ACTA DE INICIO

This section draws on literary work on unreliable narration. I do this in order to inform my judgement on whether unreliability is a mandatory or even appropriate interpretation of

71 impossible fiction. While the concept of unreliable narration was first articulated by Wayne C. Booth, it has been further refined and developed by more recent literary theorists (Booth 1961). I investigate Angsar Nünning’s 2008 account, as it summarises and reflects on a range of theories of unreliability in order to codify unreliable narration. In particular it synthesises Nünning’s own earlier reader-focussed work with the more holistic, author- and text-inclusive approaches to unreliability offered by theorists such as James Phelan and Greta Olson (Olson 2003; Phelan and Martin 1999). This gives some independent indication of the sorts of qualities works of fiction should have if somebody is to reasonably claim that a work is unreliably narrated.

In general, Nünning follows the received wisdom on unreliability—that the unreliable narrator is one whose word the reader has some motivation to suspect—but finesses on this with his cognitive model of unreliable narration (Nünning 2005: 100; Rimmon-Kenan 1983). This model responds in part to Booth, who originally classed unreliable narration as an objective, text-immanent phenomenon. Nünning’s cognitive reconceptualisation argues that unreliable narration is an interpretive method constructed by a reader, but that nevertheless textual phenomena and authorial intention can be seen to inspire, encourage and guide this sort of interpretation. Booth’s model holds that only textual phenomena are required for a judgement of unreliability (Olson 2003: 95). Nünning agrees that textual phenomena contribute to judgements of unreliability, but also claims that the reader’s own standards of normalcy provide the base point from which judgements of unreliability are made (Nünning 2005: 95). In other words, the actual content of a text can indicate to a reader that she should consider the narration unreliable, but this indication is relative to the reader. Take a paradigmatic unreliable narrator, such as Francis of Robert Weine’s The

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). After telling his story, Francis is revealed in a closing twist

to be a patient in a mental asylum. The fact that the narrator is a patient in an asylum is what triggers the judgement that he is an unreliable narrator. However, this judgement only makes sense against the background assumption that patients at mental asylums are unlikely to provide reliable testimony. If this background assumption could not be taken for granted, then the mere fact that Francis is in a mental asylum would not be sufficient indication that his testimony is unreliable.

To Nünning, unreliable narration is an interpretive strategy the reader uses. Coming to adopt this strategy successfully and appropriately requires three elements: 1) the author’s own agency, 2) textual phenomena and 3) reader judgements (Nünning 2005: 90–91).26 26 _{Nünning is neutral towards whether this triumvirate refers to the implied author (i.e., the persona}

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These three features are all demonstrated by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Author agency is present: the writers of the film introduce the twist in order to cast doubt on all of Francis’s prior testimony. The fact that Francis is shown in a mental asylum is the relevant textual phenomenon. The reader then judges, based on her ability to correctly recognise that the textual phenomenon is an invitation from the author to infer unreliability, that Francis is not a reliable narrator. All three of these aspects combined result in an appropriate judgement (and corresponding impression) of unreliable narration.

Nünning emphasises the reader’s own role in identifying the elements of the text which hint at its unreliability. The reader judgement is crucial, since it is only in virtue of this judgement that authorial agency and textual phenomena are recognised. No matter how an author invites her reader to infer that a narrator is unreliable, the inference itself is made by the reader. This reader may be positioned in such a way that the invitation is not apparent— the narrative may not strike a reader as unreliable. To use Nünning’s example, a male pederast may fail to notice that Humbert Humbert of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is an unreliable narrator, since to this reader there are no suspicious or untoward features in the text (1999). It is the reader’s judgement which allows her to determine whether an element of the text indicates the author is inviting her to posit unreliability. Without this judgement, there cannot be a diagnosis of unreliable narration.

To summarise: Nünning argues that unreliable narration is a way in which readers interpret texts rather than something found in a text. However, he also claims that in order to interpret a text as unreliably narrated, a reader must identify invitations from the author for her to infer unreliability. His account offers a way of independently verifying the claims that Nolan, Hanley and Matravers make about unreliable narration. While Nünning’s model of unreliable narration is not the only account which literary theory offers, Nünning is a prolific and respected voice in debates on unreliable narration (Shen 2013). His work is therefore a suitable yardstick for philosophical work on unreliable narration. I consider whether the arguments posed by Nolan, Hanley and Matravers about impossible fiction are compatible with Nünning’s model. If they are not, then there is reason to suspect that they (and particularly Hanley) respond to ideological commitments about impossibility rather than consideration of the literary technique of unreliable narration. If, however, their arguments

blood person or people who authored the text). Phelan recasts the implied author as a partial representation of the actual author, drawing a closer relation between the actual and implied author than previous theorists (Phelan 2005, cited in Nünning 2005: 99). Nünning seems content to proceed under Phelan’s definition of the implied author, although he notes that the nature of the author in the triumvirate remains open to debate (2005: 99–101).

73 are compatible with Nünning, it will be clear that they represent a serious concern about impossible fiction.

3.2.5 Unreliability and impossible fiction: are impossible fictions