At the other extreme from Thomas Hardy and his like are those writers of fiction who became increasingly numerous during the twentieth century and whose narratives report the thoughts and motives and such of only the chief character. This character is often of the same gender as is the author, and some at least of his or her fictional experiences can be seen to resemble the actual experiences of the author. However far-reaching or however narrow might be the view, so to call it, of the narrator, whenever I read a fictional text I am never unaware of his or her fictional presence. What happens in my mind hours or days or years after I have read such a text may be far otherwise, but for as long as the text is in front of my eyes I am mindful of its being a fictional text: sentence after sentence composed by a human agent. I seem to hear the written words as being transmitted to me in a sort of silent speech, however absurd that expression might seem. I cannot hear, or seem to hear, such speech without seeing, or seeming to see, the personage responsible for it, and even though my reporting what follows may be evidence of credulousness or gullibility on my part, I confess that my first impulse is usually to trust the narrator; to regard him or her as reliable. At this point, the discerning reader wants to know how I react in the presence of a narrator whom I suspect of being unreliable or when confronted by one of those curious texts sometimes published as fiction but having the appearance of diary-entries or collections of letters or other documents. I have no answer for the discerning reader, but I can state for his or her benefit that I decline to read any piece of fiction if I suspect the author of believing that fiction is mere artifice and that the reader of fiction has no more urgent need than to be diverted or teased. (Even the undiscerning reader should have learned from the previous sentence that the narrator of this present work of fiction is to be trusted.)
I have mentioned so far only third-person narrators and none of my sort of narrator, who writes in the first person. The undiscerning reader may be surprised to learn that first-person narrators are hardly less varied than third-person narrators if they are classified according to how much or how little they claim to know. In fact, almost all first-person narrators during the past century have been of the one sort: reporters of their own thoughts and feelings and also of what they observe of the doings of other fictional participants. At the other extreme from these limited narrators, as they might be called, are those – mostly from the nineteenth century and earlier – who seem to report for the most part in the conventional mode of far-seeing and knowledgeable third-person narrator but who report occasionally in the first person. Anthony Trollope, in some at least of his novels, narrates thus. I seem to recall a few examples of such narration in the novels of Thomas Hardy. At a further remove even from these writers and their kind is Henry James, who will be mentioned later in this work of fiction, he being of much interest to some of the occupants of an upper floor of a certain building of two or, perhaps, three storeys. Whereas my instinct is to trust a third-person narrator, I am wary of several kinds of first-person narrator. I cannot bring myself to read any fictional text issuing from a pretend-narrator, as I call any purported first-person narrator of a different gender from the author of the text or from a different historical world. I could not read, for example, a first-person narrative by a female personage if the author is known to be male. Nor could I read a first-person narrative by a personage who is obviously derived from a grandparent or a forebear of the author. The sort of first-person narrative that most repels me has for its purported narrator a personage who could never have had the wit to recite the narrative, let alone the verbal skills to set it down in writing. The late-twentieth-century American writer Raymond Carver wrote many stories purporting to be narrated by pretend-narrators, as I call them. I object to such fiction because it claims to be other than fiction; because it makes the same absurd claim that a film makes: the claim that its subject-matter is of the same order as what is commonly called real or true or actual. Fiction, even what I call true fiction, is fiction. An author demeans fiction if he or she requires the reader to believe that what happens in his or her mind while reading is no different from what happens over his or her shoulder or outside his or her window. What happens in the mind of the reader of true fiction is richer and more memorable by far than anything seen through the lens of a camera or overheard by an author in a bar or a trailer park.
Even the discerning reader who is also a student of narration – even he or she might struggle so far to classify the narrator of this present work and might struggle further as the work becomes more complicated in later pages. It is not for me to define myself, as it were. The reader should think of me as a personage as being in some respects less than an actual person and in other respects rather more so. At the very least, I am a voice: the voice behind the text. At the risk of confusing the undiscerning reader, I might well describe myself as the voice of another sort of personage who has been scarcely mentioned as yet in this work: the author or, rather, the implied author, by which I mean the personage of whom nothing is known except what can be inferred from this text. At the very least, I am a voice, but who knows what I might not seem to the discerning and sympathetic reader before he or she has read to the end of these pages, which are, let it be remembered, a sequence of sentences composed by a human hand long before they sounded to any reader as though recited by a mere voice.
I mentioned earlier in this section my being impelled to trust fictional narrators. This must not be taken to mean that I consider the subject-matter of a trustworthy narrator as anything but fiction. Never, while reading any novel by Thomas Hardy, for example, would I mistake, or even wish to be able to mistake, the text in front of me for a report of actual matters or a description of actual persons in actual places. I acknowledge that many another reader looks to fiction for what he or she might call a deeper understanding of actual persons or events or moral issues, so to call them. I am well aware that scholars are able to name actual or historical persons or places that are the originals, so to speak, or the inspiration for fictional counterparts. (Only the other day, I found in a handsome illustrated selection of poems by Thomas Hardy a reproduction of a painting with the title ‘Tess’s Cottage and Evershot Church’. I have already forgotten most of the details of the reproduction. Nor am I curious to learn why the cottage is so named. If it is claimed to have some or another connection with the fictional character Tess Durbeyfield, then I can only marvel at how far the depicted cottage is from any of the scenery where I have located the fictional personage known to me as Tess Durbeyfield during the past fifty and more years.) Even so, I can only state what clear-sighted observation has taught me, which is that many a fictional character, so to call him or her, has become, from the moment when I first learned of his or her fictional existence, a far from fictional personage in a far from fictional setting that happens to be, among other things, the setting for this and every other of my works of fiction. And if I report that I trust certain narrators, I am thereby announcing my confidence that those fictional presences would approve of the previous sentence.
One of the many sorts of fiction that became briefly fashionable during the past fifty years was called by most commentators self-referential fiction. I can recall reading several examples of such fiction in the 1970s, or was it the 1980s? Self-referential fiction was never more than a small part of the body of fiction published at the time, but those who wrote it or praised it seemed to suppose that no sort of self-referential works of fiction had been published in earlier times and, predictably, that writers and readers would soon agree that self-referential fiction was better able than more traditional modes to achieve the aims of fiction, whatever they might be. In the 1970s and the 1980s, I was easily deceived as a reader. Even so, I was just sufficiently alert to be able privately to refute the claims of the advocates of self-referential fiction. I had read Tristram Shandy and some of the fiction of Anthony Trollope and much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy. I admit that I was dazzled at first by If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino, but I did not fail to note soon afterwards how little I could recall of its intricate contrivances or of the seeming-qualities of its glib narrator, not to mention its stock characters, and if I think