaded with connotations concerning Grice’s conversational implicatures during acts of communication21). The plotting of a text, as an inherent part of the storyworld, provides the reader with certain expectations in regards to the ending, and novels which fail to adhere to these expectations generate frustration in their readership

– the point, it seems, is lost.

Generic Categorisation

In order to understand generic categorisation, I believe we must draw on theories of narrative communication, since categorisation is at the heart of the readerly expectations relied upon by the author in the process of textual communication.

Specifically, I will here invoke the slightly corrupted version of Peter J. Rabinowitz’s authorial and narrative audiences22 which I have been using throughout this thesis – groups which he explains readers must (metaphorically) join in order to process fiction, but which, as I have previously outlined, I see not as social audiences so much as dual functioning processes within the reader’s mind (see Introduction and Chapter Two).

20 Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. p. 35. 21 Grice, H.P. “Logic and Conversation”. In P. Cole. and J. Morgan (eds.). Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Arts. New York: Academic Press, 1975. pp. 41-58. 22 Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn 1977). pp. 121-141. 150

The authorial audience uses genre categorisation in order to predict the outcomes of the narrative, and therefore formulate readerly expectations. This audience is lexically- and semantically-preoccupied, categorising based on formal features in the pursuit of making meaningful sense of the work. If the reader has knowledge of the author’s other works, the authorial audience will also access Booth’s concept of the career-author, and thus invoke the implications about textual ‘type’ based on the author’s history of favoured genres. In ‘typing’ based on formal features, as well as paratextual elements, the authorial audience affixes a genre label to the text, and so, in knowing how certain genres stereotypically play out in terms of plot (the ‘rules’ of the genre), will go on to predict how a text will likely progress.

The reader (employing both narrative and authorial audience processes) allows this generic classification to guide the narrative audience function in its role of imagining (and believing in) the storyworld with recourse to previous generic imagery.

The narrative audience’s storyworld does not need to be complete, and my claim is that in most readers it is not complete – the reader does not, for example, need to actively think about what exact shade of green each leaf on every single tree is within that world.

This, of course, touches on Walsh’s theory of relevance, whereby he argues that readers only infer storyworld details which they deem relevant to the narrative.23 However, although the reader does not consciously think about every detail of a storyworld, I seek to prove that these are filled-in by the reader in an implicit, intertextual process. That is, that irrelevant background information is provided in a sort of blanket ‘sweep’ from other storyworlds we have previously imagined (as invoked by literature) or seen (in visual media). This is our ‘cheat sheet’ if you will – our base model imagery which is drawn upon and adapted when reading books of similar genres. I am arguing that the

23 Walsh, “Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality”. 151 storyworld is not always imagined with exclusive recourse to the real world or purely from textual cues – rather, textual cues allow us to generically classify and then draw up a storyworld in relation to other conceived storyworlds whose stories appear in similar worlds (and such storyworlds, when first created, would have relied to various extents on the real world).

Until we read across a wide range of genres, it may be that we see all storyworlds as fairly similar. As early readers, we must begin to group the types of storyworlds we see, and so learn a ‘type’ for each genre, which can then be endlessly applied. Once the genre is identified, the narrative audience uses it as a shortcut – categorising the text as similar to others within the genre, and using this as a means to auto-fill a similar storyworld which can then be amended as the text gives specific detail. Thus, the reader engages the dual functions of authorial and narrative audiences in order to generically classify, to invoke previously-held generic schema to fill in the vague storyworld detail, to use this generic storyworld to make predictions based on convention, and in so doing to form readerly expectations which the author relies upon for full, expansive narrative comprehension.

What happens, then, when a literary work does not adhere to genre, when the text suddenly and without warning frustrates our expectations? Such trickeries place the reader in a precarious position. If there are two ways to read a sentence, we naturally

(with the least effort) choose the interpretation which conforms with the category

(genre) we currently hold. As Fludernik states in her theory of narrativization:

When readers are confronted with potentially unreadable narratives, texts that

are radically inconsistent, they cast about for ways and means of recuperating

these texts as narratives – motivated by the generic markers that go with the

152

book. They therefore attempt to re-cognize what they find in the text in terms

of the natural telling or experiencing or viewing parameters, or they try to

recuperate the inconsistencies in terms of actions and event structures at the

most minimal level. This process of narrativization, of making something a

narrative by the sheer act of imposing narrativity on it, needs to be located in

the dynamic reading process where such interpretive recuperations hold

sway.24

Fludernik is writing of the macro level here, of how readers make sense of sequences of sentences, however seemingly unrelated, by recourse to narrative – by imposing narrative on them, and thus imposing links between them. Fludernik states that this happens as “motivated by the generic markers that go with the book”, but I take her assertion a step further by stressing even more the impact of genre on interpretation; generic markers not only help the reader narrativise a complex text, they (fairly obviously) help guide a reader to categorise a text as belonging to a certain genre, and thus to make judgments on anything that poses ambiguous uncertainty within that text.

It is this generic categorisation that certain authors play upon, using the reader’s automatic assumptions about the text as based on genre in order to subvert expectations.

Cases of novelistic fiction in which readerly expectations are flouted explicitly demonstrate why we must refocus on the relationship between genre and storyworld construction. This focus allows us to see afresh that the storyworld is a key tool in complex narrative communication: it is not just a means through which the reader ‘sees’ the fictional world, but also a shorthand code which the author invokes in order to aid narrative communication without recourse to explicit instructions. In order to ascertain

24 Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, p. 25. 153 how generic categorisation informs communication by acting as a shorthand for a swathe of information, I will now turn briefly to two works which contain a specific form of genre-based trickery: that involving an ending which frustrates readerly expectations.

Endings and Expectations

Novels which frustrate our expectations in regards to endings do not always disappoint us. Sometimes we can overlook this betrayal of the narrative contract if it is carried out with authorial skill. For the most part, however, these types of trickeries do seem to disappoint readers, leaving us with quite negative feelings towards not just the story, but also its creator – the author. After all, to expect certain endings is to be a competent reader. The genre of mystery seems to be the most frequent culprit of the frustrated-expectations trickery, and that may be because a very specific, genre-ruled ending is expected for a successful mystery. Subverting expectations in this genre is so simple because the rules are so strict and specific – rules which make it possible for the authorial audience to strictly classify the genre of the work as mystery. Such classification only works if the great majority of the work (especially that of the beginning) conforms stringently to the genre. As such, the subversion contained within a trickery in a mystery must happen at the end of the novel, otherwise the reader does not have the textual reading time to assess the text and first classify it based on its specific generic markers.

Van Badham’s 2010 young adult novel, Burnt Snow, is an example of a book that fails to deliver on its contractual promise – a failure that, according to many readers, does not ‘pay off’ (it is not ‘worth it’). Burnt Snow is a teen paranormal romance which closely follows in the generic tradition of the hugely popular and

154 successful Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer25. The latter has created a template for many similar narratives: such stories are set in high schools in the present day, involve a female narrator (often new to the school) who longs to be loved and who is attracted to a strange, almost-outcast male (a relationship which eventually turns into an intense love affair), and detail strange paranormal elements which are the catalysts for a major action sequence, or battle, at the end of the novel. This battle is resolved with ‘good’

(that is, the girl and her boyfriend) winning the day, and everyone relaxing for the time being (with a slow-burning, not immediate threat still hanging overhead to provide a three- or four-book narrative story arc). Burnt Snow follows this formula of storyworld and plotting almost to a tee. As online blogger Lissy Ann states in her review of the novel, “Burnt Snow is a young adult fiction novel that firmly ticks all the boxes.”26 The work seems to be aimed squarely at an audience infatuated with the genre popularised by Twilight. This, of course, means that Badham is aware her readership – taught a category by previous novels, which is ratified by the majority of Badham’s own writing in Burnt Snow – has certain precise expectations in regards to plot, and especially in regards to the ending of such a novel.

Burnt Snow is driven by a mystery that slowly unravels, ending in a highly explosive action sequence at the end of the novel. It is the first part of a (yet to be published) trilogy, and so we must expect overarching threads not to be resolved in this novel. However, this novel itself in no way resolves – in fact, it cuts out mid-final- action sequence. During this sequence, with dramatic action (a mortally-dangerous battle scene) and high stakes (the young lover at risk, the heroine putting herself in

25 Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2005; Meyer, Stephanie. New Moon. New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2006; Meyer, Stephanie. Eclipse. New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2007; and Meyer, Stephanie. Breaking Dawn. New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. 26 Ann, Lissy. “Lissy Ann’s Review of ‘Burnt Snow’ by Van Badham.” On Lissy Ann... Writer. 14th June 2013. http://lissyann.com/2013/06/14/lissy-anns-review-of-burnt-snow-by-van-badham/. Accessed 9th December 2014. 155 harm’s way to save him), heroine Sophie is suddenly removed from the Australian battleground to a dusty room in Sweden:

My skin burned… his skin burned… our burning flesh bubbled and spat even

as the cause of the pain was still between our hands. Tears poured out of my

eyes as I pressed my fingers even more fiercely into the back of his [boyfriend

Brody’s] hand.

Looking up, I saw my mother chant her prayer with a murderous

expression. More storms were above us now; bolts of lightning rippled through

black clouds that were pregnant with rain. Still I clutched Brody’s hand. […]

Rain started to fall.

“I won’t leave him!” I screamed [...]

She just smiled. Her hair was flowing out behind her, amber curls

bouncing at her shoulders. She was young and ancient, wise and naive. Blue

magic crackled over my body and Brody’s as I kept my hand pressed into the

pendant.

My mother saw what I was doing. She nodded to herself. A word howled

out of her mouth that I could not understand.

Then a whoosh, a snatching. I felt blood spray from my hand – it had

been ripped out of Brody’s and now I was falling – or flying, I couldn’t tell.

[…]

Then the rush stopped. […]

I was naked on a pine floor.27

27 Badham, Van. Burnt Snow. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2010. pp. 677-678. Original stylistic ellipses marked as “…”, my ellipses marked as “[…]”. 156

A few short paragraphs later the novel ends with an unknown boy telling Sophie,

“‘You’re in Finland.’”28 The above climactic scene brims with intensity, Badham calling into play the dramatic atmosphere invoked by the impending doom of a thunderstorm in order to enhance the scene of the tear-streaked, screaming-with-passion heroine fighting to save her lover (heightened emotion), the “murderous” mother chanting to separate them, becoming something of a mythical creature in the act

(familial betrayal and gothic horror combined), and the spraying blood and the burning, bubbling, spitting flesh (gruesome visual imagery). This highly visual action sequence is both chaotic and intense; it is enhanced by the auditory and tactile sensory elements designed to create a climactic dramatic peak which pushes characters to their absolute limit. The sudden “whoosh, a snatching” seems to fit within this supernatural scene, and for a moment we believe the battle action is continuing. The sudden break from action –

Sophie lying naked on a dusty pine floor – comes as a surprise. Our heroine is alone but for a boy who calmly tells her the town and country in which she has been deposited before the book ends, providing no answers to what happens next, nor to how the battle scene in Australia is carrying on (and thus to the fate of her boyfriend). The juxtaposition of the two scenes – from loud and busy to calm and quiet – is intended to shock us, and so it does. But it is the abrupt ending with a lack of denouement which really leaves us scrambling for answers; since the novel adheres so strictly throughout to the other rules of this genre, we expect it to provide closure, and we are flummoxed when it does not do so.

Badham’s ending follows more closely the cliffhangers of television serials than it does the conventions of the novel, and in this sense she may be trying to replicate this technique in the written narrative form in order to cultivate audience hunger for

28 Badham, Burnt Snow, p. 679. 157

‘what comes next’. This positive desire is reflected in online blogger Adina West’s review of the novel, when she states that “Burnt Snow ends with an emotional roller coaster of a finale that leaves the reader wanting more.”29 Regular reader, Lydia, points out that “the ending was a bit cliffhangerish”, while Lucy seems to like the nature of the trickery, exclaiming “omg suspense is killing me / i cant find the 2nd book white rain!!!!”30 Blogger Lissy Ann labels the ending “a perfect cliff hanger”, but somewhat negates the positivity this implies by expressing frustration about the unavailability of the as-yet-unpublished sequel31, and regular reader, Aynab, claims “I think this book was good, however the abrupt ending totally killed it for me”32, displaying an ambivalence of feeling to the work as a whole caused by the unexpected ending. Rachel

(The Rest Is Still Unwritten) takes this a step further, venting her frustration at the trickery by stating, “[m]y only issue with the ending is that I feel it was all very abrupt, like it was cut out in the middle of something, not really finished.”33 This expectation can be explained by generic convention. Regular reader Kaz identifies the genre invoked by the book, reflecting on the copycat generic style of Badham’s work: “This could be classed as a poor mans twilight with witches but it is so much more than that.”34 These reader comments demonstrate the surprise at the ending, revealing the expectations Badham fostered then frustrated in her readership through the invocation of a very specifically- and tightly-ruled generic storyworld.

29 West, Adina. “Book Review - Burnt Snow by Van Badham.” On Stairways and Landings: Onwards and upwards. A writer’s journal. 20th September 2010. http://adinawest.blogspot.com.au/2010/09/book- review-burnt-snow-by-van-badham.html. Accessed 9th December 2014. 30 Reviews by Lydia and Lucy. Reader reviews on page: “Burnt Snow by Van Badham.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8562584-burnt-snow. Accessed 29th October 2013. 31 Ann, Lissy. 32 Aynab. Reader reviews on page: “Burnt Snow by Van Badham.” On Goodreads. Accessed 29th October 2013. 33 Rachel (The Rest Is Still Unwritten). Reader reviews on page: “Burnt Snow by Van Badham.” On Goodreads. Accessed 29th October 2013. 34 Kaz. Reader reviews on page: “Burnt Snow by Van Badham.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8562584-burnt-snow. Accessed 4th August 2015. 158

Badham builds on the successful conventions of a previous bestseller, but then employs the cliff-hanger technique of serialised narratives. Such a combination of styles might be a thrill for the reader unfamiliar with the genre so religiously adhered to for the vast majority of the novel – for these readers there is no generic violation. However,

Badham deliberately and steadfastly invokes such a specific storyworld throughout the novel that her apparent intention to link her book with others such as Meyer’s cannot be ignored by those readers familiar with the genre. In closely replicating the key generic attributes of Meyer’s storyworld, Badham delivers a whole range of information to her readership without the need to explicitly state it. A crucial aspect of this information is a map of plot progression for the story to come. Through the invocation of the generic storyworld Badham creates the expectation that the story will conclude in a similar fashion to others of the genre. This creates the necessary conditions for the final trickery, where expectations are subverted through the cliff-hanger ending. Indeed, the generic storyworld becomes crucial to enabling the cliff-hanger ending, which relies on the expectations associated with genre in order to frustrate the readership and leave them wanting more.

Sarah Water’s 2009 mystery novel, The Little Stranger, is a period piece about an old, crumbling country manor, its family inhabitants, and their doctor. The story is narrated by that doctor (the son of the manor family’s former nursery maid, with a great chip on his shoulder concerning the social classes and their entitlements), who seems a good man. A ‘presence’ in the house drives Roderick, the son of the manor household, mad, and the doctor sends him to an institution; the presence ‘kills’ Mrs Ayres, the mother of Roderick (she is found hanged in her children’s old nursery, and suicide through a deranged mind is the verdict returned after the autopsy is carried out by the doctor); and also ‘kills’ Caroline, the daughter of Mrs Ayres (engaged to the doctor, she

159 calls the wedding off, and then dies in suspicious circumstances – again suicide through a deranged mind is returned as the verdict). This ‘presence’ only occurs when the doctor is absent, and so by the end of the novel we are invited to entertain the possibility that he might have brought about these tragedies as a form of revenge, whether knowingly or not. The ending leaves us in doubt – perhaps it was the doctor with intent, perhaps he did it in a sleep walking state, perhaps it was a phantasm of his aggrieved soul, perhaps it really was a house ghost unrelated to him. Late in the final chapter, the Doctor narrates, “I am no nearer now to understanding just what happened at the Hall than I was three years ago.”35 He details still feeling a ghostly presence when he visits the house, but his last short paragraph reads, “[i]f Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn’t show itself to me. For I’ll turn, and am disappointed – realising that what

I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.”36 Is the Doctor, then, (metaphorically) ‘the ghost’ and so responsible for the whole affair (including the murders), or was it simply a

‘little (spectral) stranger’ which he can never definitively spot? Waters leaves the question in the air, thanks to a very subjective narrator.

The ending, which confirms and/or denies nothing, may be very dissatisfying for the reader of this mystery who expects a plausible explanation. Then again, such an open-ended conclusion may in fact delight certain readers. Certainly, online reviews from regular readers seem to support both conclusions, delivering a fairly even smattering of both good and bad reviews. Tatiana is in favour of the ending, claiming

“[l]ooking back at The Little Stranger, I think I quite liked the novel as a whole, especially the ending that wrapped up the tale in a curious and deliciously ambiguous and enigmatic way.”; Melinda agrees, stating, “[c]leverly told, the end is left for the

35 Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger. London: Virago Press, 2009. p. 498. 36 Waters, The Little Stranger, p. 499. 160 readers to make their own conclusions, which makes the book even more compelling...”; and Mike Staten affirms the power of suggestion, “[t]he story is intentionally ambiguous. There are several possible explanations for the events in the book. This of course prompts a lot of speculation in some readers or groups.” However, some readers found the lack of conclusion disappointing: Diana was frustrated that

“[t]he book ends with no real wrapping up of any details-though you are left with this feeling that the author is trying to be clever and point the finger many different ways... I just wish when I got to the end, it was an actual ending”; while Ruth felt very let down:

I had no clue as to how the story was going to end, and was eager to find out

what would happen – and here is my only criticism of the book, because the

ending was something of a let-down... I certainly did not find the big twist that

I felt sure must be coming at any moment, the nearer I got to the last page. That

kind of left me with a “is that it?” feeling, when I finished the book, which is

something that I’m not used to feeling with Sarah Waters books. All the time I

was reading this, I thought it was going to be a 5 star book, but because of the

ending, I ended up giving it 4.37

Ruth fails to see that the ‘twist’ she expected simply came in a different form (the lack of fulfilled expectations), pointing to her clear generic understanding of the novel as a conventional mystery, and her inevitable expectations that it would conform to that convention.

37 Reviews by Tatiana, Melinda, Mike Staten, Diana, and Ruth. Reader reviews on page: “The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6065182-the-little- stranger. Accessed 28th November 2013. 161

Interestingly, most professional reviewers avoid discussing the ending. Hilary

Mantel alludes to the trickery by referring to Waters’ previous novel (“The reader of

Fingersmith will know how deftly she handles a plot twist.”38), and Ron Charles points to the confusion of classification that the reader may feel, while careful avoiding actually discussing the ending itself by praising the writing which produces such uncertainness: “What are we dealing with here? Hysteria? Evil spirits? A jealous doctor? Waters teases us with clues that send us running off in every direction: psychological, paranormal and socioeconomic. But the story’s sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell over these pages.”39 Both Charles and Mantel point to the similarities between Waters’ novel and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – another novel where realism and ghost story indeterminably mingle. An obvious reason for a lack of discussion concerning the ending may be that these reviewers do not wish to spoil the novel for readers, yet this avoidance may well also point to another cause: the slow, tension-filled suspenseful storytelling was what preoccupied them (and this is certainly reflected in many reviews).40

Like Charles, many regular readers felt that they had presumed the book belonged to one category, when in fact it did not. This produced a disappointment within the category, but some readers were willing to recategorise the book and so judge

38 Mantel, Hilary. “Haunted by shame.” On The Guardian. 23rd May 2009. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/23/little-stranger-sarah-waters. Accessed 9th December 2014. 39 Charles, Ron. “Book Review: Ron Charles on ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters.” On The Washington Post. 20th May 2009. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/05/19/AR2009051903162.html. Accessed 9th December 2014. 40 Thomas, Scarlett. “House Calls.” On The New York Times: Sunday Book Review. 29th May 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/books/review/Thomas-t.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 9th December 2014; Lo Dico, Joy. “The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters.” On The Independent. 31st May 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-little-stranger-by-sarah-waters- 1693071.html. Accessed 9th December 2014; FitzHerbert, Claudia. “The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: review.” On The Telegraph. 29th May 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5407691/The-Little-Stranger-by-Sarah-Waters- review.html. Accessed 9th December 2014. 162 it positively within that new field. Paul sums up this sentiment when he tells us, “[t]his is classified as a ghost story, but as a ghost story it is very unconvincing and not really very chilling... However this is actually a really good novel”, and Laura agrees, claiming “[i]f you are looking for a traditional horror novel, you won’t find it in The

Little Stranger. This book is... essentially historical fiction that happens to have a touch of the supernatural about it. And as historical fiction it is excellent... If you prefer your supernatural forces to come with complete explanations, this book may feel incomplete to you.”41 Clearly the paratextual indicators produced a number of readers who picked up the book assuming it fit within the ghost story category. Throughout the novel the supernatural elements aid this categorisation, but the slow-burning tale, its historical setting, and its lack of conclusive ending serve to disappoint this generic classification and lead many readers towards reclassification in a new genre in which these elements are not defects, but attributes. Many others see the work as belonging somewhat to the genre of classic cosy detective mysteries, such as those written by Agatha Christie.

Despite the absence of a real detective (the doctor becomes a substitute), Waters certainly takes pains to align her novel with this genre through the storyworld: an

English aristocratic country house, a cast of likely aristocratic characters, deaths, and a mystery to be solved that links them all. The combination of ghost story and detective novel does not hinder the expectations for the ending – in both genres mysteries are conventionally resolved. Thus Waters’ generic storyworld, like that of Badham’s, provides a plot template which invokes very clear expectations for the ending of the work – expectations which she then denies. The reactions to this novel prove why generic categorisation is so important to the reader, and why trickery within a single category constitutes an authorial violation of respect for readerly processes.

41 Reviews by Paul and Laura. Reader reviews on page: “The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.” On Goodreads. 163

These novels are clear examples of mystery narratives failing to complete the expectations for their genre (for good or ill). However, John Fowles’ The French

Lieutenant’s Woman differs slightly in its approach to this trickery by nature of containing a variety of generic frustrations.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

John Fowles’ 1969 novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, flouts not only generic guidelines, but also one of the fundamental ‘rules’ of conventional narrative storytelling – that a story will have a beginning, a middle, and one end. What at first seems to be a romance set in the mid-1800s which we are invited to expect will conform to the genre of the traditional Victorian novel, eventually and unexpectedly turns out to be a postmodernist work. Not only does the narrator (who is also the authorial persona) appear as a character fairly late within the narrative, but the novel also contains two equally plausible endings, thus denying the reader absolute knowledge of which is the

‘real’ or ‘true’ ending. The surprise of these two elements comes about because of a frustration of readerly expectations which have been provoked by the work’s clear generic storyworld setup. Fowles uses this generic storyworld as a code for a plethora of information, only to later subvert the assumptions caused by this implicit information.

In doing so, Fowles first invites the reader to expect, then denies, a singular, unchanging fictional world, and instead opens up multiple possible worlds (or a singular world with rules in flux) within the fictional arena. The author thus enacts possible worlds theory within his fiction, causing frustration for the reader who expects a steadfast, singular fictional world – an ironic frustration considering the creation of storyworlds depends upon the notion that other worlds apart from the actual world might exist.

164

In a novel which relies so heavily on the creation of a very specific storyworld

(and thus the reader’s participation in the mental contemplation of other possible worlds), the author dramatises this theory of possible worlds on the page. The shock readers express towards this dramatisation, when they are confronted with multiple possible storyworlds, demonstrates just how firm readers require their storyworld to be.

Reading multiple fictional works, then, requires of the reader the ability to imagine an infinite number of worlds in varying degrees of difference to the real world, but reading a specific text requires of the author the delivery of a single, unchanging world.

Exploring this novel through the lens of storyworld theory allows us to see how Fowles subverts the rules regarding storyworlds, and thus allows us to focus clearly on these rules in regard to reading and the process of literary communication.

This novel was published during the postmodernist era, after decades of discussion on the ‘probable’ death of the novel (or at least the traditional novel).

Authors were experimenting with new forms – postmodern metafiction, where narrators self-reflexively ponder the status of the text as artefact within that very text, became popular, with a linked rise in what Linda Hutcheon terms “historiographic metafiction”, where a text both asserts a version of past events and questions the veracity of that narrative.42 Fowles’ novel, taken as a whole, fits squarely within this contextual style, and yet it still surprises readers to this day. This, I believe, is due to the author’s subterfuge – carefully employing a traditional genre and setting only to deny fulfillment of this type of narrative later in the text. The success of the novel at the time and through subsequent decades attests to its importance within the field of postmodernist literature, but the surprise readers display towards the duplicity of the work

42 Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” In Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis (eds.). Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. p. 3. 165 demonstrates that Fowles manages to first fool the reader into believing the work is traditional. This trickery has not faded with age – contemporary readers still express the same range of reactions, which can be summed up by the following largely- representative regular reader reviews:

“Fantastic book, and not at all what I expected. I was expecting a

contemporary Victorian novel - perhaps a ‘Scarlett Letter’ written in the 1880s.

Imagine my surprise upon finding out that, in fact, its this weird, fascinating,

post-modern version of a Victorian novel written in the 1960s. So cool.” –

Briynne

“I love reading fiction that knows it is fiction--it becomes more than a story,

and is an experience that constantly reminds the reader that he or she is a

reader--that there is a relationship of sorts between the author and the reader.

There are alternate endings and plot lines that took me out of the story and

reminded me that these characters are real and yet not real. I was constantly

wondering ‘what is the true version?’ only to remember that there is no true

version because it’s fiction. I couldn’t help but feel slightly manipulated--but

every reader is.” – Ashley

“A love triangle in Victorian times involving nobility, a commoner and an

upstart. Delightful. But the style of this book was intensely aggravating for me.

The presence of the author, not as a character, but as...a plot almost? The

author was part of the book as an author, writing this book in the 1970s while

the story is set in Victorian times. He also ended the book 3 different times. In

166

3 different ways. And then he did physically show up in the book towards the

end. I really disliked this device... Boiled down - I would have liked this book

if... all the author narrative was removed and he had chosen one ending. So I

would have liked this book as a 200 page romance novel.” – Katie Konow43

Each reviewer points to the book having denied their expectations – some liking this denial, others disliking it. Briynne and Katie Konow both started the novel believing it would be a typical Victorian romance, only to find out that the book does not conform to the expectations as set up by the conventions of this genre. Konow and Ashley both point to the multiple endings as having flouted novelistic conventions. Ashley thought that the alternate endings of the Fowles’ novel (an unexpected postmodernist aspect which defied the seeming Victorian genre of the novel) took her out of the story, reminding her that ‘these characters are real and yet not real.’ This caused her to ponder the notion of fictional truth and her role in the act of narrative communication which conveys this truth. Her emphasis during reading shifted from her narrative audience function to her authorial audience function, and in so doing she was distanced from the story and characters. This wrench away from investment in the narrative story may explain why many readers generate negative feelings towards the text (and thus the author) in cases of such trickery – though Ashley and Briynne demonstrate that the reaction is not always negative.

In order to understand why readers have specific expectations in regards to the way a text conforms to genre, it is imperative that we examine the way the novel sets up such expectations through the storyworld.

43 Reviews by Briynne, Ashley, and Katie Konow. Reader reviews on page: “The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56034.The_French_Lieutenant_s_Woman. Accessed 19th May 2014. 167

Victorian Storyworld Setup

Fowles invokes a very specific generic storyworld from the opening lines of his novel – a storyworld which taps into the reader’s previous interactions with other

Victorian narratives (both nineteenth century novels, and contemporary Victoriana in fiction and film). Numerous critics have emphasised the Victorian-ness of the novel, particularly at the outset of the work. Patrick Bratlinger tells us, “[a]s an experimental work, it paradoxically assumes the form of a Victorian novel” and that “Fowles’s narrator is so crammed with Victoriana that he verges on pedantry.”44 Ian Adam notes that “Fowles chooses to write within the literary conventions current at the time of the novel’s Victorian setting. We see extended pictorial description of place and character, plot-mirroring in parallel master and servant romances, internal narrative, the sensational suspension of meaning or event, and especially omniscient comment”45. The work is overwhelmingly and self-consciously Victorian.

Many have also noted the incongruity of a novel written in the 1960s in the style of the 1800s, and in so doing reveal Fowles’ achievement in capturing the

Victorian era (in style as well as setting) in an era decidedly anti-Victorian in literary style. Richard Hauer Costa notes that Fowles’ use of the Victorian style is deceptive in a work written in the 1960s, arguing “Fowles’ technique is to take a ready-made 1860’s plot and allow a 1960’s point of view to overlay it”, and that Fowles’ “adherence to the conventions current at the time of the novel’s Victorian setting is... deceptively apparent”46. Frederick M. Holmes claims that “[b]y imitating the Victorian novel

44 Brantlinger, Patrick. In Brantlinger, Patrick, Adam, Ian and Rothblatt, Sheldon. ““The French Lieutenant’s Woman”: A Discussion.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (March 1972). p. 339. 45 Adam, Ian. In Brantlinger, Adam, and Rothblatt. ““The French Lieutenant’s Woman””, p. 344. 46 Hauer Costa, Richard. “Trickery’s Mixed Bag: The Perils of Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 1975). pp. 2 and 3, respectively. 168

Fowles is able to create the paradoxical effect of a narrative at once credible on a realistic plane and self-consciously artificial... Fowles’s use of out-of-date conventions enables us to perceive their conventionality; they remind us that we are reading an unusual sort of novel, not witnessing the unfolding of actual events.”47 John V.

Hagopian states that “though the matter is Victorian – an excellent fictional exposé of the period – the manner is pseudo-Victorian and, curiously, also pseudomodern. As

Dwight Eddins notes, Fowles does not imitate so much as parody the omniscient

Victorian narrator.”48 Charles Scruggs also finds the work a mix of both the popular

Victorian style and that of a later era, claiming “if... [Fowles] has adopted the voice of the omniscient narrator, because he is writing a novel set in Victorian England, that voice has necessarily been altered by the revisionist perspectives of the modern novel and modern criticism, as well as by the implications of the exploded, centrifugal universe of the modern world.”49 Ruth Christiani Brown refers to “Fowles’s ironic echoing of the nineteenth-century realistic novel”50; and Keith M. Booker remarks that the fact “[t]hat The French Lieutenant’s Woman can be both an authentic Victorian novel and, at the same time, an effective parody of a Victorian novel attests both to the dexterity of the construction of the book and to the properties of the Victorian novel itself, a genre so extreme that it constantly teeters on the brink of its own parody.”51

This seems to come to the crux of the matter: Fowles has not simply parodied Victorian

47 Holmes, Frederick M. “The Novel, Illusion and Reality: The Paradox of Omniscience in The French Lieutenant's Woman.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Fall 1981). p. 186. 48 Hagopian, John V. “Bad Faith in The French Lieutenant's Woman.” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring 1982). pp. 194-195. 49 Scruggs, Charles. “The Two Endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 1985). p. 96. 50 Brown, Ruth Christiani. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Pierre: Echo and Answer.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 1985). p 115. 51 Booker, M. Keith. “What We Have Instead of God: Sexuality, Textuality and Infinity in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter 1991). p. 193. 169 fiction, but (for the most part) has engaged wholeheartedly with the form. This lulls the reader into engaging reading practices associated with that earlier literary form.

Throughout the decades since the novel’s publication, scholars seem to be in agreement about the distinct Victorian narrative style of the work (if not the authorial choices behind that style). Tamás Bényei muses on the possible reasons behind the novel’s enduring appeal to critical work, postulating that this phenomenon may be due to:

... [the book’s] deceptively authentic reconstruction of a Victorian novel,

complete with the typical novelistic world, the fictional discourse and the

narrative voice of Victorian fiction. Whatever it is that the different critical

traditions claim to be paradigmatic about the text, the basis for their final

evaluation has always depended on how they interpreted the relationship

between The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Victorian novelistic

discourse, the gesture of resuscitating a dead idiom.52

Bényei identifies Chapter 1 as the location of the establishment of the Victorian-ness of the work, both in terms of the generic storyworld (“the identification of the place and the time, as well as of the three major characters”), and voice (“[the narrative voice’s]

Victorianism does not merely consist in the way it obligingly marks out the novelistic space and time right at the start, but also in the rhetorical means it employs to create the protocols of intimacy between narrator and reader, so typical of Victorian fiction”)53.

Generic storyworld is thus enhanced by generic voice.

52 Bényei, Tamás. “Seduction and the Politics of Reading in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 1, No. 2 (1995). p. 122. 53 Bényei, p. 123. 170

Chapter 1 is indeed the spatio-temporal location where the Victorian novel is invoked both in style and substance. The first paragraph of the first chapter sets the story within Lyme Bay, in the south of England, on “one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.”54 Here we have a specific real world locale, in a specific month and year, and we even get the weather thrown in to boot. The reference to Lyme Bay (the setting for part of Jane Austen’s Persuasion), as well as the diction – words such as “disagreeable”, “incisively”, and “blustery” – immediately remind us of traditional novels such as those of Austen. Fowles wishes to locate us immediately, both in the spatio-temporal sense, and in the literary sense: to have us draw on our knowledge of what such a storyworld time and place might be like, as well as our knowledge of a specific literary style – in short, to quickly invoke the generic storyworld within which his novel will work (and eventually, the boundaries of which it will push beyond).

Already distanced in a temporal sense from the narrated events (he55 writes from “centuries”56 later, aligning himself with the “us” of “today”57), the narrator also stays at a great physical distance from the human subjects within this first chapter. First we see the setting, Lyme Bay, in relation to its position within the country of England – the “largest bite from the underside of England’s outstretched south-western leg”58.

Here the narrator invokes the image of a map, the most distanced way of viewing land, whereby actual earth masses are reduced to representative outlines. We then briefly glimpse “the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but

54 Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Vintage Books, 2004. p. 3. 55 For ease of reference, I will assume the narrator is likely to be a ‘he’, since Fowles invites us to conflate the figure with the implied author (an audience will naturally then make the extension to the real author, male John Fowles). In addition, the character who eventually appears in-text, whom we are told is the narrator, is male. 56 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 3. 57 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 5. 58 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 3. 171 ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late

March of 1867.” 59 The narrator here seems to zoom in from the map to a couple of people, before zooming back out again to the town and map reference (“inbite”), then positions the storytime within a specific pocket of history. Importantly, “the pair” do not yet warrant any more description, despite (we learn later) being two of the three lead characters in the story to come. The characters of this novel thus take a back seat to the setting, this precedence conveying just how important the generic storyworld is to the setup of the novel.

