Text: Henry James, The Aspern Papers

Theory: ‘Rhetoric of Fiction’ (Unreliable

Narrators)

The Chicago School of neo-Aristotelian criticism was an important

alternative to the New Criticism during the 1940s and 1950s. Its

exponents, who included R. S. Crane, W. R. Keast, Richard McKeon,

Elder Olson and Bernard Weinberg, believed that criticism had already

established a valid foundation in the fragmentary writings of Aristotle,

notably in the Rhetoric and Poetics. The Chicago School was scholarly,

systematic and theoretically sophisticated. It aimed to establish on a

firm philosophical foundation the principles which governed the whole

range of literary genres. Wayne C. Booth’s study of the novelist’s

techniques for imposing ‘his fictional world upon the reader’ is the

School’s most influential text.

It was probably Plato who first pointed out that ‘narration’ can either

proceed by ‘imitation’ or ‘simple narration’ or by a mixture of the two.

When Homer describes in his own voice a hero’s action this is ‘simple

narration’, but when he ‘quotes’ his hero’s words this is ‘imitation’. The

French structuralist Genette points out that this distinction is illusory

because in fact both types are part of a single narration; ‘imitation’ is

really just another form of narration. Nevertheless, if we think of

modem literature, it is evident that there is a clear difference between a

play and a novel in their mode of discourse. In a novel we can talk of

‘narration’ in the sense that a voice tells us a story, but in a play there is

no such narrative level (except when, within the play’s structure, a

character narrates a story).

The confusion which might arise from these observations is avoided

if we make the necessary distinction between author and narrator.

There are novels (those of Henry Fielding and George Eliot, for

example) which appear to be narrated by their authors: the reader quite

naturally treats the ‘voice’ of the narrator as the author’s, mainly

because the voice has all the authority of an author, and seems to

possess a godlike knowledge of the characters. However, we can never

really be certain that the attitudes of the narrator, even an omniscient

narrator, are identical with those of the author. Wayne Booth argues,

in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), that there is nevertheless a sense in

which we recognise the values and attitudes of an author quite

independently of our sense of the narrator’s identity. He calls this sense

of the author’s voice the ‘implied author’ - an ‘official scribe’ or the

author’s ‘second self. This ‘author’ is not the actual author, but rather

the author we construct by implication from the values expressed in the

fiction.

This useful distinction leaves us free to talk about narration in its

own right without losing ourselves in speculation about the author’s

attitudes. Booth uses the term ‘rhetoric’ to describe the study of

fictional narration. Rhetoric, in the classical sense, is the study of

verbal devices for the purpose of more effective speaking and writing.

The ‘rhetoric of fiction’ studies the way in which writers construct their

fictions in order to make them more effective in terms of narration.

There is a whole range of narrators which an author may employ: at one

extreme is the ‘impersonal’ narrator whose voice is not discernible as a

separate identity and who characteristically speaks in the third person;

at the other end of the spectrum is the ‘unreliable’ narrator who is

usually a character in the story and who often uses the first person. At

first sight, we might assume that the impersonal narrator is to be

preferred as being able to give us a more faithful rendering of reality.

However, we must remember, once more, that all narration is a

construction behind which resides an ‘implied author’ who cannot be

identified with the narrator. Impersonal narration does not guarantee

greater objectivity or truth.

Henry James’s The Aspem Papers (1888) is narrated by the central

home of an elderly lady and her niece in order to obtain by any means

the ‘Aspem papers’ (correspondence in the possession of the elderly

Miss Bordereau, who was admired by the fictional American poet,

Jeffrey Aspem, whom James modelled on Byron). The narrator is

unashamedly ‘unreliable’: he is morally quite without scruples and

admits this to the reader (‘there’s no baseness I wouldn’t commit for

Jeffrey Aspem’s sake’); and he has a limited and subjective view of the

world he lives in. Henry James especially favoured this type of narrator

who could not only provide a peculiar point of view but also convey

that sense of ‘bewilderment’ which is more true to human experience

than the omniscience of the conventional ‘authorial’ narrator. Our

narrator, a ‘publishing scoundrel’, as Miss Bordereau calls him when

she discovers him at night inspecting her secretaire in which he hopes

the papers are kept, is a focus of uncertainty throughout the story. He

frequently makes wrong deductions, confesses ignorance of the situ¬

ation, or conveys a shifting perspective. His assumptions about the

niece, Miss Tina, are proved quite mistaken. He regards her as

essentially naive and pitiful, and he has no scruples in seeking her help

in defrauding her aunt. Having failed to establish any social contact

with the ladies for many weeks, he is finally permitted to enter into

conversation with Miss Tina at a time when her aunt is unwell. The

narrator conveys his puzzlement:

1 scarce knew what to think of all this - of Miss Tina’s sudden

conversation to sociability and of the strange fact that the more the old

woman appeared to decline to her end the less she should desire to be

looked after. The story hung indifferently together, and I even asked

myself if it mightn’t be a trap laid for me, the result of a design to make me

show my hand. I couldn’t have told why my companions (as they could

only by courtesy be called) should have this purpose - why they should try

to trip up so lucrative a lodger. But at any hazard I kept on my guard, so

be ‘up to’. Poor woman, before we parted for the night my mind was at rest

as to what she might be [up to]. She was up to nothing at all.

