21st Century Literature discussion

"Having got wind that the head of the British intelligence service calls himself M (yes, like in James Bond), he decides in all seriousness to call himself H."

"...I've been talking rubbish, the victim of both a faulty memory and an overactive imagination. If fact, the head of the British secret service at this time was called "C"—not "M" as in James Bond. Heydrich too called himself "C," and not "H."

There are plenty of passages like this, where the author/narrator corrects himself based on a variety of reasons: faulty recollection, newly discovered facts, or simply a fanciful and overactive imagination. Can we see this as a nod to the device of the unreliable narrator? Perhaps more a comment on the human need to make stories more appealing to the audience as well as one's self?

Although Binet apparently said in an interview that he is the narrator of the novel and that he has not created himself as a fictional unreliable narrator, I think he's having us on. In the first place, as you read the book, you'll notice that the narrator repeatedly uses novels and films as his "sources" for book. In effect, he's using fictions to create fiction. Secondly, by doing this I think he's making a comment on the writing of history--that when a writer goes about writing history, he often ends up creating a story rather than a factual account. And finally, the narrator's constant undermining of himself gives us no choice to but to think of him as unreliable. (For example, he tells the reader that he hates it when an author makes up dialogue for historical characters and that it's something he wouldn't do--and then he makes up dialogue for his characters!)

I'm about a third into the book. I'm not sure if Binet is commenting on what he sees as the dubious nature of historical fiction as a genre or the human tendency to create preferred stories from historical events, especially horrific ones (as when Pi Patel asks "Which story do you prefer?"). Perhaps he is saying that any re-teller of history is to some degree unreliable.

Donna--yes! I think he's doing all of what you suggest.

I believe, from what I've read so far, that that's exactly what he's doing. He's saying that none of the authors or directors know, and further, that even people who are writing about what they can comment on are not particularly reliable, hence his unreliability even when writing about himself.

I think this is very true to life. I've caught myself sometimes telling a story and then thinking... did it really happen that way? Or even, did that really happen to me, or did I just appropriate someone else's story? Am I remembering the event, or remembering remembering?

There's also much comment in there about how we construct narrative. A lot of it echoes Naseem Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan... the idea that when we tell a story we edit out all the 'random' events that, looking back, don't seem to fit the story, which contributes to a nice clean narrative, where causes and effects are strongly linked, and the sweep of history was always only ever headed in one direction.

This kind of approach (which we all do) -- the narrative fallacy -- discards things that could easily have happened but didn't, and all the things that led up to them. I think by showing us contradictions and changing his mind, he's shedding some light on this process and how it conflicts with reality as it happens, rather than how it is perceived looking back. I think his frequent use of the present tense buttresses this -- instead of telling the story from a single point in time, he shows that perceptions at different points are/were different.

Terry, what a thoughtful and intelligent response. I had never thought about the tenses in this book, probably just assuming it was a stylistic choice. But even the use of the present tense undermines his reliability--of necessity, when we sit down to write about an event (even something that occurred three seconds ago) it is always a past tense event, if that makes sense. The use of the present tense, then, is an illusion, an attempt to make events seem to happen in the present moment, when of course, everything is in the past, even the opening lines of this comment.

Thank you, Diane.

Daniel, great choice of chapter to illustrate the point -- I just read it and it more than anything gives the sense of different 'takes' on history, on what happened. The 'true' version is like an old photocopy, losing fidelity, while the invented version is, well, invented. But is it less true?

So good.

Great points all. It's such a meaty topic, and every response here elicits an "oh yes, and that too!" from me.

From 150: 'I can't tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates and the infinite branching of cause and effect -- and these people, these real people who actually existed. I'm barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it -- even higher and denser, like a creeping ivy -- the unmappable pattern of causality.'

This.

Yes, and you've totally anticipated my final discussion thread! :)

I'm going to start that up now ("Another story I could write a whole book about…"), and hopefully we can get some discussion going along the lines of this quote.

Another quote for this thread:

"This story is personal. That's why my visions sometimes get mixed up with the known facts. It's just how it is." (Chapter 91)

Is a story ever *not* personal, and does that create a narrative bias that makes any narrator unreliable in one sense or another?

Oops.

Re: Personalness (is that a word?)... I agree absolutely that any narrator is unreliable if by reliable we mean absolutely true to events. I think Binet is perhaps making a point that this story is intensely personal for him, but your point holds true either way.

Hmmm, I'm just thinking that a post I made on another book is quite relevant here... the book is 'A Long Way Gone' by Ishmael Beah, a book about a child soldier's recollections of his war, and the question was... is it real? Has he made things up? Here's what I said:

"It's been shown in well-respected studies that normal people in normal situations will remember key things differently, down to who said something or what colour a car involved in an accident was.

When we remember even a simple, short, recent incident, our memories are rarely all we think they are. For someone recalling a sustained period of their (at the time young) life where they were constantly frightened, confused, stressed, etc., memory is bound to take some twists and turns from what a video camera on the scene might have captured.

There are lots of other things that factor in here, such as the way that, when people tell a story (and you can bet he told many of these stories in informal settings long before he set them to paper), you literally re-create the story. I'm sure most people have had the experience where they've listened to someone telling an anecdote where they were actually present at the time of the story, only to think to themselves 'that's not how it happened'. It doesn't mean the person is lying -- we often, when re-creating stories, think to ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, 'how did that part happen? oh, it must have been like... that, maybe', and then convince ourselves after repeated tellings that that's exactly how it was, no question. We make a narrative that makes sense out of events that may not really have made much sense at the time.

Now there's definitely a line between that, and what James Frey and Greg Mortensen appear to have done, which is to deliberately fabricate detail. But to my knowledge, there's *nothing* to suggest that Ishmael Beah has crossed that line.

Specific details that he remembers may not have happened exactly thus, but he would be some kind of superhuman memory machine if they all had. I have no reason to doubt the thrust of his story and that it paints a fairly accurate picture of what went on."

Apologies for quoting myself (hubris? what's that?), but I think it's pertinent. I guess I more or less stand by it, but would perhaps now substitute 'fairly accurate' with 'as accurate as could be expected'.

Binet may not have lived the events he's writing about but he has lived with them, with his research. He's been reading all these accounts, and he has to try to visualise how it really was in his head, and each time he hears a different slant, maybe it changes or colours that visualisation, but still he has to have that picture -- that's what we do, right? And how can that picture not colour what he writes?

What are people's thoughts on the division of a 500+ page book into 250+"micro-chapters" of 1 to 3 pages (leaving aside the two long ones)?

It make me think of how crazy people with long psychopathological political beliefs write long screeds without paragraph or section breaks. So, the unabomber can write a long screed without any break. This novel is the opposite, but might represent the same type of psychopathy -- too many breaks instead of too few -- like the way that the Far Right in Germany and the Far Left in the Soviet Union could form an alliance even though their political views are nominally "opposite" because deeper down they were really the same.

I thought it was interesting that there were also uncorrected untruths as well. Scattered in. I think there were probably more of them than I caught because he wanted to be sure that he was caught at them.