Two paragraphs then follow which include descriptions of “The Cobb” from the perspective of “real Lymers” (who apparently harbour contempt for their geographical neighbour), and from the narrator’s own opposing perspective (“it is simply the most beautiful sea-rampart on the south coast of England”).60 Importantly, these descriptions and attitudes are discussed in terms of geography – we are still

‘zoomed out’, as it were, from the human figures of the tale, dwelling instead on the grand landscape of the storyworld. In the next paragraph, “the man”61 (presumably one of ‘the pair’) makes an appearance, but only as a tool through which to show the view from the Cobb back towards land. It would seem that we jump into the man’s point of view here, but we certainly do not gain access to his mind – the narrator describes the aspect with his very own, particular subjective language (he repeatedly asserts his subjectivity through the pronoun “I”62), and historicises the view in a way that the man

(stuck as he is in the world of 1867) cannot do: the narrator tells us “[n]o house lay visibly then or, beyond a brief misery of beach-huts, lies today in that direction.”63

59 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 3. 60 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 3. 61 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 4. 62 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 4. 63 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 4. 172

A storyworld character then enters the piece – “[t]he local spy – and there was one” whose point of view we may adopt. Yet this character position seems merely hypothetical despite the qualification that ‘there was one’ – he ‘might’ have deduced the pair were strangers, or he “might, focusing his telescope more closely, have suspected that a mutual solitude interested them rather more than maritime architecture”64. Here we have what David Herman refers to as “hypothetical focalization” which “entails the use of hypotheses, framed by the narrator or a character, about what might be or have been seen or perceived – if only there were someone who could have adopted the requisite perspective on the situations and events at issue.”65 Specifically, this is an instance of “direct” hypothetical focalization, since the narrative “explicitly appeal[s] to a hypothetical witness, a counterfactual focalizer”66. The narrator adopts a hypothetical focaliser, and in so doing adopts the limited knowledge found in a storyworld character

(however hypothetical) to keep a distance from the main characters. In doing so, the narrator has simultaneously pointed our attention towards subjects of interest (‘the pair’) whilst denying us the gratification of our desire to know more about these subjects (and particularly, about their interactions and their minds).

Suddenly (presumably through the hypothetical spy’s hypothetical telescope) we are introduced to the physicality of the characters in quite a distanced way. It is not the people themselves, but rather their clothes which are explored. We learn “[t]he young lady” (and here we finally learn the sex of the remaining member of the pair)

“was dressed in the height of fashion”67. The spy is reduced to an “eye in the telescope” which “might have glimpsed” her brightly-coloured skirt (narrow and short, with ankles showing), her “rich green coat… black boots… netted chignon, [and] one of the

64 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 4. 65 Herman, David. “Hypothetical Focalization.” Narrative, Vol. 2, No. 3 (October 1994). p. 231. 66 Herman, “Hypothetical Focalization”, p. 237. 67 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 4. 173 impertinent little flat ‘pork-pie’ hats with a delicate tuft of egret plumes at the side”68.

The man gains the relative descriptor “taller”69, which tells us little, considering we do not know her height from which to compare. He is listed as having “light grey”70 clothing, a “top hat held in his free hand… [and] severely reduced… dundrearies”71 – the height, we are told, of Victorian fashion. These two individuals (later to be known as

Ernestina and Charles) are reduced to fragments – to a couple of body parts and a very showy ensemble of Victorian fashion which reveals their wealth. We are given no real detail about their persons beyond these few isolated body parts, which reveal little of the lady and man themselves. Rather, Fowles is using these soon-to-be-main-characters as

‘types’ – to populate the reader’s generic storyworld with a generic rich Victorian woman and man. These anonymous stereotypical characters are defined by their clothing (which in turn defines for us their social status within a very specific setting) – for now, they are not individual characters, but aides to our storyworld development.

Finally in the last paragraph of Chapter 1 we are introduced to a third character

(who we learn later is Sarah, the title character of the novel). The narrator tells us the hypothetical local spy surveying the scene “would have been at sea himself” in regards to this third human on the Cobb – thus we can ascertain she is something of a mystery.

This short paragraph keeps us at an even greater distance from Sarah than from the man and lady; we receive no greater description of her clothes than that they “were black”, and none of her body parts is described at all. In fact, the narrator does not even allow her a gender here – she is simply “the other figure”, and “It”72. For now, ‘it’ is simply the darkly-clad, almost Gothic mystery placed within our generic storyworld.

68 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 5. 69 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 5. 70 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 5. 71 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 5. 72 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 5. 174

The course of Chapter 1 invokes the imagery of a film of the historical or fantastical genres, where we (stereotypically in these forms) start with a map, then zoom in on a specific storyworld setting, before vaguely glimpsing the most bare-boned physical details of three characters. The distance between narrator and characters is therefore kept as great as possible for as long as possible. From this chapter we are invited to garner sweeping storyworld views (in the visual, geographical sense of the word) and vague character outlines (in the physical sense). The narrator sets up the three lead characters of the tale without divulging anything much at all about them, especially about the mysterious Sarah, who is not given so much as a gender. Fowles is thus encouraging us to focus acutely, and without distraction, on the establishment of the generic Victorian storyworld.

Chapter 2 sees the narrator zoom right in on ‘the pair’ to eavesdrop on their conversation, reducing greatly our distance from these characters. However, this is a chapter almost exclusively comprised of documented dialogue, and so in this we still see distance between narrator and characters – he has still not thoroughly entered their minds with any authority, but is rather for the most part simply witnessing their outward interaction as an unobtrusive, outside observer. We learn the characters’ names only through their conversation with each other – the narrator does not tell us that Charles is the man and Tina is the young lady (though later in the chapter he does let slip

Ernestina’s full name). Rather pointedly, Tina receives from the narrator an age (or maturity) demotion in this chapter, dropping from “the young lady” to “the girl”73. This seems to be Fowles’ way of making room for the graduation of Sarah from “it” to “the woman”74. In this, the forthcoming relationship between the three characters is prefigured – Charles’ “the man” matches Sarah’s “the woman”, while Tina’s transition

73 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 7. 74 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 10. 175 from “the young lady” to “the girl” reduces her to a status that is a step below the two

‘adults’ – that of a youthful child, an outsider to the others.

This second chapter sees the narrator guessing vaguely at basic character thoughts in a cursory manner. The almost blanket dialogue (devoid of the common ‘he said’, ‘she said’ speech markers, though still containing quotation marks) is only very sparsely dotted with physical action descriptions, and even less sparsely populated with indications of thought. The action markers, such as “[t]he girl stopped, and looked him in the eyes”75, or “[h]e glanced sharply down, and as abruptly kneeled”76, tend to be short and to the point – they give a vague sense of action without any intricate detail.

This gives the effect of us viewing the scene alongside the narrator – he will not interpret for us, rather we are to (mostly) listen and (sometimes) view in order to reach our own conclusions. The narrator acts here as a conduit of obvious information rather than an interpreter. Sometimes he ventures into the territory of the characters’ minds, but only to hint at what may lie beneath, never to expressly convey thought processes.

We are told, “for a moment Charles seemed inclined to be serious, but then changed his mind”77, and “[i]t was only then he noticed, or at least realized the sex of, the figure at the end”78 – both observations of the character’s mind, but neither laced with detailed thought reporting concerning the complexities of decisions or realisations (rather we are simply told that such decisions or realisations occurred). Ernestina is given even less narratorial attention in regards to her mind, the narrator seeing fit to venture into this field only once in the entire chapter, and only for a fleeting, shallow moment. We are told, “[s]he looked at him then as they walked, and moved her head in a curious sliding sideways turn away; a characteristic gesture when she wanted to show concern – in this

75 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 7. 76 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 8. 77 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 7. 78 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 8. 176 case, over what had been really the greatest obstacle in her view to their having become betrothed.”79. Here we are told of a gesture, informed it is characteristic of the character

(confirming the narrator does know Ernestina well enough to know of her habitual gestures), and told it means she wishes to show concern – the narrator here refusing to allow us to enter the character’s mind to witness firsthand the intricate reasons for such concern (or for choosing to show it), instead merely brushing over the vague reasons for the demonstration of that emotion. This is the narrator’s only insight into Tina’s mind – a curiosity given the chapter is not restricted by sole focalisation through another character. Here, again, the generic storyworld and the vague action taking place within it are given precedence over the intricate, individual, non-generic thoughts of a character.

As the pair come towards Sarah at the end of the Cobb, we slowly gain more insight into Charles’ mind. When she turns to look at Charles, we receive the longest paragraph yet detailing his thoughts through psycho-narration. The narrator tells us how things “seemed” to Charles, and repeatedly how he “felt”80 – we are gaining Charles’ interpretations and emotions, if not the complete machinations behind them. It seems, then, that Fowles wishes again to make a distinction between Tina and Sarah – the former as a superficial character (implied through straight dialogue and a lack of thought reporting, as well as a lack of depth in Charles’ thoughts), and the latter as a deep, complex mindful character (implied through the sudden access we gain to much more complex thoughts within Charles – as if she inspires his thinking). Although Sarah is still being called “it” at this stage in the narration, we are invited to assume it will be she who becomes the catalyst in the novel for a deeper, more mindful narration. This

79 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 7-8. 80 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 10. 177 will, in fact, turn out to be a frustrated expectation since Sarah’s mind remains elusive to both us and the narrator throughout the text.

At the start of Chapter 3, the mystery of the “it” that is Sarah spurs Charles on to a session of thorough thinking. However, the narrator still maintains some sort of distance, telling us “[h]is thoughts were too vague to be described”, then giving us a distinctly summarised version of their contents in the form of a psycho-narrated list (his thoughts “comprehended mysterious elements; a sentiment of obscure defeat not in any way related to the incident on the Cobb, but to certain trivial things he had said at Aunt

Tranter’s lunch, to certain characteristic evasions he had made; to whether his interest in palaeontology was a sufficient use for his natural abilities…”).81 The narrator then launches into a history of Charles and his family in order to attempt to explain the character in more detail – a step which at once distances us from the currently-thinking mind of Charles in the moment, and which also proves the narrator is somewhat god- like in his omniscience, knowing such details of Charles’ life. This narrator, then, is something of a conundrum – both omniscient and not, both intimate with the characters and distanced – and as such Fowles’ stylistic choice deserves greater scrutiny. This narrator is, after all, the means through which the generic storyworld is invoked, so

Fowles’ choice to assign him a specific (generic) narratorial style also informs our storyworld formation.

Fowles’ Narrator: The Unknowing Know-all

Fowles’ narrator in many ways follows the style of fictional narrator that had become conventional by the Victorian era, but the nature of many of his existential intrusions (rather than the intrusions themselves) give him away as a postmodernist

81 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 12. 178 product. In many ways conventionally Victorian, this narrator is a very specific, subjective personality – he lets us know he is there from the fore. He asserts his humorous side from the very start of Chapter 1, using colloquialisms rather than formal language in order to prove he is ‘human’ rather than ‘godlike’ – he describes the Cobb as having “invited what familiarity breeds” (that is, contempt) and asserts his own subjective taste, claiming the Cobb is “a superb fragment of folk-art. [Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry

Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass.”82 Presumably expecting an unbelieving response from his narratee, the narrator then asserts his own subjectivity through the most simple and yet the most definitive of means – using the personal pronoun ‘I’, he asks, “I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can be put to the test”83. In only a page and a half of text, then, the narrator has asserted himself as a clear identity – one that is subjective, with tastes and humour.

Fowles continues to imbue his narrator with an incredibly strong personality throughout the text, allowing this being to regularly pepper the narrative with his opinions. The narrator tells us, “personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art”84; after a particularly exuberant few paragraphs of free indirect discourse channeling Charles’ outrage the narrator suddenly cuts back in, telling us, “I am overdoing the exclamation marks”85; the narrator cannot allow a reference to a medical anecdote to go by without further exploration, explaining the full story of a particular case in a footnote86; he tells us “[w]hat particularly pleases me”87, emphasising the importance of the self with italics; and he compares himself with the

82 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, pp. 3 and 4, respectively. 83 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 4. 84 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 159. 85 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 209. 86 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 236. 87 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 306. 179

(apparently inferior) artistic tastes of Charles, telling us (after particularly disparaging remarks on Charles’ own poetry) of the “one thing he and I could have agreed on”88.

Fowles obviously does not want his readership to ignore the subjective presence of this narrator.

The narrator places himself within a specific span of history, and so places himself within the storyworld, if not within the timeframe of narrative events. The use of subsequent narration, alongside the early indication that the first events take place in

“late March of 1867”89 tells us that this narrator comes from this world in a time after this specific year. He talks of “then” versus “now”90 (and also of “today”91), and how the landscape and clothing choices have dramatically changed in that time, thus hinting that quite some time has passed. Indeed, throughout the novel the narrator delights in filling us in on details of the era in which the narrative is set – details we may not know of, living as we do (like him) ‘today’. He constantly positions himself as more knowing than the characters through the benefit of hindsight – frequently referring to the 1867 events of the novel as belonging to a relatively ignorant, though endearing time. The narrator uses these intrusions to attempt to explain to a modern audience the

‘peculiarities’ of “those days”92 – a time less knowledgeable than the “nowadays”93 of approximately one hundred years later that both the narrator and Fowles’ initial readership share. These asides serve to flesh out the storyworld, to make it conform even more with the reader’s knowledge of generic history. In this way, the narrator confers on himself the authority of retrospect – the knowingness and superiority often felt in relation to the relative ‘ignorance’ of previous eras. If not temporally-unbounded

88 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 429. 89 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 3. 90 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 4. 91 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 5. 92 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 332. 93 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 255. 180 omniscience, then, he insists he owns the knowledge of what has been, and so invites the reader to trust his narration on this authority. Indeed, this authority is often conveyed quite deliberately – he tells us with absolute assuredness early in the first chapter that

“there was one” (a local spy), while in Chapter 2 he even prefigures what is to come in the characters lives (“Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look”94), conveying a knowingness which extends beyond the constraints of present moment story time.

However, despite frequently knowing all about a character’s actions and thoughts, the narrator at other times peppers his language with modal locutions, paradoxically displaying an inability to know all. Charles “must have” made “sufficient excuses”; “[p]erhaps” there were sexual feelings between Sarah and a maid; concerning

Charles, “I do not know what he expected”; after reporting Mrs Poulteney’s less-than- charitable thoughts, “perhaps I do her an injustice”; “one can only speculate” about

Mary and Sam’s motives; what happened to Sarah “I do not know”; and “I am not at all sure where she is at the moment.”95 When a character enters the tale who is strongly suggested to be the character personification of the author himself, the narrator still cannot accurately gauge this character’s mind: “one has the impression he can hardly contain his amusement… as if… it seems…”96 When this author-character winds his watch back fifteen minutes (an action which subsequently rewinds narrative time by the same amount of time), the narrator guesses at what he is doing rather than telling us, supposing at first that his watch is fast and he is merely adjusting it (which “is doubly strange, for there is no visible clock by which he could have discovered the error in his

94 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 10. 95 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, pp. 117, 160, 244, 246, 259, 340, and 409, respectively. 96 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 465. 181 own timepiece”97), and then guessing that he is “merely providing himself with an excuse for being late at his next appointment”98 – both reasons of which are incorrect

(as we learn, courtesy of the narrator, in subsequent pages when we see time has rewound), and arguably should really have been known by the narrator since he is the implied author, and so is also this author-character (albeit one with split personalities, affected or ‘real’).

The most profound aspect of the narrator’s ‘unknowingness’ is his inability to read the minds of certain characters – the ability to do so being an integral feature of traditional omniscient narrators. The narrator’s unwillingness, or inability, to portray

Sarah’s mind at the end of Chapter 12 is arguably what sparks the existential crisis of

Chapter 13 in which the narrator ‘comes clean’ about his un-godlike lack of omniscience. As Sarah stands alone gazing out of her Marlborough House room window (a regular, conventional location for detailed character thought exploration, owing to its languid, limitless and uninterrupted time potential), the narrator ‘zooms out’, as it were:

I will not make her teeter on the window-sill; or sway forward, and then

collapse sobbing back on to the worn carpet of her room. We know she was

alive a fortnight after this incident, and therefore she did not jump. Nor were

hers the sobbing hysterical sort of tears that presage violent action; but those

produced by a profound conditional, rather than emotional, misery – slow-

welling, unstoppable, creeping like blood through a bandage.

Who is Sarah?

97 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 465. 98 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 465. 182

Out of what shadows does she come?99

This section immediately precedes the chapter break and the narrator’s confession, “I do not know.”100 This inability to really understand Sarah continues throughout the novel – the title character remaining the most elusive of all minds. On a second occasion, as

Sarah sits alone in her Exeter apartment, the narrator tells us, “[a]nd I no more intend to find out what was going on in her mind as she firegazed than I did on that other occasion when her eyes welled tears in the silent night of Marlborough House.”101 Yet again in the final ending to the novel, the narrator refuses to access Sarah’s mind, claiming “[s]he is too far away for me to tell” whether or not she is crying102.

This arbitrary lack of mind access is a characteristic feature of Victorian fiction, Fowles thus inviting the reader to view his novel as part of that genre, even if the work is published anachronistically. Many Victorian novelists employed narrators who refused to enter the minds of certain characters (often female characters, as Dorrit

Cohn notes in relation to Henry Fielding’s narrator in Tom Jones103). In the chapter on psycho-narration in her seminal work, Transparent Minds, Cohn reflects on a certain style of narrator employed during certain Victorian years. Writing of the refusal of

William Makepeace Thackeray’s narrator to enter the mind of Becky at a certain moment in the text, Cohn reflects on its stylistic prominence during the era:

This avoidance of psycho-narration is characteristic for a novel in which a

hyperactive narrator deals with a multitude of characters and situations by

99 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, pp. 93-94. 100 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 95. 101 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 282. 102 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 469. 103 Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton and Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1978. p. 22. 183

rapid shifts in time and space. This pattern dominates the third-person novel

well into the nineteenth century. While prolonged inside views were largely

restricted to first-person forms, third-person novels dwelt on manifest behavior,

with the characters’ inner selves revealed only indirectly through spoken

language and telling gesture.104

Cohn talks of the relationship between narrator’s mind and characters’ minds in this period as largely inversely proportional: “the more conspicuous and idiosyncratic the narrator, the less apt he is to reveal the depth of his characters’ psyches or, for that matter, to create psyches that have depth to reveal. It almost seems as though the authorial narrator jealously guards his prerogative as the sole thinking agent within his novel”105. This typically Victorian narrator, then, is something of an egoist, refusing complete access to all his characters’ minds as a means to foreground his own. This, of course, reflects exactly the kind of narrator Fowles has created in The French

Lieutenant’s Woman. Cohn claims that this narratorial style was historically-located, and that as the preoccupations of the times changed, so too did the style of narration:

“[the] historical development of the novel clearly bears out the old-fashioned narrator’s self-preservative instinct: with the growing interest in the problems of individual psychology, the audible narrator disappears from the fictional world.”106 And so by the time Fowles came to write his novel, not only was this style of narrator and limited character-mind access out of fashion – it was so rare as to be obsolete, an archaic and easily-dated stylistic technique. This, of course, created the perfect environment for

104 Cohn, Transparent Minds, p. 21. 105 Cohn, Transparent Minds, p. 25. 106 Cohn, Transparent Minds, p. 25. 184

Fowles in 1969 to encourage his reader to accept his narrative as distinctly Victorian – in style as well as content.

Fowles’ narrator is commonly understood as omniscient. Meir Sternberg gives his interpretation of the omniscient narrator – a description which very closely aligns with Fowles’ narrator:

... the all-knowing narrator is, and often presents himself openly as, an artistic

figure with superhuman powers. Though he may pretend (as Thackeray’s and

Fielding’s do) to descend into the fictive arena and rub shoulders with the

characters, he essentially stands above the world which he sometimes professes

to have created and over which he has complete control owing to his godlike

privileges of unhampered vision, penetration to the innermost recesses of his

agents’ minds, free movement in time and space, and knowledge of past and

future... [T]he omniscient narrator is characterized... by his intense awareness

of facing an audience...107

Sternberg elaborates, stating that while modern narrators seldom overtly perform in such a way, the omniscient narrators from novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “devote considerable energy to striking up an acquaintance with the reader, to characterizing themselves and him or themselves in relation to him, to preaching or poking fun at him, to anticipating his every wish, or to taking pride in having frustrated his expectation.”108 Fowles’ narrator is indeed performing for an audience, and he certainly descends into the fictive arena to at times ‘rub shoulders’ with the characters.

107 Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. pp. 256-257. 108 Sternberg, p. 257. 185

He moves freely in time and space, and also frequently displays an all-knowingness. In this way he is very like the narrators of the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel.

However, he also frequently professes a lack of knowledge or control over his artistic creations – a lack of superhuman powers – and the existential angst which accompanies this lack of godliness (angst lacking in works such as Fielding’s) is distinctly postmodernist. Sternberg might see this apparent lack of knowledge simply as an aspect of the narrator’s omniscience – his controlling “the effects of his suppressions”109. After all, eighteenth and nineteenth century novelists such as Thackeray and Fielding frequently had their omniscient narrators profess a lack of knowledge of a character’s mind in a particular moment, or leave their characters to briefly continue their lives on their own without authorial guidance. However, the angst that accompanies these moments of not knowing is particularly existential, and so in a way out of step with these traditional conventions.

Of course, the idea of omniscience itself has been heavily questioned in academia. Examining the case of Fielding’s narrator in Joseph Andrews, Wilhelm Füger points to the “close interaction of knowledge and ignorance” found therein as typical of narrators that theorists, he claims, often mistakenly label as omniscient.110 Füger maintains that “the limitations of his narrator’s so-called omniscience are at least as important and significant as the (partial) cognitive privileges granted to him.”111 It would be a mistake, he argues, to label such narrators as omniscient. Jonathan Culler directly takes on Sternberg’s claims, arguing instead that omniscience is a problematic term for narratology if it equates to a godlike figure (since, Culler claims, those without faith have no model on which to rest their narratorial understanding, and those with it

109 Sternberg, p. 266. 110 Füger, Wilhelm. “Limits of the Narrator’s Knowledge in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: A Contribution to a Theory of Negated Knowledge in Fiction.” 1978. Style, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Fall 2004). p. 288. 111 Füger, p. 288. 186 can never know god absolutely, so their model is a guess of her powers of knowing).

Culler’s issues with authorial omniscience extend to supposed narratorial omniscience.

He argues that we have come to see certain technical narrative choices (such as telepathic knowledge of another’s mind) as markers of omniscience rather than understanding them for what they really are – simply creative choices. Culler thus maintains that we should simply give up on the term ‘omniscience’ altogether.112

Paul Dawson also contests the god model, stressing that omniscience (at least in contemporary fiction) should not be defined by the unboundedness of knowledge held by a narrator, but rather by the narratorial performance of authority. Dawson argues that instead of locating omniscience in the domain of information (of focalisation), it should instead “be firmly located in the domain of narrative voice.”113

The point, he argues, of contemporary novelistic omniscience is in fact a rhetorical strategy of indicating authority, rather than a complete knowingness. It is certainly true that we cannot view contemporary omniscience in an identical way to traditional omniscience – the fact that it fell out of fashion means that its return in the twentieth century comes loaded with referentiality to a previous form. In this way we cannot accept Fowles’ narrator simply as an omniscient narrator alongside those popular in the

Victorian era. He has deliberately invoked an outdated (for his time) style, and so can only interact with that movement anachronistically. In this way, the narrator is both at one with, and a mimicking of, the Victorian style.

It is not the domain of this thesis to contribute to the debate on omniscience.

Rather, it is enough at this juncture to acknowledge that scholars have taken issue with the term (and with good narrative reason). However, it is also important to remember

112 Culler, Jonathan. “Omniscience.” Narrative, Vol. 12, No. 1 (January 2004). p. 32. 113 Dawson, Paul. “Real Authors and Real Readers: Omniscient Narration and a Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Winter 2012). p. 98. 187 that omniscience is a term with a common understanding amongst most regular readers, and invoked when they read a third person narrative (and many of the scholars who question the definition of the term do so acknowledging that it must be retained). The

Sternberg god-model is most alike to the one most readers rely upon for their understanding of this type of narrator, and so the common assumption by such readers is that these narrators, like their basic understanding of a god, know all. It thus comes as a surprise when Fowles’ narrator chooses to profess a lack of knowledge of the world he creates. Further to this, a fairly well-read reader will pick up on the fact that this style of narrator is outdated for the 1960s – that Fowles is deliberately invoking (for the most part) a narrator very similar in style to those common in the time in which his novel is set.

It cannot be denied that the result of invoking such an out-of-fashion form of narration is for the reader to understand the novel as belonging not to its own era, but rather as harking back to a previous time. The use of such a narrator thus immediately invokes the genre of the Victorian novel. The result of Fowles’ use of such a known and familiar type of narrator is to at once set up expectations within the reader. Here is a period piece that is narrated in the style of a Victorian novel. Fowles’ narrator even explicitly tells us that he has adopted the conventions of Victorian literature:

If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost

thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the

vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my

story…114

114 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 95. 188

The convention, then, is set, and the reader is thus being invited to believe that Fowles’ novel will follow the same pattern as conventional Victorian novels. As Bényei notes, the reader “realizes that what seems to be the discovery of a world is in fact the recognition, reappropriation of a well-known textual world: characters like Ernestina and Mrs. Poulteney work so successfully because they are already familiar from fiction.”115 This is to be a conventional, solid, unchanging tale of a life, told by an intrusive, humorous, subjective narrator – or so it seems. In fact, the strength of this readerly expectation of convention is the very thing that will be relied upon throughout the novel until it is subverted by Fowles later in the work.

The ending of The French Lieutenant’s Woman frustrates the reader because a clear storyworld invokes certain readerly expectations which the author does not fulfill; and yet Fowles over the course of his novel takes careful steps to attempt to warn his reader, to gently guide them towards the surprising ending. He does this through allowing a postmodernist inflection to colour his narrator’s Victorian subjectivity. The narrator of Fowles’ novel tells us he is also the creator/writer of the piece, and so it seems he is also the implied author (in the sense of being the constructor of the whole work, rather than a reader’s imagined image of the real author – although this conflation with the real author is also invited). This narrator, in typical metafictional form, takes frequent opportunities to discuss the role of an author, the problems associated with that role in terms of both agency and writing style, and thus the existential crisis that invokes. The text frequently branches away from the Victorian ‘norm’, and it does this through the particularly postmodernist existential outbursts of the narrator. Chapter 13 of the novel is entirely devoted to what it means to be an author, and the problems

115 Bényei, p. 127. 189 experienced by those who identify as such. This chapter begins, “I do not know.”116 – a statement severely lacking in authority for a supposedly all-knowing being. If we take into account that the third person (mostly) omniscient narrator of the tale is conflated with the creator of the piece – the implied author – then this statement comes across as both troubled and troubling. For a supposedly all-knowing being to ‘not know’ is a shock, for the creator of the piece to ‘not know’ is unthinkable, and yet here we have a declaration that these agents believe that such is the case at the start of the thirteenth of sixty-one chapters. Of course, to not know is common for narrators in Victorian fiction, but the postmodernist angst invoked in this narrator by his not knowing is distinctly lacking in Victorian flavour.

This narrator is troubled by the god-like figure of the Victorian narrator – he knows he cannot live up to that image because he does not have all knowledge, and he tells us so. And yet this figure does not give up the god metaphor so simply – he concedes that “[t]he novelist is still a god, since he creates”117, but that this god is unlike that of the narrator in Victorian fiction: “what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing”118. This god problem troubles the narrator right throughout the novel. Just before we begin the multiple endings, the narrator wonders what to do with lead character Charles, then chastises himself for thinking of limiting that character’s freedom of choice. The narrator poses the possibility of an open ending (no conclusion of the story threads), “[b]ut the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive ending”119. This existential crisis concerning the author as god continues to assert itself in narratorial outbursts throughout the novel, culminating in the clear message delivered

116 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 95. 117 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 97. 118 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 97. 119 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 408. 190 in the final pages of the novel: that there is (or should be) “no intervening god”, that there is only “the actions of men (and of women) in pursuit of their ends.”120 That is, free will rather than fate is the ideal that this creator adheres to – a paradox considering the literary creator cannot be anything but intervening god, since he creates every explicitly-stated facet of the world of fiction and its inhabitants.

And yet this narrator rails against this paradox – pushing us towards acceptance

(and in the process, seemingly attempting to convince himself) of the idea that the creator cannot be god. He argues, “we cannot plan… It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.”121 The narrator questions whether such an intrusion into the fictional world by one ‘outside it’ has “disgracefully broken the illusion”, but in the next breath argues that “[n]o. My characters still exist and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken.”122 The narrator here asks that we as readers accept that fiction is a reality since it is so much a part of human existence – that we accept the ‘truth’, the ‘reality’ of Charles’, Sarah’s, and Ernestina’s world even though the narrator constantly intrudes into that world. Here we see the narrator plead for the notion that fictional worlds are in fact real, that they are independent of the actual world. As Doležel explains, fictional worlds are “not imitations or representations of the actual world (realia) but sovereign realms of possibilia”123. Ronen affirms this integrity of the fictional world and its fictional constructs thus:

This view on the autonomy of fictional worlds implies that fictional worlds are

ontologically and structurally distinct: facts of the actual world have no a priori

120 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 469. 121 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 96. 122 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 97. 123 Doležel, “Possible Worlds”, p. 788. 191

ontological privilege over facts of the fictional world. The fictional world

system is an independent system whatever the type of fiction constructed and

the extent of its drawing on our knowledge of the actual world. Since fictional

worlds are autonomous, they are not more or less fictional according to degrees

of affinity between fiction and reality: facts of the actual world are not constant

reference points for the facts of fiction.124

Despite the broken illusion then, we are asked to remember that fiction, although

‘unreal’ is still real in the sense that it creates a world which cannot be trumped by real world facts, since it exists outside of, parallel to, the actual world. In this way Fowles is preparing the reader for the multiple endings by stressing that this is fiction, yet through his narrator asks them to trust, to believe despite the storyworld’s fictional status.

While laying subtle groundwork for the endings to come, Fowles also takes steps to carefully siphon blame away from the creative agents of the text (narrator, implied and real authors). The narrator blames the characters for his inconsistent writing:

If you noticed in those last two chapters an abruptness, a lack of consonance, a

betrayal of Charles’ deeper potentiality and a small matter of his being given a

life-span of very nearly a century and a quarter; if you entertained a suspicion,

not uncommon in literature, that the writer’s breath has given out and he has

rather arbitrarily ended the race while he feels he’s still winning, then do not

124 Ronen, p. 12. 192

blame me; because all these feelings, or reflections of them, were very present

in Charles’s own mind.125

This supposedly reinforces the idea that the narrator is not to blame – this being is simply telling the tale, and it is the fault of the life-filled, autonomous, complex, and often-unknowable fictional characters if things do not go to the reader’s liking. This alleged inability to really interfere in the storyworld (it carries on, with or without the narrator) encourages the reader in their belief in a steadfast storyworld – one that

‘exists’ (on some plane of our imagination) independent of authorial interference.

And yet the notion of a lack of blame by necessity comes paired with a lack of creative agency – a claim firmly refuted by the narrator’s control over the storyworld.

He asserts his authority by showing he has permitted characters to act in certain ways

(“in the first truly feminine gesture I have permitted” Sarah)126, by toying with fictional storylines he has already created and thereby rewriting narrative story (“[s]o let us kick

Sam out of his hypothetical future and back into his Exeter present”127), by inserting a character within the narrative who ‘is’ the author and having this character rewind narrative time (and thus erase written narrative ‘history’) simply by changing his watch128, and even by creating a hypothetical historically-anachronistic character situation (a “young woman pushing a perambulator”129, a device that did not exist for another decade) – in the same breath openly acknowledging her impossibility and giving her a detailed narrative life. The strength of individuality in the narrator’s voice at once positions this being both as a character (rather than an objective, impartial, omniscient being), and as a strong individual capable of power over the characters and

125 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, pp. 342-343. 126 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 281. 127 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 344. 128 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 465. 129 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 421. 193 events of the narrative. This seeming paradox encourages us to view the narrator as fallible as well as indomitable, and the resulting confusion aids Fowles in removing the blame from himself for the trickery contained in the multiple endings. After all, if this wayward character narrator is both Fowles and not Fowles, the author cannot shoulder all blame.

However, despite the postmodernist blame attribution, the overwhelming style of narration is that of a traditional Victorian narrator. This narrator allows Fowles to wholeheartedly engage with popular Victorian conventions, encouraging generic

Victorian storyworld engagement which trumps the postmodernist outbursts in terms of overall categorisation. The Victorian narrator is thus invoked to support the strong storyworld setup, which is necessary to lay the groundwork for the trickery to come – to implicitly provoke the expectations concerning a singular, solid storyworld, which will be frustrated.

The Unconventional

Fowles’ novel is infamous for two genre-subverting narrative trickeries. In the first subversion, the narrator and authorial persona (who tells us he belongs to a mid- twentieth century era) enters the text twice as a character – the first time to watch one of his lead characters sleep on a train and decide what to do with him next, and the second time to rewind story time by rewinding his pocket watch. In the second subversion,

Fowles’ text contains two equally-plausible endings. The insertion of the author as a physical character within the storyworld is a rather large signal that what we are reading is not traditional fiction – rather that it has some ‘peculiarities’ for that genre which makes the novel lean towards postmodernism. It is perhaps the biggest indication that this book may not follow the traditional path, thus letting the reader down in increments,

194 softening the path for the trickery of the multiple endings to come. This character who is at once narrator, implied author, and potentially the real author’s image as self portrait, appears a few times throughout the novel. Over half way through the book, Sarah purchases a Toby jug which “was cracked, and was to be re-cracked in the course of time, as I can testify, having bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged. But unlike her, I fell for the Ralph Wood part of it. She fell for the smile.”130 This link between narrator and characters comes as something of a shock – after all, despite the few occasions of professing a lack of ability or desire to know a character’s mind, this narrator has until now come across as largely all-knowing – a trait that is impossible for a realist storyworld character to possess, unless that character is a god (and it is unlikely in this realist storyworld that a god purchased a jug). Thus we are reminded that this narrator is inventing this story, and so the storyworld does not exist as an independent world. And yet paradoxically, in becoming a historical artefact, the jug also becomes an affirmation of veracity. Fowles in one blow both affirms and destabilises the solidity and independence of his storyworld.

Later in the novel the character who is also narrator/implied author suddenly appears within the same storyworld timeframe, sitting opposite Charles on a train. This, of course, suddenly throws into question the narrator’s knowledge of the ‘now’ of the late 1960s, considering he is an adult man “of forty or so”131 sitting on a train in 1867.

One of the two – either character or narrator – is a fabricated being, and since the latter controls the events and characters within the storyworld (despite his protestations that he does not), the reader immediately begins to suspect the ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ of this creator-character. The solid, known storyworld is suddenly fragmented by this

130 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 280. 131 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 406. 195 apparently anachronistic appearance. The narrator gives a disagreeable portrait of the character, describing him at first from Charles’ point of view as a “decidedly unpleasant man”, then (as Charles falls asleep and the man stares at the protagonist), from the narrator’s own point of view as having “an unpleasant aura of self-confidence”132. The narrator judges the stare as “cannibalistic in its intensity”, the stare of one who sizes another up, thinks of how they could use them – “the look of an omnipotent god”133.

Finally the narrator gives away the front, telling us “I will keep up the pretence no longer.”134 He reveals that the character is himself, that he is wondering from within the story what to do with Charles as that character sleeps. So the personification of the narrator/implied author as a character within the storyworld actually intrudes directly into the story time – the narrator is wondering then where to take Charles next, and so the narrator-character enters the story at this time to confront Charles directly, to stare at him as if to provoke a response, an answer to the narrator’s problem. This, of course, reminds us that story, and thus story time, do not exist prior to discourse, but rather come into being at the moment of the discourse being written (at once creating the illusion that story exists independently of, and prior to, that discourse). At the end of the scene, the narrator becomes aware of Charles, his created character, staring back at him

– at once Charles is staring at the middle-aged man in the carriage, as well as

(unknowingly) his creator, the narrator/implied author outside of the storyworld.

