Unreliably Yours
Let's try this again.
One of the claims of literary theorists concerning Wuthering Heights is that it has an unreliable narrator and that that's where all the fun is. Never mind Cathy goes kookoo and tears a pillow apart with her teeth. Never mind that her husband Edgar punches Heathcliff in the throat. Never mind that the book is incredibly exciting even to a modern audience -- no, the point of this crapfest of a book (for, friends and others, this book, while exciting, isn't really worth it. One of my favorite comments on the novel comes from Meredith: "I was rooting for the moor") is the unreliable narratorness of it.
I guess. But...no.
So, some background on the book: Wuthering Heights tells the story of Heathcliff and Cathy, their lives, their loves, their various DSM-IV diagnoses. However, the whole story is told by one narrator: a man named Lockwood, who is renting a house called Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood is gay and bitchy, and does things like forces the servants to stay up later than they want to to tell him stories. He can sleep his lazy ass in until whatever o'clock; the servants, though? Those pots aren't going to scrub themselves; and I don't think Lockwood has the hands for scouring.
Everything in the novel, then, comes from Lockwood. Lockwood is writing in his journal -- and he comes from the Mina Harker school of dictation, since he apparently can remember entire conversations that he's had and can write them down verbatim. The woman who's telling him the bulk of the story is Nelly Dean, she of the late-night girl-talk chat-fest with Lockwood. She also has an amazingly crystal clear memory, since most of the events she's relating to Lockwood occur about 20 years earlier.
So, here's the thing about Unreliable Narrators. The term is coined in a 1961 book by Wayne Booth called The Rhetoric of Fiction. Wikipedia has a list of novels that allegedly have unreliable narrators, and Wuthering Heights is listed among them. It also lists Henry James's The Turn of the Screw -- and that's another book that I don't think has an unreliable narrator. It's cooler, of course, to assume that the governess is mad; however, she's not. Those ghosts are real. And you're just going to have to deal with that.
Unreliable narrators make a lot of appearances in modern/contemporary fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro sort of specializes in unreliable narrators. That goddamned Life of Pi was all about the unreliable narrator. The authors, in these cases, give you reason to distrust the narrator. They'll give conflicting accounts, or there'll be a twist of some kind. A Pale View of Hills has a lovely and eerie and downright creepy moment of narrative shift. The author wants you to know that the narrator can't be relied on. That's part of the fun.
Wuthering Heights doesn't have an unreliable narrator. It has just the one narrator. And nothing appears out of line in what he's sharing. Except for the superhuman feats of memory and recall, that is. If you want to go the unreliable narrator route with Wuthering Heights, then how do you know when to stop? How do we know that Lockwood is giving us the correct version of what Nelly Dean said? How do we know that he hasn't editorialized? Even when Lockwood isn't directly related at all (e.g., the entire first 20 years of the story), he's still the only one writing it down. How does one decide when he's reliable and when he isn't? What I'm arguing here is that eventually you'll find yourself having to come to the conclusion that no part of Wuthering Heights happened at all, and that Lockwood, much like Nabakov's Kinbote made the whole thing up because he's a kookshow of epic proportions.
I was going to say that the Victorians had no truck with the unreliable narrator, but I'll have to back off that argument because I remembered Wilkie Collins and he pulls some unreliable narrator tricks with both The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But there, he lets us know he's doing it because he gives us honest, reliable narrators who counter what the dishonest or unreliable ones have to say.
What I will say is that one can have an unreliable narrator; however, one cannot have an unreliable author -- and a good author will let you know what the intent is.
And that's what I have to say about that.
One of the claims of literary theorists concerning Wuthering Heights is that it has an unreliable narrator and that that's where all the fun is. Never mind Cathy goes kookoo and tears a pillow apart with her teeth. Never mind that her husband Edgar punches Heathcliff in the throat. Never mind that the book is incredibly exciting even to a modern audience -- no, the point of this crapfest of a book (for, friends and others, this book, while exciting, isn't really worth it. One of my favorite comments on the novel comes from Meredith: "I was rooting for the moor") is the unreliable narratorness of it.
I guess. But...no.
So, some background on the book: Wuthering Heights tells the story of Heathcliff and Cathy, their lives, their loves, their various DSM-IV diagnoses. However, the whole story is told by one narrator: a man named Lockwood, who is renting a house called Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood is gay and bitchy, and does things like forces the servants to stay up later than they want to to tell him stories. He can sleep his lazy ass in until whatever o'clock; the servants, though? Those pots aren't going to scrub themselves; and I don't think Lockwood has the hands for scouring.
Everything in the novel, then, comes from Lockwood. Lockwood is writing in his journal -- and he comes from the Mina Harker school of dictation, since he apparently can remember entire conversations that he's had and can write them down verbatim. The woman who's telling him the bulk of the story is Nelly Dean, she of the late-night girl-talk chat-fest with Lockwood. She also has an amazingly crystal clear memory, since most of the events she's relating to Lockwood occur about 20 years earlier.
So, here's the thing about Unreliable Narrators. The term is coined in a 1961 book by Wayne Booth called The Rhetoric of Fiction. Wikipedia has a list of novels that allegedly have unreliable narrators, and Wuthering Heights is listed among them. It also lists Henry James's The Turn of the Screw -- and that's another book that I don't think has an unreliable narrator. It's cooler, of course, to assume that the governess is mad; however, she's not. Those ghosts are real. And you're just going to have to deal with that.
Unreliable narrators make a lot of appearances in modern/contemporary fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro sort of specializes in unreliable narrators. That goddamned Life of Pi was all about the unreliable narrator. The authors, in these cases, give you reason to distrust the narrator. They'll give conflicting accounts, or there'll be a twist of some kind. A Pale View of Hills has a lovely and eerie and downright creepy moment of narrative shift. The author wants you to know that the narrator can't be relied on. That's part of the fun.
Wuthering Heights doesn't have an unreliable narrator. It has just the one narrator. And nothing appears out of line in what he's sharing. Except for the superhuman feats of memory and recall, that is. If you want to go the unreliable narrator route with Wuthering Heights, then how do you know when to stop? How do we know that Lockwood is giving us the correct version of what Nelly Dean said? How do we know that he hasn't editorialized? Even when Lockwood isn't directly related at all (e.g., the entire first 20 years of the story), he's still the only one writing it down. How does one decide when he's reliable and when he isn't? What I'm arguing here is that eventually you'll find yourself having to come to the conclusion that no part of Wuthering Heights happened at all, and that Lockwood, much like Nabakov's Kinbote made the whole thing up because he's a kookshow of epic proportions.
I was going to say that the Victorians had no truck with the unreliable narrator, but I'll have to back off that argument because I remembered Wilkie Collins and he pulls some unreliable narrator tricks with both The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But there, he lets us know he's doing it because he gives us honest, reliable narrators who counter what the dishonest or unreliable ones have to say.
What I will say is that one can have an unreliable narrator; however, one cannot have an unreliable author -- and a good author will let you know what the intent is.
And that's what I have to say about that.
posted by Mike at 7:18 PM
1 Comments:
That's pretty nice- I think you're right. I'm re-reading the Moonstone right now, and man, Wilkie Collins IS the king of the unreliable narrator. Or at least- his narrators in the Moonstone are not so much unreliable as unbearable. That lunatic spinster character is awesomely annoying, but she does tell the truth as she sees it: you don't question her version of events, just her interpretation of them...I think maybe the real liars came later.
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