(This and the following passage from The Aspem Papers and Other Stories,

ed. Adrian Poole (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1983,

PP. 38-9))

The narrator turns out to be completely wrong. While he appears to be

the plotter who is carefully and subtly achieving his aim, it turns out

that the ladies are in fact the more effective plotters. They manage to

persuade their lodger to pay exorbitantly for his lodgings, and it turns

out that Miss Tina has a definite price in mind as payment for the

papers. When the narrator realises that she wants him to marry her, he

fails to conceal his revulsion, and he is defeated by Miss Tina’s

response: she destroys the papers and dismisses him.

The following passage suggests the wandering viewpoint of the

narrator:

I found myself mistakenly thinking of her too as one of Jeffrey Aspem’s

contemporaries; this came from her having so little in common with my

own. It was possible, I indeed reasoned, that she hadn’t even heard of him;

it might very well be that Juliana [Bordereau] had forborne to lift for

innocent eyes the veil that covered the temple of her glory [the papers]. In

Anglo-American Criticism 33

this case she perhaps wouldn’t know of the existence of the papers, and I

welcomed that presumption - it made me feel more safe with her — till 1

remembered we had believed the letter of disavowal [sent earlier denying

the existence of the papers] ... to be in the handwriting of the niece.

James here evokes all the half-knowledge, false supposition, surface

judgement and forgetfulness typical of most human consciousnesses.

We are very far from the all-seeing clarity of the omniscient author who

misses nothing and is never mistaken about the facts or about a

character’s thoughts. The unreliability of the narrator makes not only

is put in his place by the naif), but also produces a more ‘truthful’

rendering of human narrative consciousness.

Wayne Booth is surprisingly critical ofJames’s use of the ‘unreliable’

narrator in this story. He points out thatJames, in his preface, indicates

an intention to create a sense of the ‘palpable imaginable visitable past’.

Booth believes that the voice which tells us of this historical Venice is

not compatible with the immoral and self-deceiving ‘scoundrel’ who

narrates the story of his intended coup. Booth argues that this

contradiction creates a kind of moral confusion which makes the story a

failure. This presupposes that an artistic appreciation of the past is not

psychologically compatible with lack of moral scruples of the kind

illustrated in the story. It is by no means clear that this ‘contradiction’

is implausible. Booth’s criticism of James certainly highlights the

complexity produced by the use of unreliable narrators. In these cases

the reader is forced to decide at what points the implied author’s values

can be separated from the narrator’s. Is the concern for the Venetian

past something we should attribute to James or to the narrator? Booth

clearly attributes it to James and believes that James inartistically

attributes it to the narrator.

An awareness of the types of narrative voice forearms us against

naively blurring the distinction between authorial and non-authorial

viewpoints. Beyond this, there remains the difficulty of locating

precisely a ‘reliable’ focus of values and assumptions which will guide

the reader’s interpretation (see section 8 for further discussion). The

limitations of Booth’s work from a poststructuralist viewpoint lie

precisely in this region.

Booth’s book concludes with a brooding and inconclusive meditation

upon the moral problems raised by the use of unreliable narrators.

Booth is positively Johnsonian in his concern for the moral effects of

particular techniques. An author, he argues, must be careful to

pulous, corrupt, deviant, or downright wicked characters too much

scope to confuse the reader. Not all readers are capable of grasping the

author’s moral intentions. It is not hard to think of our own examples.

There are many admirers of Milton’s Satan, Graham Greene’s whisky

priest, Alf Garnett’s racism and Loads-a-money’s greed. Booth, in

effect, argues that rhetorical techniques are successful only when they

produce the intended moral identifications in readers.

Recent theories have cast doubt on several of Booth’s working

assumptions about reading and writing. Authors are no longer consid¬

ered the sole arbiters of meaning: they transcribe and adapt the

interminable discourses of culture and ideology in words which readers

inevitably reinscribe with their own cultural and ideological systems of

meaning. The model of the responsible author and the obediently

responsive reader is now an antiquated one. However, the rhetoric of

narration elaborated by Booth remains a useful source of concepts for a

refashioned theory of literary discourse. On questions of point of view,

types of narrator and especially the notion of the implied narrator, his

work remains seminal