Seymour Chatman claims that “the scandalous ‘literal’ appearance of the contemporary narrator in Charles’ train compartment makes his ‘mingling’ with the character so much more intimate than anything that happens between Dickens’ narrator and the Dombeys, or Forster’s ‘reader’ (really the narratee) and Lucy, or Stowe’s maternal ‘you’ and Eliza,

132 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 407. 133 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 408. 134 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 408. 196 or Hemingway’s perambulating camera-eye and Nick”135. Chatman is here revealing the difference between established ‘mingling’ of narrator with characters and the much more literal mingling in Fowles’ postmodern work – the latter being so different, so literal, as to be new and shocking to the contemporary reader. The complexity of the transgressions of story/narrative discourse boundaries contained within this sequence cannot help but alert the reader to the idea that this is ‘simply’ fiction – that it is being invented, written before our eyes.

Moving from character post-story time, through physical character who inhabits the same time and space as the characters, the narrator/implied author finally becomes a character who alters the storyworld from the inside. After the first of the double endings of the novel, the character-narrator (or the figure Elizabeth D. Rankin terms “another narrator-surrogate”136) stands outside the house in which Sarah and

Charles have reunited. He takes his watch out, rewinds the time on the clockface by fifteen minutes, then gets in a landau and exits the scene. We then find out that story time has rewound fifteen minutes, and Charles and Sarah are to relive their time from that moment on, but with a different ending. Suddenly, the narrator-character is an interfering god – one who can control at least the circumstances surrounding his characters’ interactions, if not their choices. Interestingly, the narrator does not cast himself as a likeable being. Rather, he is an upper class, self important meddler. He is an “extremely important-looking person” of whom the narrator says,

I did not want to introduce him; but since he is the sort of man who cannot bear

to be left out of the limelight, the kind of man who travels first class or not at

135 Chatman, Seymour. “How Loose Can Narrators Get? (And How Vulnerable Can Narratees Be?)” Narrative, Vol. 3, No. 3 (October 1995). p. 305. 136 Rankin, Elizabeth D. “Cryptic Coloration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” The Journal of Narrative Technique. Vol. 3, No. 3 (September 1973). p. 204. 197

all, for whom the first is the only pronoun, who in short has first things on the

brain, and since I am the kind of man who refuses to intervene in nature (even

the worst), he has got himself in – or as he would put it, has got himself in as

he really is.137

This split personality allows Fowles to pass the trickery off upon an unlikeable character who is separate from the narrator/implied author, even as he is at one with this being. This character “can hardly contain his amusement” at what he is about to do by changing his watch, he “evidently regards the world as his to possess and use as he likes”138 and so we are invited to blame him, a fall man. This humorous, modest, even degrading authorial self portrait of course lessens any potential angst towards Fowles, who clearly understands the duplicity of this move.

It is one of the most fundamental principles of conventional storytelling that narratives have a beginning, middle, and end – not two or more equally plausible endings. The ending is, after all, the part of the narrative that we expect to be associated with the pulling together and tying up of storyline threads – the place, as Kermode claims, where the message or meaning to be taken from the tale is expected to become clear. Although there exists a small body of works that deny this singular-ending convention, they remain firmly classed as aberrational – the example of Fowles’ novel, and the readerly reactions expressed in response to the lack of a singular ending in this instance, demonstrates to us just how unconventional it is for an author to reject or flout this principle.

Fowles gives us a short false ending slightly earlier in the novel, using this to prepare us for the multiple endings to come. The end of Chapter 44 (of 61) is used to

137 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 464. 138 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 465. 198 summarise an ending for all characters complete with weddings, children, and death, much like the endings of traditional novels such as those of Jane Austen. In the first line of the next chapter, the narrator tells us “[a]nd now, having brought this fiction to a thoroughly traditional ending, I had better explain that although all I have described in the last two chapters happened, it did not happen quite in the way you may have been led to believe.”139 Rather, the narrator tells us, the last few pages of the previous chapter were simply what Charles imagined might happen in his future. However, the narrator admits to some duplicity, pointing out that Charles “did not think quite in the detailed and coherent narrative manner I have employed”140, before launching into a spirited defense in which the narrator blames Charles for any inconsistencies in the writing, pointedly telling the reader, “I was not cheating”141. This is the first defense launched by the creator against potential readerly charges of betrayal, and lays the groundwork for more defensive work when the true trickery is revealed. It is also another instance of the reader’s expectations, as based on generic storyworld (narrative audience domain) and literary genre (authorial audience domain), being denied.

Later in the novel, when the narrator-character stares at Charles on the train, the narrator comes to the conclusion that the only fair ending of such a novel with such

‘free’ characters is to not provide a definitive ending. Rather than “fixing the fight” between the characters in order to “show one’s readers what one thinks of the world around one”, the narrator tells us that it is futile to engage in such fixing when the world of the novel is long since past, that a century on one cannot pretend to “show optimism or pessimism, or anything else about it, because we know what has happened since.”142

This is a curious fatalism in a narrator who is about to provide two equally plausible

139 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 342. 140 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 342. 141 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 343. 142 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 409. 199 endings. It is also the first declaration of intent that we, as readers, receive from the narrator:

The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That

leaves me with only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet

whichever is the second will seem, so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter,

the final, the ‘real’ version.143

The narrator then flips a coin, and the endings, we presume, are set by chance. And yet this is only chapter 55 of 61 – we are still convincingly lulled by the conventions of fiction into passing off the narratorial intrusion as just another existential outburst. Most readers, I would suspect, despite this overt warning, would still remain unbelieving that the novel – a narrative fiction – would choose to flout the most expected of narrative conventions. Frederick M. Holmes asserts that the reason the narrator can “periodically point up the artificial nature of his story without destroying it” is because this “narrator- novelist is not a character... Rather the narrator identifies himself as the author” and so does not really exist within the storyworld.144 Holmes claims that the result of this is that “[t]he reader... soon forgets the narrator’s warning, once again becoming immersed in the verisimilitudinous account of a Victorian love triangle and its effects on the lives of the characters.”145 Once again, the overwhelming force of the Victorian genre trumps the postmodernist clues that fly in the face of their traditional contextual surroundings.

However, upon experiencing the double endings, the reader’s previously-solid foundational generic classification of the novel is destabilised. In his 1969 review for

143 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 409. 144 Holmes, pp. 185 and 184, respectively. 145 Holmes, p. 185. 200

The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt talks of “a story so irresistibly novelistic that... [Fowles] has disguised it as a Victorian romance”, gestures towards the second-last ending as “wholly consistent with Fowles’s charming tale. The tale we thought we had been reading, at any rate”, and yet reveals his surprise and delight at the last ending, which “explodes all the assumptions our Victorian sensibilities had so willingly embraced. In a giant step it covers the distance between the Victorian novel and the roman nouveau.”146 And yet since Lehmann-Haupt’s early review, not all critics have been favourable in their accounts of this explosive conclusion. Hagopian is particularly negative in his essay on the novel, referring again and again to the trickery as a negative deception of reader by author: he claims Fowles “tricks the reader”, and maintains there is “fraud” in chapter 13 (where the narrator claims he does not know

Sarah’s mind), stating that the narrator “constantly feigns ignorance, adopts various disguises, lies to the reader – that is his narrative gambit. But he knows full well who these people are and what they are doing – after all, he created them.” Hagopian posits that “[p]erhaps a good reader is never really deceived and, indeed, actually enjoys playing a game of tricks and deceptions with an author who, like Nabokov, winks at the reader. But where is Fowles’s wink in French Lieutenant’s Woman?” He emotively asserts that “no reader with intellectual integrity will appreciate being tricked and patronized by a guru who, instead of telling him the truth, manipulates him with lies.

That resembles ‘bad faith’ more than the authenticity of a genuine existentialist”147.

Clearly, just as the trickery as revealed in the multiple endings is not appreciated by all regular readers, it also provokes a similar range of responses within the professional and academic communities – the objections, once again, hinging on the idea that the reader

146 Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “On the Third Try, John Fowles Connects.” On The New York Times. 10th November 1969. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/31/specials/fowles-french.html. Accessed 27th November 2014. 147 Hagopian, pp. 196, 198, 198, 197, and 197, respectively. 201 has been deceived by a manipulative creative agent who lulled the former into believing the work would follow the conventions of a traditional, known generic form.

Yet not all reviews and scholarly articles are negative when discussing the trickery involved in the multiple endings – many are ambivalent, and some are positive.

Discussing the alternate endings, Bényei states that “[t]he question is whether blatantly manipulative gestures of this kind are able to ‘liberate’ the reader, whether the seductive power of the narrative is not reproduced in the very act of its disavowal.”148 He claims that the multiple endings are “seductive strategies... [that are] experienced by the reader as a challenge that does not let him/her break free of the text.”149 Holmes notes,

Fowles is intentionally duplicitous in elaborating a fictional world which on the

one hand is realized with documentary realism but which on the other hand

bears slight resemblance to contemporary social realities. By doing so he

invites the reader to feel that he is entering a solid, factually-based environment

and therefore to delude himself that he is responding in a morally engaged way

to serious human concerns.150

Yet despite these seemingly negative terms (‘intentionally duplicitous’, ‘invites the reader to delude himself’), Holmes maintains Fowles “avoids writing in bad faith”, and that “the success of his novel is inseparable from its reflexive character.”151 Katherine

Tarbox claims that the trickery involved in the multiple endings means that the reader,

“by virtue of accepting the radical cognitive challenges the novel offers, develops new perceptual skills and processes that enable him or her to read in other than narrative

148 Bényei, p. 129. 149 Bényei, p. 136. 150 Holmes, p. 187. 151 Holmes, pp. 185 and 196, respectively. 202 ways, in other than institutionally conferred ways that take their being from narrative practice in the first place.”152 Positive views of the alternate endings thus also abound in scholarship, with critics pondering the postmodernist ramifications for the text and reader.

Fowles has carefully embedded his Victorian genre text with postmodernist aberrations, and so cannot be claimed as a full-blown villain. The narrator chooses to justify the multiple endings, after we have experienced them, by again pressing upon us the importance of the multiple endings – that the last is not the ‘real’ ending, that “you must not think… that this is a less plausible ending to their story.”153 The narrator insists that “there is no intervening god… thus only the actions of men (and of women) in pursuit of their ends.”154 Here Fowles’ narrator pleads with his readership to understand the necessity of the duplicity, the flouting of the most fundamental convention in regards to narrative endings – that there is only ever one correct ending.

The trickery, the narrator argues (on Fowles’ behalf, we might say, since the author himself has invited the conflation), was necessary in order to prove the point that there is no intervening god, that we must rely on ourselves to make actions that carve out our own paths, our own stories. As the narrator claims, “we [are] all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional future for ourselves”155, and it is up to us to choose actions that deliver these futures.

By carefully setting up both the narrator-character and the narrator/implied author as fall men, by steadfastly creating a narrator who is at once all-knowing and not, both filled with personality and the power to change the narrative and at the mercy of autonomous characters, by warning us over and over again that this is not a traditional

152 Tarbox, Katherine. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Evolution of Narrative.” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, No. 1, John Fowles Issue (Spring 1996). p. 88. 153 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 469. 154 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 469. 155 Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 342. 203 novel, that unexpected elements (such as the author entering the storyworld as a character, or false endings) occur, Fowles has carefully created a novel whereby the potential frustration and readerly outrage that may develop as a result of the trickery of the frustrated-expectations ending can be carefully siphoned off so that the blame falls, if not entirely away from the author, at least in part so.

Although James Phelan insists that an ideal reading of the novel leaves no other option of expectation than that of the double ending, he also claims that “Fowles works a characteristically twentieth-century narrative subterfuge on his audiences” in focusing our attention on the narrative discourse (the synthetic) rather than the story itself (the mimetic).156 This contradictory dual notion of subterfuge and of fulfilled expectation I believe points to the difference in possible readings. I would contend that, although many of the ‘clues’ to the ending, as itemised by Phelan, are easily identified and analysed on a subsequent reading, the first-time reader would probably not pick up on many of these. It is retrospect which allows us to see the careful planning Fowles articulates throughout his novel in order to ‘set up’ the circumstances and justification for his double ending. Fowles relies on a sense of surprise in his reader – why else would there be so much discussion, so much justification, carried out in the narrative in regards to the double ending? The presence of this justification tells us that Fowles expects his reader to expect a single ending – that the double ending will surprise the reader (give off a sense of authorial ‘subterfuge’), and that he must provide a reason for it as it takes place, rather than relying on his carefully-planted earlier clues (which may, indeed, have been overlooked as hints to this specific ending).

156 Phelan, James. “The Functions of Character and the Relations of Audiences in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” In Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. p. 102. 204

In discussing Chapter 13, Phelan draws on Peter Rabinowitz’s theory concerning the narrative and authorial audiences, and their different roles in understanding and interpreting literature. Phelan argues that both the narrative audience’s endorsement of the narrator’s refusal to give an account of Sarah’s mind, and the authorial audience’s awareness of Sarah, and by extension all the characters, as synthetic creations, make it possible for a non-conventional single ending to occur. He claims,

The narrative audience can accept both Sarah’s rejection and Sarah’s

acceptance of Charles because she has not been given enough of a mimetic

function to make us certain that she would act one way rather than the other

(though many of us may have our own convictions on this point). The authorial

audience can accept the double ending because it grows out of the prior

insistence on the synthetic nature of the characters – once we accept them as

constructs then we can very readily accept them doing many things at the

bidding of their maker, including of course agreeing to marry or to part

forever.157

The narrator’s drawing of our attention to the nature of characters as synthetic creations does, of course, make our authorial audience function question why the author has done this, to ask what specific purpose it serves the narrative to withdraw us from immersion in the storyworld. As Phelan states, it draws our attention to the “thematic functions of the characters”158. However, I cannot believe that the reader readily accepts (or even expects) the double ending just because certain aspects of the mimetic have been

157 Phelan, “Functions of Character”, p. 101. 158 Phelan, “Functions of Character”, p. 98. 205 denied. Sarah’s mind is denied to us in this chapter (and indeed, throughout the majority of the novel), but this does not make her any less ‘real’ for the reader. We see her standing at her window – we observe her and wonder at her mind. Not knowing this character well enough to predict her big life decisions (such as those carried out in the endings) does not preclude the narrative audience from believing she is a singular, whole ‘person’, and so will make a choice – that she cannot make more than one, since the conventions of realistic narrative, as based on observations of life, dictate that she can only live through a scene once and so only make one choice in that moment. The storyworld as constructed by the narrative audience is strong enough to survive an authorial audience’s focus on text as construction. We may see Sarah and Charles as synthetic constructions, but we see them, nonetheless, as (fictional) human beings inhabiting a specific world we have imagined at the prompting of the text.

Although Fowles’ narratorial intrusions often make us focus on the creation of the work rather than the storyworld, this, I believe, does not result in an immediate readerly acceptance of the double ending as we read it as simply a natural progression in this novel (and so, by inference, does not create an expectation within the reader of an unconventional narrative ending). The fact that the double ending surprises us proves that we are expecting Charles and Sarah to have a definitive ending (though we may not be able to predict what that will be, given our lack of access to Sarah’s mind). The fact that this surprise engenders frustration rather than acceptance in many readers’ reviews demonstrates that certain expectations override any potential ‘logic’ in the narrative and authorial audience functionings. These expectations are formed by the conventions of literature, but also by our seeing the characters as part of a storyworld that acts much like our own world – moving in a linear temporal fashion without repetition. This is the storyworld deliberately invoked so strongly by Fowles from the outset. Although this

206 double ending might excite or enthrall us, it is only on a second reading that I believe it can be predicted. On a first reading, the generic storyworld is too strong, too insistent, to allow subtle ‘clues’ to break our conventional expectations. Indeed, the comments of

Lehamnn-Haupt provide evidence for this hypothesis, the professional reviewer stating that the novel is “filled with enchanting mysteries that demand solutions, and the solutions are withheld until the last page. And even beyond the end. When I finished it,

I started over, searching for missed clues, testing the beginning in light of the end... The language is elegant enough, the solutions elusive enough.”159

The unconventional subversions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman rely on our already-formed classification of the work as Victorian fiction. Nowhere in the novel does it explicitly state the authorial narrator will not anachronistically pop into the storyworld as a character, or that the work will contain a single ending. To invoke certain textual rules without explicitly stating them in-text, Fowles must invoke a generic storyworld which comes with these rules attached. The author goes to great lengths to engage this generic classification at the outset in order to formulate expectations which can then be subverted. He does this by setting up a clear storyworld which relies on generic schema we, as readers, already possess.

Victoriana, Storyworlds, and Communication

Through the trickery contained in his fictional text, Fowles is dramatising the theory of possible worlds. Through narrative, he creates several possible worlds (or, arguably, one singular world with rules which are in flux). There is a world in which a very strict Victorian storyworld applies (a world in which the narrator is clearly creating this fictional world as an author would); a world in which the narrator buys a storyworld

159 Lehmann-Haupt. 207 jug (thereby conflating the creator’s world with the created); a world in which the narrator physically enters the storyworld to become a character on a train watching his protagonist (thereby also conflating the story time with the narrator’s time); a world in which a different narrator-character enters the storyworld and rewinds time by rewinding his pocket watch; a world in which one ending may happen, and another in which another ending may occur. Fowles uses his narrative to dramatise (within the fictional sphere) the notion of possible worlds. And yet this frustrates us. Why? Because we expect a singular world to exist. The notion of possible worlds is imperative to our creation of all fictional worlds. By imagining a world that is distinct in any way from our actual world, we have utilised (knowingly, or in most cases, unknowingly) the theory which attests that multiple possible worlds may exist. And yet, once created, we expect this fictional world to remain solid and unchanging. We expect it to conform to our expectations. These expectations come from generic convention, as invoked by the generic storyworld template which we laid over the text early on. Of course, Fowles goes almost overboard trying to lull us into the belief that this generic storyworld is the right one – his work is exuberantly Victorian, especially in the opening few chapters where genre is typically determined. Although he plants small clues to the subversive nature of the work to come, these may easily be overlooked thanks to the overwhelmingly Victorian nature of his text (for example, the postmodernist existential narratorial outbursts may give us some clue, but they are not enough to override the essentially Victorian narrative voice).

Through readers’ self-reporting evidence we know that the unconventional conclusion of The French Lieutenant’s Woman creates surprise. Therefore we know that the generic storyworld at this point in the temporal reading process is strong and omnipresent. Generic storyworlds are invoked by authors in order to convey a vast array

208 of information which need not be explicitly stated. The strength of Fowles’ formulated storyworld comes not just from the novel itself, but from the full force of storyworlds created and sustained previously in the reader’s interactions with similar Victorian- based fiction. In a process similar in effect to Booth’s career-author (where expectations about an author’s work are informed by her/his previous body of work), a generic storyworld comes into being as shaped by all previously-read Victorian literature and previously-seen Victorian imagery (film, television, artworks). The generic Victorian storyworld invoked is only ever-so-slightly altered for the current novel – characters like Charles, Ernestina, and Sarah are added as features, though the formation of these, too, rely on already-held generic depictions of Victorian characters. The double ending suddenly opens up multiple possible worlds, explicitly recreating the philosophical underpinnings of fictional worlds (whereby multiple possible worlds exist simultaneously), and also destabilising the generic storyworld as a singular entity.

Fowles thus draws our attention to the theory behind world creation. In first invoking, then refuting a strong generic storyworld, Fowles frustrates the expectations of his audience by narrativising the very theory on which fictional worlds hinge.

This novel proves to us that storyworlds are not just constructed by the words found on the pages of a single text, nor does any given storyworld stem completely from real life with only minor textually-cued changes (such as Marie-Laure Ryan’s infamous blue deer160 in the principle of minimal departure). Rather, the text invokes, then comes to bear on, generic storyworlds – those which, like the weight of the career-author on a single book, act with such force that they create strong readerly expectations. For the first time reader, then, the double ending frustrates readerly expectations, but does so with such skill that it is often deemed a wonderful trickery. Fowles uses the strong

160 Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Possible-worlds theory.” 209 readerly expectations created by the generic storyworld in order to craft a surprising postmodernist work. In so doing the author demonstrates not just the significance of already-held generic schema in storyworld construction, but also the vital importance of the cognitive process of storyworld construction to the act of narrative communication.

I will turn now to Fictional(ised) Memoirs in order to explore how generic classification results in reading practices and expectations explicitly concerning fact and fiction – expectations which may be played upon to create trickeries in this subgenre.

210

Chapter 4:

The Fictional(ised) Memoir and Fictionality

Fictional(ised) Memoirs constitute a curious subgenre with numerous contemporary examples, both controversial with, and accepted by, readers. These are novels which follow the style of memoir, but which are in part (or in whole) fictional. I have placed the ‘ised’ within parentheses, since the genre ranges from the more

‘regular’ memoirs which simply contain some fictional elements (the fictionalised), right through to novels which mimic the style of memoir but are entirely invented (the fictional). I have deemed these works trickeries because they contain revelatory material which can drastically change the way we view each text. In the case of fictionalised memoirs, the reader engages nonfictional reading practices, expecting the work to fully conform to that genre. The revelation of fictional elements within a mostly-factual text, if and when they are noticed, can be shocking. However, fictional memoirs are unique in the trickery genre, since they sometimes reveal the nature of their ‘trickery’ from the very beginning of the text. How, then, do these works trick us if they are also completely ‘honest’ about the trickery? The authors of these works ask us to suspend disbelief, to pretend the fictional work is true. Like the eighteenth century pseudofactual, they ask us to engage the reading practices associated with reading memoirs – a genre in which readers approach the text largely on the proviso that what they are to read is to be the ‘truth’ of a unique personal experience. Yet these works cannot be defined as pseudofactual, owing to the vastly different historical context in which they appear. As explored in Chapter One, the pseudofactual appeared at a time when definitions of fact and fiction were in flux. Today, the definitions of terms such as

211 facts/lies and nonfiction/fiction are so dichotomous and fixed that authors seeking to blend the forms do so at their peril, risking the alienation of readers who read with these binaries firmly in place. For many contemporary readers, engaging nonfiction-based reading practices when they know a work to be fictional does not allow for a simple suspension of disbelief, as in the case of conventional fiction. Documented readerly responses demonstrate this inability to allow the text to be freed of the weight of all readerly expectations which a nonfictional text would invoke.

Readers often become complicit in these very particular cases of trickery because they are at once encouraged to engage two different, mutually exclusive reading practices (that of fiction, and that of nonfiction) – the textual generic blurring encouraging a blurring of readerly processes. In pursuit of a good fiction reading experience, readers suspend disbelief, and in pursuit of a good memoir reading experience, they engage nonfictional reading practices associated with the implicit contract of the genre (that is, understanding that they are reading the story of a true experience). The fictional use of the memoir form blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction. The resulting combination of distinct reading processes sometimes results in readers willingly engaging with the text as truth and thus engaging reading practices based on readerly expectations which can never be fulfilled. They look for the truth because they have been asked to do so (even while being told there is none). In essence, these readers aid the author and text in tricking themselves. Both forms – the fictional and the fictionalised – could be studied independently, but since they both involve questions of fact and fiction in the memoir form, I have chosen to touch on both in the one chapter. I will briefly touch on one clear example of each, before turning to an intriguing blend of the fictional and the fictionalised in the form of my main case-study text – William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. An understanding of the complexities of

212 fact, fiction, and fictionality embedded in this work allows us to see it as more than the cult classic popular fiction fluff piece for which it has been adored (by general readers) and ignored (by academics). Goldman’s intricate blurring of the genre boundaries is often overlooked, and yet his achievement is profound – to carry off such duplicity while keeping his audience laughing is a rare skill, and one academia should not ignore.

In this chapter I will engage with the debates surrounding notions of fictionality, which are necessary for making sense of the Fictional(ised) Memoir. While readers come to a text with firm notions about what they are reading in terms of fiction and nonfiction (as informed by their exposure to the paratext), an author may guide the reader into invoking opposing reading practices. They may encourage the reader’s narrative audience to dominate, to believe in the truth of what they are reading even as they may know that ‘truth’ to be false (for example, a fictional text read as if it were memoir).1 This mimicry of the memoir form allows a reader to engage with a fictional work as if it were a memoir – to engage nonfictional reading practices. Alternatively, the author may flout a nonfictional paratextual classification by planting fictional elements, thus destabilising an observant reader’s nonfictional reading process (reading as truth, rather than as if truth). Either way, if an author chooses to flaunt the mixture of nonfiction and fiction in their fictionalised memoir, then this is explicitly noted and interrupts the natural memoir reading processes. I will argue, then, that fictionality within any text is only ever acknowledged by the reader when techniques foreign to the generic context (as perceived by that individual reader) flag the work as fictional. When such techniques of fictionalisation (or ‘signposts’) are observed, the reader is left

1 And here, once again, I am using my own version of Rabinowitz’s theory even though I am invoking his terms. The narrative audience mental process is that part of the brain’s functioning which allows us to immerse ourselves in, and believe in, the storyworld. This is different to Rabinowitz’s narrative audience, which is a metaphorical group a reader may choose to align themselves with. 213 without a solid, unchanging understanding of narrative ‘truth’ – a development which violates the implicit narrative contract.

Let us turn, then, to the scholarship surrounding fictionality to see how knowledge of Fictional(ised) Memoirs may contribute to the debate.

Fictionality

The terms ‘fact’ and ‘lie’ have fairly clear and generally (though not universally) agreed-upon definitional meanings – the former describes something that has actually occurred in the real world, the latter describes the telling of something that has not occurred in the real world as if it had. However, the term ‘truth’ occupies far murkier definitional, philosophical, and conceptual waters. Most often aligned with the

‘fact’ side of the divide, it does not always exactly equate with that term – and in fact, can vastly differ from it. Fictional narrative can contain ‘truths’ when we consider the universality of morals, meanings, and messages that may be taken away from the text.

The scholarly origin of this contemporary understanding of universal truth in fiction can be traced back as far as Aristotle, who claims that “poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages.”2 The particular of fiction, then, exemplifies the universal (while the particular of history can only exemplify that particular). Aloysius Martinich claims that “fiction gives rise to its own kind of facts, just as any institution does. Fictional facts (facts of fiction) are just as

2 Aristotle. “Poetics.” (Trans. S. H. Butcher.) On The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html. Accessed 2nd June 2015. Part IX. 214 factual as legal facts, and may or may not diverge from natural facts.”3 Martinich’s use of the term ‘fact’ seems to sit within the context of fictional worlds theory, whereby that world exists alongside any possible world, including the real world. Certain aspects of a fictional narrative, then, are ‘facts’ in the sense that they are ‘true’ for that narrative, even if they are not true in regards to the real world. Pierre Ouellet maintains that “the truth-value of the [fictional] utterance depends on the extent to which the experiences described and presented through a given semiotic form correspond to those that we experience or could experience in the phenomenal [fictional] world.”4 Although this seems to restrict the concept to realist fiction, the notion of ‘truth’ extends beyond this genre. Truth is relative to the work itself – a fictional fact must fit within the fictional world in order to be a fictional truth. And yet, as previously stated, fictional truth can also refer to the more figurative truths gained from themes, morals, and metaphors.

Fiction clearly has a complicated relationship with ‘truth’. Calin-Andrei

Mihailescu and Walid Hamarneh claim that “the concept of fiction cannot be elaborated upon outside of its incipient relation to truth”5. They state:

... the making of fictional sentences and texts is to be defined as the set of

discursive procedures that leads to escaping the limitations of truth judgment.

Fictional products are arrived at through these procedures, the traces of which

3 Martinich defines “institution” in a broad sense: “... the practice of fiction is an not a formal institution like the Congress or the court system, but an informal institution, as marriage is in societies without a central bureaucracy and as the O. Henry Pun Off is.” Martinich, Aloysius. “A Theory of Fiction.” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 25, No. 1 (April 2001). p. 102. 4 Ouellet, Pierre. “The Perception of Fictional Worlds.” In Calin-Andrei Mihailescu and Walid Hamarneh (eds.). Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1996. p. 78-9. 5 Mihailescu, Calin-Andrei, and Hamarneh, Walid. “Introduction: Under the Jealous Gaze of Truth.” In Calin-Andrei Mihailescu and Walid Hamarneh (eds.). Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1996. p. 3. 215

they keep: rather than being static, fictional products are to be viewed as being

in tension with their alleged nonfictional counterparts.6

Thus Mihailescu and Hamarneh are making the claim that all fiction is oppositional to nonfiction – that the link remains between the two because of their direct opposition.

Our linguistic understanding of these terms both hints at firm, unbreachable dichotomies, and also guides us towards apparently contradictory definitions.

The ‘problem’ of fictionality has been broached from a number of different angles – namely, the semantic, pragmatic, rhetorical, and syntactic approaches. Paul

Dawson explains that originally, “[f]ictionality as a nominal field of study... was explicitly framed as a debate between semantics and pragmatics.”7 The contested field, then, the opposing sides of which posited differing approaches to referentiality and the problem of fictional truth, developed out of “philosophy of language and logic”8. The extension from philosophy into literary studies was made when fictional worlds were seen as other possible worlds (a development discussed in the previous chapter). As regards the study of fiction, the semantics scholars (such as Ruth Ronen, Thomas Pavel,

Lubomír Doležel, and Marie-Laure Ryan) are concerned with possible worlds theory, which posits that there are any number of possible worlds – the ‘real world’ being just one of these. The rules of any created fictional world thus apply to that world alone, in potential isolation from the real world – each fictional world works in parallel relation to, but is not reliant on, referentiality to the real world.

In contrast, the pragmatic approach developed out of speech act theory. As a seminal scholar of this persuasion, John R. Searle argues that “speaking or writing in a

6 Mihailescu and Hamarneh , “Introduction”, p. 9. 7 Dawson, Paul. “Ten Theses against Fictionality.” Narrative, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 2015). p. 75. 8 Dawson, “Ten Theses against Fictionality”, p. 74. 216 language consists in performing speech acts of a quite specific kind called ‘illocutionary acts.’”9 Fiction, then, is the result of an author whose intent is to make “nonserious” utterances10 – the fictional narrative is “pretending... to make an assertion...”, where to pretend is “to engage in a performance which is as if one were doing or being the thing and is without any intent to deceive.”11 The traditional rules of real world utterances in regards to truth are then suspended due to this open pretence to which all parties

(authorial and readerly) agree. This pretending, Searle argues, causes a disruption in the usual referentiality between language and the real world – “the pretended illocutions which constitute a work of fiction are made possible by the existence of a set of conventions which suspend the normal operation of the rules relating illocutionary acts and the world.”12 This notion of pretending literality has come up against much opposition from those who argue that the goal of writing fiction is to write fiction – not to pretend to write reality. Ultimately, the question comes down to whether the truth status of a statement resides in the words themselves, or the use of those words.

A development of the pragmatic approach comes in the form of the rhetorical approach, whereby the context of authorial intent is seen to determine fictionality.

Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh argue that “fictionality attaches to the communicative act, not the object of representation”13. Thus it is rather the communication of authorial intent which makes a work (or statement) fictional, rather than any inherent textual ‘fictionness’. While these scholars concede that a text may be interpreted as fictional by a reader even when that is not the intent of the author, this

9 Searle, John R. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and Narratives (Winter 1975). p. 319. 10 Searle, p. 320. 11 Searle, p. 324. 12 Searle, p. 326. 13 Nielsen, Henrik Skov, Phelan, James, and Walsh, Richard. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 2015). p. 65. 217 may “impede effective communication”14. Importantly, like pragmatics-based Searle who argues that “there is no trait or set of traits which all works of literature have in common and which could constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a work of literature”15, these rhetorical theorists also argue against the idea that certain textual elements can be found which point definitively to the text as being fictional or nonfictional. Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh claim, “[n]o formal technique or other textual feature is in itself a necessary and sufficient ground for identifying fictive discourse.”16

This leads me to the last alternative approach to fictionality – that is, what

Dawson has termed the “syntactic” approach17 – which I wish to engage with in this chapter. The syntactic approach fundamentally hinges on whether or not certain narrative techniques can be identified as belonging exclusively to either the domain of fiction or the domain of non-fiction. Michael Riffaterre believes that textual features, or

‘signs’, of fictionality exist, arguing that certain techniques are found only in fictional narratives, and not in nonfictional discourse. He lists a multitude of such techniques:

… author’s intrusions; narrators’ intrusions; multiple narrators; humorous

narrative that acts as a representation of the author or of a narrator or that

suggests an outsider’s viewpoint without fully intruding; metalanguage

glossing narrative language; generic markers in the titles and subtitles, in

prefaces, and in postfaces; emblematic names for characters and places;

incompatibilities between narrative voice and viewpoint and characters’

voices and viewpoints; incompatibilities between viewpoint and

verisimilitude, especially omniscient narrative; signs modifiying the

14 Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh, “Ten Theses”, p. 66. 15 Searle, p. 320. 16 Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh, “Ten Theses”, p. 66. 17 Dawson, “Ten Theses against Fictionality”, p. 78. 218

narrative’s pace and altering the sequence of events (backtracking and

anticipation, significant gaps, prolepsis, and analepsis); mimetic excesses,

such as unlikely recordings of unimportant speech or thought (unimportant but

suggestive of actual happenings, of a live presence, creating atmosphere or

characterizing persons); and, finally, diegetic overkill, such as the

representation of ostensibly insignificant details, the very insignificance of

which is significant in a story as a feature of realism.18

Of course, all of these supposed markers of fictionality may be identified through a conscientious close study of the text by one skilled in the knowledge of narrative techniques, but I would question whether a regular reader simply reading for pleasure would be aware of most of them as they read.

Riffaterre is not alone in claiming that certain linguistic elements occur only in fictional narrative. Käte Hamburger declares that there is a definable difference between statement and fiction. She argues that certain linguistic markers denote that a text is fiction as opposed to nonfiction. Most notably, the usually linguistically-problematic combination of the temporal instances of action and narration in third person retrospective narration means that past tense third person narration is read as present if it is fiction – the characters are carrying out their lives as described in the present moment, despite the past tense of the narration. This is the opposite of statement language, where past tense denotes something that has already happened and is not happening now. Thus fiction, in making a statement about something occurring (even if that statement is in past tense), creates the thing it is describing – the narration makes the events happen then, right before us. The natural consequence of this, Hamburger

18 Riffaterre, Michael. Fictional Truth. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. p. 29-30. 219 argues, is that in fiction we are privy to characters thinking as opposed to having thought.19 I find the argument that there is a complete reduction of the temporal distance between action and narration (that the past takes place in the present, despite the tense) problematic – often there is a real sense of retrospection in this form of narration, the narrator clearly wanting to put distance between the characters’ time and their own.

However, I will willingly concede that narrative fiction more easily makes an (invented) past come alive, since this past never truly took place and is in fact being created for the first time through the narrative discourse. This makes our reading of character thoughts less troubled than it would be for nonfictional discourse (though within the latter it is certainly not impossible).

Ann Banfield asserts that “[r]epresented thought is restricted to genres which are not orally composed (the epic) or an imitation of an oral communication (the drama and skaz).”20 Furthermore, she maintains that the genres containing represented thought

“belong to the category of narration”21 rather than discourse. Banfield separates fictional narrative from historical narrative, claiming that unlike historical narrative,

“[n]arrative fiction is structured linguistically by the conjunction of two unspeakable sentences, the sentence of narration and the sentence representing consciousness.”22 She states that the introduction of the conjunction of narration and consciousness- representation into historical narrative marks the introduction of fiction to that narrative, and so it ceases being nonfictional.23 Banfield is here making a very specific claim – that there is one defining linguistic combination which marks a work as fiction, since that combination cannot occur in nonfiction. This is obviously quite a different claim to

19 Hamburger, Käte. The Logic of Literature. Second, Revised Edition. (Trans. Marilynn J. Rose.) Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1973. 20 Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable sentences: Narration and representation in the language of fiction. Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1982. p. 241. 21 Banfield, “Unspeakable sentences”, p. 242. 22 Banfield, “Unspeakable sentences”, p. 257. 23 Banfield, “Unspeakable sentences”, p. 258. 220

Riffaterre’s enormous list of techniques. Dorrit Cohn finds a happy medium between the two, arguing for three “fiction-specific signals [which] may be found within texts”.24

Cohn explores these three areas of narratological study which she claims are “specific to the fictional domain and need to be modified before they can apply to neighboring narrative precincts”25 – that is, to nonfictional discourse. These three areas are “the synchronic bi-level (story/discourse) model…; the dependence of certain prominent narrative modes (notably for the presentation of consciousness) on the constitutional freedom of fiction from referential constraints; and the doubling of the narrative instance into author and narrator – a meaningful conception for the vocal origin… of fictional narratives.”26

Others have argued against the possibility of such signposting for the reader, claiming that supposedly unique fictional techniques can be, and are, used by nonfiction writers. Richard Walsh maintains the distinct category of narrative fictionality within the broader field of narrative. He asserts:

I want to grant full force to the claim that all narrative is artifice, and in that

very restricted sense fictive, but maintain nonetheless that fictional narrative

has a coherently distinct cultural role, and that a distinct concept of fictionality

is required to account for this role… true, there are formal qualities strongly

associated with fiction, but they do not supply necessary or sufficient

conditions of fictionality.27

24 Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1990). p. 776. 25 Cohn, “Signposts”, p. 800. 26 Cohn, “Signposts”, p. 800. 27 Walsh, Richard. “The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality.” In James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005.. p. 152. 221

Thus, although agreeing that narrative fiction is a distinct category within narrative as a whole, Walsh differs from Riffaterre and Cohn on the idea of certain unique textual features of fictionality. James Phelan agrees with Walsh, in that “distinguishing between fiction and nonfiction remains a worthwhile activity, but I do not believe… that we can make the distinction on the basis of techniques that are either sure markers of fiction or nonfiction or that appear exclusively in one. As soon as such techniques get identified, some narrative artist will use them for unanticipated effects.”28

Nicholas Rescher seems to hover between the two sides, at once claiming that

“the boundary that separates fiction from nonfiction cannot be neat and simple”, while also managing to find “three salient features that are characteristic of fiction: a prominent role for the activities of imaginary persons and/or imaginary actions or events; substantial length and comprehensiveness; significant limitation of scope and unified integrity of treatment as represented in an interconnectedness of events and episodes within a narrative space of moderate scope.”29 Martinich points to certain signposts which may guide a reader in determining that a text is a work of fiction:

“Sometimes the word ‘fiction’ or ‘novel’ on a book’s spine or the notice ‘Any resemblance between the events and characters in this book and real events and people is purely coincidental’ is sufficient. And there are other ways of signalling fictional content, such as ‘Once upon a time.’”30 However, he points out that such markers are not always sufficient to definitively categorise the work: “While it is always located in some Fiction section of libraries and bookstores, its location does not make the book fiction. It occupies that location because it has been recognized as fiction. And it is

28 Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. p. 68. 29 Rescher, Nicholas. “Questions About the Nature of Fiction.” In Mihailescu, Calin-Andrei, and Hamarneh, Walid (eds.). Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1996. pp. 31 and 32, respectively. 30 Martinich, p. 102. 222 recognized as fiction because, given our network of beliefs, it makes the most sense to construe it that way.”31 By extension, then indicative markers may actually be employed in a ‘false’ way and thus cannot be absolutely trusted (even if they may initially guide us), and so we make recourse to our societal beliefs, Martinich argues, in order to decide whether works are fiction or nonfiction.

Nielsen refuses the notion that a list of techniques of narrative fiction can be formed, insisting, rather, that these are techniques of fictionalization. Nielsen explains that “the reader is often guided in his or her interpretation by a number of features that invite different readings” rather than textual markers.32 A narrative can be fiction, nonfiction, or both, and it can use techniques of fictionalization. This explains what

Walsh terms “the range of borderline cases that vex definitions of fiction: historical novel, roman à clef, fictionalized memoir, historiographic metafiction, hoax.”33

However, Nielsen also claims (on behalf of Phelan and Walsh, as well as himself) that readers alone do not determine whether something is a signpost: “It takes an interaction among authors, readers, and textual features in a historical context to establish something as a signpost.”34 While my position is sympathetic with the Phelan/Walsh and Neilsen arguments, in that I believe no specific technical element can be isolated to the one genre, I take issue with the idea that readers cannot be sole interpretive agents regarding signposts. In fact, I will use this chapter to argue that it is only readers who can interpret a technique as a signpost of fictionality – if they notice a textual element rather than passing over it without note, if they regard it as foreign to the generic context in which they have determined it sits (for example, a fictional technique in a

31 Martinich, p. 103. 32 Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration.” In J. Alber and M. Fludernik (eds.). Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. p. 280. 33 Walsh, “Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality”, p. 163. 34 Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “Fictionality as Rhetoric: A Response to Paul Dawson.” Narrative, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 2015). p. 106. 223 work they believe to be nonfictional), then they see the technique as indicating fictionality. Of course, authorial intent will often go a large way in guiding this interpretation, and historical context (including accepted generic conventions in a given time) without doubt play a fundamental role in setting readerly expectations – but it is the reader alone who is the final interpreter, and thus the final decider of fictionality.

While readers do consciously read alien techniques (for example, narrating the minds of others in nonfiction) as techniques associated with the craft of fictionalisation, once these techniques are naturalised into the reader’s consciousness, the reader then fails to explicitly note them on future occurrences. Nielsen reports that readers in the

James Frey A Million Little Pieces case failed to notice the many techniques of fictionalisation in the memoir, and points to the probability that this came about because

“the text only uses techniques that have already been conventionalized in first-person narration.”35 I wish to extend this notion a step further – rather than simply advocating for the concept that most readers do not notice what is conventional about the most common styles of narrative discourse, I would argue that readers only consciously notice what is unconventional, new, or foreign to them. What I mean by ‘notice’, is that they are abruptly drawn out of the storyworld – a technique being so unfamiliar in its setting that it jolts the reader and makes them consciously contemplate its placement within that context. These unfamiliar elements are what remind the reader that the work they are reading is fictionalised since they are forced to think consciously about these elements. Not noticing the conventional and noticing the unconventional would seem to be similar concepts (and, indeed, they are two sides of the one coin), but I will argue that they are distinct processes. Failing to notice is a passive readerly process, whereas noticing is an active process. In noticing the unconventional we are forced as readers to

35 Nielsen, “Natural Authors”, p. 291. 224 carry out additional, unforeseen work, and in cases of trickery this work is rewarded not with a deepening complexity of storyworld (for the pleasure of the narrative audience), but with further work – that is, forced acknowledgement of the fictionalisation of the narrative (the labour of the authorial audience). This interrupts our conventional engagement of nonfictional reading processes, which rely on our understanding of the work as factual.

All literary techniques can either be consciously or subconsciously processed, depending on whether or not the technique is well-known to that reader. This, of course, means that the reader’s experience with different kinds of texts and techniques guides how they read new texts, and so the socio-cultural and historical context of the reader

(and their exposure to narratives) matters greatly in their observation of techniques of overt fictionality (that is, signposts). Ruth Ronen makes this claim when arguing that fictionality is not an inherent quality of a text, but rather that “the fictional property of texts can be defined relative to a given cultural context, as a pragmatically decided feature of texts. Every culture adduces its own relative criteria for classification of texts”36. She asserts that whether a text is deemed fact or fiction is determined by the cultural context of the reader, and that the “fictionality of a text is a type of relationship between writer and reader reflected in the world the text projects”37 – that is, the fictional world. Building on Ronen’s assertions, I am claiming that beyond the macro classification of text as fiction or nonfiction (as decided by the cultural context of that decision), the micro observations of techniques of fictionality during reading depend also on the reader’s specific, individual context – the most important part of which is that reader’s exposure to similar (and so, expected) techniques within given genres. Of

36 Ronen, Ruth. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. p. 10. 37 Ronen, p. 87. 225 course, whilst this may seem impossible to study, most readers do, in fact, share a large body of understanding in regards to conventional techniques, as encouraged by conventional literature.

If this argument stands up to testing, it would throw new light on the fictionality debate – building on Nielsen’s idea that “readers do, in fact, react very differently depending on whether they think they are reading fiction or not”38 (that is, it matters less what is in the narrative, but moreso what frame the reader brings with them to the text in regards to whether it is fictional or non-fictional), I am arguing that techniques are only explicitly read and noted as fictionality markers if they are foreign to the reader. That which is new places the reader’s attentive focus in the interpretation realm of the authorial audience, making them acutely aware, as they read, of the fictionalisation of the story, violating their implicit assumptions in regards to narrative truth. It matters not, then, whether certain techniques belong solely to fiction or nonfiction; rather, for the reader, fictionality is a marker only visible when it is made explicit through techniques foreign to that reader.

Authors of Fictional(ised) Memoirs make use of known or identifiable genres and techniques in order to ‘switch off’ the alertness of the authorial audience, so to speak – as a way to sneak the seemingly incompatible mix of ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ past the conscious judgment of the reader. Fictionality is not explicitly pointed to or acknowledged in most of these works, sometimes in the service of verisimilitude, sometimes as a gentle form of hoax. Readers align what they read with truth because to them, memoirs are inextricably linked with truth. These works are generally lacking in foreign techniques that might jolt the reader out of this natural alignment experience; as such, the reader is not reminded of the crafting, the invention of the work, and so they

38 Nielsen, “Natural Authors”, p. 280. 226 do not question their memoir reading process. However, before I can address fictional(ised) memoirs, I must first touch on notions of truth within the genre from which these works borrow – the memoir.

Memoir

Memoir, like all life writing, is inherently bound by questions of ‘truth’ – moreso than most other literary forms. In this, there is an inherent link between memoir and history writing. As Louise W. Knight outlines, there are great gulfs of difference between the two different writing styles:

Memoir interprets a personal past; history a collective one. Memoir, being told

in the first person, is irrevocably subjective; history, being written in the

impersonal voice, is ostensibly objective; memoir is a mind, writing, frozen at

a point in time; history, though it often fails at the task, aspires to

transcendence... Memoir, as its name implies, is memory’s uncorrected

report.39

Knight goes on to outline “history’s grumpiness about memoir’s relationship to objective truth”40 – an apparent dislike of one genre by another based on memoirists’ supposed ‘failure’ to adhere to the strict nature of truth as facts. I would go a step further and say that, although we may not feel any grumpiness, we, as regular readers, feel at times inspired, at times confused by the relationship of memoir to ‘truth’, and so truth is, for the reader, an implicitly understood ‘issue’ in memoir.

39 Knight, Louise W. “Essay: Sibling Rivalry: History and Memoir.” The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2007). p. 12. 40 Knight, p. 12. 227

Philippe Lejeune claims there is a contract between author and reader in cases of autobiography, which he terms the “autobiographical pact”.41 He claims this pact differentiates autobiography (and its closely related genres, such as memoir) from fictional works. Lejeune states that fictional novels may mimic autobiography, but “as soon as we include the [title page]... in the text, with the name of the author, we make use of a general textual criterion, the identity (‘identicalness’) of the name (author– narrator–protagonist). The autobiographical pact is the affirmation in the text of this identity, referring back in the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover.”42

Lejeune argues that the “fictional pact” constitutes the exact opposite – the author deliberately making clear to the reader that there is no autobiographical pact, through the “obvious practice of non-identity... [and the] affirmation of ficticiousness”.43 Musing on Lejeune’s assertions, Gérard Genette comments on the relationship between author and narrator:

It seems to me that their rigorous identification (A = N), to the degree that this

can be established, defines factual narrative, in which, in Searle’s (1975) terms,

the author assumes full responsibility for the assertions of his narrative and,

consequently, does not grant autonomy to any narrator. Conversely, their

dissociation (A ≠ N) defines fiction, that is, a type of narrative for the veracity

of which the author does not seriously vouch.44

41 Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Paul John Eakin (ed.). (Trans. Katherine Leary.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. p. 13. 42 Lejeune, pp. 13-14. 43 Lejeune, p. 15. 44 Genette, Gérard. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 1990). p. 764. 228

Thus Genette argues that if the author and narrator identify, then the work is factual – if they do not, then it is fictional. This definition works, he claims, no matter the content within the story (that is, whether or not the work contains factual or fictional story elements). Many would not be so rigorously dichotomous in their interpretation of a work as nonfictional or fictional, but both Genette’s statement and those of Lejeune’s point to a commonly held view – that identity between the author and those agents within a text (the narrator and the protagonist) plays a large role in generic determination of a work. This reflects the importance of accuracy within the life writing genres, especially those personal forms such as autobiography and memoir.

The numerous literary variants within the overarching genre now referred to by scholars as ‘life writing’ have a complicated classificatory history. Susannah B. Mintz notes that “[e]ven in academic circles, the categories associated with life writing are not used consistently (‘life writing’ being itself a term primarily known only to scholars)”45.

The term ‘memoir’, then, like associated terms such as ‘autobiography’ and

‘biography’, does not have a fixed definition. G. Thomas Couser argues that despite the troublesome nature of ‘genre’ in this particular literary field, “a notion of genre is indispensable in analysis of life writing, whether historical or contemporary.”

Emphasising function over form, he goes on to argue that while some genres may be defined by formal features or content, “[g]enres of life writing are sometimes defined by what they do – the work of memoir.”46 Although I would argue that fictional genres may also be defined by the work they do, that work differs in type from that carried out by memoir. The work of a memoir may be to apologise, to confess, to explain, and so on, and it is these motives which allow the subgenres of life writing to be made distinct

45 Mintz, Susannah B. “Memoir: An Introduction.” Life Writing, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2013). p. 354. 46 Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 14. 229 from one another, and for the group as a whole to be made distinct from fictional genres which may more readily be classified not just by form, content, or style, but also by their work of telling a good story, entertaining, throwing light on life through invention and metaphor, and so on. The work of memoir is thus ‘I’-centred on the author, unlike fictional genres which need not be defined in this way.

The difference between autobiography and memoir has an even more contentious, and certainly more judgmental, history. Laura Marcus states that in the nineteenth century, there was a certain value judgment placed on the two forms, with autobiography coming out on top. Marcus notes that for the critics of this period,

... there is a hint that the writers of ‘memoirs’ (in the modern sense of the

term), are... inadequate to the profundities of introspective autobiography. Thus

the autobiography/memoirs distinction – ostensibly formal and generic – is

bound up with a typological distinction between those human beings who are

capable of self-reflection and those who are not. This opposition is still current,

often correlated with class and cultural capital.47

Marcus’ last point – that the inherent negative value judgment of the form persists today

– is also noted by other scholars, particularly in contrast with the novel: Mintz asserts that “the truthfulness of memoir leads some to minimise the genre’s artistry, as if adherence to the facts of life obviates an author’s imaginative skills and makes a good memoir easy to write”48; Couser comments on this perceived lack of artistry, referring specifically to the powerful backlash against memoir as a skilled literary genre: “[o]ne

47 Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical discourses: Theory, criticism, practice. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. p. 21. 48 Mintz, p. 353. 230 powerful impulse in the ‘memoir backlash’ seems to have been to privilege the novel on the grounds that fiction is more ‘imaginative,’ ‘literary,’ and ‘artistic’ than non-fiction

— a response that suggests that all genres are not created equal.”49 Couser notes that there has been a recent turnaround for memoir, which has been “revalued” more positively, though it is unclear exactly why. Couser states that “writers and publishers have outflanked and co-opted critics on this matter. So today, ironically, memoir is the term of art, the prestige term. We have not experienced an autobiography boom, but a memoir boom. No one writes autobiography any more. At least, no one reads it.”50 The market, then, has enacted a turnaround for a historically-devalued term, turning it into a highly commodified and prized literary form. Of course, life writing in general has recently experienced a boom in terms for subgeneric forms, many of which acknowledge the blend of fact and fiction these genres can contain (faction and autofiction are notable and well-regarded examples). The fact that most readers today will read life writing as ‘memoir’ rather than ‘autobiography’, coupled with the powerful literary capital the term has accrued, is powerful impetus for me to use the former term in this study.

The fact that memoir is often seen as a form which details part of a life, rather than a whole life, solidifies my choice of the term. Marcus claims that “[t]he distinction most frequently made is that between autobiography as the evocation of a life as a totality, and ‘memoirs’ which offer only an anecdotal depiction of people and events.”51

Couser agrees, stating, “the term [autobiography] was coined [around 1800] to refer to... the sort of narrative... that attempts to represent a life in its chronological entirety...

When contemporary writers devote narratives to particular periods or events of their

49 Couser, G. Thomas. “Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation.” Life Writing, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2005). p. 144. 50 Couser, Memoir, p. 18. 51 Marcus, Auto/biographical discourses, p. 3. 231 lives, it is better to think of them as memoirs than as autobiographies. So autobiography is more comprehensive, memoir more limited, in scope.”52 Whether or not it is better to think of memoirs in this way, it is clear that many readers today do so, and so I am adopting this terminological definition.

Memoir seeks to portray the ‘real’, personal experience of the subject within a specific time or series of life events. Unlike history, memoir’s focus on the personal experience of events means it can only be told by the experiencer. Jocelyn Bartkevicius states that “[t]he word itself suggests that memoir’s focus is not exterior but rather interior.”53 This genre is thus consciousness-based rather than events-based, but like autobiography and biography it still carries the onus of ‘truth’. The truth of the personal experience (even if this differs from the truth of actual events) is at the heart of the genre. Robert S. Fogarty claims that “most memoirists tell the truth as they remember it.

Despite that fact the controversies continue and few are without opinions about the

‘truth or falsity’ of such texts.”54 Here Fogarty points to the inherent tension within the genre – the striving for ‘truth’, coupled with the subjectivity of personal experience. Yet this tension does not cloud the popularity of the genre; memoirs are appealing to readers because their narratives tell unique personal truths. As Dawn Latta Kirby and Dan Kirby reveal, memoirs “are reflective and sometimes partially fictionalized creations that reveal truths and mysteries of lives we would never know if the author had not chosen to take us there.”55 This loose mingling of fact and fiction makes the memoir a particularly ripe genre for the possibility of narrative trickery.

52 Couser, Memoir, p. 23. 53 Bartkevicius, Jocelyn. ““The Person to Whom Things Happened”: Meditations on the Tradition of Memoir.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1999). p. 135. 54 Fogarty, Robert S. “Editorial: Memoirs True and False.” The Antioch Review, Vol. 64, No. 4, Memoirs True and False (Autumn, 2006). p. 597. 55 Kirby, Dawn Latta, and Kirby, Dan. “Contemporary Memoir: A 21st-Century Genre Ideal for Teens”. The English Journal, Vol. 99, No. 4 (March 2010). p. 24. 232

Memoir engages the use of memory – an inherently unreliable cognitive function. Marcus claims that “[v]ery few critics would demand that autobiographical truth should be literally verifiably – this would, after all, undermine the idea that the truth of the self is more complex than ‘fact’. Thus, it is claimed, the ‘intention’ to tell the truth, as far as possible, is a sufficient guarantee of autobiographical veracity and sincerity.”56 This, we must remember, is what critics demand of the genre – whether those same expectations are placed on it by the clearly-adoring general readership is another question entirely. Truth matters for memoir – even if absolute truth does not.

And therein lies the rub – if some untruth may be forgiven or even invited, how can writers determine exactly what ratio each reader will demand and so satisfy their expectations? The answer, of course, is that they cannot, and this is where the genre blending trickery begins.

Although readers rely on the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in order to understand certain narratives, individual authors have always borrowed techniques or forms typical of the alternative. Ina Schabert talks about the distinction between fictional and factual biographies, claiming “the fictional biography might be regarded as the highly sophisticated version of the anecdote which is known to be fictitious but which brings out a truth about a real person in a more poignant way than would a factual account.”57 ‘Truth’, then, may actually come from untruths. Max Saunders, amongst others, has employed the term “Autobiografiction”58 for the blended fictional/nonfictional forms. He claims that blurring the “generic boundaries doesn’t invalidate the concept of genre. It may highlight the inevitable overlappings of genres,

56 Marcus, “Auto/biographical discourses”, p. 3. 57 Schabert, Ina. “Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contaminations.” Biography, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 1982). p. 6. 58 Saunders, Max. “Autobiografiction: Experimental Life-Writing from the Turn of the Century to Modernism.” Literature Compass, Vol. 6, No. 5 (2009). pp. 1041–1059. 233 since genres aren’t pure entities.”59 Saunders points to the unstable term

‘autobiography’ in order to illustrate the blending of generic forms, and how that blending merely brings to our attention the different generic forms rather than invalidating them:

The term ‘autobiography’... has a radical ambiguity. It can mean a mode of

writing that’s separate from other forms (drama, poetry, fiction etc), and that

exists purely for telling the story of your own life. Or it can be used to describe

something about all those other forms too. The best illustration of this is the

way we use the adjective ‘autobiographical’. When we speak of an

autobiographical novel, the point is that we’re applying it to something that

isn’t a formal autobiography, but that has some qualities or content of

autobiography in it. It’d be nonsensical to talk of an autobiographical

autobiography; not just because sounds tautological, but because it’s also a

contradiction to the extent that ‘autobiographical’ means, in this context,

‘having some of the content of an autobiography in a form that isn’t

autobiography’.60

The terms associated with ‘autobiography’ thus have a complicated relationship with fact and fiction. And yet there remains a strong link between these terms and notions of truth. Even when a work blurs the generic lines, the fact that we notice this blurring means that genre still remains important to us. Laurie McNeill maintains that

“identifying text types continues to be important. We still need to ‘pin down,’ to name,

59 Saunders, “Autobiografiction”, p. 1055. 60 Saunders, “Autobiografiction”, p. 1055. 234 what we read or watch or hear, in order to comprehend the work these texts do.”61

Interpretive strategies, then, are engaged on the basis of recognisable genre – even if stereotypical generic techniques are blended within the work.

Fact and Fiction in ‘Memoir’

Arthur Golden’s 1997 novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, and James Frey’s 2003

‘memoir’, A Million Little Pieces, represent two stylistic extremes within the diverse field of the Fictional(ised) Memoir. The former is a novel which is completely fictional

(and makes no pretense otherwise)62 yet is written in the style of memoir, while the latter is a memoir based on the author’s own experiences where certain techniques of fictionalisation, as well as fictional events, are employed in order to enhance the narrative. Fiction in the style of memoir is a centuries old novelistic tradition. As

Barbara Foley explains, the pseudofactual novel, which came to prominence in the eighteenth century, involved an implicit contract between author and reader which asked readers “to accept the text’s characters and situations as invented... [and, a]t the same time... to approach the text as if it were a nonfictional text – a memoir, a confession, a group of letters.”63 Cohn states that she sees “historical and novelistic narratives that center on a life plot as the generic region where factual and fictional narratives come into closest proximity, the territory that presents the greatest potential

61 McNeill, Laurie. “Editorial: labelling our selves: genres and life writing.” Life Writing, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2005). p. 9. 62 It should be noted here that Golden interviewed Mineko Iwasaki (a former geisha) for background research, which greatly informed his novel. He thanks her “above all others” in his Acknowledgements (p. 433), and it was this public gratitude that caused Iwasaki to sue Golden – she had apparently agreed to speak to him on condition of anonymity, and after her identity was revealed she was allegedly negatively viewed by others for having violated the code of the geisha (that is, of secrecy). However, this does not change the fact that the work was released as a fictional novel in the style of a memoir – inspiration for such works often coming from real world people, eras, or events – and so does not affect my discussion of fictionality in the text. For information on this court case, see: Ellison, Michael, and Watts, Jonathan. “Geisha wants cut of Golden’s goose.” On The Guardian. 26th April 2001. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/apr/26/books.booksnews. Accessed 4th June 2015. 63 Foley, Barbara. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986. p. 107. 235 for overlap.”64 Cohn maintains that “fictional autobiography, is the deliberate artificial simulation of this referential genre [of autobiography]... they are not related in the manner of identical twins, but as a facsimile relates to its original.”65 She maintains that

“all fictional autobiographies offer a telescoped double pact: an autobiographical pact impacted within a fictional pact” and so shape the reading experience in this respect.66

Susan Lanser asserts that “calling a novel a memoir… is a conventional practice claiming truth for the text in order, paradoxically, to increase its impact as fiction.”67

The idea of truth, then, Lanser claims, increases the readerly impact of fictional works – the readerly experience is enriched by this connection with ‘truth’.

Golden is never deceitful in regards to the entirely fictional status of his work – it is the memoir of a female, Japanese geisha named Sayuri, and yet his male, anglo- saxon name adorns the cover. Under the terms of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, this fails the necessary conditions whereby there is an “identity of name” between the author

(that is, the name on the cover), the narrator, and protagonist.68 Under Genette’s understanding of factual and fictional narrative, the text must be fictional because author and narrator do not identify. At once then, this cannot be autobiography or memoir. Once the reader passes through this paratext, the text itself conforms entirely to the genre of memoir. The text contains what Edward Maloney refers to as an “artificial paratext”69, which is an apparent piece of paratext – for example, a preface or acknowledgements – which is actually part of the text itself. Importantly, the artificial

64 Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. p. 18. 65 Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, p. 30. 66 Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, p. 33. 67 Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. p. 128. 68 Lejeune, p. 12. 69 Maloney, Edward J. “Footnotes in fiction: a rhetorical approach.” Electronic Thesis or Dissertation. Ohio State University, 2005. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ p. 58. 236 paratext is always integral to, and indeed a part of, the text (the fiction) itself. Golden prefaces Sayuri’s memoir with a “Translator’s Note” from:

Jakob Haarhuis

Arnold Rusoff Professor of Japanese History

New York University70

Jakob tells us that, after seeing geishas perform as a child many decades prior to the instance of writing, he now recalls the recent past where, “in a time and place as far away as New York City nearly fifty years in the future, one among them would become my good friend and would dictate her extraordinary memoirs to me.”71 Golden thus immediately locates his text within the field of memoir, but also in the realm of ‘truth’ – this is a true story as told by the experiencer, and this professor is merely acting as a translator and amanuensis. Through Jakob, Golden gives us a positive perspective on memoir, and thus also defends his appropriation of the genre:

As a historian, I have always regarded memoirs as source material. A memoir

provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world. It

must differ from biography in that a memoirist can never achieve the

perspective that a biographer possesses as a matter of course... I say this with

the certainty of an academician who has based a career on such distinctions.

And yet I must confess that the memoirs of my dear friend Nitta Sayuri have

impelled me to rethink my views... she leaves behind... a record of herself that

is far more complete, more accurate, and more compelling than the lengthy

70 Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha. London and Sydney: Vintage, 1998. pp. 1-4. 71 Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha, p. 1. 237

chapter examining her life in the book Glittering Jewels of Japan, or in the

various magazine articles about her that have appeared over the years.72

In the first two pages of the novel we thus have a sparkling recommendation from, as

Knight would put it, a stereotypically grumpy historian who (by virtue of his academic discipline) has always previously taken issue with memoir, but who is then so taken with this particular tale that he is converted – from one who is disdainful of the inaccuracies of the genre, he now recognises the inherent ‘truths’ that lay in subjective experience. There could hardly be a more glowing review of the book to come – a review which not only makes positive claims about the quality of the narrative, but also about the genre of memoir and its inherent ‘truthfulness’. As if this statement needed further backing, Golden then has the professor refer to Sayuri’s inclusion as a subject in a host of other material – these storyworld ‘paratextual’ and ‘intertextual’ references

(fictional magazines articles and a book chapter) which feature this character thus not only increase our understanding of her as a worthy subject (one who has been profiled repeatedly), but also lend an air of ‘truth’ to the work. Not only is this a ‘memoir’, but it is a memoir with links to other ‘real world texts’ which back up its veracity. This relentless and explicit linking of the text with ‘truth’ encourages the reader to engage with this story as memoir – to engage the particular reading practices associated with the genre of memoir, rather than those associated with fiction and the novel. Although we know this is fiction, we are led to read the text as memoir, as truth. To further encourage this reading, the publishers have removed almost all peritextual material concerning the author from its more traditional spatial domain prior to the text

(excluding the front cover and title pages, which bear the author’s name). Golden’s

72 Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha, pp. 1-2. 238

Acknowledgements (which begins with the storyworld truth-shattering phrase,

“[a]lthough the character of Sayuri and her story are completely invented...”), “A Note

About the Author”, and his biography and accompanying picture are all instead placed at the end of the book so the reader comes to them after reading the text, rather than allowing them to influence the reader prior to reading.73 This has the effect of limiting the overt presence of the real author’s identity pre-text, and in so doing enhances the reader’s potential engagement with the text as ‘memoir’. Short of perpetuating a hoax, everything possible is being done here in the peritextual realm so that we can be gently lulled into reading as if the work were memoir.

Golden’s novel is a fictional memoir, which is constructed in a similar fashion to pseudofactuals. Golden is directly drawing on a traditional form of the novel – one in which readers accepted they were reading fiction but read as though the work was nonfiction. The novel is an obviously fictional work for a contemporary readership familiar with the pseudofactual form, since it clearly follows this historical style. And yet I would argue that this novel also follows the format of what Foley tells us is the

Historical Novel74 – rather than being interesting in and of herself (a marker of the pseudofactual), what makes Sayuri interesting to the contemporary reader is that she is a geisha, and therefore representative of a specific time and place. In this way, then,

Golden’s novel is a blend of the two historicised styles, and so the work harks back to traditional forms, inviting the reader to read the novel as a memoir by invoking the style of that genre and by stressing in the artificial paratext the power of ‘truth’ that is inherent in the genre. Pushing so heavily for a memoir reading results in readers engaging truth-based expectations, the result of which may be that these expectations are hard to shake. Readers, thus, can become complicit in their own trickery.

73 Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha, pp. 433-434, 435, and the inside back cover, respectively. 74 Foley, pp. 143-184. 239

This is evidenced by the great gall demonstrated by some readers in reaction to what they perceive as the author attempting to accurately represent the life of a geisha in that time and place. Regular reader, Kitty, asserts, “I believe that the author has successfully deceived many of the audience out there into believing his story... Good job, Golden, on paralleling with one of the prominent themes in the novel that is deception. I look forward to writing a literary essay that underlyingly criticizes the authenticity of the novel”75, while another regular reader, Suzanne Tanaka, states,

“[w]hen an old white man even DARES to write a book about a Japanese maiko, presumes for one second to know what it is to be female, Japanese, and a part of that closed society within an already closed society and the sacrifices made by women, it is

BOUND to go wrong. And it does. Go wrong. Horribly.”76 If this book were read purely as fiction, it might well still be read as sexist or racist in its portrayal, but it could not be accused of being inaccurate, since the fictional world is created by the work itself and is not reliant on absolute referentiality to the real world.77 The fact that readers such as

Kitty and Tanaka insist on this referential link is a by-product of the genre with which

Golden engages. By writing in the style of memoir, the author asks his readers to engage the reading practices associated with nonfictional narrative, the result of which is that expectations regarding nonfiction are formed which can, for some readers, be hard to disengage when it is remembered that the work is actually fiction.

Frey’s work, on the other hand, went a long way in attempting to hide any fictional elements prior to the paratextual revelation of its fictionality. Frey incorporated

75 Kitty. Reader review on page: “Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/930.Memoirs_of_a_Geisha?from_search=true&search_version=s ervice_impr. Accessed 4th June 2015. 76 Tanaka, Suzanne. Reader review on page: “Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.” On Goodreads. 77 This, of course, does not stop readers from engaging in verifying fictional ‘facts’. The closer a story comes to replicating the ‘real world’, the more readers try to ascertain its ‘truth’. However, an author may always argue that their work is fictional, and if it is declared as such, they are largely given leave by readers to play with ‘facts’ as they wish. 240 many elements of fictionalisation into the writing of his memoir – from narrating his unconsciousness to inventing whole scenes – yet the work still remains a representation of his experiences. In this, it is a fictionalised memoir. Frey originally submitted the work as fiction, but publishers allegedly indicated to him that it would not sell under that label, so he resubmitted the work as nonfiction, it was published, and the book was officially endorsed by famous American television talkshow host, Oprah Winfrey, in her bookclub segment. The success of the work was overwhelming until the fictionalised events were revealed in an investigative journalism piece by website The

Smoking Gun. The revelatory article, “A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey’s

Fiction Addiction”, is an extended piece which picks apart in minute detail the factual discrepancies between the events of the book and those of real life (particularly in relation to Frey’s supposed criminal experiences), the authors claiming Frey “has demonstrably fabricated key parts of the book, which could – and probably should – cause a discerning reader (and Winfrey has ushered millions of them Frey’s way) to wonder what is true in ‘A Million Little Pieces’”78. On revelation of these story fabrications, both Winfrey and many in the general public turned on Frey, labelling him a ‘hoaxer’. Self-documented reactions by regular readers demonstrate this post- revelation negativity: Adrianne asserts, “James Frey is a liar”, Kristy states, “I thought this was a great book until I found out it wasn’t actually true as the author originally claimed it was”, and Lisa Garner declares, “[a]s a true story I would have given this book a four or five... After finding out that indeed the book is almost completely fabricated...well what can I give it now, but a one? What makes a persons autobiography great reading is the truth in it, if there is no truth, then who the hell

78 Bastone, William, Goldberg, Andrew, & Jesselli, Joseph. “A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey's Fiction Addiction.” On The Smoking Gun. 4th January 2006. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/million-little-lies#lightbox-popup-44. Accessed 16th July 2014. p. 2. 241 cares? Shame on you James Frey.”79 The hoax not only changes these readers’ views of the author, but this negativity also informs their judgment of the book itself (all three giving the book one star – the lowest possible rating on the Goodreads website).

These readers obviously initially read the work as autobiography and could not positively appreciate the fact that parts had been invented. Despite such invention being a regular feature of memoir (since the genre purports to tell a subjective ‘truth’, not an objective chronicle of facts, like history), the readership took the narrative as absolute truth, and subsequently branded Frey a hoaxer (one whose intention is to deceive), rather than a writer of memoir (one who attempts to tell the truth of personal experience). Nicole Smith Dahmen collates opinion and editorial responses to the case, looking at how they framed it, and particularly how they framed ‘truth’ as an issue. She points out that “[i]n a federal class-action lawsuit, readers alleged that reading the book was a waste of time and they should be reimbursed for the book and time they spent reading it”80. Smith Dahmen documents the many written instances of outrage where

‘truth’ was the defining feature:

One editorialist wrote the central problem with A Million Little Pieces is that

“great chunks of the nonfiction book are fiction” (San Antonio Express-News,

2006, p. B6). The idea of nonfiction was further defined by another writer, “In

nonfiction, though, there’s a different contract with the reader: you don’t make

stuff up” (Karr, 2006, sec. 4, p. 13).81

79 Adrianne, Kristy, and Garner, Lisa. Reader reviews on page: “A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1241.A_Million_Little_Pieces?from_search=true&search_versio n=service_impr. Accessed 5th June 2015. 80 Smith Dahmen, Nicole. “Construction of the Truth and Destruction of A Million Little Pieces: Framing in the editorial response to the James Frey case.” Journalism Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2010). p. 116. 81 Smith Dahmen, p. 119. 242

As [Martha] Sherrill wrote, “when [readers] hear a work of fiction is

autobiographical – i.e. that is has nonfictional elements – they get excited.

Very excited. They ask endless questions, demanding to know what parts of the

novel are ‘real’” (2006, p. A17).82

Smith Dahmen sums up the response by stating that the “book was powerful to many readers because it was thought to be ‘true.’”83 The fact that it was not true, yet had been read as such, was clearly more of a problem to many readers than a simple genre switch would seem to imply – the nonfictional genre was crucial to their reading experience.

This particular work is clearly a complex case – further than simply providing a subjective account of true events, Frey actually inserts invented events into his narrative. The limits of invention a reader will accept within the autobiographical genre are clearly violated when mere subjective interpretation of a personal experience turns to the invention of personal experience. Nielsen documents the Frey debacle, using it to illustrate the slippery nature of the supposed absolute binaries of facts/lies and nonfiction/fiction. He points out that Frey’s work “was read as nonfiction, and that many readers found its inaccuracies… highly disturbing.”84 Because the work conforms to the genre of memoir – because it invites us to read it so – we follow through and expect some semblance of ‘truth’ from it. These elements would then be seen as localized moments of fictionalisation within the global nonfictional context. The crux of the problem here is that local moments of fictionality within the discourse (such as narrating one’s own unconsciousness) are seen by most readers as conventional in first person narration (including memoir). These are then not markers of fictionality, and

82 Smith Dahmen, p. 125. 83 Smith Dahmen, p. 125. 84 Nielsen, “Natural Authors”, p. 289. 243 thus cannot alert readers to other potential fictional aspects within the text. Continuing to read the work as nonfiction, readers are not skeptical in regards to any invented story episodes. To these readers, a lack of techniques foreign to nonfiction (a lack of fictionality signposts) means a lack of warning about fictionality in the text. The story they bought into was nonfiction, and the text seemingly conformed.

From one extreme (pure fiction invited to be read as if it were memoir) to the other (supposed memoir containing hidden fictionality), I will now turn to a work which openly combines nonfiction and fiction in a joyful and confusing form, both abusing the privileges accorded by, and rejecting, generic categorisation.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

William Goldman’s 1973 novel, The Princess Bride, forms its own subcategory within the fictional(ised) memoir genre, containing a strong mix of both the fictional and the nonfictional. Although the text is quantitatively mostly fictional, the nonfictional elements have a profound weight, stemming from Goldman’s infamy – he is a fairly well-known screenwriter, having penned the screenplays for major

Hollywood films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives, All the President’s Men, and of course the screenplay adaptation of The Princess Bride. His work makes him a personality, and as such the references to these screenplays within the book have the effect of lending a great deal of weight to these nonfictional statements. In short, we take note of these nonfictional elements because they are penned by a cinematic celebrity – most western readers have at least heard of some of these films, and so his statements about his writing processes for these films are

244 arguably more memorable than similar statements might be from an unknown writer who penned unsuccessful film screenplays.

As such, despite the dominance of fiction within the novel, nonfiction plays a large role – in qualitative persuasion (lending the book an air of veracity), if not in quantity of concrete textual presence. Interestingly, the book does not invite us to read much of it as fiction – several prefaces invoke a memoir reading, and authorial intrusions into the realm of the fictional romance text continue in the same

‘nonfictional’ vein. It is only when a reader picks up on some of the myriad fictional story elements contained therein (elements which, after research, are revealed as quantitatively far outweighing the real world facts) that the generic categorisation of the

‘paratextual’ elements of the work begins to waver. In the eyes of many readers, obviously fictional elements (such as invented countries) signpost fictionality by nature of their being foreign to these readers’ understandings of nonfiction literature, and this causes these readers to reflect on the veracity of all other textual elements. This reflection on veracity and fictionality does not allow for an easy engagement with the text as either factual truth or fictional truth.

The Princess Bride contains two narratives – that of the embedded story, and that of the frame story. The embedded story is a fantasy romance, a swashbuckling comedy adventure, titled “The Princess Bride”, supposedly written by the (fictional) S.

Morgenstern, and supposedly edited by William Goldman. Narrated by Goldman, the frame story is a mostly fictional (sometimes nonfictional) memoir-type story peppered with lines such as, “I didn’t keep notes, so this is from memory”85, designed to lull us into reading this frame as if it were a memoir. This frame story details elements of

Goldman’s life in relation to Morgenstern’s tale. Goldman tells us his father, an

85 Goldman, William. The Princess Bride. London and Berlin: Bloomsbury, 1999. p. xi. 245

American immigrant from Florin (the fictional country where Morgenstern comes from, and the setting for the embedded story), read Goldman the story of “The Princess Bride” when he was a young boy, sick in bed. When Goldman grew up, he tracked down a copy of the book to give to his own son as a birthday present. When his son actively disliked the story, a surprised Goldman read the book, and in doing so realised that his own father had in fact altered Morgenstern’s text as he read it to young, sick Goldman – editing out the boring sections. This frame story then tells us how Goldman set out to edit Morgenstern’s text to create a “‘GOOD PARTS’ VERSION”86 that we then read.

The country of Florin is (obviously) invented, as is Morgenstern. Goldman’s son is invented (the author only has daughters), and “Helen, my superstar-shrink wife”87 is also a fiction (his real life then-wife, Ilene Jones, was a model). This memoir-style frame story is awash with fictional ‘facts’. However, it is not all fiction – it is also peppered with references to Goldman’s real life cinematic career. Many instances occur where real life events or people known to Goldman are combined with obvious fictions.

In the Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition (which forms part of the frame story)

Goldman tells us that “[o]ne day Rob and Andy were in Florin doing final location scouting” for the film adaptation of The Princess Bride. 88 Goldman tells us these men are Rob Reiner and Andy Scheinman, the director and producer of the film – real world facts easily confirmed by anyone reading this 25th anniversary edition of the novel. And yet he places these real world figures, who probably did do final location scouting for the film, in the land of Florin – an obviously fake country. Easily-checkable fact and fiction are blended together in similar ways right throughout this narrative.

86 Goldman, The Princess Bride, Frontispiece. 87 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. ix. 88 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. xiv. 246

The original 1973 novel contains a lengthy preface with Goldman as narrator which appears as part of the work The Princess Bride (no title such as ‘preface’,

‘author’s note’, or ‘introduction’ separates it from the text, but it is clearly delineated by a signoff which includes the city and date of writing: “New York City / December,

1972”89.) The 25th Anniversary Edition contains a new Introduction placed before all other text, which is slightly shorter than the original preface (the original is retained in the new edition). This Introduction is also (supposedly) in Goldman’s voice, and speaks mostly about the 1987 film adaptation of the book. The 30th Anniversary Edition contains all that had come before, in the order in which it had previously been placed, but also includes a new Introduction placed before the 25th Anniversary Edition

Introduction. This delves even more into the realms of fantasy, for the most part detailing the author’s fictional journey to the fictional location country of “The Princess

Bride” with his fictional grandson to visit the fictional museum dedicated to the fictional author of the original work he supposedly edited. All three prefatory sections, which each form a part of the frame story, contain a mix of fact and fiction, and it is important to note that, while each expand the narrative of the frame with new stories, new characters, new ‘elements’, they do not contradict each other – a reader of any of the three editions of the novel will have received a similar proportionate mix of fact and fiction, of memoir and fantasy, and so will have been equally troubled in regards to defining the novel in terms of genre. Goldman thus causes readers of all editions to question their initial generic classification of the frame as nonfiction by deliberately and playfully subverting their assumptions.

89 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 31. 247

Readerly Reactions – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Reviews by reviewers, online bloggers, and regular readers (academic discussion of the work is sorely lacking) show that they have all been confronted by the combination of narrative cues and their convention-attuned expectations, but that this confrontation results in a variety of responses. The reviews offered by regular readers on the website Goodreads indicate a strong pattern of positive reception. Positive reviews far outweigh negative ones (there were 135260 five star reviews and only 6000 one star reviews at the time of research, with the quantities in between steadily declining between the two extremes as the stars declined). Those who rated the novel negatively tended to dwell on the trickery (these readers mostly having been fooled into believing Morgenstern existed) while those who rated it positively tended to dwell less heavily on this fact/fiction blurring as the sole reason for their rating, touching instead on a range of positives. This pattern of reaction is reflected across the different reading groups. Regular reader, Savannah, believes Goldman’s invention of Morgenstern simply

“shows how concieted he is”, and that “I wasted MY time reading the opening, when it was all fake-Well I was annoyed.”90 Tortla, on the other hand, at first “hated this book for a while” because of the discovery of the invention of Morgenstern, but “then I reread it and it was awesome in an entirely new way.”91 This reader demonstrates how a second reading – one not tarnished by conventional expectations – allows an appreciation of the novel which could not be attained on a first reading while these expectations stood in his/her way. These readerly expectations regarding literary conventions in relation to the fact/lie and nonfiction/fiction dichotomies clearly dictate the first reading experience of The Princess Bride.

90 Savannah. Reader review on page: “The Princess Bride by William Goldman.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21787.The_Princess_Bride?from_search=true. Accessed 10th July 2014. 91 Tortla. Reader review on page: “The Princess Bride by William Goldman.” On Goodreads. 248

Blogger Geoffrey Prewett does not take the trickery contained in The Princess

Bride well – he repeatedly uses negative language to describe the experience he had whereby his readerly expectations were manipulated:

This book had me fooled. Completely, up until about half an hour ago... here is

the part that I missed: it was all a fraud! There never was an S. Morgenstern,

there were no small Italian city-states named Florin and Guilder, Goldman did

not have a wife named Helen, and half the personal stuff he said was not true.

But the other half was, or at least certain parts, including the name of his

works, was... Of course, I did not notice this until I started writing this review,

because it did not occur to me that an author would flat-out lie, especially in his

introduction. I didn’t get the point... So now, I am disillusioned, too... And now

I can’t figure out whether I should rate this book as 9.7, brilliant and subtle but

just a little too colloquial for my taste, or 5, good romantic adventure but

author failed miserably in getting his point across by being too subtle...92

‘Fooled’, ‘fraud’, ‘lie’ – this is very strong language from someone who clearly feels abused by the falsehoods perpetuated by the author who he assumed would not lie, and especially by the fact that these lies are cased in (and thus obscured by) ‘truths’. For

Prewett, then, the reading experience deliberately cheated him by denying his fact-based expectations.

Some bloggers agree with this negative reading experience, while others revel in the mastery of the trickery. Barbara H. is one of the more favourable reviewers,

92 Prewett, Geoffrey. “The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure: The “Good Parts” version abridged by William Goldman.” On Geoff Prewett’s Homepage. 2004. http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~prewett/writings/BookReviews/ThePrincessBride.html. Accessed 10th July 2014. 249 exclaiming, “[m]y mind is still taking in this twist! Very clever!”93 Holly, on the other hand, is so aghast at the manipulation that her review becomes laden with incredibly negative emotive language:

That’s right gang! THERE IS NO S. MORGENSTERN. Goldman made him

up and the whole “I’m making an abridged version because Morgenstern is a

windbag” is just some sort of narrative device where Goldman is trying to be

clever. When the reader figures it out they’ll be like “Oh Mr. Goldman-you

got me! HA HA! Except I wasn’t going HA HA. Instead I sat here on the bed

for at least a good half hour feeling like a total idiot. And I DON’T like

reading books that make me feel like an idiot.94

Here, the manipulation has made this reader feel they are lacking in intelligence, the trickery causing Holly to feel as though she is an outsider from the ‘inner’ hypothetical group of those who have not been easily manipulated. Nick feels the need to put “A disclaimer” into his review, pointing out that Goldman’s claim concerning abridging an original Morgenstern text “is not true.”95 He feels strongly enough about the importance of this disclaimer (presumably because he believes it involves important, withheld information) that he bolds the text, and from then on insists on reviewing the book as two separate entities – the Morgenstern embedded story, and the frame story

(not surprisingly, he rates the former very favourably, and the latter abysmally).

93 H., Barbara. “Book Review: The Princess Bride.” On Stray Thoughts. 15th September 2007. http://barbarah.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/book-review-the-princess-bride/. Accessed 10th July 2014. 94 Holly. “REVIEW: The Princess Bride by William Goldman.” On Bippity Boppity Book. 13th August 2011. http://bippityboppitybook.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/review-princess-bride-by-william.html. Accessed 10th July 2014. 95 Nick. “Book Review: The Princess Bride, by William Goldman.” On Lions and Men: a literary journey through scifi, fantasy, and horror. 22nd August 2011. http://scififantasyhorror.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/book-review-princess-bride-by-william.html. Accessed 10th July 2014. Original bold. 250

These extreme responses appear to demonstrate a misreading of the text – and yet Goldman has encouraged such responses, at least to some extent. James Fredal explains that “because audiences typically approach texts naively (that is, without expectations of imposture), even simple clues are easily missed.”96 Fredal goes on to say that “[t]he power of rhetorical techniques to fool also implies the readiness of viewers to be fooled... Despite the warnings of critics that lies, hoaxes, and cons generate a culture of distrust, we seem still and ever willing to accept and learn from improbable claims posing as truth, even and especially when they seem too good to be true.”97 This gullibility, this trusting belief in the honesty of the text (despite all evidence of instances where that trust has been abused) is responsible for the negative feelings of these readers – they are angry that they have been cheated out of their expectations by a writer willing to abuse their honest readerly innocence.

Couser claims that readers of memoir are particularly open to this ‘abuse’ because of the nature of the genre. He maintains, “memoir imposes ethical obligations on writers that are not incumbent on novelists. They lie in two distinct areas: fidelity to the truth and consideration for the rights and interests of others. Memoir always impinges on the real world in a way that fiction does not, and therein lies both its power to do good and its ability to cause harm.”98 Couser claims this genre-specific ethical requirement exists because of the way readers come to those texts: “we invest in them

[fictional novel and memoir] very differently. Rightly so. Once we have determined that a narrative is a memoir rather than a novel – usually on the basis of extra-textual cues – our response toggles to a different mode.”99 This reading mode produces a very specific set of expectations that revolve around notions of truth, and if this reading mode is

96 Fredal, James. “The Perennial Pleasures of the Hoax.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 47, No. 1 (2014). p. 81. 97 Fredal, p. 90. 98 Couser, Memoir, p. 107. 99 Couser, Memoir, p. 13. 251 manipulated without the reader realising it during the temporal act of reading, then that reader will likely have a negative response when their manipulation is finally discovered post-reading. The fact that the subversion of such expectations regarding nonfiction results in such extreme responses to The Princess Bride indicates that they are undeniably brought to the table in the reading experience. The positive or negative response seems to hinge on whether the reader has an inkling that they are being played with as they read. To understand why such strong nonfiction-based expectations are invoked during the reading of this novel, we must look to the frame narrative.

The Frame Narrative

The frame essentially tells the story of how Goldman came to be ‘editing

Morgenstern’s work’. It consists of a variable number of prefaces (one to three, depending on the edition being read), and authorial intrusions into the narrative space of the embedded story, “The Princess Bride”. Knowing that Morgenstern and his work are both fictional, rather than simply deeming Goldman a liar (since it is clear to the competent reader from the humorously ridiculous nature of his ‘deceit’ that at least some of it is never meant to be hidden from the reader), we might assume that the frame simply contains the voice of the fictional authorial counterpart, and not the Real Author.

In this case, the Fictional Author has written the frame story and intrusions into the embedded story. The reader, though, will inevitably conflate this Fictional Author with the Real Author; this is encouraged by similarities between the two Authorial agents – they are both simultaneously the writers of real films Goldman actually wrote in real life, and both carry the name ‘William Goldman’. This work complies with Lejeune’s autobiographical pact – the name on the cover matching those of the narrator and protagonist. It also complies with Genette’s definition of a factual narrative, whereby

252 author and narrator identify. This readerly conflation of Fictional Author and Real

Author, then, is not only understandable – it is deliberately encouraged by the book. The

Fictional Author insists this book is just an edit of Morgenstern’s story rather than wholly invented by Goldman, and so, because of the conflation of Fictional and Real

Authors, we attribute this ‘truth’ to the Real Author too. However, there are obvious falsehoods thrown into this frame narrative which problematise the conflation. For example, thanks to the popularity of Goldman’s The Princess Bride book and film, the

(invented) Cliffs of Insanity are supposedly now “the biggest tourist attraction in Florin, making life hell for their forest rangers”100. ‘Truth’ and ‘lies’ come in mixed measure, and so there is deliberate confusion of the fiction/nonfiction divide. And yet this is clearly not a conflation that is intended as authorial deceit – by the obvious nature of the

‘lies’, we can assume that it is the author’s intention that the audience is supposed to understand that some parts of the narrative are true and some are not.

Cohn points out the primary means through which a conventional first-person text supposedly reveals its fictionality: “the duplicate vocal origin of fiction” – that is, a clear difference of persona between narrator and author.101 Here again, though,

Goldman flummoxes his reader; the frame story is narrated by ‘William Goldman’, a narrator with the same name as the real author. These two beings share many life details which are narrated in the frame story (such as Goldman’s cinematic career), and yet they also part ways in many facts (such as Goldman’s family) – there is obvious crossover, and yet they are not the same. The contemporary reader, versed in the memoir style of ‘truth’ and living in a world where accurate authorial biographies are a commonplace paratextual addition to any fictional novel, might be confused by this crossover, this refusal of the text to fit within the neat realms of either nonfiction or

100 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. xvi. 101 Cohn, “Signposts”, p. 794. 253 fiction. This again draws the reader’s attention to the fictionality of the text – the fact that the reader is consuming a heavily crafted work.

This text is a curious simultaneous mix of mimicry and warping of the memoir genre. Often in cases of memoir both frame and inner stories come into question when veracity is questioned – the frame is used to support and verify the ‘truth’ of the inner story. However, in this particular case the embedded story is obviously fictional, and never purports to be truth. It is the frame story alone that is the unknown entity in regards to truth. The truth or otherwise of the frame story has no impact on the fictional status of the embedded story. Here aspects of the outside world (that is, reality –

Goldman’s real life) are used to ‘verify’ the rest of the frame. Yet certain details about

Goldman’s life as detailed in the frame are patently untrue – a cursory internet search today reveals this, though that instant fact-checking would not have been so easy when the book was first released in the pre-internet age. Nevertheless, these ‘facts’ were easily disprovable by any journalist – the intent was therefore never absolute deception.

The two parts of the frame narrative – the introductions, and the authorial intrusions, thus warrant greater analysis.

Frame Narrative I: The Introductions

As already outlines, the original preface reads like memoir – a personal story of a profound childhood moment, and how it led specifically to the penning of this work.

The narrator (who we are to assume is Goldman) peppers the text with short, seemingly throwaway lines concerning facts and lies in order to encourage this reading. A few pages in he tells the reader in parentheses: “(True story about Gunga Din: when I got discharged from the army...)”102; a couple of pages later he tells us “I don’t remember

102 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 11. 254 what I said exactly. (Lie: I remember exactly what I said, except it’s too goonlike to put it down...)”103 These statements put the supposed dichotomy of lies/truth at the forefront of the reader’s mind, and the narrator is indirectly asking us to trust that he is firmly on the side of the latter in telling his tale – even when he lies he immediately tells us he has done so and the very human reasons behind such a potential breach of readerly trust. In these recollections of past events, Goldman is expressly aligning his work with the style of memoir, and specifically with the notions of ‘truth’ associated with that genre.

However, he also makes many references to things which are obviously untrue (and others which can be checked for veracity, such as the biographical details of his wife and child). It is here that Goldman tells us Morgenstern existed, that the countries of

Florin and Guilder existed, that Morgenstern was from Florin (as was Goldman’s father), and that Goldman has edited Morgenstern’s “The Princess Bride” for us: “S.

Morgenstern wrote it. And my father read it to me. And now I give it to you.”104 This section deftly lulls us into a memoir reading, but does not allow us to sit comfortably within it. The falsehoods in a work that so clearly invokes a ‘truthful’ genre jolt the reader – we read them, know them to be foreign, unconventional for this genre, and so we are confused as to how to define the text. This forced conscious acknowledgement of the fictionality of the text tells us that we are not reading a ‘history’ of facts.

Reviewer David Soyka demonstrates how Goldman has engendered a lack of fact-based stability for the reader. Unsure (as many readers are) about the veracity of the

‘facts’ presented by Goldman, Soyka is nonetheless drawn into Goldman’s narrative, claiming not to know whether Morgenstern is real or invention:

103 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 13. 104 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 31. 255

Equally unsure is whether there is, in fact, an S. Morgenstern. Probably not.

But, whether he is or not (it is a “he” because Goldman reports excising from

the “original” text comments from Mrs Morgenstern about how much she

enjoyed what her husband was writing. Just one example of how Goldman

pulls your leg, but letting go just before you can be absolutely sure he’s

kidding), is really beside the point. In interrupting the narrative periodically to

explain what part he’s about to cut, or just to comment on the action, Goldman

takes pot shots not only at a literary form, but literary pretensions (see how

many you can count).105

Although claiming that knowing for certain whether or not the Florinese writer is ‘real’ is beside the point, this reviewer feels the need to muse on that very question in his review. It is not beside the point for Goldman or his readers (nor this reviewer) – the fact that we cannot help but ponder the question of Morgenstern’s actuality is a result of our invitation to do so by the text. This novel is explicitly designed to make us ponder the fact/fiction divide, and in doing so, to consider why it is that it matters so much to us.

The Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition follows the same course as this preface, enhancing the mixture of fiction and nonfiction in order to destabilise any simple readerly categorisation of the work as a whole. Goldman refers heavily to the film adaptation of the work – a film which still enjoys an extremely popular cult following. Real people and companies associated with the work (Rob Reiner, Andy

105 Soyka, David. “The Princess Bride, 25th Anniversary Edition: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure: The “Good Parts” Version, Abridged: William Goldman: A review by David Soyka.” On SF Site. 1999. http://www.sfsite.com/04a/pb54.htm. Accessed 10th July 2014. 256

Scheinman, production company “Fox”106) as well as other real world people (“Jack

Finney [author of] novel Time and Again”107, “The GG at Fox send it to Richard Lester in London – Lester directed, among others, A Hard Day’s Night, the first wonderful

Beatles film”108) are peppered throughout this Introduction. Goldman documents the first script reading, and name drops once again to lend more real world authenticity to his work:

[Actors] Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, [who played characters] Buttercup and

Westley, were there. So, too, were Chris Sarandon and Chris Guest, the villains

Prince Humperdinck and Count Rugen, and Wally Shawn, the evil genius

Vizzini. Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo, was very much there. And sitting

by himself, quietly – he always tried to sit quietly – was Andre the Giant who

was Fezzik.109

These actors actually played these parts in the film in our reality. A script reading must have taken place, as it is accepted industry practice. We are invited to believe this is an actual documented occurrence. And yet, how are we to absolutely believe in the episode’s veracity when Goldman also speaks with as much honesty of conviction about obvious falsities? Goldman tells us that “I wish I had written it... [but] Morgenstern invented it all, and I must be contented with the fact that my abridgment (though killed by all Florinese experts back in ’73 – the reviews in the learned journals brutalized me...) at least brought Morgenstern to a wider American audience.”110 This incredible statement occurs in the first two paragraphs of this Introduction, once again telling us

106 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. xi. 107 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. xi. 108 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. x. 109 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. xiii. 110 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. vii. 257 not to read this work complacently as memoir – these falsities working to destabilise any easy categorisation of the text and pointing to the fictionality of what we read.

Interestingly, this preface would have been read by a new readership which had come to the book from the film. Apart from a cursory frame story where a grandfather narrates the inner story to his sick grandson (devoid of all reference to Goldman, and certainly not memoir in style), the film is primarily occupied with the inner story of “The

Princess Bride”. The references to the film would have increased its supposed veracity for this audience, but the obvious falsehoods would still have confounded most.

The Introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition again follows this same course of conflation of fiction and nonfiction. The section begins with fairly lengthy memoir-style anecdotes about the film set, which again encourage nonfiction-based expectations in the specific audience who has seen the far-more-popular film prior to reading the book. Goldman reveals a conversation he supposedly had with the actor

Andre the Giant, who played Fezzik, in which the latter urged the author to visit the museum dedicated to Morgenstern in Florin. Here we have a clear mix of fact (Andre and the film set) and invention (a conversation about a nonexistent museum). Goldman then relates his journey to Florin to enter the museum with his grandson. The narrator in this section conflates the real world with the storyworld and its inhabitants – the pair put off their visit to One Tree Island (where the characters escape to at the end of “The

Princess Bride”, and where we see them in the first couple of chapters of the sequel,

“Buttercup’s Baby”111, which are included at the end of the 25th Anniversary edition and all subsequent editions, though the entirety of this sequel is yet to exist). Goldman tells us he had promised his grandson “a helicopter ride there so he could see where Fezzik

111 “Buttercup’s Baby: S. Morgenstern’s Glorious Examination of Courage Matched Against the Death of the Heart. Abridged by William Goldman.” In The Princess Bride, p. 345-99. 258 was invaded, made the incision with the sword, saved Waverly’s life.”112 So here

Goldman is not only claiming that the setting of Morgenstern’s story is real, but he is going a step further in putting forward the notion that the characters actually existed and their events really took place. Goldman really labours this point, as he and his grandson view the museum exhibits: “the six-fingered sword”, “a mold of Fezzik’s fingers” (not those of the film actor, but those of the character from Morgenstern’s tale), “Buttercup’s wedding dress”, and “Count Rugen’s life-sucking machine” all feature as supposed real world historical artefacts113. This conflation of obvious fantasy with reality does not allow the reader to sit comfortably in the reading style associated with memoir, but nor do the realistic elements allow a reading of the work as pure fantasy.

This transgression, or game, (as Gérard Genette puts it), is a “narrative metalepsis”, which that scholar defines as: “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse... [which] produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical... or fantastic.”114 In this case we seem to have diegetic elements from “The

Princess Bride” entering the extradiegetic universe (the ‘real world’). This would be what J. Alexander Bareis defines as “outwards-bound metaleptical narration, where the boundary between fiction and a notion of reality is trumped” (as opposed to “inwards- bound metaleptical narration, where the boundary between different levels of existence within the narrative are trumped.”).115 Or, it could be that this is a case of the extradiegetic narrator entering a storyworld which is an entirely new world, comprised

112 Goldman, William. The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition of S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure: The “Good Parts” Version. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2013. pp. xv-xvi. 113 Goldman, The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition, pp. xvii-xviii. 114 Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. (Trans. Jane E. Lewin.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. pp. 234-235. 115 Bareis, J. Alexander. “The Role of Fictionality in Narrative Theory.” In Lars-Åke Skalin (ed.). Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction. Örebro: Örebro University Library, 2008. p. 166. 259 of what seems to be a blend of his own world and the “Princess Bride” storyworld – we are left to choose (or be perplexed by) which kind of metalepsis is occurring. As

Genette makes clear, the effect of these transgressions or games “demonstrate the importance of the boundary they tax their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude – a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells.”116 Of course, the point here is that Goldman is deliberately conflating the real world and a fantastical one – two extremely different possible worlds collide. Due to the extreme differences between these worlds, we can assume the authorial intent is not to subtly and craftily deceive a readership into believing they are one and the same (and thus that the story of “The Princess Bride” actually occurred in reality). Rather Goldman is using the conflation of worlds to deliberately conflate genres, mixing nonfiction and fiction in defiance of the dichotomy. And yet the comic effect this produces could hardly have been achieved without that binary of genres and the expectations in regards to narrative truth produced by each, upon which Goldman so heavily relies.

In this most recent Introduction Goldman again peppers his text with throwaway lines about truth (“[t]his next is true...”, “[t]hat is a true story.”, “[i]t actually arrived”117), as well as real life people (author Stephen King is documented as having urged Goldman’s visit to the museum). The last few pages seem to be dedicated to a thinly-veiled thesis on the natures of truth, invention, history, and (ironically, considering his own blend of truth and invention, and thus comically) the onus on the writer to write the truth. Goldman ‘discovers’ Morgenstern had considered changing the

116 Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 236. 117 The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition, pp. xix, xix, and xx, respectively. 260 ending of “The Princess Bride” (specifically, killing off a living character). Goldman expresses disbelief at this idea, claiming:

I remember I hated killing Butch and Sundance, but I had to, because in real

life they had gone the way I wrote it, and I couldn’t change history, just for a

happy ending.

But now here he was, Morgenstern, the man who had so much to do with

my life, doing the first thing I ever disapproved of – he was contemplating

changing history – and that bothered me.118

It is fairly safe to assume that we are supposed to take this sentiment with a grain of salt.

After all, we have just read the Introduction (and another two if we have read the others first) which is made up entirely of Goldman’s own very deliberate and obvious distortion of his own history. He has written a memoir which incorporates great invention into his own life story. We are meant to see this supposed outrage for its intended humour – Goldman has changed history so drastically, and here he is expressing shock and appallment at another writer’s mere contemplation of the idea.

Goldman hammers home this disapproval, claiming “all truth matters”, and, with the stressed passion of italics, “you cannot reverse history for the sake of your story”119.

Through the words of Morgenstern, Goldman asks his reader a final question – one very important to the reception of the prefatory sections: “How much can the truth be manipulated in the name of art?”120 Goldman here seems to be asking us to ask this of ourselves, but also to put him to the test. Has Goldman respected the interests of the

118 Goldman, The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition, p. xxiii. 119 Goldman, The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition, p. xxiii. 120 Goldman, The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition, p. xxvi. 261 reader, or has he manipulated truth too much in the name of art? Either way, this 30th

Anniversary Edition Introduction is a blended piece; in providing a mix of fact and fiction it denies easy categorisation and leads the reader towards a constant awareness of the fictionality of the work. This problematises the easy and steady classification of the section as nonfiction – a move that both thrills and enrages readers in equal measure.

The fact that this can enrage demonstrates the commitment readers show towards the nonfiction contract. If a reader notes the elements as signposts of fictionality as they read, then they can accommodate these short fictional elements into their overall understanding of the work as a comic ‘thumbing of the nose’ towards strict generic categorisation. If the reader does not realise there are fictional elements within the

‘nonfiction’ section until after they have finished reading the work (if they find out because of post-reading paratextual revelation), they read the work unwaveringly as nonfiction and thus miss the comic effect of the mix as they read. All this second reader sees is a violation of the narrative contract (much like a hoax, which will be discussed in the following chapter).

Frame Narrative II: The Authorial Intrusions

Although the Introductions make up the majority of the frame story, this frame narrative is not only relegated to this ‘peritextual’ (artificial though it might be) spatial realm within the novel. Rather, the frame story also intrudes into the physical textual realm of “The Princess Bride”; the embedded story is frequently interrupted by

Goldman’s italicised intrusions, the author using these to interrupt the temporal reading process to actively comment on how he has edited the work, or to tell us how he reacted to certain parts of the story as a child. In The Princess Bride, then, Goldman is also allowing the influence of the frame to continue into the embedded fictional narrative,

262 intentionally conflating the obviously false and the obviously factual. These intrusions seem to be used to constantly reiterate the idea that this is really Morgenstern’s work which has been edited. They become the story – the story is not just ‘Morgenstern’s’ fiction, but also another narrative running concurrently which concerns Goldman finding Morgenstern’s book and editing it. In this novel, the artificial peritext is where the second narrative plays out – both narratives being of equal importance. We cannot isolate text from artificial paratext, and so this artificial paratext is inextricably linked to our interpretation of the novel.

Even if a reader were to skip the Introductions and go straight to the text, they could not avoid coming into contact with Goldman’s constant in-text italicised intrusions. This reader could choose not to read those intrusions, but as they affect the narrative flow, that would make for a confusing reading experience. Soyka claims he does just that, admitting to abridging the work when reading it to his eight year old daughter – cutting out the (presumably more ‘adult’) Goldman story – the “digressive editorial interruptions [of] which would have been lost on her”121. Interestingly, though,

Soyka accepts that these are not just intrusions into the ‘real’ story, but rather there are

“actually two stories here” – Morgenstern’s tale is the first, while the second is

Goldman’s memoir-style narrative, which is “a fairy tale story here, too, equally archetypal, concerning the reconciliation of a father and son and the quest to regain a seemingly lost gift.” Soyka claims that “[b]oth tales leave us not quite sure if there's a happy ending”, drawing explicit parallels between the supposedly realist memoir-style tale, and the conventions of the fairytale – two genres usually seen as mutually exclusive.122 It is curious, then, that Soyka at once claims this is a novel with two intricately-bound stories, and yet also admits he abridges it at times. Obviously the

121 Soyka. 122 Soyka. 263

‘simple’ reading for his young daughter could only be achieved through the skilful editing of a father well-versed in the back and forth of the two stories (a reading which echoes both Goldman’s father’s editing of Morgenstern’s work, as well as Goldman’s own edit, which we are reading). Were Soyka to simply cut out the intrusions, and not amend the story text around them, his daughter would surely have been lost.

This complicated scenario can be imagined when looking at the intrusions themselves and how they interact with the story text surrounding them. Following intrusions, the “Princess Bride” discourse often resumes by going back a few lines in order to pick up the flow:

(At this point in the story, my wife wants it known that she feels violently

cheated, not being allowed the scene of reconciliation on the ravine floor

between the lovers. My reply to her –

* * *

This is me, and I’m not trying to be confusing, but the above paragraph that

I’m cutting into now is verbatim Morgenstern [...] This has gone on longer

than planned, so I’m going to repeat the Morgenstern paragraph I interrupted;

it’ll read better. Over and out.

* * *

(At this point in the story, my wife wants it known that...123

In this particular intrusion we can see that the Morgenstern text resumes by repeating a whole sentence and a half which had already occurred since, as the intruding voice explains, the substantial length of the intrusion (the majority of which occurs in the

123 Goldman, The Princess Bride, pp. 171-173. 264 space of my inserted bracketed ellipsis) means the flow of the ‘real’ story has been lost.

At other times the intrusions actually explain the annexing of sections of ‘the original’

(even whole chapters), the absence of which would perplex a text-only reader. For example, Chapter Four: The Preparations – apparently “the single longest chapter in the book” – is completely ‘cut’, and replaced by a single-page intrusion which attempts to justify the excision: “from a narrative point of view, in 105 pages nothing happens.”124

These intrusions are thus not simply intrusions – they bleed into the embedded story text, changing that narrative. Such fluidity blurs the boundaries between the frame and embedded narratives, conflating ‘memoir’ with ‘story’ and so again drawing the fact/fiction divide to our attention in order to have us question this dichotomy. Goldman is inviting us to understand memoir as fantasy, and yet this is hard for contemporary readers, trained as they are in the binary of fiction/nonfiction.

The italicised editorial intrusions into the spatial realm of the embedded story occur frequently throughout the “The Princess Bride”. Importantly, the first chapter does not begin with an intrusion, as so many chapters that follow do. Rather, the reader is lulled into a belief that the story will be told in a conventional fashion, only to be rudely interrupted a few pages in with Goldman’s first intrusion. It begins, “This is me.

All abridging remarks and other comments will be in this fancy italic type so you’ll know.”125 We only know who ‘me’ is because of the strong, subjective authorial presence Goldman exudes in the prefatory sections prior to “The Princess Bride”. It can only be he, since up to this point the entire novel has been his memoir, his story – there is no other ‘me’. The remarks on editing serve to confirm this suggestion, since the text we have just read details how he came to be editing the piece. Goldman goes on to comment on Morgenstern’s strong and humorous narrative voice. He at once seeks to

124 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 83. 125 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 41. 265 align the reader with his own views and guides them in how to understand this new narrative voice by placing us apart from one who reads incorrectly: his copy editor,

Denise. Denise cannot understand what Morgenstern means when he makes parenthetical intrusions into his own work, such as “(This was before Europe.)” and

“(this was after Paris)”126. Denise is reading Morgenstern literally in terms of facts delivered to an audience: “‘How can it be before Europe but after Paris?’”127, and this is her mistake. Goldman guides the reader in interpreting these asides not as historically-based factual information, but rather as elements of humour:

Either Morgenstern meant them seriously or he didn’t. Or maybe he meant

some of them seriously and some others he didn’t. But he never said which

were the seriously ones. Or maybe it was just the author’s way of telling the

reader stylistically that ‘this isn’t real; it never happened.’ That’s what I think,

in spite of the fact that if you read back into Florinese history, it did happen.

The facts, anyway; no one can say about the actual motivations. All I can

suggest to you is, if the parentheses bug you, don’t read them.128

This is a paragraph loaded with direction for the reader. In the guise of making sense of another author’s intrusions and thus intentions, Goldman instructs his reader on how to read his own intrusions and intentions. Not only does Goldman bring up the idea that what we are reading may not be meant to be taken seriously (it might be light-hearted humour), he also makes a deliberate reference to the idea that such strange, anachronistic ‘facts’ (or falsities) occurring mid-text might be an author’s way of

126 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 40. 127 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 41. 128 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 42. 266 indicating fictionality, and we are invited to infer that this may be what Goldman has been doing himself. He then, in true Goldman fashion, directly contradicts this clear message with an obviously false line about the facts of the Florinese story being ‘true’.

As a final suggestion, he gives the reader permission to ignore the authorial intrusions, such as his own, if they find they ‘bug’ them. This paragraph invites us to infer that this is clearly a story meant to entertain, and the authorial intrusions (including the

Introductions) are simply there to aid in that intention. The Princess Bride was initially published during the postmodernist wave of literature; following this style, Goldman is at once utilising and rejecting devices of traditional, conventional fiction. Employing both the (invented) prefatory remarks and digressive commentary of the pseudofactual, he then undermines this form by lacing his work with the ridiculous, the fantastical, the obviously untrue (a violation for the pseudofactual and fictional memoir forms, which are devoid of any textual element that might not allow a smooth reading process for the reader as if the work were memoir). In doing so, he not only flummoxes our convention-based expectations, but he also draws overt attention to himself as both author and creator – a deliberate rejection of the postmodernist existential angst surrounding the author as lacking the authority of godlike omniscience.

Goldman repeatedly uses the intrusions into Morgenstern’s text in order to remind the reader that the former’s intention is always to create an enjoyable narrative for the reader. Morgenstern’s overall tale, he tells us, was enthralling, but his discourse was often laboured and boring – Goldman is here to save the day, delivering to the reader the ‘good parts’ of Morgenstern’s tale. Chapter Two begins with an intrusion where he tells us:

267

This is my first major excision... Chapter Two, The Groom, only picks up

Prince Humperdinck in the last few pages.

This chapter is where my son Jason stopped reading, and there is simply

no way of blaming him. For what Morgenstern has done is open this chapter

with sixty-six pages of Florinese History. More accurately, it is the history of

the Florinese crown.

Dreary? Not to be believed.

Why would a master of narrative stop his narrative dead before it has

much chance to begin generating?129

Here Goldman again tells us that he has sacrificed some of the original in the pursuit of delivering a better story for the reader. He even informs us that “I expect every

Florinese scholar alive to slaughter me” in their reviews.130 This is a narratorial voice who wants us to know he will sacrifice himself in order for the reader to have a better experience. And yet Goldman performs a similar feat to that which Morgenstern carries out – something that he criticises the latter for: he potentially ‘stop[s] his narrative dead before it has much chance to begin generating’. By constantly intruding into the embedded story realm, Goldman is not allowing his reader to be lulled into the comfortable, conventional reading process the embedded story on its own might provoke. Rather, the author is constantly jolting us out of this comfort – these intrusions, so foreign to conventional fantasy fiction today, serve to remind us of the fictionality of the work, focusing our attention on the process of crafting narrative (and thus the powerful role of the author) rather than allowing us to be lulled into the storyworld. The fact that this might annoy us tells us much about the conventional genre

129 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 65. 130 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 65. 268 of fantasy, which relies on a reader’s complete immersion in the storyworld (the narrative audience realm) in order for such a text to be appreciated. The leap between real world and storyworld is most immense for this genre, and so requires the reader’s absolute trust in the narrative contract – their belief that their leap of faith in ‘believing’ in such a world will not be betrayed. Goldman’s interruptions do not allow for easy immersion, disrupting the conventional fantasy reading process.

This forced readerly confrontation of the crafting of the story in the form of the authorial intrusions produces mixed reactions. Online blogger, Nick, takes particular issue with Goldman’s italicised interjections, and this seems to be a contentious issue for quite a number of blog reviewers. Nick finds the purpose of these interjections to be

“beyond me... [because] they interrupt the flow of the novel”131; Steven Wu finds “these interruptions annoying”132; while Holly experienced these moments where Goldman

“butts in” as “annoying. Really annoying” – so much so that she “started skipping the parts where Goldman cuts in”133. However, some took pleasure in the interjections, rating them as a skilful device used by an intelligent author: Terri finds joy in the humour contained in the interruptions, claiming they are “freakin’ HILARIOUS”134;

Nadine concedes that the interjections “may put off some readers”, but that “I liked

Goldman’s asides” – part of the attraction being that the “inconsistencies are on purpose and, for me at least, a huge part of why the story is so much fun”135, demonstrating that the mix of nonfiction and fiction within the interjections can be as thrilling to some

131 Nick. 132 Wu, Steven. “The Princess Bride by William Goldman: A book review by Steven Wu.” On Steven Wu’s Book Reviews. 2002. http://www.scwu.com/bookreviews/h/GoldmanWilliamPrincessBrideThe.shtml. Accessed: 10th July 2014. 133 Holly. 134 Terri. “Review: “The Princess Bride” by William Goldman.” On StarlightBookReviews.com. 30th September 2013. http://starlightbookreviews.com/2013/09/30/review-the-princess-bride-by-william- goldman/. Accessed 10th July 2014. 135 Nadine. “William Goldman – The Princess Bride.” On Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews. 18th May 2012. http://sffbookreview.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/william-goldman-the-princess-bride/. Accessed 10th July 2014. 269 readers as it is abhorrent to others. Davida Chazan sums up the sentiments of many of the positive reviews:

Some readers might find this a pretty egotistical way to abridge a story.

However, I found that quite to the contrary, it was these interjections and

comments that made the whole thing come alive for me. Sort of like being

slapped in the face every so often by a velvet glove - here we are, deep in the

convoluted story and then Goldman brings us almost rudely back to the present

with something as obvious as “they had acres back then” or as silly as “they

had arguments then too”.136

The fact that many readers point to the ego of the author, to his interruptions, demonstrates how strongly Goldman’s presence is felt – how he has inserted his persona into the text, even where it conventionally should not go (traditional fantasy). Chazan claims that “it really doesn’t matter if you decide that this pretense is fact or fiction”137, and here I think she cuts to the crux of the matter – whether or not a reader enjoys this novel depends on whether they find the mix of ‘fact’ and ‘invention’, the blurring of the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction contained therein, either thrilling or a violation of trust. Either way, the readerly reception of the novel depends on the expectations that the reader brings to the reading experience – expectations based on and fortified by conventional literature, and manipulated by Goldman in-text.

The intrusions are constant throughout the entire embedded story – the reader does not know when or where they will appear (they occupy a variety of different

136 Chazan, Davida. “A Review of the Novel “The Princess Bride” by William Goldman.” On Yahoo! Voices. 9th April 2009. http://voices.yahoo.com/book-review-princess-bride-william-goldman- 3027486.html. Accessed 10th July 2014. 137 Chazan. 270 spatial positions within each chapter, and so are completely unpredictable in terms of regularity). Goldman ends the work by allowing himself the last word, discussing what he thinks happened to the characters after the tale. He says, “I’m an abridger, so I’m entitled to a few ideas of my own. Did they make it? Was the pirate ship there? You can answer it for yourself, but, for me, I say yes it was. And yes, they got away. And got their strength back and had lots of adventures and more than their share of laughs.”138

Here Goldman is allowing himself to speculate on the ending of ‘another’s’ tale, and in doing so again does not leave the reader alone to their conventional engagement with the romantic tale – we are once again reminded not only of Goldman’s role as inventor and crafter of the entire tale, but also of the mixture of truth and invention in his curious blend of fiction and nonfiction.

Reviewer Nathaniel Rich recognises the literary achievement involved in The

Princess Bride. He uses the analogy of magic, of illusion, to explain what Goldman achieves with his dual story:

The swashbuckling adventure is interrupted by an irreverent running

commentary about S. Morgenstern’s narrative tics and preoccupations, an

approach that allows Goldman to exploit the conventions of storytelling while

subverting them at the same time. It is a kind of literary magic trick, the

equivalent of the Penn and Teller bits in which Penn discloses how he pulled

off an illusion—a disclosure (which is usually false) that manages to make the

illusion even more astonishing in retrospect.139

138 Goldman, The Princess Bride, p. 317. 139 Rich, Nathaniel. “American Dreams, 1973: The Princess Bride by William Goldman.” On Daily Beast. 28th August 2013. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/28/american-dreams-1973-the-princess- bride-by-william-goldman.html. Accessed 10th July 2014. 271

Rich equates Goldman with world-famous contemporary illusionists, Penn and Teller, whose act involves revealing how magic is performed in an effort to increase audience wonder by showing the skill involved with illusion, by letting the audience in on the act and so making them feel a part of it. Rich claims this is what Goldman does in his novel; the novelist ‘exploits the conventions of storytelling while subverting them’ – he deliberately uses readerly expectations as a means to achieve an effect, which is to have the audience question their very expectations. Rich uses the word ‘trick’ to describe this action, which I believe is very important – he feels, as a reader, like the audience in a magic show, that he has been manipulated by the nature of what he expects to see. Yet, like a magic show, this manipulation is not deceitful – rather it makes the experience of reading the creative work even better. The fact that Goldman, like Penn and Teller, peppers his narrative with small disclosures of supposed truth (which are ‘usually false’), Rich believes, makes the author’s illusion, his trick, ‘more astonishing in retrospect’. Thus, in constructing part of this novel to closely resemble the truth-related genre of memoir, in peppering these sections with actual, real-life facts, in making authorial intrusions into the embedded story which resemble the form of nonfictional editorial commentary, Goldman enhances and encourages readerly expectations in regards to narrative ‘truth’ – expectations which are, of course, eventually thwarted when the reader learns ‘the truth’ about the fiction. Whether this literary trickery is deemed astonishing illusion or something far more negative then rests with the individual reader.

Goldman, the Authorial ‘Ego’, and Fictionality

The reader reactions to The Princess Bride demonstrate the dominance of

Goldman’s presence in their readings of the work. Whether for good or ill, Goldman

272 refuses to let the text exist without his persona filling the pages. The ever-increasing artificial paratext (one prefatory section is increased to two, and then three, sections with the additions of the 25th and 30th anniversary Introductions), as well as his overt interruptions into the fantasy text have the effect of making The Princess Bride a story not about a princess bride, but rather about an author. While John Fowles reacted to decades of discussion on the death of the novel with an angst-ridden, postmodernist, almost anti-god narrator/author in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Goldman seems to have taken the opposite route. In reaction to this postmodernist existential angst about the role of the author, Goldman makes himself a god – he turns a fictional romantic/fantastic book into a story about ‘himself’ (the memoir sections rival the inner text in length, and overcome it in importance), he interjects into the spatial realm of the fictional text (never letting us forget him), and he even deigns to take the work of

‘another author’ and make it better (his editing is apparently what makes Morgenstern’s writing into a good book). However, ‘the author’ is a mostly fictional creation, allowing

Goldman to create this egotistical being without being fairly or wholeheartedly blamed as egotistical. Goldman at once addresses the postmodernist concern over the lack of control an author has over their work (denying Morgenstern his authorship), and rejects the notion that the author may be ‘dead’ or unimportant140 by making himself the truly important part of the book.

The inclusion of both the memoir and fantasy genres – two extremes on the scale of literature, each defined in large part by their nonfictional and fictional content – allows the reader to employ vastly different reading processes which may then be confounded. Goldman’s choice of fantasy for the inner story (rather than a more realist

140 Whether or not Goldman was aware of the work, The Princess Bride was published after Roland Barthes’ treatise on The Death of the Author. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Vincent B. Leitch (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. pp. 1466-1470. 273 tale) allows the reader to believe the authorial voice will not interject (this genre is usually defined by unobtrusive omniscient or character narrators). The reader is lulled into the immersion of that storyworld only to be rudely shocked by Goldman’s intrusions into that natural reading process. We are at first fooled by both the form of, and the facts contained within, the memoir sections into thinking his introductions are just that – introductions rather than narrative text. This allows us to focus on Goldman as author/narrator, rather than a character. The obviously fictional elements in these

‘nonfiction’ sections only serve to increase this understanding, stressing his role not just as an editor for Morgenstern, but as an inventive author – a creator. Goldman’s role as creator/editor is thus solidified. When he interjects into the fantasy text, we do not see a character jumping in, but instead see the narrator/author intruding where he should not go. It would be easy to see this chronic attention seeking throughout the whole work as abhorrently egotistical – and indeed, as we have seen, many readers do. However, the humour with which Goldman carries this off, coupled with the fact that the narrating

Goldman is not quite the real authorial Goldman, results in the author ‘getting away with it’ in the eyes of many readers. Goldman humorously reacts to the postmodernist angst over the lack of narratorial/authorial godliness by holding himself up as a god – and never letting the reader forget it.

Goldman’s text deliberately mixes truth and untruth – blurring the lines between the two; as he does this he also brings to our attention the concepts of fiction and nonfiction and the conflation between them. Obvious truths (his film scripts) are mixed with obvious falsehoods (the countries of Florin and Guilder), thus tipping the reader off that this book is an unmarked conflation of nonfiction and fiction (the work never explicitly declares this generic mix), and in the same stroke drawing our attention to the two sides of the supposed binary. This is not like Frey’s A Million Little Pieces,

274 where that author’s invented scenes or passages (he claims) were used to more fully convey to his readership the feeling of his actual experience of being a drug addict. Frey does not draw our attention to the binary of truth/fiction, even as he conflates the realms, blurring the boundaries. Goldman, however, does. It seems, then, that Goldman wishes to make a point to his readership about the nature of narrative – that it is both real and unreal, and that that should not disturb us, as what really matters is telling a good story which often involves an acknowledged mixture of nonfiction and fiction.

Goldman conveys this message by relaxing any readerly anxieties we may feel with humour – this is a fun book, and we are invited to enjoy it, to revel in the blurring of boundaries, the breaking of rules, the subversion of our expectations. In one fell

(contradictory) swoop the author uses the readerly expectations formed by the fact/fiction dichotomy to demonstrate the ridiculous nature of this very dichotomy. He at once relies upon, and rejects, the divide. For readers, this may be unsettling, but the popularity of the book proves it is not always a negative experience to be so unsettled.

The Princess Bride is an obvious exception to the ‘rule’ whereby fictional(ised) memoirs generally lack foreign techniques that might jolt the reader out of their seeing the narrative as ‘truth’ – although the Introductions and textual intrusions mimic the memoir style, they are also littered with obvious counterfactual information. Goldman seems to use this juxtaposition of absolute, identifiable facts with absolute, identifiable inventions within the memoir sections in order to confront the reader. This is confronting because it is an unconventional technique – one not accepted or commonly used, and one which runs counter to generic expectations for memoir, a genre which typically rejects the use of obvious lies. This text refuses to lull us into a comfortable pseudo-memoir reading – it insists on being taken as something different, it refuses to let the reader ignore its inconsistencies or irregularities. Here, however, the

275 confrontation is one that invites the reader to view the writer as absurd rather than seeing themselves as stupid, since it aims to promote a comic reception rather than a serious rebuke of readerly expectations. In a world which blanketly splits texts into two distinct groups (fiction and nonfiction), Goldman’s text defies such classification, and through this technique he confounds the reader, confronting them with the new and strange, and thus making them think consciously about the fictionality of the text.

The combination of fact and fiction within the book becomes a marker of fictionality because of its unconventionality for this genre. Such markers are not simply indicators of fiction that we absorb then cease to consciously contemplate, but ‘flags’ that alert us and make us consciously ponder the genre of the text. Such narrative styles are not unconventional in and of themselves – appearing in fantasy, fantastical invention is conventional; appearing in non-fiction, real world facts are also conventional. They become markers of fictionality because they are placed in an unconventional setting, flagging the reader’s attention, and thus drawing their conscious awareness to the invention involved in the work. Fictionality markers thus depend entirely on a reader’s seeing them as unconventional – once conventional within a certain generic context, they will be read by that reader implicitly, without conscious contemplation, and thus without drawing attention to the fictionality of the work. We must therefore shift the debate away from whether or not certain textual features can be undeniable markers or signposts of fictionality, and instead move towards an understanding of fictionality as dictated by readerly interpretation. It is only an individual reader’s interpretation of a textual feature as a violation of the narrative contract in regards to notions of ‘truth’

(whether factual or narrative truth) that can produce an awareness of the fictionality of the work.

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Finally, I will now turn to the ultimate combination of (apparent) fact and fiction – the hoax – in order to explore how the paratext is vital in this most malicious and controversial of trickeries.

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Chapter 5:

The Hoax and the Paratext

The history of the hoax, one of the most malicious forms of trickery, is a long and marked one. Whether for money, glory, or the sheer thrill of deception, the hoax has been a prolific form right throughout written history – and that fact says much not just about the deceptive nature of the human character, but also the ease with which the narrative form may lend itself to be used for manipulative, devious ends. In her brief history of popular hoaxes, Melissa Katsoulis points out that “cases of writers playing games with authorship and authenticity can be traced as far back as the fourth century

BC”1, and in this sense the hoax is nothing new. However, I will show in this chapter that the form is alive and well today, and continues to hoodwink readers despite our long history of knowledge of the form, simply because reading practices necessarily predicate the conditions on which hoaxers rely.

There are many varieties of literary hoax, but the vast majority of cases fall into three categories: the autobiographical hoax (where a hoaxer writes a text based on a fictional persona and passes it off as a true autobiography), the literary forgery (where a lost or new text by a well-known author is supposedly found), and the entrapment hoax

(where the author hopes to trap the reader into believing the hoax is genuine, only to reveal it as a fake and thus shame the gullible). Although hoaxes may differ in their means, they all manipulate their readerships through deceit, and this manipulation is not in the service of the reader (to create a positive reading experience) but rather in the service of the author. The revelation is always performed outside the text in the

1 Katsoulis, Melissa. Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes. Melbourne and London: Hardie Grant Books, 2010. p. 1. 278 paratextual realm, and is usually carried out by a party other than the author, since in most hoax cases the authorial intent is never to reveal the deception. This makes the hoax unique in the literary world, an analysis of which leads us to a more determined understanding of the paratext. In this chapter I will begin with the premise that the book is just one part of the reading experience – just one artefact at the centre of a web of information which is just as crucial as the text itself in informing and shaping our reading experience. This surrounding world of book covers, advertising, author’s notes, authorial interviews, readerly reviews, and the like – which Gérard Genette names the

“paratext”2 – has become so powerful in our contemporary world that it is now impossible to relegate this information to a secondary role. Rather, I will argue that the paratext itself forms its own narrative, the readerly engagement with which forms an integral part of the reading experience. I will demonstrate this through an analysis of one particular hoax – Helen Demidenko/Darville’s The Hand that Signed the Paper – the conditions of which rely so heavily on this dual narrative structure that the paratextual narrative actually becomes the primary narrative for the reader.

Understanding Darville’s work in this extended paratextual fashion allows us to look beneath the feelings of outrage elicited by the novel in order to find the root cause of these passionate responses: namely, that the book itself cannot be isolated from its context, and that it was the context itself which caused the majority of the furore.

The Paratext

As Genette defines the terms, the peritext (material directly related to the text, occurring outside the text but within the physical artefact of the book), and the epitext

(material directly related to the text, but outside of the physical artefact of the book)

2 Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge and New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1997. p. 1. 279 together form the paratext. The notion of authorisation is important to Genette – he claims the paratext is “always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author”3. Paul Dawson establishes a theoretical point of departure from Genette’s definition on this front, defining the paratext “more broadly than Genette in the sense that if it constitutes a ‘zone of transaction,’ an attempt to influence the public, this zone also must include the textual phenomena produced by the reading public as the other party in the transaction.”4 I follow Dawson in including readerly contributions in my definition of the paratext; the importance of this inclusion will become clear later in this chapter when I analyse the event of a hoax in respect to its initial reception, subsequent revelation, consequent public reaction, and thus new reception and interpretation.

The paratext is both a useful concept and a problematic one for narratologists.

Richard Walsh argues that because the paratext constitutes the framing of the text, it has the power to set certain expectations for the reader regarding the text – expectations which are difficult, if not impossible to shake. In his exploration of fictionality, Walsh argues that a text is recognised as either fiction or nonfiction through its paratext. That is, “[f]ictionality is the product of a narrative’s frame of presentation, of the various possible elements of what Gérard Genette has described as the paratext.”5 Thus, Walsh argues, rather than identifying intrinsic textual fictionality, the reader interprets the text as either fiction or nonfiction based on the paratextual framing. Certainly, the role of the paratext in shaping the readerly reception of a work is powerful (indeed, it may shape it to such a degree that the frame holds despite much textual evidence to the contrary).

3 Genette, Paratexts, p. 2. 4 Dawson, Paul. “Real Authors and Real Readers: Omniscient Narration and a Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Winter 2012). p. 110. 5 Walsh, Richard. “Fictionality and Mimesis: Between Narrativity and Fictional Worlds.” Narrative, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 2003). p. 115. 280

However, I would be cautious about extending this notion to its logical endpoint – rather I would maintain that in certain extreme causes, textual evidence may overthrow the paratextual framing. Nonetheless, Walsh’s assertion that the paratext is more imporant than most textual evidence is a salient point, and one I believe to hold true for readers in most circumstances.

In acknowledging this paratextual power of influence over readerly reception, I would claim that we cannot separate text from paratext in the way the etymology of the words seem to imply. Indeed, they are bound together, and work upon one another in a way that cannot allow for easy separation. H. Porter Abbott briefly makes this point about the paratext in his Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, where he claims, “[a]ll of this tangential material can inflect our experience of the narrative, sometimes subtly, sometimes deeply. So in this sense all of this material is part of the narrative.”6 The discussion, therefore, must shift from text and reception to the question of narrative progression in the readerly experience of both text and paratext combined. In contradiction to Genette’s original definition, Paul Dawson offers a new communication model which implies paratext covers everything related to the text (including the text), inside and outside of the book. He states:

The paratext, I am arguing, is a type of discursive formation, a set of textual

statements whose interrelations construct the text as its object, which leads to a

discursive reformulation of the diagram of narrative communication:

6 Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Second Edition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. p. 30. 281

Paratext:

epitext (author) ↔ peritext (extrafictional voice) ↔ text (narrator > narratee) ↔ epitext (reader)7

Dawson argues there is no ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of a text – that it is all paratext in the sense that all elements are part of a discursive formation. I want to be wary of taking this notion to its extreme and conflating text into paratext so much so that any distinctions collapse. Even in the cases where the boundaries are not clear cut, the notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ still hold in the mind of the reader. However, I do wish to challenge the strict dichotomy implied by the etymology – in practice, the boundaries between text and paratext are so often blurred, the two are so intricately linked, that the notion of a strict ‘inside’/‘outside’ dichotomy is inadequate for complex narratological analysis. I therefore accept the premise of Dawson’s discursive model, even if I do not accept we can label the entire communication act as ‘paratext’. Rather, the act of narrative communication requires both text and paratext – separate entities in theory, but blurred in practice.

Indeed, some have taken this concept of blurred boundaries to its logical conclusion, asking what the notion of paratext must mean if its fixed borders are accepted no more. Birke and Christ have shifted the discussion concerning the paratext from classification to conceptualisation. They claim, “our primary interest in paratext does not center on resolving its classificatory problems and improving its differential exactness, but on making use of the concept as ‘a treasure trove of questions’ in

Genette’s spirit (Palimpsests 4).”8 Thus, they maintain, that the function of the paratext

7 Dawson, “Real Authors and Real Readers”, p. 110. 8 Birke, Dorothee, and Christ, Birte. “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field.” Narrative, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2013). p. 66. 282 is to organise the text’s “relation with potential and actual readers” through three main avenues: the “interpretive function” (guiding the reader’s interpretation of the text), the

“commercial function” (advertising the text), and the “navigational function” (orienting the reader and guiding them through the text in a mechanical way).9 In this way, Birke and Christ are stressing the importance of the authorial authorisation involved in the paratext, and yet they do point out that in contemporary media, such as the E-reader

(where marginalia are often recorded and available to other readers), readers’ contributions can, in fact become paratext, throwing open the question of the importance of authorisation.10 I believe all paratextual material (whether authorised or not) must be considered in paratextual analysis.

Birke and Christ’s essay points out the troublesome nature of the datedness of

Genette’s definition. In our current digitised world, a definition that came from a

(mostly) pre-digital era is bound to be found wanting in some respects. Virginia

Pignagnoli attempts to fill that gap by creating a new category of paratextual elements called “Paratexts 2.0”11. These resources are either material peritexts (“the visual, iconic, and material elements”) or digital epitexts (“the digital paratextual elements officially produced or released by the author as support to her narrative”).12 Importantly, these resources are, in Pignagnoli’s view, “resources of narrative communication at the author’s disposal”13, and so fall under the Genettian authorisation model of paratext.

Nevertheless, Pignagnoli’s contribution is important, as it fills the void left wanting by a theory created in relation to print culture – in my view, we must simply expand it to include unauthorised contributions.

9 Birke and Christ, pp. 67, 67, 68, and 68, respectively. 10 Birke and Christ, p. 78. 11 Pignagnoli, Virginia. “Paratexts 2.0: New Perspectives on Twenty-first Century Literary Narrative.” Electronic Thesis or Dissertation. Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10579/3974. 12 Pignagnoli, p. 66. 13 Pignagnoli, p. 65. 283

Such theories which identify and adapt paratextual definitions must ultimately rest on the assumption that paratext and text are different entities. I would argue that the distinction made between text and paratext is as useful as the distinction made in current narratological theory between story and discourse; most scholars today accept that the latter distinction is an artificial one for fictional texts (since story is only constructed through discourse, and cannot exist prior), yet it is still acknowledged as a useful concept for examining how readers approach texts (most academic readers do, in fact, see story and the way that story is told as two distinct elements of the narrative, and so approach and digest the narrative in this way). In the same vein, the distinction between text and paratext is an artificial one. Our current digital rise has produced new elements which blur the always-in-flux boundaries in new ways – so much so that it is often difficult to discern what is text and what is paratext (consider Birke and Christ’s example of the extra features on a DVD, where deleted scenes are at once diegetic

(belonging to the storyworld, and so presumably text), and also paratextual (an optional extra the viewer may choose to watch or not watch, included paratextually on the

DVD)14). And yet this distinction is a useful tool in helping us to understand how readers (in the case of books) approach the narrative and its surrounds. Both readers and authors still utilise the ‘distinction’ between the arenas of text and paratext, even if they do not use those terms. As such, it will be important to consider the ‘divide’ even as we acknowledge that the divide cannot be so easily identified – that the boundaries of text and paratext shift and blur, and this interaction allows for the hoax to take place.

Of course there is nothing new in the notion of the paratext being not simply the material that exists outside the text, but rather the material that serves a directional purpose – leading the reader into, and guiding their reading of, the text, and thus in this

14 Birke and Christ, p. 73. 284 way bleeding into and blending with that text. Genette refers to the paratext as a

“threshold... a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back.”15 He talks of the lack of solid boundaries around the paratext

(either on the side of the text or the “world’s discourse about the text”16), stating that the paratext acts as the threshold between the text and non-text, guiding the reader as to what they might find within if they choose to cross the threshold. As my definition includes the world’s discourse about the text, I see the paratext not as a threshold between that discourse and the text, but rather as a solid entity in itself – one that interacts with and mixes into the text to create the reading experience.

Of course, in the case of the hoax, timing is everything – the reader must first be led to believe before the revelation is carried out and the experience completed. We must, then, not simply consider the spatial realm of the paratext, but also look to its temporality, its necessary progression rather than any fixidity. Taking a book’s publication date as its time zero, Genette claims there is an “original paratext” which appears at the same time as the text, as well as several other types of paratext which appear at other times: “prior” (existing before the date of publication), “later” (after publication, but quite soon – perhaps in a second edition), “delayed” (after publication, much later), “posthumous” (after the author’s death), and “anthumous” (during the author’s lifetime).17 Genette points out that the posthumous/anthumous distinction is not dictated by publication date, as the death of the author may come before, after, or at the time of publication. He also claims that paratextual elements may disappear (though I would argue this is almost an impossibility today, considering our age of documentation

15 Genette, Paratexts, p. 2. 16 Genette, Paratexts, p. 2. 17 Genette, Paratexts, pp. 5-6. 285 and storage).18 Nevertheless, this brings up an important point – that the paratext is a temporally-moving collection. The story the paratext tells almost never stays the same, so we must come to understand the paratext as having its own progression, and we must see it as a narrative in and of itself. Rather than simply supporting material that may guide a reading of the main text, that may provide a threshold through which to enter that text, the paratext is a temporally-progressive narrative. The hoax provides the perfect opportunity through which to see this narrative in action, since the hoax, more than any other type of trickery, insists on paratextual analysis. For the hoax as an act of communication, the primary narrative exists in the paratextual realm.

Hoaxes: Authorial Intent to Reveal or Deceive

Hoaxes come in three main styles. Of these three forms, the entrapment hoax is the least common, and differs in intent to that of the autobiographical hoax and the literary forgery – while the authors of these last two forms intend for their deception to remain a secret, the authors of entrapment hoaxes structure the revelation of their hoax into the reading experience. The delayed, paratextual revelation is planned – it is in fact part of the author’s aims. One very famous example of this is the Ern Malley poetry collection. In 1944 disgruntled Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart

“decided to carry out a serious literary experiment.”19 They were discontented by what they saw as the lack of artistic merit involved in the modernist poetry of the era, and so decided to test the modernist poets and critics of Australia by submitting ‘fake’ modernist poetry to Australian literary magazine Angry Penguins under a made-up name – Ern Malley. The poetry was taken up and published by editor and modernist

18 Genette, Paratexts, p. 6. 19 McAuley, James and Stewart, Harold. Quoted in Harris, Max. “The Hoax.” In Malley, Ern. Ern Malley: Collected Poems. Pymble: Angus & Robertson, 1993. p. 4. (Original emphasis.) 286 poet, Max Harris, and was generally quite well-received. The hoax was revealed in the press, and McAuley and Stewart made a statement explaining their motivations as they gloated over their success in ‘proving’ that there was no difference between ‘good’ and

‘bad’ modernist poetry – and furthermore, since their poetry was deliberately bad, this therefore proved the rule for the style as a whole. In their hoax revelation, McAuley and

Stewart explained their method as follows:

We produced the whole of Ern Malley’s tragic life-work in one afternoon, with

the aid of a chance collection of books which happened to be on our desk: the

Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare’s, Dictionary of

Quotations, etc.

We opened books at random, choosing a word or a phrase haphazardly.

We made lists of these and wove them into nonsensical sentences. We

misquoted and made false allusion. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and

selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary.20

These two traditional poets had set out, then, to discredit a movement by deliberately creating the worst poetry they could in imitation of the style they despised.

Unfortunately for them, though, the poetry turned out to be good enough to be applauded by a number of prominent critics. Indeed, far from proving the hoaxers right, their poetry become hugely influential; the Malley poems were published in the 1991 anthology, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, and they even exerted a global influence – New York School poet John Ashbery became enamoured of the work

(post-revelation), publishing a couple of the poems in a journal he was coediting. This

20 McAuley and Stewart. Quoted in Harris, p. 5. (Original emphasis.) 287 poetry, then, seemed only to prove that these poets were good writers, even when they did not allow their conscious artistic judgment to amend their subconscious literary work. In fact, the argument goes that, freed of the constraints of formal poetry, they could write what some would claim to be better poetry than their consciously-minded traditional works. They could not not write good poetry.

The Ern Malley case provides us with an early-mid twentieth century example of a hoax where the planned revelation is crucial. McAuley and Stewart’s hoax hinged on their ability to gloat in the papers that they had outwitted the modernists, and so

‘prove’ the latter had no grasp on good taste (something they presumably thought they themselves had in spades). In this particular case, the revelation, which was intended to shame modernist poets and critics, was crucial for the authors in order to attempt to prove their point that modernist poetry required no literary skill and was therefore essentially worthless. Indeed, the changing temporality of the paratext is, in this case, fundamental to the narrative. A letter to the editor was sent accompanying the poems, supposedly written by the poet’s sister, Ethel, which tells the story of both the poet and the uncovering of his work. This initial paratext supports the hoax, supplying the necessary modernist author for the works – undiscovered and, crucially, not McAuley or

Stewart, whose views on modernism were known and so whose modernist works would be read with a skeptical eye. The subsequent revelation comes only after the work is applauded by critics – one must presume that, had the experiment failed (had the poetry not been acclaimed), McAuley and Stewart might not have revealed themselves, since the hoax rested on the poetry being accepted. The narrative point thus relied on a late paratextual revelation, which in turn relied upon prior paratextual acclaim, and before that, the initial paratextual setup. The progressive temporality of the paratext was crucial to the narrative, and thus to the reading experience.

288

There is a relationship between this type of planned-revelation hoax and other types of trickery as explored in chapters two to four of this thesis – the revelation is crucial to all. Although the point of revelation in this type of hoax sits in the paratext as opposed to the text, the texts of both this style of hoax and other trickeries rely on the revelation to complete the readerly experience of the text. In this sense, the revelation is part of the narrative of the reading experience. The greatest difference between this rare style of hoax and that of other trickeries is largely that of narrative emphasis – in these hoaxes, the paratextual narrative takes precedence over the textual narrative.

This holds true for the majority of other types of hoaxes, in which the deceitful manipulation and authorial egocentrism remains, but is intended to be kept secret. It is these types of hoaxes that I wish to explore in this chapter since they form the majority of the genre, and since they provide a distinct contrast with other types of trickeries already examined. For ease of reference the term ‘hoax’ will hereafter be used to refer to this style of trickery. The intention of the author of the hoax is thus never to have that hoax revealed, to ‘get away with it’, so to speak. This, of course, creates an important distinction between this hoax style and the other types of trickery outlined in the previous chapters of this thesis: the revelation is unintended, and therefore carried out by a party other than the author. Authorial intent is lacking in the planning and carrying out of the revelation, and thus it is not only not integral to the authorial design of the intended readerly experience, but it also disrupts and distorts that design completely.

The Autobiographical Hoax

I wish to focus on the autobiographical hoax, whereby an author invents and adopts a character persona and writes an autobiographical narrative from this perspective. While we can but speculate as to the complex psychology behind a decision

289 to deceive through these means, one of the main intentions is clear: to deceive a readership into believing the text carries with it the weight of ‘truth’, when in fact it is completely fictionalised.21 The autobiographical hoax is usually seen as a fairly callous form of deception, since it often invokes the use of a fictionalised persona who supposedly comes from a marginalised or disadvantaged group. Whether an ethnic or gender minority, a victim of disease or hardship, these personas supposedly give voice to those who traditionally have had their voices suppressed or silenced. If, upon revelation, the author turns out to be a member of the majority who have traditionally suppressed such voices, this ventriloquism is seen as just another oppressive injury. The autobiographical hoax is thus one that usually invokes a strong negative reaction when the deceit is finally revealed.

Most hoaxes are revealed in the epitext, since the revealer is usually not associated with the production of the book (author or publisher) and so can only work outside of it since they have no access to its formulation. Although the epitext and peritext work together (with the text itself), they perform distinctly different roles in the case of the hoax. The paratext as a whole is usually used as a tool of manipulation by the author (and publisher, if they are aware of the deceit). The peritext is part of the physical document which also contains the text – it is the element that comes ‘in writing’, and so forms part of the artefact of the hoax. The epitext, however, is a step removed, and thus encompasses unsubstantiated forms of information such as rumour and hearsay (which can benefit manipulative authors who wish to foster a falsehood at a safe distance). The epitext, then, is usually where the majority of the deceptive manipulation occurs. This is because the epitext is part of ‘real life’; the reader trusts

21 Of course, nothing is black and white, and this fact remains true for authorial intent in autobiographical hoaxes. Many authors of autobiography have been accused of being less than truthful (indeed, the genre of nonfiction is fraught with such issues) when their authorial intent has been to present their experience, rather than facts. Please see Chapter Four for an in-depth exploration of these grey areas. 290

(whether misguidedly or not) that information provided in this sphere is correct, since it is verifiable. The irony is, of course, that much of ‘reality’ is created, fictionalised, and so this is the arena where the most manipulation is possible since the reader is least on guard.

One writer who very much preyed upon this readerly trust is Norma Khouri, the author of the 2003 autobiographical hoax, Forbidden Love: A harrowing true story of love and revenge in Jordan (also published in the United States of America as Honor

Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan). In this hoax, text and authorial paratext are integrated, both giving the same truth cues to the reader. The book contains the story of Norma and Dalia, women in their mid-twenties and best friends despite their respective Catholic and Islamic faiths, living in Jordan in the 1990s. Norma narrates the sequence of events which concern Dalia falling in love with a Catholic man named

Michael, Dalia’s family’s suspicions about the affair, and the latter’s so-called ‘honour killing’ of Dalia in response. We are invited to assume the narrator is also the author, and indeed, Khouri’s emotive performance in authorial interviews as the writer of this harrowing ‘autobiographical’ work supports this connection. Importantly, the book is not set up simply as one woman speaking for another who cannot speak for herself anymore; rather Khouri stresses that these are events which she experienced. Even though the book concerns the love affair and death of Dalia, Norma is intricately bound up in those same events – it is her story of her friend’s love affair and death, which she had to deal with at the time, and which she is still dealing with now since she has had to flee her country of origin. Khouri invites us to take this story as her own personal memoir, and so we must see it as autobiographical.

Issues of truth are inherently bound up with autobiography, and so the success or failure of this hoax hinged on whether or not the readership believed the work to be

291 true. Gillian Whitlock argues that “[b]ooksellers agree that the label of ‘nonfiction’ was critical to the best-seller status of Honor Lost, as sales of nonfiction, from memoirs to autobiographies, fulfill a desire for facts and truth that is promised by the autobiographical pact.”22 Indeed, the paratext is used to make a claim for the work as nonfiction, and so to buy into this autobiographical pact. The front cover and frontispiece both proudly display the title of the work: “A harrowing true story of love and revenge in Jordan”.23 The back cover classifies the work as “NON-FICTION”, and also contains a recommendation quote from Jean Sasson, who calls the book an

“extraordinary true story”.24 A short authorial biography is included on the first page of the book; the last two (of three) sentences reads: “As a result of the events recounted in

Forbidden Love (which was written secretly in an Internet café), she was forced to emigrate to Athens. She now lives in Australia.”25 This biography thereby invites us to read the inner narrative as real events which took place, and which specifically happened to Norma Khouri, the author.

The text itself also encourages the readerly belief in the work as nonfiction. It begins with a “Prologue” where the narrator talks of “my family’s neighbourhood in

Amman”, of Jordan being “my home”, and that “it may never be safe for me to return.”26 This sets up a personal story for this first person narrator, the storyworld of which is a real place. Curiously late for an ‘autobiography’, where self identity matters so much, the first mention of the narrator’s name as “Norma” (for the first time aligning the identity of the narrator and the author) comes in chapter two on page 16, when Dalia

22 Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007. p. 111. 23 Khouri, Norma. Forbidden Love: A harrowing true story of love and revenge in Jordan. Sydney and Auckland: Bantam Books, 2003. Front cover and frontispiece. 24 Khouri, Forbidden Love, back cover. 25 Khouri, Forbidden Love, authorial biography, front matter. 26 Khouri, Forbidden Love, p. 2. 292 identifies her in conversation.27 There follows the story of Dalia and Norma as they meet Michael, right up to just after Dalia’s death. An “Afterword” follows the conclusion of the narrative, and contains information about so-called honour killings and their history as a cultural, rather than religious, practice. This section makes reference to “Dalia” (the victim of the killing in the narrative), and so links the inner narrative with this peritextual section.28 Following this, a “Farewell” continues the narrator’s personal narrative story, giving an indication of her life outside of Jordan.29 In this Farewell, Norma continues writing within the confines created by the storyworld, weaving references to Dalia with her own supposedly fear-filled life and how she came to write this manuscript. Thus Khouri here is interweaving her book with the storyworld, leading her reader to believe they both exist in the same world, and so if one is true, the other must be by default. The last three and a half pages of the Farewell are packed full of references to (presumably) actual so-called honour killings – these she lists in a factual way, detailing in brief the circumstances of each in the style of a newspaper article. Immediately following this, she writes, “Dalia’s death never reached the newspapers.”30, thereby linking Dalia’s death with those other so-called honour killings as just another fact. Following this very drawn-out series of endings, an emotive

“Dedication”31 of the novel to Dalia concludes the inner peritextual elements of the work. ‘Dalia’ thus links the storyworld of the text and the epitextual real world for the reader, lending an air of truth to the inner work.

Of course, upon hoax revelation, this belief in the autobiographical nature of the work, so carefully cultivated by Khouri, was what caused the greatest grief for the hoaxer. In his 2004 The Sydney Morning Herald articles, Malcolm Knox exposes the

27 Khouri, Forbidden Love, p. 16. 28 Khouri, Forbidden Love, p. 195. 29 Khouri, Forbidden Love, pp. 205-211. 30 Khouri, Forbidden Love, p. 211. 31 Khouri, Forbidden Love, p. 213. 293 hoax – the entire ‘true story’ is, in fact, a fabrication. Knox writes a scathing series of articles detailing the extent of the lies, both within the book, and outside of it as carried out by the author. He writes:

Khouri’s real name is Norma Majid Khouri Michael Al-Bagain Toliopoulos,

and she only lived in Jordan until she was three years old. She has a US

passport and lived from 1973 until 2000 in Chicago. She is married with two

children, 13 and 11. She has four American siblings and a mother who are

desperate to hear news from her. But she has managed to conceal this double

life from her publishers, her agent, lawyers in several continents, the Australian

Department of Immigration and, until now, the public.32

In essence, Knox states, “Norma Khouri is a fake, and so is Forbidden Love.”33

Khouri’s work is a true hoax. The book itself never wavers from its insistence on the truth of the tale – both within the text itself, and in the peritext. Khouri herself never dropped her epitextual performance, claiming the ‘truth’ of the tale even once the fraud had been exposed. Simon Caterson reveals the dumbfounding lengths to which

Khouri went to hold fast to her story:

After insisting on the truth of her book and threatening the Sydney Morning

Herald with legal action, Norma Khouri did finally make an apology in a

television interview conducted by a suitably grim-faced Ray Martin and

broadcast [on Australian television] on Channel Nine’s A Current Affair nearly

32 Knox, Malcolm. “Bestseller’s lies exposed.” On The Sydney Morning Herald. 24th July 2004. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/23/1090464854793.html. Accessed 12th January 2015. 33 Knox, “Bestseller’s lies exposed.” 294

four weeks after her book was exposed as a fake. Her explanation was far from

being a confession:

I’m not saying I deny that I’ve lied. I’m saying I apologise to all the

readers, publishers, and agents out there for not letting them know my

personal full story. But I did not lie about Dalia’s existence, or about

her murder or about her life.34

It is clear that Khouri never intended for her lies to be discovered, and indeed, cannot even admit to them once they have been revealed by an outside party. Although the hoax was revealed against what we can fairly safely assume were her wishes, Khouri amassed both fortune and fame (though the latter was potentially not the type she was chasing). As Simon Caterson tells us, “there can be little doubt that Forbidden Love is the most profitable literary hoax ever perpetrated in Australia... Khouri told [Ray]

Martin she had not received any royalties for the book, a claim her British publisher denied the next morning on ABC Radio. Malcolm Knox estimates that her advances totalled as much as $1.5 million.”35 Fortune, then, seems to have been Khouri’s reward

– a reward which must compensate her for the extremely negative notoriety she earnt herself through this autobiographical hoax.

Why, then, did the work succeed before the revelation? Khouri’s highly- emotive performance in authorial interviews framed the reading of the work – readers understood from Khouri that this was a true story, and so they were primed to read it as such. Susanna Egan claims that impostures such as Khouri’s “are topical and timing is key to their success. Particular times and places are sensitive to particular identity

34 Caterson, Simon. “The Norma Khouri Affair.” Quadrant, Vol. 49, No. 12 (December 2005). p. 66. 35 Caterson, “Norma Khouri Affair”, p. 66. 295 performances.”36 She maintains that Khouri’s tale was exactly what the Western, post-

11th-of-September-United-States-terrorist-attacks climate demanded, and so the work was “spot on.”37 Egan explains that in cases of imposture such as Khouri’s, “the imposter successfully targets the anxieties of his or her reading public and receives undue attention, out of all proportion to the quality of narrative or style, for that very reason.”38 Khouri capitalised on a certain climate of both fear and interest in Islamic and

Arab societies, and so a book that essentially told readers their fears about another culture (and their feeling of superiority about their own culture) were justified was bound to be highly successful. This created the perfect readership for the hoax – one which already believed the type of tale they were to read before they read it. Clearly in

Khouri’s case the text, peritext, and epitext work in a carefully orchestrated harmony to create the hoax. Not one element disagrees with another in regards to storyworld truth – even when the hoax was revealed, Khouri maintained her epitextual performance. And so, with such dedication Khouri almost carried off one of the first major hoaxes of the twenty-first century – indeed, Australia’s first major (outed) hoax of that century. For

Khouri, the paratext was never meant to progress. The revelation demonstrates the ability of the paratextual temporal progression to drastically shift the hoax narrative.

Interestingly, Khouri is simply one of the latest in quite a list of Australian hoaxers. One of the most infamous of these took place in the 1990s. I wish to look at this next work in detail because, intriguingly, it is both a hoax and not a hoax – if ever a hoax was to hedge its bets, this would be it.

36 Egan, Susanna. “Auto/Biographical Impostures as Media Sensations.” In Alfred Hornung (ed.). Auto/Biography and Mediation. Memmingen: Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg, 2010. p. 133. 37 Egan, “Auto/Biographical Impostures”, p. 133. 38 Egan, “Auto/Biographical Impostures”, p. 134. 296

The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville/Demidenko

Australian author Helen Darville’s first (and, to date, only) novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper (hereafter The Hand), won the 1993 Vogel Literary Award, an

Australian prize for an unpublished manuscript by a young author. As part of that prize, the work was subsequently published in 1994, and in 1995 it won both the highly prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Australian Literature Society Gold

Medal. The novel was published under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko, and to support this fake name, Darville performed a fake authorial persona in real life, lying about her real name and ethnic background in public interviews. Darville’s hoax was dramatically revealed by a journalist in a national newspaper in 1995, and the controversy scandalised both the literary world and general Australian society alike.

The author claimed she was of Ukrainian descent – a false claim which lent an element of strength by association to the Ukrainian subject matter of her fictional work.

The Hand details the lives of a fictional Ukrainian family in World War Two. It also contains a frame story which depicts the fictional Fiona Kovalenko, a young Australian woman living in the 1990s, worrying that her uncle and father may be tried for the war crimes detailed within the inner story. The novel first caused a stir for its supposed anti-

Semitism: an apparent attempt to explain Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust by holding Soviets and Jews responsible for the Ukrainian famine (a charge strongly disputed by historians). The book was also released within the context of the history wars – an ongoing debate about the way Australian history had been, and was now, told.

The traditional telling of Australian history all but ignored Aboriginal suffering and death during the European invasion and settlement and instead focused only on the positives, but this changed from the 1960s onwards, when that suffering and death was

297 acknowledged and included; the history wars were fought between those who believed the new curriculum to be just, and those who believed that the intense positivity was simply replaced with undue intense negativity which only focused on Aboriginal suffering. Darville’s book, sympathetic to the perspective of those who fought on the side of the traditional oppressors of World War Two, tapped into the hot topic debate raging in the history wars by refusing to condemn the oppressors’ actions. Her topical novel, then, was perfectly situated to carry out a hoax on an Australian readership already primed for the material. The historical inaccuracies contained within her novel only added more fuel to the fire when angry readers realised they had been duped.

What separates this hoax from many others is that the book never claims it is a work of nonfiction. In fact, it does the opposite. The Author’s Note preceding the main text tells us that “[w]hat follows is a work of fiction. The Kovalenko family depicted in this novel has no counterpart in reality.”39 However, Darville’s performance in public appearances as a young Australian woman with Ukrainian heritage led many to conflate the author with Fiona, the woman in the frame story, and thus to believe the novel had the strength of truth behind it – something of an undeclared semi-memoir about herself, or at least about ‘her people’. Indeed, Andrew Riemer claims that “everyone assumed that the manuscript had grown out of the communal (if not personal) memories of its author’s compatriots.”40 Darville’s lack of Ukrainian heritage was revealed in a front- page national Australian newspaper story. The outrage that erupted when her real surname was revealed – many subsequently claiming her previously-acclaimed novel was a terrible piece of literature, and some calling for her awards to be revoked – reveals just how deeply many readers believed in the truth of the story, even when explicitly told within the book that it had no basis in reality. Darville’s trickery occurred

39 Demidenko, Helen. The Hand That Signed the Paper. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. p. vi. 40 Riemer, Andrew. The Demidenko Debate. Sydney: Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd., 1996. p. 21. 298 outside the text, confusing readers into a genre switch by making them believe the fiction had an underlying autobiographical element. In this case of real authorial manipulation, it is the secondary text (both the epitext, where Darville performed, and the peritext, where the book cover detailed the fake authorial name) that has shaped the reception of the work both before and after the hoax revelation.

Authorial/Narrative Voice Conflation

Demidenko’s The Hand has caused great offence to large numbers of people as a result of its purported anti-Semitism. Although the novel is a piece of fiction, those offended have conflated the narrative and authorial voices, and hence the author has been heavily criticised for her apparent intolerance. A range of critics berated the author for the anti-Semitism contained within the book, demonstrating that these readers could not separate text and authorial viewpoints. Robert Manne sums up the sentiments of many critics:

While Demidenko might argue that some of this knowledge about Jewish

malevolence is conveyed by the voices of her Ukrainian characters, there is

absolutely nothing in the novel which suggests that any of this detail is

imagined or exaggerated or false. Some is even conveyed in the authorial voice.

Nor is there, in the narrative, any alternative perspective against which this

almost unrelieved portrait of Jewish wickedness can be balanced.41 [My

emphasis.]

41 Manne, Robert. “The Strange Case of Helen Demidenko”. Quadrant, Vol. 39, No. 9 (1995). p. 27. 299

Manne here clearly reads the third person omniscient narration as the voice of

Demidenko. Others have also conflated narrative and authorial voices, or had difficulty conclusively identifying who is speaking. Raimond Gaita expresses the difficulty in distinguishing “Fiona, Kateryna and the unidentified narrative voice”42, while Sneja

Gunew sees “little distance between the implied author (who focalises much of the historical ‘evidence’) and the contemporary narrator Fiona”43. These confusions and conflations of voices seem a strange set of critical interpretations for a work of fiction.

How do we account for such abnormal reactions to fictional voices? An analysis of both the work itself and the paratextual hoax reveals just what has prompted these responses.

The narrative voice in The Hand is a central element of the controversy – being inextricably linked with the authorial voice thanks to Darville’s performance as the fake author, ‘Helen Demidenko’.

The controversy surrounding The Hand is a complicated affair, at the very heart of which lay the concepts of truth and genre. The first element of the offence arose because the work lacks a clear moral message in relation to the anti-Semitism presented, and as a result the novel as a whole was branded by some as deeply anti-Semitic. Manne claims the world of The Hand is one that has “altogether lost its moral bearings”44 where the author demonstrates “how little respect she feels for those who perished in the

Holocaust”45. Gaita agrees, claiming, “the novel does not yield to us… a serious concept of remorse in whose light we may better understand the deeds and sentiments of its characters”46. However, the element of the affair that produced the greater controversy

(and, indeed, that which produced the most outrage) arose from Darville’s use of the

42 Gaita, Raimond. “Literary and Public Honours”. Quadrant, Vol. 39, No. 9 (1995). p. 33. 43 Gunew, Sneja. “Performing Ethnicity: The Demidenko Show and its Gratifying Pathologies”. Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 11, No. 23 (1996). p. 56. 44 Manne, “Strange Case of Helen Demidenko”, p. 22. 45 Manne, “Strange Case of Helen Demidenko”, p. 24. 46 Gaita, p. 32. 300 fictional ‘Demidenko’. Darville paraded herself as Helen Demidenko – an Australian with Ukrainian heritage. In the author’s note Demidenko alludes to the idea she later confirmed to the press, that The Hand contained stories from her own relatives’ pasts:

“... it would be ridiculous to pretend that this book is unhistorical: I have used historical events and people where necessary throughout the text.”47 Indeed, Darville repeatedly referred to her work as “faction” – the problem with that descriptor, as Riemer points out, was “the difficulty in deciding how much of it may have been intended as ‘fact’ and how much as ‘fiction’.”48 The subsequent revelation that Darville’s chosen authorial persona was false deeply shocked the press and the public.

This shock was not caused merely by Darville’s false self-presentation as

Demidenko, but principally because she had initially promoted The Hand as semi- autobiographical. Susanna Egan maintains that Darville’s performance as Demidenko

“radically transformed The Hand from a work that was simply assumed to be autobiographical to a work that she herself claimed as autobiographical. Performance determined genre”49. Thus the Demidenko performance destroyed any claim for fiction in the eyes of readers. Egan asserts that readers judge people morally, and books aesthetically, but autobiography is protected from aesthetic judgement because of the authentic nature of experience50. Although I believe this oversimplifies the reality by reducing judgments to an unrealistic dichotomy, Egan’s emphasis is valuable – although not entirely protected from aesthetic judgment, any lack in aesthetic quality is often excused because autobiography is also judged morally as authentic experience (moreso, that is, than fiction). Thus Darville’s choice of genre changed the way readers viewed the novel – that is, primarily as an authentic experience, rather than an aesthetic work.

47 Demidenko, The Hand, p. vi. 48 Riemer, p. 65. 49 Egan, Susanna. “The Company She Keeps: Demidenko and the Problems of Imposture in Autobiography”. Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (May 2003). p. 24. 50 Egan, “Company She Keeps”, p. 20. 301

An editorialist in newspaper The Age at the time of the scandal claimed, “it was bad enough that these prizes were awarded to an author whose life was as much a work of fiction as the book”51. This reader clearly equated the worth of the novel with the truth of the autobiography. It is for this reason – readerly judgement based on authenticity – that Egan believes “deliberate imposture in autobiography is… outrageous and gives rise to scandal”52.

Authenticity is indeed the key issue here for a number of critics. William

Schaffer sees Demidenko as making “a bid for authenticity”53 in the author’s note, while

Gunew claims that “the question of authenticity continues to haunt the reception of minority writings”54. Terry Goldie maintains that as Demidenko, Darville “had a particular role to play” as a specific, ethnic type of Australian55, while Kateryna Olijnyk

Longley sees the heart of the debate as “the question of ethnic authenticity”56. Longley agrees with Egan in stating that the Darville/Demidenko affair cannot simply be

“equated… with the taking of a nom de plume”57. Indeed, Darville’s choice to hint at autobiography is what made this impossible. McKenzie Wark plainly explains

Darville’s mistake: “she confused two ways of speaking: from imagination and from descent”58. Riemer maintains that the result of the revelation “should have made it possible – indeed, mandatory – to return to the novel, and to examine it as a work of

51 The writer refers to the Vogel Literary Award and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, both presented to Helen Demidenko before her real identity was revealed. Anon, “Plumbing New Depths”. Quoted in John Jost, Gianna Totaro, Christine Tyshing (eds.). “Plagiarism Allegations”. In The Demidenko File. Ringwood: Penguin, 1996. p. 252. 52 Egan, “Company She Keeps”, p. 14. 53 Schaffer, William. “The Book that Evaded the Question”. Southerly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (1995). p. 175. 54 Gunew, p. 53. 55 Goldie, Terry. “On Not Being Australian: Mundrooroo and Demidenko”. Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (May 2003). p. 89. 56 Longley, Kateryna Olijnyk. “Fabricating Otherness: Demidenko and Exoticism”. Westerly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Autumn 1997). p. 30. 57 Longley, p. 35. 58 Wark, McKenzie. “The Demidenko Effect”. In The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. p. 138. 302 fiction governed by the laws and conventions of imaginative writing”59; however, he concedes that the bad blood created by the controversy may have made that impossible.

Indeed, I would extend this notion a step further, by saying that Darville’s performance made claims for her literary work that could not be substantiated – once revealed that the work was entirely fiction, it could not be judged as that form because it had already been ‘claimed’ as life writing. And therein lies the heart of the controversy: in falsifying her authorial persona, Darville deceived her readership, explicitly inviting them to view fiction as fact – the crux of the problem being that, once the work was judged as fact, readers could not judge her work as fiction – they were left only to judge her person morally.

However, if Darville herself is to be judged because of the close link she forged between her image and the voices in her novel, then we must assess what these voices convey. At the centre of the novel is the story of the Ukrainian famine and the

Holocaust. These sections are narrated polyvocally in the first and third person. The first person sections are clearly marked with the name of each narrator preceding the text – the most common of these narrators being Fiona’s aunt, Kateryna. The third person sections are overseen by an unobtrusive omniscient narrator, and are focalised through a range of characters – the narrator often allowing the characters’ voices to bleed into the narration. The characters that own these voices, with the obvious exception of the

Jewish woman, Judit, all display elements of anti-Semitism. The equation of Jews with

Bolshevists is common, and the Ukrainian characters frequently blame the Jews for the

Ukrainian famine. Kateryna narrates a section where her younger self bursts out with a tirade against her Jewish teacher:

59 Riemer, p. 26. 303

“Yes you did, you filthy fucking Bolshevist. You and all the filthy fucking

Jewish Bolshevists. Marx. Trotsky. Kamanev. Kaganovich. Bukharin. Fuck

you!”60

This extreme language demonstrates hatred that is typical of the views expressed by these characters. Although the third person omniscient narrator does not proclaim such anti-Semitic sentiments, neither does this narrator place a moral judgment upon the information laid down as ‘fact’ by the characters. As such, an unhindered anti-Semitism is displayed throughout the testimonial-like story telling of the historical sections of the novel. This lack of moral judgment by an ‘outside’, objective narrator once again lends credence to the idea that this is recorded oral history (in all its imperfect horror) rather than a moral narrative.

The role of Fiona Kovalenko – the character often equated with Demidenko – in the modern sections of the novel is less blatantly prejudiced. Opening and closing the novel, and interspersed between the historical material, Fiona’s sections are narrated in the first person. Within the first sentence of the novel Fiona sets up the contemporary plot point which is the catalyst for the historical memories: “my uncle will soon be on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity”61. Fiona casually drops in this presumably devastating information amongst her musings on world destruction as she drives down an Australian highway and fills her car up with petrol. Darville thus denies a moral view on the subject by conferring a mundane status upon it. However, Fiona is far from neutral in her views and treatment of her uncle’s (and other relatives’) wartime activities. She states, as if an irrefutable fact, that “the Ukrainian famine bled into the

60 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 16. 61 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 1. 304

Holocaust and one fed the other”62, thereby giving her relatives a moral excuse for their actions. Fiona goes on to tell the narratee, “people just did certain things that could not be prevented”63. Imbedded within Fiona’s narration, her friend Cathe comforts her:

“I want you to understand… that… that I think it’s wrong to try them. That

trying people for what they did in a war legitimises other wartime activities

that are left untried. War is a crime, of itself...”64

Cathe is a cameo character – she has no complex character development and this is her largest appearance in the novel. Since Fiona narrates this section, Cathe seems to be simply a mouthpiece for Fiona’s views, a way for the latter to give more credence to her own views by showing they are supported by others. After her uncle Vitaly’s death

Fiona tells us she “wrote letters to various Australian newspapers and magazines, protesting against the trials”65. Ken Stewart argues that “nobody ‘excuses’ Vitaly…

Fiona wants to prevent his punishment because she is his niece”66. It is true that we do not read of Fiona yelling “fucking Jewish Bolshevists”, like many other characters – at the end of the novel, when prompted by a Jewish descendant, she even says she is sorry.67 However, even here we are not sure whether she is truly sorry for the things that her uncle did or just sorry he was a poor peasant who volunteered and was called upon to perform such atrocities. Fiona fights for her family and against the accepted version of Holocaust history. As such, Fiona has inherited at least an element of her family’s

62 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 3. 63 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 4. 64 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 4. 65 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 156. 66 Stewart, Ken. “‘Those Infernal Pictures’: Reading Helen Darville, Her Novel and Her Critics”. Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (May 1997). p. 74. 67 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 157. 305 anti-Semitism – even if it is displayed far less coarsely in her narrative than in those of her relatives.

There is a strong case for the suggestion that Fiona is also the editor of the entire novel, and if so, the linking of Demidenko’s authorial voice and the voice of the third person omniscient narrator in the historical sections must be questioned. Peter

Kirkpatrick, convenor of the judging panel which awarded the Australian Literature

Society Gold Medal award to Demidenko in 1995, makes this claim, stating the novel

“is made up of a series of monologues framed by a narrator, Fiona Kovalenko, who is not an omniscient, extradiegetic third-person. The voices are introduced through the cipher-like Fiona...”68 Manne disagrees with Kirkpatrick, claiming his assertion is

“untenable”. He provides apparent proof for this by stating that the narrator possesses knowledge Fiona cannot have access to, maintaining that “[i]t is, in short, unmistakeable that large parts of The Hand’s European story are told to us through the voice of an historically omniscient third-person narrator of the conventional kind.”69

However, there is no reason that Fiona cannot be employing paraleptic70 knowledge in her choice of third person narrator – a common attribute of narrators in fiction, and one which Manne seems to have overlooked. I believe there is a very good case for Fiona being the editor of fiction, and if this proves to be correct, the third person narrator belongs to this character (and with it, any charges of anti-Semitism).

Fiona obviously controls the contemporary sections, however there is textual evidence to imply she collates the stories, edits them, and is the author behind the third person omniscient narrator. In chapter two Fiona reveals in a conversation with Vitaly

68 Kirkpatrick, Peter. “The Jackboot Doesn’t Fit: Moral Authoritarianism and The Hand That Signed The Paper.” Southerly, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Summer 1995-1996). p. 158. 69 Manne, Robert. The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1996. p. 126. 70 Paralepsis occurs when a character knows and discloses more knowledge than they would naturally have access to. 306 that she has been toying with the idea of transcribing tapes sent to her by her aunt

Kateryna71. We are not told what the tapes contain, but the fact that most of the first person historical narration is performed by Kateryna (each of her sections are clearly labelled “Kateryna:”72) is a pointed clue. Mid-way through the novel Fiona reveals she has collected information concerning the past, including “transcriptions”73 from three sources – Kateryna, Vitaly, and her father. This would seem to imply the author is inviting the reader to see the novel as Fiona’s collation of this collection. Fiona describes her act of writing about the past: “I dip…[my pen] in the ink, poise it above the blank paper before me. Vitaly goes to Treblinka, I write, and underline it. Vitaly goes to Treblinka.”74 Here part of her collated evidence is her own writing in the third person – implying it is she who narrates the third person historical sections.

Interestingly, this title (“Vitaly goes to Treblinka”) does not appear in the novel we read, indicating (if we are reading her collation and narrative) that she has edited her own work, and that in the quote above we are witnessing along with Fiona in ‘real time’ her early drafts as they come into being.

The most telling piece of evidence indicating that Fiona is the editor of the entire work comes in the lack of her father’s evidence – either in first person narration, or focalised through him in third person narration (although we know it was collected).

Fiona is worried that the trial of her uncle will lead to the trial of her father. Early in the novel she recounts, “I did not tell Cathe that my father could be in as much ‘trouble’ as

Vitaly”75, and at the conclusion she is relieved to state “but my father was never charged”76. It seems a natural conclusion, then, that as a result of this fear, she should

71 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 41. 72 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 8. 73 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 83. 74 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 84. 75 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 2. 76 Demidenko, The Hand, p. 156. 307 protect her father by withholding his testimony from her narrative work. After all, if she is not the editor, why is the reader denied such evidence? In Fiona, then, we seem to have an unreliable narrator collating, editing and narrating the voices of the past for her own purpose – to write her past the way she wishes it to be written.

How, then, do we explain Fiona’s sometimes paraleptic knowledge as an implied author? A letter from Judit, as well as evidence from other characters not related to Fiona, appear within the novel; if Fiona was indeed the editor rather than just the collator of information, short of eyewitness testimonies it seems unlikely she would have been able to collate, the only way to explain this impossible knowledge is to conclude that she has fabricated it to serve the story. The fact that the first person testimonies of Magda (Vitaly’s common-law wife) are the only sections that appear within speech marks77 might imply that these are the only sections with which Fiona has not tampered.

The presence of an unreliable character editing the entire novel should arguably clear any allegations of anti-Semitism laid against The Hand (and thus the author) and focus them on Fiona. However, as we have seen, many critics have laid these allegations against the novel, and I believe that this is a direct result of the inconsistencies in Darville’s writing. Darville does not make clear to her reader that

Fiona is, in fact, the editor of the novel and hence the third person narrator of the historical sections. Had the critics believed that Fiona was the editor of the work (and so also the subjective agent behind the seemingly objective third person narrator), they may not have responded as they did – Manne might not have claimed that some of the novel’s anti-Semitism is “conveyed in the authorial voice”78, Gaita would have expressed no difficulty in distinguishing characters and narrators, and Gunew would

77 Demidenko, The Hand, pp. 120-122 and 134-135, respectively. 78 Manne, “Strange Case of Helen Demidenko”, p. 27. 308 have seen no link between Fiona and the implied author. I believe the lack of absolute surety conveyed by critical readers about who is speaking occurs because Darville’s subtle indication that Fiona is, in fact, collating the stories comes too late in the novel, and so many readers have already viewed The Hand merely as a polyvocal novel with an omniscient, objective implied author. The allegations of anti-Semitism are thus levelled at an implied author who would have no cause to direct the prejudice, rather than a flawed, unreliable narrator with real motivations for her prejudices.

To further complicate the issue, the controversy has resulted in a conflation of the narrative voice and the authorial voice. If Fiona is not seen as the editor of the novel, then the book itself, rather than the character, displays anti-Semitic characteristics. If these allegations cannot be levelled at a specific character, then who else is there to blame but the author? After all, that author has not condemned Fiona. And even if

Fiona’s plural roles of character, narrator and editor are acknowledged, Darville has put herself in the firing line of anti-Semitism allegations due to her performance as

Demidenko. ‘Demidenko’ encouraged her audience to view her novel as autobiography, and hence to view Fiona as a stand-in for herself. Egan claims that the fact that in the original manuscript Fiona’s last name was Demidenko only encouraged “the perception of overlap between text and personal history”79. Thus Fiona’s anti-Semitic attitudes are conferred upon the implied author. Many people wish to confer them further onto

Darville, the author herself, rather than Demidenko, the fake author. However, that leap is technically problematic (even if emotively it has proved not to be so). Darville’s performed authorial persona has been revealed as false, and the anti-Semitism must be linked with that false persona. Darville constructed Demidenko, and it was Demidenko who ‘wrote the book’. There is confusion between character, narrator, implied

79 Egan, “Company She Keeps”, p. 22. 309 editor/author, fake author and real author. Alex Byrne notes that few commentators

“have been able to distinguish between the work and the writer, between

Demidenko/Darville and her book… [and that] with her complicity,

Demidenko/Darville’s critics appear to confuse her as the author and her authorial voice”80. Indeed, I would argue that had Darville not created her Demidenko persona – had she not deliberately conflated authorial and narrative voice – any allegations of anti-

Semitism laid against her could have been thoroughly quashed through an understanding of the narrative mechanics of The Hand. Darville’s paratextual performance thus irrevocably directs the reception of the text itself.

It seems inconceivable that Helen Darville would not have known the outrage she was to cause in choosing to write on such a controversial topic from the ‘taboo’ angle of subjectivity (that is, sympathetic to those on the war crimes side of the holocaust). However, to understand the anti-Semitism in The Hand that Signed the

Paper, one must understand that a flawed character becomes the unreliable narrator of the whole novel – inflicting her anti-Semitism onto the entire story as she collates, edits and narrates. However, the narrative voice in this work is forever conflated with the authorial voice due to the author’s performance as Demidenko. And yet it might not

(should not?) have been – Darville is not Demidenko, and therefore she cannot claim as autobiographical the attitudes of the novel (even if at heart she does share the anti-

Semitism – something we cannot definitively know). Narrative voice for Darville, then, may not represent true authorial voice. In something of a Catch-22 situation, Darville created Demidenko presumably to lend credence to her tale of anti-Semitism

(autobiography is ‘authentic’ experience and so cannot be so easily challenged), and yet in doing so she opened herself up to heavy judgment on an ethical scale (autobiography

80 Byrne, Alex. “Demidenko – a literary Lindy?” Northern Perspective, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1996). p. 155. 310 is judged more morally than aesthetically, unlike fiction, for which aesthetic judgments take precedence). Had she allowed her work to be judged primarily aesthetically as a fictional narrative, she might have avoided any personal anti-Semitic accusations through the great distance placed between the anti-Semitic narrative voice of Fiona (the editor and implied author of the novel) and her own authorial voice. As it is, the conflation of the two through her Demidenko hoax has left Darville bereft of true aesthetic judgments and laden with ethical ones.

The Paratextual Demidenko

In most cases of autobiographical hoax (such as Norma Khouri’s), the entire paratext and text convey the same narrative until revelation. However, Darville’s autobiographical hoax is a curious case to consider, since the text and parts of the peritext actually contradict the epitextual information. This is in part because the book was released as a novel – as fiction rather than nonfiction. The autobiographical hoax, then, occurred in this case outside the book, while much of the peritext assured the reader of the fiction contained within the historical novel. In early editions, the author’s name is credited on the cover, title page, author biography, and publication details page as “Helen Demidenko”. This conforms with Darville’s performance as Demidenko in the epitext. However, an Author’s Note, inserted between the dedication page and the author/publisher Acknowledgments page (these bookends clearly placing it within the peritext as opposed to a fictional Author’s Note that might be intended as part of the text), claims the text is a “work of fiction… [with] no counterpart in reality.”81 This contradicts the narrative conveyed by both another element of the periext (the authorial pseudonym) and the epitext. Such a contradiction resulting in a clash between peri- and

81 Demidenko, The Hand, p. vi. 311 epitext motives, leads us to infer that the majority of the trickery for this hoax occurs outside the book, since that is the arena which conveys the singular message of trickery: that ‘Demidenko’s’ historical novel was legitimated by her authentic ethnicity, and thus was not entirely fiction. Later, post-revelation editions of the novel amend the earlier references to “Helen Demidenko”, replacing this pseudonym with the author’s real name, “Helen Darville”; in doing so, the book is now rid completely of any trace of deceit, leaving the epitext to carry that responsibility completely.

Of course, a narrative trickery hoax cannot be carried out without the false document at the centre of it all, and so the book itself is in this case also involved.

However, were the book to have hypothetically appeared on its own, without the authorial performance, it would have appeared almost devoid of trickery; the book does not lie – it details a fictional novel, and informs the reader it is fiction, which is all absolute truth. Of course, the original authorial name is false, but without the authorial performance, this might have been overlooked and the reader would thus still have retained the notion that they were reading fiction. The actual spatial placement of the trickery therefore occurs in the epitext – in reflection on, and in relation to, the book as artefact (text and peritext).

To understand the extent to which the epitext can influence a readership in the case of the hoax, we must first understand the power of this arena in contributing to readerly understanding of any text. The content of the narrative text belongs to the world of fiction, and the paratext to the world of real life. This notion of ‘real life’, of

‘truth’ reflects our understanding of reality – we expect honesty in the real world because it does not cross our minds that a fictional narrative may extend to this realm.

In experiencing fiction, or fictionalised texts, there is a strong interaction between the invented and the ‘truth’ – between fiction and real life. The hoax, where readers believe

312 the narrative of the epitext over the narrative of the book (where they place greater faith in the honesty of epitextual information than they do in words on the page), reveals the extent to which this interaction occurs. This strong link between the two arenas – and in fact the power of the epitextual information to ‘trump’ textual information – casts a shadow over our understanding of readerly interaction with a book. How much faith can we place in the idea that literary awards are bestowed on texts because the words on the page are brilliant, rather than the idea that the judges were influenced by an epitextual performance? How can we believe our individual response to a book is simply that, rather than a response to a book as coloured (or even governed) by the paratext?

And yet, to cast off the doom and gloom, these questions might also be asked a different way: how might we come to understand that a book is not simply a book in isolation, but a text in conversation with the paratext? How might this change our understanding of readers, shifting them from passive to agential roles, since they too can participate in the epitextual narrative and so influence ongoing readerly experiences?

Certainly, this power of the paratext can have negative effects. In a well-known contemporary anecdote, one of the most successful authors of our time, Joanne

Rowling, was persuaded by her publishers into accepting that her name should be printed as “J. K. Rowling” on her Harry Potter series, since (they told her) boys would be unlikely to read a book written by a woman.82 Since the paratext colours our experience of a book, it may be that such sexism, and other bigotry such as racism or homophobia, frequently influences our readerly experiences, causing us to judge books more negatively than we might have, had we not had that paratextual information – indeed, this explains why so few women and members of other minorities make the

82 J.K. Rowling’s official website offers this particular anecdote: “The use of a pen name was suggested by her publisher, Barry Cunningham. He thought that young boys might be wary of a book written by a woman...” Anon. “Pen Name.” On J.K. Rowling.com. http://www.jkrowling.com/en_US/#/timeline/pen- name/. Accessed 20th January 2015. 313 traditional literary canon. This influence of the paratext has real world implications outside our world of literary theory, and an understanding of this influence may help us in combating such bigotry in the future. Simply being aware of how we react to the hoax (and why) tells us how we react to fiction in general and therefore could make us aware of previously-hidden prejudices or biases.

Yet such an influence need not be negative – the paratext frequently affects our readerly experience in a more positive way, making us more likely to judge a book in a favourable manner. Most readers have settled in with excitement to read the latest book by a favourite author – already deciding before they read the first sentence that they will probably like it since they like most or all of what the author has written previously.

Here we see at work the effect of what Wayne C. Booth terms the “career-author” – that is, the agential being “who persists from work to work, a composite of the implied authors of all his or her works.”83 The aura, the fiction, the narrative of ‘the author’ and their circumstances of writing are important to us – the career-author, I would argue, is not just a conglomeration of the implied authors of all their texts, but also a conglomeration of all the paratextual information about that author, and how that ‘real life author’ has come to write the way they do. This positive judgment is, of course, equally problematic if the aim is to be truly objective about a text. Objectivity, then, seems highly unlikely unless we shield ourselves from all paratextual influence; reading a blank manuscript with no name or peritext of any sort attached, in an isolated hut cut off from all internet and media influence seems the only (highly improbable) way to accomplish such an objective reading experience.

The paratext, then, plays a dramatically influential part in book reception and understanding – a far bigger role than its traditional relegation to ‘secondary text’ seems

83 Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. p. 431. 314 to allow. Indeed, the hoax demonstrates that the paratext is a narrative in itself – imperative to the reading experience, and thus hugely influential. The epitext, as in the case of Darville’s The Hand, may even overthrow information the book itself provides – epitextual information is more ‘real’ and therefore more trustworthy to us. This, of course, is misplaced faith – objectively we are all aware how a narrative might be manipulated by the media so a story is presented in a certain light, and yet we are all very willing to believe we are mostly told the truth in this arena. There is an expectation of truth or sincerity in the ‘real world’. We believe there is no room for charlatans in the world of litigation and instant internet fact-checking, and therefore there is an expectation that they will not exist, or that we, at least, will not be taken in by them. We might ask, at this stage, whether the epitext is only this important when the author is very strongly linked to their work, for example in the case of autobiography. I believe many famous authors would refute this claim. To draw again on Rowling, the fan cult of

Harry Potter has flowed over into an intense love and interest in the woman who created the much-loved wizarding storyworld. Perhaps, then, it could be claimed that the influence of the epitext really depends on how much research a reader does (how likely they are to read articles about the author, or listen to authorial interviews), and so depends on how much a reader actually likes a book, or previous books by that author.

Wanting ‘more’ from a favourite book often results in a reader combing through the paratext for anything with a link to that work – and again, here the power of reflected glory comes into play. While there may only be a single narrative text, there is a plethora of paratextual information which formulates a solid being, and a narrative, of who and what that author is, and therefore what is to be expected in future works.

In examining this obsession with ‘the author’, I believe the Author’s Note warrants further examination. Helen Darville’s Author’s Note is somewhat akin to a

315

Preface – indeed, it could just as easily have held that title. What, then, is the power of a preface? Roberta Ricci tells us that in a preface, “the narrator comments on a text the reader has not yet read, influencing its reception immediately”84. Here we might substitute the agent of the author for that of Ricci’s narrator, since in most contemporary cases a preface’s narrator is in fact the author, and in the Darville case we are invited to assume that this holds to be true since this preface is titled “Author’s Note”. Genette outlines his taxonomy of both author types, and narrative types, for prefaces, and this may shed some light on Darville’s preface. The narrator of the preface may be the real or alleged author (“the authorial, or autographic, preface”), or might be fictional (either a character from the text, “the actorial preface”, or another party entirely, “the allographic preface”).85 In this case, the prefatory narrator is assumed to be the author, so this preface is authorial. The truth or otherwise of the preface is then up for consideration, and we can immediately rule out Genette’s term “fictive”, since this only applies to fictional narrators.86 After this, though, the waters become murkier. Within

Genette’s authorial category (where the narrator is assumed to be the real or alleged author), he subdivides prefaces into “authentic” (those prefaces where the attribution is confirmed by other paratextual signals), or “apocryphal” (those prefaces where “the attribution to a real person is invalidated by some paratextual sign”).87 The book was promoted as fiction, so this seems to confirm the preface attribution, and so the preface is deemed authentic; however, the Demidenko performance contradicted the fictional statement by claiming authenticity, and so the preface is apocryphal. Here, then, we can see the deliberate obscuration of precise information, making complicated the reader’s task of interpreting signals.

84 Ricci, Roberta. “Morphologies and Functions of Self-Criticism in Modern Times: Has the Author Come Back?” MLN, Vol. 118, No. 1 (January 2003). p. 130. 85 Genette, Paratexts, pp. 178-179. 86 Genette, Paratexts, p. 179. 87 Genette, Paratexts, p. 179. 316

Either way, though, the preface cannot be ignored – its claim for fiction is an integral part of the hoax narrative. Ricci makes an important point when she emphasises the fact that the reading of a preface comes before the reading of the text (the text is unknown, and so theoretically not yet interpreted, understood, judged, and so on). As such, it has the power to influence the reception of the text before that reader begins reading the first sentence of the work. This is important when we consider the Darville case: the Author’s Note tells the reader, just before that reader reads the text, that the text is fictional. As such, one can only presume that the immediacy of this information

(being read in most cases only seconds before the reader embarks on the text itself) gives this Author’s Note a special influence over readerly reception of the text. When we remember that a reader may well have come to the Author’s Note having already engaged with the somewhat contradictory message of ethnic authenticity contained in the epitext, we must question how much power the Demidenko performance might have in lessening the impact of the Author’s Note, or vice versa, how much the immediacy of the Author’s Note might lessen the impact of the epitextual message. Clearly, they would interact in the reader’s mind, possibly causing confusion and thus potentially mutually lessening the impact of one another.

Darville’s choice of the title “Author’s Note” as opposed to “Preface” seems to be a deliberate one – she is stressing that this is written by The Author, and not a fictional editor (the latter a common narratorial feature of fictional prefaces). This further problematises the authorial message being sent to the reader – this is the author’s note (the only one important enough to have been consigned to the page, to accompany the work, to preface it so the work is read with this note in mind), and yet it contradicts the peritextual pseudonym, as well as the epitextual performance as Demidenko. The clue to understanding the inclusion of Darville’s Author’s Note may lie in

317 understanding the need of the hoaxer to control the hoax – to manipulate, to deceive.

Ricci believes that authorial self-commentaries (such as prefaces) both invite the reader to participate in their reading experience, and seek to determine the outcome of that experience:

[I]n public self-commentaries... the reader plays a fundamental role because it

is for him that commentaries are written. In so doing, the author of the

commentary simultaneously stresses the importance of the reader’s

participation in the text and tries to establish a constant dialogue with the

reader within the text itself. Yet, paradoxically, he does not seem to have any

faith in his reader’s interpretation.88

The Author’s Note, then, becomes another way for Darville to control the readerly experience within the pages of the book, after that reader has engaged with her epitextual manipulation – to once again seek to control what the reader thinks of the work. The fact that the message contained within the Author’s Note contradicts her public performance rather than supporting it indicates something of a disconnect for

Darville between book and ‘real world’; for this author, the reality (that the text is fictional) lies within the world of the book, the habitual realm of fiction, whereas the invented lies within the habitual realm of ‘truth’ – that is, reality.

One way to explain the preface’s assertion of fiction in contradiction to

Darville’s obvious intent for how she wished her book to be read, would be to see it as a disclaimer. Genette explains that often contemporary novels contain such prefatory statements, which take their inspiration from disclaimers found in film, whereby it is

88 Ricci, p. 142. 318 stated that any resemblance of people or places contained in the work is entirely coincidental and unintentional.89 This apparently frees the creator from becoming the subject of any legal action, and indeed, Darville may have been protecting herself, knowing that she would give a fake performance in real life which would cast a shadow over her fiction. In addition (and, indeed, in contradiction), the assertion of fictionality has the effect of making the reader wonder why such an assertion is needed. As Genette explains, “[w]e would, of course, do well to handle such confirmations and refutations gingerly or take them cum grano salis, for the denial of ‘any resemblance’ has always had the double function of protecting the author from the potential consequences of the

‘applications’ and, inevitably, of setting readers in search of them.”90 Thus by declaring the fictionality of an apparently obviously fictional novel, Darville prompts the reader to wonder whether, in fact, there are resemblances to or inspirations from reality contained therein.

On the other hand, Edward Maloney’s concept of “artificial paratexts”91 could offer an alternative explanation for Darville’s Author’s Note. Maloney explains that artificial paratexts “extend the boundaries of narratives, create new narrative levels, and engage readers in new modes of interpretation, even as they create new expectations for the reader.”92 Rather than simply surrounding the text (as regular paratextual elements do), these artificial paratexts are integral to the reading of the text itself, and actually change our understanding of the narrative – without them, the narrative would be entirely different. Let us consider for a moment that Darville’s note is not, as we have presumed, her own authorial words – that this note therefore does not, in fact, contradict the epitextual message (and therefore result in a whole paratext that conveys very mixed

89 Genette, Paratexts, p. 217. 90 Genette, Paratexts, p. 218. 91 Maloney, Edward J. “Footnotes in fiction: a rhetorical approach.” Electronic Thesis or Dissertation. Ohio State University, 2005. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/. p. 4. 92 Maloney, p. 61. 319 messages); rather, let us consider that the Author’s Note belongs to the fictional world of the text. These, then, are a fictional implied author’s words, and not Darville’s. As such, it then becomes part of the fictional narrative that the narrative text is fictional.

Darville (performing as Demidenko) is therefore relaying the ‘real’ message (that the world of the book is in fact based somewhat on reality, and specifically on her life and family) while the book as a fictional whole, including the Author’s Note, is conveying the fictional message (that the text is fictional).

Considering the Author’s Note as part of the fictional text (as an artificial paratext) is certainly a possible reading, and yet I do not believe most readers will have this reading experience. The main reason for this, I believe, is the placement of the

Author’s Note: it comes at the start of the book, after the dedication page, but before the

Acknowledgments page. Thus the Author’s Note is bookended by actual peritextual information, protected from conflation with the text by a wall of actual paratext. It seems unlikely, then, that most readers will see the note as part of the fiction, but rather that they will view it as the actual words of the real author. Despite Darville’s clear intention to control her hoax (and thus the reading experience), it is the reader’s own views which really predict the reading experience. This, then, may be why Darville spent so much time in authorial interviews trying to convince her readership of the hoax

– in order to do as much as she could to all but guarantee preformed opinions about the text.

Why, then, has Darville’s hoax caused so much ire? In short, Darville confused her frames – she performed Demidenko in the epitext (and thus framed her text as having nonfictional influence), she allowed her persona’s name to be printed in the peritext in place of her own (supporting the epitextual frame), but she directly claimed her work as fiction in her Author’s Note in the peritext (the Author’s Note indicating

320 authorial ownership and authority). Thus readers were forced to choose between conflicting paratextual messages – those that chose the overwhelming epitextual message of nonfictional influence falling prey to the hoax. As such, these readers (as hoax victims) have read her text as the detailing of truth, and upon hoax revelation have been forced to both amend the frame (to reject the overwhelming paratextual message as false and construct a new frame themselves), and to change their understanding of the role this piece of fiction and its surrounding readerly experience plays for them. It seems completely understandable, then, that such a confused paratextual frame with such contradictory messages results in the anger of readers towards the author and her text when they find out they have invested in the readerly experience of this text and paratext in entirely the ‘wrong’ way.

Reader Trajectory

1995 Miles Franklin Award Judges’ Report:

Pre-revelation:

“From this literary device [Fiona gathering historical family accounts] comes a

multi-voiced novel of shifting perspectives which renders, with great

authenticity, both the inhuman horrors and the human pleasures of her

characters’ lives... Demidenko’s first novel displays a powerful literary

imagination coupled to a strong sense of history, and brings to light a hitherto

unspeakable aspect of the Australian migrant experience.”93

93 Crook, Alison, Mitchell, Adrian, Kitson, Jill, Kramer, Leonie, and Heseltine, Harry. “Miles Franklin Literary Award 1995.: Judges’ Report.” On Miles Franklin Literary Award. http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/pastwinners/year_1995. Accessed 28th April 2015. 321

Jill Kitson, 1995 Miles Franklin Award and 1993 Vogel Award Judge:

Pre-revelation:

“It was riveting and amazing for the events described in it, and also riveting

because of the possibility that... [Demidenko] had taken it from tape-recorded

material and worked it into a convincing fiction.”94

Post-revelation:

“Initially [reading it in manuscript for the Vogel], I assumed she had been

given the material by family or others. Then, when it came out that she had so

immersed herself [that she had taken on the Demidenko name], it made it an

even more extraordinary work of literary imagination.”95

David Marr, 1993 Vogel Award Judge:

Post-revelation:

“I reread it once it was known that her identity was fake. My view remained

that it was a powerful little novel that deserved to win the Vogel but not the

Miles Franklin.”96

Authenticity, the migrant experience, taped recordings, history – the pre-revelation comments from the judges who awarded Darville the 1993 Vogel Award and the 1995

Miles Franklin Award clearly demonstrate the way they read the book. Darville’s novel was read and judged not simply as fiction, but rather as a fiction that was borne from truth, that reflected her authentic ethnic experience, that gave life to history. And this style of reading was not limited to the literary judges – Manne claims “[a]ll [readers]

94 Kitson, Jill. Quoted in Knox, Malcolm. “The Darville Made Me Do It.” On The Sydney Morning Herald. 9th July 2005. http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/the-darville-made-me-do- it/2005/07/08/1120704550613.html. Accessed 27th April 2015. 95 Kitson. Quoted in Knox, “The Darville Made Me Do It.” 96 Marr, David. Quoted in Knox, “The Darville Made Me Do It.” 322 had seen her book as a fiction based, directly or indirectly, on the dark secrets of a

Ukrainian family’s wartime experiences.”97 The post-revelation comments show how readily the judges wished to stick to the core of their initial judgment. Publicly, at least, they saw the book as just as good, even though it was “fake”. But therein lies the problem – these awards elevated the judges to the exalted status of ‘the arbiters of good literary taste’, and so their public comments, both before and after the revelation, carry a weight of responsibility which those of the average reader are unburdened by. These were ‘experts’, and they were fooled – it is possible that the unwavering positive judgment of the work throughout the hoax trajectory simple belies a wish not to lose face in a very public way (to admit the experts were fooled, and thus their initial judgments corrupted by the ‘authenticity’ narrative, when they ‘should have’ judged the work solely in and of itself). Then again, these comments may truly reflect their readerly experience of the work. Either way, they are in the minority – the outcry by journalists and the public is more representative of the general reaction to the work.

Manne displays this vitriol through his typically cutting remarks: “[f]or long-time critics of The Hand [such as Manne] the exposure of the ethnic fraud was continuous with their initial reading of the novel as shallow, banal, cold, historically ignorant, ludicrously adequate to its subject and antisemitic.”98 Here Manne seems to imply that the hoax itself was as cold, shallow, ludicrous and hate-filled as the content he saw in the novel.

Fliss Blanch, a regular reader who posted a review on the website Goodreads sums up the public sentiment in declaring: “This story was proved to be a fake so I’m not going to give it a rating as it doesn’t deserve one”99, while Deborah Ideiosepius conveys the

97 Manne, Culture of Forgetting, p. 3. 98 Manne, Culture of Forgetting, p. 99. 99 Blanch, Fliss. Reader review on page: “The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville, Helen Demidenko.” On Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1294359.The_Hand_That_Signed_the_Paper?from_search=true &search_version=service. Accessed 28th April 2015. 323 public anger towards the affair – an anger which deflected onto the awards judges – when she states that “[i]t is to the eternal shame of Australian literary evaluators that they were so desperate for ‘real’, ‘personal discovery’ ect that they fell for this very regrettable hoax.”100 For most readers, then, the hoax inspired incredibly passionate, negative responses – but only upon revelation. The important aspect of these extreme negatives responses is their trajectory – the readers reacted in direct response to the changing elements of the hoax, and through this we can see a shifting, progressing paratext.

The reader trajectory for The Hand that Signed the Paper follows quite a different path from the reader trajectory we would hypothesise for most other pieces of fiction. For most works, we would ordinarily trace the way a reader might respond by following that hypothetical reader as they negotiate the text in a temporally- and spatially-progressive manner (the temporal aspect of their reading being the advancing, linear time the reader uses when reading, the spatial aspect being the text itself – a regular reading consisting of reading from the first page to the last page of the text, in numerical and spatial order). What we notice here is that we are talking only about the text. Although scholars often acknowledge the influence of the paratext on the reader, we do not generally factor it into a temporal and/or spatial reader trajectory. Of course,

Genette factors the temporality of the paratext into his taxonomic work on the subject, but it is not generally included in analyses of the reading experience. I wish to address this by acknowledging that the paratext plays a crucial role in the reading experience, and so the paratextual temporality and spacitity must be considered in an analysis of that experience.

100 Ideiosepius, Deborah. Reader review on page: “The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville, Helen Demidenko.” On Goodreads. 324

After all, Darville’s work is distinctive because it demands an integration of the paratext into our tracing of the reader trajectory. The paratext becomes a part of ‘the work’ because the main narrative is not the fictional narrative found within the text, but the narrative created around that text (and including the text) by the hoax and its revelation. The detailing of such a reader trajectory sheds light not just on the reader experience during a hoax, nor just on this specific hoax as a unique, isolated example; rather, this reader trajectory reflects the truly influential nature of the paratext – how it can not only shape but actually determine reader experience, and how this oft-titled

‘secondary’ text can actually become the primary text. Manne reflects the primacy of the paratextual narrative upon hoax revelation – “Helen Demidenko altogether supplanted her creator”101 – demonstrating how this paratextual narrative becomes “the work”, trumping the fictional text itself.

There are two main possible reader trajectories for The Hand, and it is important to isolate and examine each, since they will result in different readerly experiences. There is, of course, the unaware reader – one who is under the impression there is no hoax, that Darville really is Demidenko and the work semi-autobiographical.

The judges’ pre-revelation comments concerning the wonder of the work, and its authenticity, reflect this viewpoint. It seems fairly unlikely (though it is still conceivable) that such a reader could exist following the hoax revelation, since the hoax relies on paratextual information – a paratext that is now awash with the hoax revelation. Such readers did, however, exist before the hoax revelation – most readers at this time (apart from those few ‘in the know’) fell into this category. Then there is the aware reader – the reader who comes to the book knowing it is part of a hoax. This reader can either be a second time reader who was previously unaware, and (following

101 Manne, Culture of Forgetting, p. vii. 325 the hoax revelation), returns to the work with newly aware eyes, or one who comes to the work after the revelation and knows of the hoax from the very beginning of their readerly exposure. The judges’ post-revelation comments, as well as the waves of vitriolic abuse directed towards Darville through the press and other public avenues, reflect this viewpoint.

Let me first address this latter, aware reader, since this trajectory is the simpler of the two. This reader who comes to the text following the revelation, aware that it is an artefact of a hoax. For this reader there is no shock – they follow a single path and must never alter their position of understanding at the insistence of the author. The hoax is incredibly influential for this reader, and it is this narrative that becomes all-important in their trajectory. We can see this in the online comment of regular reader, Richard, who states, “an interesting book but the whole demidenko / darvelle debate is much more interesting.”102 The text for the aware reader becomes an artefact of the hoax, rather than a book to be judged as fiction in its own right. Any aesthetic reading of the novel only comes in conjunction with an ethical judgment on the hoax, or at least coloured by knowledge of it. The primary narrative shifts from that contained in the text to a narrative about Darville (including the Demidenko persona, Darville’s lies and her actual ‘truth’, the hoax, as well as the novel). For this reader the paratextual narrative cannot be separated from the text – both are part of the temporal and spatial reader trajectory.

Then we have the unaware reader, who reads the book, tracing their way through the author’s note (where they are told the work is fictional) and on to the text itself. This reader is also under the influence of the hoax – believing (through exposure to authorial interviews, newspaper articles and the like) that the work is written by a

102 Richard. Reader review on page: “The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville, Helen Demidenko.” On Goodreads. 326 young woman named Helen Demidenko, a woman of strong Ukrainian heritage with many striking similarities (in both person and familial relatives) to the lead character of the novel, Fiona Kovalenko. This reader might then make the not so difficult leap in guessing that the work, albeit not strictly autobiography, retains a strong flavour of this

‘truth-telling’ genre. There is a strong interplay for the unaware reader between the text and the paratext – the two become intertwined, part of the same story. Upon the hoax revelation this reader must come to a completely new understanding of text and paratext by shifting their narrative and authorial audience positions. The hoax revelation means that an entirely new authorial audience position must be created and adopted – one that judges the work as fiction rather than nonfiction. This is very difficult since it requires a lot of mental work, and such an intense, last minute workload is likely to result in a fairly hefty negative judgment of the author.

Importantly, the textual narrative audience does not shift upon hoax revelation

– the very nature of that narrative audience is to believe implicitly in the storyworld, characters and events of the textual narrative. The hoax revelation in the case of The

Hand does not change this – the textual narrative audience still believes absolutely in these storyworld elements of the textual narrative. The narrative audience position that does shift is of course that involved with the paratextual narrative. Here I am suggesting that we also have a narrative audience function in regards to paratextual narrative – the part of us that believes implicitly everything told to us within that paratextual realm.

Darville created the narrative that she was a young Australian woman (Helen

Demidenko) of Ukrainian descent, who wrote a fictional novel strongly inspired by conversations with her Ukrainian family members, who very much resembled the family members within the novel she wrote. This invited a conflation of the author’s life with the life of Fiona Kovalenko, the novel’s protagonist, by virtue of the strength of

327 association and commonality. The novel is part of this paratextual narrative, but only that – a part; it does not make up the primary narrative of the experience of The Hand.

The paratextual narrative audience shifts dramatically upon hoax revelation – gone is the adopted position of one who believes implicitly in Demidenko and her tale. Now the reader must scramble to adopt a new paratextual narrative audience position – one who views the Demidenko persona and story as part of an elaborate hoax by author Helen

Darville. The unaware reader steps into the role of one who believes Demidenko’s story, and then must shift to one who understands Darville has entirely invented her story.

And this is the rub for Darville: her (presumed) attempt to infuse her novel with importance by playing up the fictional narrative she invented resulted in a conflation of the two authorial audiences. This had a positive effect on her novel (and hence book sales and awards) and so was, presumably, as she wished – if the paratextual authorial audience believed her tale of Demidenko, then this would colour the authorial audience judgment of the text. The problem for Darville is, of course, that once conflated, the two authorial audiences could not be disengaged. This was

Darville’s downfall, and the reason for the strong negative reaction not just to her as a person (the ethics of lying to a readership in the ‘truthful’ arena of the paratext), but also to her novel (the text now tarred with the negative reactions the readership had towards the paratextual narrative).

Truth, Lies, and the Paratextual Narrative

So what, then, does the Darville/Demidenko reader experience tell us about norm-based interactions and processes as readers (of texts) and consumers (of paratexts)? First, I believe it tells us that autobiography differs from other fiction in its

328 reception – it is granted special status and privileges due to its emphasis on ‘truth’.

Readers of fiction and readers of autobiography follow different trajectories because their readerly processes of engagement with the text and paratext are quite different.

The reader of autobiography must acknowledge and encompass within their trajectory an understanding of the paratextual narrative, and thus the author must be present in the textual reading experience. As such, the paratextual narrative audience’s awareness of the text as part of the paratextual narrative colours the textual authorial audience’s interpretation of the text as ‘real’ or ‘truthful’. In the case of true hoaxes, where the text does not proclaim its fictionality and so the author is present within the world of the fiction, the textual narrative audience is aware of author as part of storyworld; this is opposed to the norm of reading fiction where the narrative audience must be completely unaware of the author as external creator.

The Darville case is different from regular hoaxes, so what does this mean for both regular hoaxes and for fiction in general? Darville prefaces her text with an admission that the book is nothing more than fiction, and so the text itself never actually lies. Taken in isolation, it is a fictional work by an author – no hoax involved. However, we have already seen that the text cannot be taken in isolation, and that it is heavily influenced by its paratext. This means that the narrative audience and authorial audience positions are problematised. In a normal autobiographical hoax, the text conforms completely with the paratext, as opposed to undermining it (as opposed to creating doubt). Unlike most autobiographical hoaxes, Darville’s Author’s Note, as well as the classification of the work as fiction, creates doubt in the reader’s mind about the authenticity of the narrative. This means that Darville has deniability, as she only hoaxed in the paratext, not the text (after all, she proclaimed her novel was fictional, and her readers have that evidence in writing right next to the text itself). However, this

329 deniability is in many ways a false deniability, as Darville herself ensured that her text and paratext are part of the one whole and cannot be separated or isolated from one another.

The hoax allows us to see the importance of the paratext to the reader. In cases where nonfictional elements are brought into play, the paratextual narrative becomes so important that it overtakes the importance of the text itself – the latter simply becoming an artefact of ‘the real story’. Though the paratextual narrative plays less of a leading role for regular fictional texts (the book could be – though almost never is – isolated from its paratext), what the case of The Hand tells us is that the paratext plays at least some role in the reader trajectory for the vast majority of textual narratives, and can play an extremely influential role, sometimes almost entirely informing our interpretation, understanding, and judgment of the text. The paratext, then, is an integral part of the reading experience – so much so that it can become crucial in forming the career-author persona for all authors, and so in turn can greatly inform readerly expectations for future works. The hoax clearly demonstrates for us how intricately connected text and paratext are – and thus how we must see them as two often-overlapping parts of the one whole.

The hoax/paratext link is acute, and this forces us to reexamine paratext theory.

Although text and paratext have been etymologically set up as distinct spatial arenas, theory has acknowledged that they cannot be so easily defined. Indeed, the bleeding of one into the other gives us pause to reconsider the terms as isolated from one another.

However, the trickery of the hoax demonstrates to us that, while text and paratext do bleed into one another, the theoretical distinction between the two arenas is also necessary to aid understanding of the complex interplay between reality and fiction. In the case of the hoax, the text and paratext constitute two distinct, interacting narratives which together formulate the reading experience. The paratext, like the hoax itself, must

330 therefore be understood in a narrative sense. The paratext not only constitutes a spatial arena, but also progresses temporally, and it is this temporal progression which is crucial for the readerly experience of the hoax and revelation. The hoax, then, is not just trickery, but narrative trickery – relying as much on changing temporality as on its spatial location.

331

Afterword

Trickeries are a fascinating topic. Right throughout my research period, the bored, slightly glazed look that inevitably accompanied the out-of-politeness question

“Oh, what are you studying?” turned to excitement when I revealed my area of research.

From academics through to adults who had despised high school English classes, faces lit up because they had a story to tell me. Every person was fascinated by a time they were tricked by the author of a narrative. Many were thrilled by the duplicity, and some were disgruntled, but all displayed passionate responses. This passion comes from the surprise caused by the breaking of convention – a convention so set that many do not consciously realise it exists until it is broken. I have delighted in reading the responses of regular readers on sites such as Goodreads – not simply because they provide a break from more academic analysis, but because these are the oft-ignored responses of general readers documented in the first person passionate language of those who experienced the trickery. I have been able to see patterns in readerly responses – these regular readers often display the same reactions as academics, and yet they provide perhaps more crucial insight into the reasons behind the feeling of betrayal thanks to their brutal honesty. Thanks largely to the documented evidence allowed by the internet, the academic analysis of the readerly response of regular readers has been growing recently, and this thesis adds one piece of knowledge to that body of research. Trickeries affect us all, and through the range of responses now freely available for study we can see that this is because the subgenre relies on the act of communication fundamental to all narrative literature, and to all types of readers.

Over the past several chapters I have explored the mechanics behind the four main types of trickeries – the unexpected twist, the frustrated-expectations novel, the 332 fictional(ised) memoir, and the hoax. I have taken textual examples from a range of literature ‘types’ in order to test my hypotheses against genre boundaries. These books form part of the body of aberrational literature which is crucial to our understanding of conventional literature, and thus to our understanding of the act of communication that is the writing and reading of narrative. Recognising the conventional reading processes relied upon by both highly-acclaimed literary authors such as McEwan and Fowles, and authors of supposedly ‘low-brow’ genres such as fantasy writer Goldman and hoax perpetrator Darville, allows us to see that there is common ground amongst all literary narratives. McEwan manipulates the simultaneous reading processes of authorial and narrative audience to deliver his reader a shocking end which adds an additional element to the narrative, changes the ‘known’, and forces the reader to amend their narrative audience perception; Fowles carefully crafts his convention-adhering narrative before denying the fulfillment of expectations and focusing the reader’s attention on the possibility of different worlds through the dual crumbling, and ultimate abuse, of the power of the author as god; Goldman humorously weaves fact and fiction to playfully blur the binary distinction, allowing him to recreate himself as an authorial god without drawing the ire of most readers; and Darville uses the paratext to shape the reading experience and so lull her readership into falling for her hoax while keeping her self- declared fictional novel immune from any responsibility for the duplicity.

In order to perform the most objectionable form of trickery – that of the hoax – the author of this late twentieth century text relies on the reader’s understanding of the binaries of facts/lies and nonfiction/fiction, which have developed over the course of the novel’s history. The notion of narrative truth thus remains of paramount importance to the contract between author and reader through the contemporary narrative text.

Trickeries not only prove that this implicit contract exists, but also allow us to see

333 conventional texts and conventional reading and writing processes in a new light. These aberrations force us to consider the complex, paradoxical mental processes achieved by the reader during their active role in the process of communication; they allow us insight into the crucial role of generic storyworld formation as a shorthand code for a plethora of authorial information in the act of communication; they shed light on the nature of fictionality by drawing attention to the role of readers in determining signposts; and they allow us to see that the paratext should be understood as a narrative in itself that is as important as (and sometimes more important than) the text. The study of the range of trickery subgenres thus both contributes significantly to theoretical debates, and allows us critical and exciting insight into the world of narrative communication through the novel.

Thus we must come to see trickeries as their own genre – these texts joined together not through any characteristic storyworld, content, plot progression, narrative style, or any other factor that typically defines other genres. In fact, the absence of any textual markers that belong solely to trickeries is crucial for the genre – a trickery relies on the pretense that it belongs to another genre in order to lull the reader before the trick. These texts, then, are grouped simply by the authorial manipulation of the reader contained therein – a manipulation which first invites the reader to believe one thing about the narrative, before the rug is pulled out and the reader’s beliefs revealed as unfounded (if understandable). The genre of the trickery allows authors to interrogate typical reading practices, to use convention-based expectations against the reader, and so open the reader’s eyes to the processes associated with the writing and reading of narrative fiction in the form of the novel. Contemporary authors in particular seem to delight in the genre – a form which is not a new invention, but finds a comfortable place today amongst the masses of conventional fiction. When a trickery, at first

334 masquerading as one such piece of conventional fiction, reveals itself as having broken the implicit narrative contract, as having mocked the conventional reading process, readerly reactions are understandably extreme. The fact that this genre disgusts and delights readers in equal measure proves it worthy of study in its own right, but also demonstrates what it may reveal to us about fiction in general – this study being one contribution to that area of knowledge.

335

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